Spirits and Plague: The Representation of Epidemics Throughout History
When reindeer herders entered an Even settlement, a tribe living in eastern Siberia, they would sometimes bring a red-headed Russian woman with them. The shamans would watch for her and had a special ritual they would conduct often with the help of the villagers in an effort to drive her out when she came. She was a strong spirit and if the shamans failed to defeat her, she would take the form of a red bull, charging down the villagers, leaving only two people alive to bury the dead. If she was successfully vanquished however, she would leave the encampment and none would die. This woman was the spirit of smallpox.
The universality of folklore is staggering. The Even people had their red-haired woman and India’s goddess of smallpox was named Shitala Mata. Meanwhile Western Africa had their own red coded spirit, Shapona from the Yoruba religion and in China, children were encouraged to pray to a deity known as T’ou-Shen Niang-Niang when they contracted pox diseases. In other countries around the world red was the colour of treatments rather than a sign of the illness itself. Charles V of France dressed all in red when he contracted the disease; Elizabeth I was wrapped in a red blanket and placed by a fire.. Japanese texts cited red light as a way to weaken symptoms on top of having their spirits and origins for the epidemic. The 735–737 Japanese Smallpox Epidemic was introduced by way of Korea. They believed the cause of the illness came from onryō, spirits of vengeance capable of instigating disasters as a way to express the wrongs done to them while they were alive. It was said that the devils had a fear of red, in keeping with the common theme of the ‘red treatment’, widely ineffective and out of a lack of any better treatment to try though physician Niels Ryberg Finsen in 1893 claimed that red light reduced the severity of the scars.
Epidemics and plagues have been a part of human life and society for thousands of years, too many to put in a single article. They have become interwoven with our very way of life. Some diseases linger on longer than others. Hundreds of years later, The Black Death still permeates literature and media. The fascination, I find, is twofold. On the one hand, people have the same shared fascination with illness and suffering, whether as a horror we can’t look away from or something you find interesting. On the other hand, the fascination is derived from human connectedness. History keeps the memory of those who died of plague alive. By not forgetting the pandemics and epidemics of the world, we are not forgetting all who have suffered from them. Even this fascination with death has its roots in history. The Danse Macabre is an allegory of the inevitability of death and how the fact that all people shall die unites us. It gained a lot of traction in the Middle Ages as a result of the obsession with the the Black Death, the disease killing anyone regardless of their rank in life. The Grim Reaper is another popular image that appeared in Europe during the Black Death, another example of both the peoples’ constant exposure to death and the desire to make something more of the pandemic than it was.
Superstition around the Black Death is rampant. The miasma theory was still going strong with plague doctors protecting themselves by stuffing herbs and dried flowers into the beaks to defend against the bad air. In Europe, Jews were blamed for poisoning the wells and still other theories suggested earthquakes released poisonous fumes. This last one is similar to the supernatural belief that the devil brought the plague by poisoning the air. Even before the plague arrived, black cats were being killed for their supposed connection to Satan, letting the rat population grow and fester unhindered in what might be a fairly ironic twist.
In Northern Europe, the plague was represented by an old crone-like woman bearing a broom and a rake. She was well illustrated by the Norwegian painter Theodor Kittelsen in his series of artworks on the Black Death in his collection Svartedauen in 1900. He names the woman Pesta and she features in numerous pieces including ‘Pesta I Trappen’ and ‘She is Making Her Way Through the Country’ depicted as a gaunt hooded woman with a wailing downturned mouth, her face skeletal and emaciated. In ‘Pesta I Trappen’ she is peering around the banister of a set of stairs, low to the ground as though dragging herself up on her hands and knees. In the latter, she hugs a rake to herself, hunched over and shuffling, a village in the background. Both pictures call to mind sadness and inevitability, a long road with no end. In ‘Pesta I Trappen’, she is coming to a destination, invoking a sense of weakness and desperation. In ‘She is Making Her Way Through the Country’, there is a sense of her beginning the journey but also of eternalness. The way she holds her rake and her cloak make her seem cold as if of a corpse, her gait already seems lumbering. This may be the beginning here but she is already in the middle of a far longer journey.
It seems that most of the personifications of plague and illness are women. From Norway’s Pesta to Shitala Mata and the Evens’ shapeshifting Russian woman. In Gambia, the malaria endemics were often attributed to Jinne, non-human spirits. Some are defined as bad jinne who can attack passers by and afflict them with illness. Still other causes for malaria have been attributed to buwaa or sukuñaabe, meaning witches. These were purported to eat a person’s life force until they became sick and died. The Keres in Greek mythology were sometimes associated with death though the more famous choice for illness and disease are the Nosoi, released from Pandora’s Box. In Slavic mythology, Likhoradka was a female spirit who caused disease when she possessed or touched a victim while in Serbian folklore, the plague was personified as Kuga, generally an old woman dressed in white. It is likely there are some old superstitions about women and their connection to the supernatural coming into play here in the same vein as women being prosecuted as witches throughout history. Perhaps projecting themes of death and disease onto women was just another way for men to parade their own power and control over them, proving that the assertion of a patriarchal society being pure and just permeates even the supernatural with little to no attention being brought to the obvious bias left in its wake.
Whether a spirit, a goddess or a religious superstition, the personification of death and plague proves consistent and in many cultures. And why? Perhaps in the past we have been loath to see these horrors as invisible killers and prefer something we can see no matter how grotesque. What does it say about humanity that we have insisted on assigning death and plague human attributes? A romantic might theorise that it implies a sort of subconscious self-awareness of the duality of nature, an understanding that humanity can do terrible things. Maybe it hints at our pride. Nothing should have more power than humankind and so we personify plague to stoke our own ego. But perhaps it is more simple. Perhaps we simply want to look it in the eyes and see a face we understand.
