Sacred rites shrouded in history
The parchment, on which medieval monks created their glorious manuscripts, came from the hides of calves. The skins of slaughtered animals were carefully selected for their texture and the absence of holes made by ticks. Next, the animal’s hair had to be taken off, not an easy task. However, help was at hand from an unlikely source; the monastery cesspool. A skin, left soaking in urine, shed its hair.
But not everybody’s pee, it seems, is equally effective as a hair remover. Best results were obtained using the abbot’s product. His diet was richer than that of more humble monks and this, apparently, meant the water he passed was more effective at dislodging hair. So the Book of Kells, Ireland’s greatest art treasure and sacred text has a murky past.
The fusion of the sacred and the profane predates Christianity. The ancient Egyptians revered the scarab beetle. This little black creature, which lives in hot arid places, rolls balls of dung the way children build a snowman. The balls pick up more and more dung until they are many times heavier than the insect itself. The movement of the little sphere along the ground paralleled that of the sun across the sky. The beetle, the Egyptian theologians concluded, must be spiritually connected to Ra, the Sun-god who rose in the east in the morning and travelled across the sky to the west. The scarab lays its eggs in the ball. When these hatched the priests, seeing what seemed to be the miraculous appearance of young scarabs, concluded that dung is sacred; out of excrement comes life.
Given their world view, it’s hardly surprising that the use of crocodile dung as a contraceptive was acceptable to the Egyptians. The Kahun Medical tome, written on papyrus almost 4,000 years ago, recommends that dung mixed with a paste can be used as a suppository. Whether the preparation was spermicidal or merely acted as a barrier is not clear.
’Saltpetre’, you might be tempted to think, means ‘St. Peter’s salt’, but you’d be wrong. It comes from the Latin ‘sel’ for salt and ‘petrae’, meaning ‘of the rock’. ‘Dung of the bat’ would have been a more appropriate name because bat droppings are exceedingly rich in saltpetre. A cave at Gunung Mulu in Borneo, which I visited a year ago, is home to about three million bats. These high performance flyers need lots of energy and consume vast quantities of insects during their nightly forays. Not surprisingly, the floor of the enormous cavern is covered with a layer of bat dung half a metre thick. It looks like a blanket of dark caviar, with creepy-crawlies writhing in it. The main constituent of the dung is potassium nitrate, saltpetre.
We bought saltpetre from chemists when I was a youth. Mixing it with sulphur and charcoal produced gunpowder. We would pack the mixture into a length of copper pipe and close the ends with a vice-grip. A little hole in the sheath enabled a piece of inflammable material, which served as a fuse, to be inserted. The bomb would explode with a loud bang, lethal fragments of copper flying into the air. As they say; don’t try this at home!
The Gunung Mulu cave is deep in the jungle so its dung isn’t harvested. The great bat caves of Central and South America, however, were raided by armaments manufacturers during the 19th century. Indeed, the excreta of bats played a crucial role in the history of the ‘New World’. The Great Saltpetre Cave in Kentucky was a major gunpowder source during the War of 1912 and both sides in the American Civil War used bat dung. A conflict between Bolivia, Peru and Chile between 1879 and 1883 is known as the ‘Saltpetre War’ although mines, and not just bat caves, were the target.
If life comes from dung, as the Egyptians thought, so too can death!
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