The Stone from Satan’s Crown

Central America in the 16th century. The empire of the Aztecs and their allies is being overrun by the forces of Hernán Cortez. Conquistadores plunder while Catholic priests turn hundreds of sacred books into towering bonfires. In the Mixtec capital of Achiotlan the resident priest, Father Benito Hernández, comes into the possession of a sacred stone much revered by the Mixtec, known as the People's Heart. The stone is a wondrous thing. Father Burgoa, an eyewitness to the events, described the stone as being an emerald as large as a capsicum, “upon which a small bird was engraved with the greatest skill, and, with the same skill, a small serpent coiled ready to strike. The stone was so transparent that it shone from its interior with the brightness of a candle flame.”

We are lucky to have this preserved description, for it is all that remains to tell us of this remarkable stone’s appearance. Another Spaniard present offered the priest three thousand ducats for it. But Hernández did more than merely turn down the handsome offer. He carried his priestly destructive zeal to the extreme: first he had the priceless gem ground down to powder, then mixed the pulverised mass with water, poured it out upon the Mixtec earth, and trampled it underfoot.

Even given the wholesale destruction of such cultural artefacts which took place during this period, Father Hernández’ obliteration of this particular treasure seems to have gone that extra mile in terms of its finality - an indication of the priest’s drive, not merely to destroy the stone, but to erase its actual presence from the world. I wondered why this might be so. Could the priest perhaps have thought that he had chanced upon the fabled emerald said to have fallen to earth from the crown of Satan during the war in heaven? This fabulous jewel is said to be as legendary and as mystical as the Holy Grail. Stronger yet: for some, it actually is the Grail, with the Grail’s miraculous ability to confer enlightenment upon its possessor.

According to the legend, Adam possessed the stone in Eden, but left it behind after his expulsion. Seth, the son of Adam, briefly returned to the earthly paradise to retrieve it, and from that time it has been in the world, its whereabouts unknown. Perhaps the priest who stood frenziedly trampling the conquered soil imagined that his act of obliteration was in some tangible way a triumph over Satan - an act which would forever deny the Prince of Darkness any possibility of restoring his crown to completeness and glory. But evil does not reside in a stone: it is within ourselves. Father Hernández destroyed nothing except what would now be viewed as a priceless cultural treasure, and his own dark shadow remained behind in its place.

Hawkwood

Sources:

The images for this post are adapted from Gustave Doré's depictions of the fall of Satan. An account of the destruction of the Mixtec emerald can be found in Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods. The possible connection between Father Hernández' motive for destroying the stone and the legend of the stone from Satan's crown is my own.

Renaissance Snuff

The city of Tournai (Doornik), not far from what is now the border between Belgium and France, in the year 1547. In a theatre a performance is being given which portrays the Biblical story of Judith and Holofernes, and her fearless beheading of the mighty Assyrian general in a bid to save her beleaguered town. The drama-charged moment of the actual beheading scene arrives. The audience is silent. With a single sure blow the sword falls, and the audience recoils in horror as the head of the actor playing Holofernes drops to the stage with bloody finality. Then the audience erupts, some shouting in appalled indignation while as many others cheer wildly. They have witnessed an actual death.

Or have they? No incident that I can think of brings the line between art and life, between illusion and reality, so shockingly into sharp focus as this one. Is this story a Renaissance urban legend? Did the audience in that theatre witness an early snuff drama in which someone actually dies? The forest of hearsay surrounding the story seems impenetrable, but some details emerge:

The 'actor' playing the part of Holofernes for the evening was actually a serial murderer who, when presented with the ghastly choice, opted for the role as an alternative to a more prolonged and agonising death by torture. Perhaps also he had hoped that the young actor (for we are still in an era when women were not permitted a stage presence) would balk at delivering the blow. In the event, it seems that the organizers of the drama were already a step ahead of him, and had persuaded a youth condemned to banishment to take over the role for the evening, the carrot on this particular stick being that his sentence would then be revoked upon the successful completion of his task.

And so all was in place for the performance. But did it actually happen? The town records were destroyed in a fire in 1940, and we are left looking down a long tunnel of circumstantial suggestion. For me, the odds tend to tip on the side of factual. There are just too many persuasive details, and the story must have come from somewhere. So let's say that it actually happened. And if it did, then we find ourselves at another shocking interface.

You can search the Bible for the story of Judith and Holofernes, but you won't find it. The Book of Judith, for so many centuries an accepted part of the canon, was dropped from the Old Testament as late as the 1880's, apparently mostly on the grounds that it was just too historically suspect. Puzzling enough when you consider that so much of scripture is actually historically [1]unverifiable. But it seems that the [2]Book of Judith was viewed as more of a novel, a work of fiction. Which in turn means that we now have the grimly bizarre situation in which a performance in the arts was more real than the event which it purported to portray. Art, it seems, can not only be more real than life: at times it can even supersede it, and the illusion becomes the terrible reality.

Hawkwood

Notes:
[1] My post The Butcher of Canaan is an in-depth scrutiny of the Old Testament's Book of Joshua, which concludes from all the historical evidence that the Israelites' conquest of Canaan under the command of Joshua never actually happened, and this book in scripture, as with the Book of Judith, is therefore largely a work of fiction. This being so (and it is, according to the weight of contemporary academic conclusions), it seems reasonable to ask: why is this book still canonical scripture, when The Book of Judith was omitted from the canon for exactly this reason?

[2] These scriptural texts were often written many centuries after the events which they purported to describe. Their unknown writers did not have the perspective on history which we now have, and ancient stories which finally were committed to text had already been interwoven with considerable embellishments as a heritage stemming from an oral tradition.  


Sources:
Jody Enders: Medieval Snuff Drama, published by the University of North Carolina (the author uses the term 'Medieval' in her title and article for stylistic reasons, as the period is actually the Renaissance).
Louis Goosen: Van Abraham tot Zacheüs, published by Sun, Amsterdam.

The images for this post are details of the statue in alabaster of Judith by Conrat Meit, in the Bavarian National Museum. The statue was created in the late 1520's - just two decades before the events related here. This statue and other works of art portraying Judith are now featured as a post on my blog: On Being the Opposite of a Moth. You are welcome to visit and see them here: Judith: The Woman with a Sword