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Ghost Marriages
China, Shanxi province, on the nothern part of the Republic.
At the beginningof 2016, the Hongtong County police chief gave the warning: during the three previous years, at least a dozen thefts of corpses were recorded each year. All the exhumed and smuggled bodies were of young women, and the trend is incresing so fast that many families now prefer to bury their female relatives near their homes, rather than in secluded areas. Others resort to concrete graves, install surveillance cameras, hire security guards or plant gratings around the burial site, just like in body snatchers England. It looks like in some parts of the province, the body of a young dead girl is never safe enough.
What’s behind this unsettling trend?
These episodes of body theft are connected to a very ancient tradition which was thought to be long abandoned: the custom of “netherworld marriages”.
The death of a young unmarried male is considered bad lack for the entire family: the boy’s soul cannot find rest, without a mate.
For this reasons his relatives, in the effort of finding a spouse for the deceased man, turn to matchmakers who can put them in contact with other families having recently suffered the lost of a daughter. A marriage is therefore arranged for the two dead young persons, following a specific ritual, until they are finally buried together, much to the relief of both families.
This kind of marriages seem to date back to the Qin dinasty (221-206 a.C.) even if the main sources attest a more widespread existence of the practice starting from the Han dinasty (206 a.C.-220 d.C.).
The problem is that as the traffic becomes more and more profitable, some of these matchmakers have no qualms about exhuming the precious corpses in secret: to sell the bodies, they sometimes pretend to be relatives of the dead girl, but in other cases they simply find grieving families who are ready to pay in order to find a bride for their departed loved one, and willing to turn a blind eye on the cadaver’s provenance.
Until some years ago, “ghost marriages” were performed by using symbolic bamboo figurines, dressed in traditional clothes; today weath is increasing, and as much as 100,000 yan (around $15,000) can be spent on the fresh body of a young girl. Even older human remains, put back together with wire, can be worth up to $800. The village elders, after all, are the ones who warn new generations: to cast away bad luck nothing beats an authentic corpse.
Although the practice has been outlawed in 2006, the business is so lucrative that the number of arrests keep increasing, and at least two cases of murder have been reported in the news where the victim was killed in order to sell her body.
If at first glance this tradition may seem macabre or senseless, let us consider its possible motivations.
In the province where these episodes are more frequent, a large number of young men work in coal mines, where fatal accidents are sadly common. The majority of these boys are the sole children of their parents, because of the Chinese one-child policy, effective until 2013.
So, apart from reasons dictated by superstition, there is also an important psychological element: imagine the relief if, in the process of elaborating grief, you could still do something to make your dearly departed happy. Here’s how a “ghost wedding” acts as a compensation for the loss of a loved boy, who maybe died while working to support his family.
Marriages between two deceased persons, or between a living person and a dead one, are not even unique to China, for that matter. In France posthumous marriages (which usually take place when a woman prematurely loses her fiancé) are regularly requested to the President of the Republic, who has the power of issuing the authorization. The purpose is to acknowledge children who were conceived before the premature death, but there may also been purely emotional motivations. In fact there’s a relatively long list of countries that allowed for marriages in which one or both the newlywed were no longer alive.
In closing, here is a little curiosity.
In the well-known Tim Burton film Corpse Bride (2005), inspired by a centuries-old folk tale (the short story Die Todtenbraut by F. A. Schulze, found within the Fantasmagoriana anthology, is a Romantic take on that tale), the main character puts a ring on a small branch, unaware that this light-hearted move is actually sanctioning his netherworld engagement.
Quite similar to that harmless-looking twig is a “trick” used in Taiwan when a young girl dies unmarried: her relatives leave out on the streets a small red package containing Hell money, a lock of hair or some nails from the dead woman. The first man to pick up the package has to marry the deceased girl, if he wants to avoid misfortune. He will be allowed to marry again, but he shall forever revere the “ghost” bride as his first, real spouse.
These rituals become necessary when an individual enters the afterlife prematurely, without undergoing a fundamental rite of passage like marriage (therefore without completing the “correct” course of his life). As is often the case with funeral customs, the practice has a beneficial and apotropaic function both for the social group of the living and for the deceased himself.
On one hand all the bad luck that could harm the relatives of the dead is turned away; a bond is formed between two different families, which could not have existed without a proper marriage; and, at the same time, everybody can rest assured that the soul will leave this world at peace, and will not depart for the last voyage bearing the mark of an unfortunate loneliness.
The Devil and the Seven Dwarfs
A pale sun just came up that morning, when a soldier came knocking at the Angel’s door. He would never have disturbed his sleep, if he wasn’t sure to bring him a tryly exceptional discovery. Once he heardthe news, the Angel dressed up quickly and rushed towards the gates, his eyes burning with anticipation
It was May 19, 1944, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Josef Mengele was about to meet the largest all-dwarf family ever recorded.
The Ovitz family originated from Rozavlea, a village in the district of Maramureș, Transilvania (Romania). Their patriarch was the itinerant rabbi Shimson Eizik Ovitz, who sufferd from pseudoachondroplasia, a form of dwarfism; over two marriages, he had ten children, seven of which were stricken by his same genetic condition. Five of them were female, two males.
Dwarfism made them unfit for heavy work: how could they solve the paradox of having such a large family with virtually no labor force? The Ovitzs decided to stick together as much as possible, and they embarked in the only activity that could grant them a decent life: entertainment.
They founded the “Lilliput Troupe”, a traveling show in which only the seven dwarf siblings performed onstage; the other, medium-height members of the family warked backstage, writing sketches, preparing costumes or managing their next gigs. Their two-hour show mainly consisted of musical numbers, in which the family covered popular hits of the day on especially tailored instruments (small guitars, violas, violins, accordeons). For 15 years they toured Central Europe with huge success, the only all-dwarf act in the history of entertainment, until Nazism’s dark shadow reached them.
In theory, the Ovitzs were bound to die. First of all because they were observant Jews; and secondly, because they were considered “malformed” and, according to the Aktion T4 euthanasia program their lives were “unworthy of life” (Lebensunwertes Leben). At the time of their arrival in Auschwitz, they were twelve. The youngest was a 18-months-old child.
Josef Mengele, nicknamed the “Angel of Death” (Todesengel), still remains one of the most sadly infamous figures in those unimaginable years of terror. In the tales of the survivors, he is without doubt the most enigmatic and unsettling character: a cultivated and elegant man, with doctorates received in anthropology and medecine, fascinating as a Hollywood star, Mengele possessed another face, one of violence and cruelty which could burst out in a totally disinhibited way. According to some accounts, he could bring sugar to the children in the nomad camp, play the violin for them, and shortly after inject them with chloroform on the operation table or personally carry out a mass execution. As the camp’s physician, he often began his day by staning on the platform and selecting with a gesture of his hand who among the newly arrived deportees was fit to work and who was destined to be eliminated in the gas chambers.
He was known for his obsession with twins, who according to his studies and those of his mentor Otmar von Verschuer (who was well-informed about his pupil’s activities) could undisclose the ultimate secrets of eugenics. Mengele carried out human experiments of unprecedented sadism, infecting healthy individuals with various diseases, dissecting live patients without anesthesia, injecting ink into their eyes in order to make them more “aryan-looking”, experimenting poisons and burning genitals with acid. Mengele was not a mad scientist, operating under cover, as was first understood, but was backed by the elite of German scientific community: under the Third Reich, these scientists enjoyed an uncommon freedom, as long as they proved their research was going in the direction of building a superior race of soldiers – one of Hitler’s obsessions.
“I now have work for 20 years”, Mengele exclaimed. As soon as he saw the Ovitz family, he immediately ordered that they be spared and arranged in privileged living quarters, where they would be given larger food portions and enjoyed better hygiene. He was particularly interested in the fact that the family included both dwarfs and middle-height individuals, so he ordered the “normal” members also to be spared from gas chambers. Hearing this, some other prisoners from the Ovitz’ village claimed to be blood-related to them (and the Ovitz of course did not deny it), and were moved along with them.
In exchange for their relatively more comfortable life, in respect to other inmates – their hair was not shorn, nor were they forced to part from their clothes – the Ovitzs were subjected to a long series of experiments. Mengele regularly took blood samples from them (even from the 18-months-old child).
Written accounts of inmate doctors shed further light on the endless anthropological measurements and comparisons between the Ovitzs and their neighbours, whom Mengele mistook for family. The doctors extracted bone marrow, pulled out healthy teeth, plucked hair and eyelashes, and carried out psychological and gynaecological tests on them all.
The four married female dwarves were subjected to close gynaecological scrutiny. The teenage girls in the group were terrified by the next phase in the experiment: that Mengele would couple them with the dwarf men and turn their wombs into laboratories, to see what offspring would result. Mengele was known to have done it to other experimental subjects.
(Koren & Negev, The dwarfs of Auschwitz)
The “White Angel” kept a voluntarily ambiguous relationship with the family, constantly walking a fine line between mercyless cruelty and surprising kindness. In fact, although he had already gathered hundreds of twins, and could sacrifice them if need be (accounts tell of seven couples of twins killed in one single night), he only had one family of dwarfs.
Still, the Ovitzs didn’t indulge in false hopes: they were conscious that, despite their privileges, they would die in there.
Instead, they lived to see the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. They walked for seven months to get back to their village, only to find their home looted; four years later they emigrated to Israel, where they resumed touring with their show until they eventually retired in 1955.
Mengele, as is known, escaped to South America under a false name, and during his more than thirty years as a fugitive his legend grew out of proportion; his already terrible deeds were somewhat exaggerated until he became a demon-like character trowing live children in the ovens and killing people just for fun. Reliable accounts evoke a less colourful image of the man, but no less unsettling: the human experiments carried out at Birkenau (and in China, at the same time, inside the infamous Unit 731) rank among the most dreadful examples of scientific research completely detaching itself from moral issues.
The last survivor in the family, Perla Ovitz, died in 2001. Until the end, she kept recounting her family’s tale, encapsulating all the helplessness and painful absurdity of this experience, which she could not possibly explain to herself and to the world, in a single sentence: “I was saved by the grace of the devil“.
Further material:
– An excerpt from the documentary The Seven Dwarfs of Auschwitz (available here), featuring Perla Ovitz.
– Giants: The Dwarfs of Auschwitz (Koren & Negev, 2013) is the main in-depth research on the Ovitz family, based on interviews with Perla and other Auschwitz survivors.
– Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz (Lagnado & Dekel 1992) is an account of Mengele’s experiments on twins, with interviews with several survivors.
– The video in which Mengele’s son, Rolf, recounts his meeting with his father – whom he had never knew and who was living incognito in Brazil.
– The truth about Cândido Godói, a small village in Brazil with a high twin births rate, where in the Sixties a strange German physician was often seen wandering: did Mengele continue his experiments in South America?
La morte in musica – VI
Esiste un gioco a cui giocano gli amanti, talvolta, quando vogliono cedere alla dolcezza della malinconia. È la sofferta partita del “chi di noi se ne andrà per primo”.
“Preferirei morire per ultimo, per farmi carico del dolore e non pensarti sola e senza più sorrisi. Anzi, preferirei morire per primo, perché anche senza di me forse il destino ti regalerebbe ancora qualche sorriso…”
“Preferirei morire per ultima, per tenerti la mano fino alla fine. Anzi, preferirei morire per prima, per puro egoismo…”
Melassa sentimentalistica? Forse. Certo è che quando teniamo davvero a una persona, è naturale immaginarsi il momento e il modo in cui potremmo finire per perderla. È a questo tipo di intimi e delicati pensieri che è dedicato il brano Naked As We Came del cantautore folk rock statunitense Iron & Wine (nome d’arte di Samuel Beam).
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd-A-iiPoLg]
Gli esseri umani sono forse gli unici animali che anticipano, si pre-occupano e si pre-parano, “allenandosi” a provare l’inevitabile dolore che li attende.
Ma questa prefigurazione della morte non sembra affatto essere causa di angoscia, nel testo del cantautore americano: perfino il pensiero della dipartita è permeato dalla serenità che sta vivendo la coppia. Certo, uno dei due morirà “fra queste braccia”, in fondo è il mistero del mondo – si viene e si parte senza difese e senza comprensione, “nudi come siamo arrivati”. Per questo è essenziale “rubare” ogni istante. E l’autore non resta fermo, nel letto, respirando semplicemente il profumo della donna, ma respirando lei (breathing her). Questo tipo di simbiosi non verrà intaccata dalla morte. In questo senso, il gesto di disperdere le ceneri nel giardino di casa non è affatto un momento di separazione, ma di perpetua vicinanza. Chiunque partirà per primo, sarà sempre lì, parte di quella famiglia felice.
Nonostante Iron&Wine sia stato paragonato a Nick Drake o Neil Young, Naked As We Came si distingue per il tono dimesso e per l’assenza totale di accenti tenebrosi o maudit, che sarebbe facile aspettarsi da una ballata incentrata sulla morte. Una coppia che scherza, ma non troppo, e i bambini che dormono nell’altra stanza… tutto il contrario dello stereotipo rock. Eppure la canzone cattura in modo stupefacente la poesia di un attimo sospeso, e riesce ad esprimere alcune fra le emozioni più difficili da verbalizzare. L’accettazione del fluire delle cose, la pace interiore, la speciale comunione avvertita da due spiriti affini, anche di fronte alla morte.
Gente blu
Lo sanno anche i bambini: gli alieni Navi del blockbuster Avatar hanno la pelle di un bel blu acceso. Ma cosa direste se anche il vostro vicino di casa un bel giorno uscisse dal portone con un look simile?
Per quanto possa sembrare assurdo, la storia medica ha registrato diversi casi di gente dalla pelle blu. L’uomo fotografato qui sotto (al centro), per esempio, era del tutto normale.
Oggi, all’età di 60 anni, la sua pelle ha assunto un colore blu smorto. Come è potuto succedere?
La trasformazione di Paul Karason (così si chiama il simpatico vecchietto dell’Oregon) è avvenuta gradualmente, nel corso degli ultimi 17 anni. Tanto gradualmente che, a detta dello stesso Paul, né lui né gli altri parenti se ne sono resi conto immediatamente. È bastato però rivedere un amico rimasto lontano per anni, per sentire la fatidica domanda: “Ma cosa ti è successo?”. Da quel momento, la sua vita è cambiata. Paul Karason ha cominciato a vergognarsi, ad evitare i posti affollati. Fino alla difficile decisione di lasciare il suo Stato per emigrare in California, dove “la comunità è molto più aperta e spero di vivere una vita normale, in cui mi accettino per quel che sono”.
La sua fidanzata, Jackie Northrup, afferma di “ricordarsi” che lui è blu soltanto quando sono in spazi pubblici e la gente comincia a fissarlo. “È gentile e dal cuore generoso”, lo descrive Jackie.
Sembra che lo strano cambiamento sia da attribuire all’assunzione prolungata di argento colloidale, uno di quei rimedi a cui la medicina alternativa attribuisce poteri benefici e curativi che possono risolvere praticamente qualsiasi problema di salute. Si ottiene liberando l’argento nell’acqua tramite energia elettrica, e molti lo considerano una panacea universale. E, nonostante tutto, Paul ne è ancora convinto. Secondo lui l’errore non è stato bere la pozione d’argento, ma passarsela sulla faccia per combattere delle eruzioni cutanee, provocando così un brutto caso di argiria. Quali che siano le cause, comunque, Paul ha deciso di non curarsi e si è rassegnato a vivere così il resto dei suoi giorni.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahihGKZC5Kk]
Ma la pelle blu può derivare anche da problemi di tipo genetico. Divenne celebre il caso di una famiglia del Kentucky, residente sui monti Appalachi, la familia Fugate.
Poiché risiedente in una zona montagnosa sperduta, questa famiglia installatasi a Troublesome Creek nel 1800 e ivi stanziata fino agli anni ’60 del XX secolo, dovette ricorrere spesso ai matrimoni consanguinei. Questo fece emergere dei geni recessivi responsabili della malattia denominata metaemoglobinemia, un’alterazione che produce alti livelli di metaemoglobina nel sangue. La metaemoglobina è una variante dell’emoglobina che non si lega con l’ossigeno, e quando è prodotta in dosi massicce può portare a ipossia dei tessuti (poco ossigeno nelle cellule). Questo spiegherebbe il colore bluastro dei Fugate, con labbra viola ematoma.
I Fugate furono curati dal medico che si prese a cuore il loro caso con iniezioni e pastiglie di blu di metilene: il trattamento ridonò loro il colorito naturale (anche se l’effetto era temporaneo e le pastiglie andavano assunte quotidianamente). “Erano gente povera, ma brava gente”, ricorda il medico. Diverse troupe di documentaristi e programmi televisivi hanno da allora cercato di intervistare i Fugate, ma sono state regolarmente respinte dai feroci cani da guardia della famiglia. Dagli anni ’60 si è persa traccia dell’esatta localizzazione del ranch dei Fugate, e ora la famiglia dalla pelle blu può vivere in pace.