5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (17 page)

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Beyond Belief:

Ten Routes to Sainthood

1

St. Denis is the patron saint of syphilis and of Paris. He was beheaded, but he carried his head around with him.

He is not to be confused with St. Fiacre, the patron saint of nonspecific venereal disease, a job he combines with looking after gardeners and hemorrhoid sufferers (after an altercation with a nonbeliever in Brittany, St. Fiacre sat down heavily on a rock, miraculously leaving the impression of his buttocks upon it. Christian hemorrhoid and acne sufferers later claimed that they could get relief by sitting where St. Fiacre had rested).

2

St. Agatha is the patron saint of Malta, bell-makers, diseases of the breast, earthquakes, fire, and sterility. In the third century, she defended her virginity against a high-ranking Roman and was sent to prison, where her breasts were cut off; they were restored by divine intervention. She was sent to work in a brothel (where her virginity miraculously remained intact), then burned at the stake, where she failed to ignite. Finally she was beheaded. Sicilians honor her feast day every year by carrying an image of her breasts through the streets.

3

The feast day of St. Lawrence is August 10. He was roasted alive on a spit, but faced death heroically, telling his torturers, “Turn me over—I’m cooked on that side.”

St. Lawrence is the patron saint of those who grill.

4

September 18 is the feast day of the seventeenth-century

“flying monk,” St. Joseph of Copertino. During Mass he was seen to hover about twelve paces above the ground while “uttering his customary shrill cry.” Pope Urban
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VIII once saw him in flight and was full of admiration, but his feats of levitation didn’t go down well with everyone, especially his fellow monks, who regarded his flying as a nuisance.

5

December 19 is the feast day of the Blessed William of Fenoli, a monk who lived in the thirteenth century. One day, while accompanied by his mule, he was attacked by robbers. William defended himself by ripping off the leg of his mule and clubbing his attackers with it. Then he restored the leg and continued on his journey.

6

The feast day of the sibling saints Eulampius and Eulampia, brother and sister martyrs, is celebrated on November 10. In fourth-century Turkey, during the reign of Gallienius, the couple survived being boiled in oil, which moved 200 astonished onlookers to convert to Christianity on the spot. By the order of the emperor, all 200 converts were beheaded.

7

St. Nicholas is the patron saint of Russia, children, pawnbrokers, unmarried girls, perfumers, and sailors. He was a bishop in southwestern Turkey during the fourth century and is purported to have restored to full health three decapitated children. St. Nicholas was said to have been such a pious baby that he abstained from his mother’s milk on Wednesdays and Fridays.

8

The feast day of St. Swithun is July 2. Known as “the drunken saint” (
The Oxford Companion to the Year
notes that this is “probably a jocular reference to heavy
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rainfall”), St. Swithun performed only one recorded miracle, and a relatively modest one at that. A woman on her way to market dropped her basket of eggs, breaking all of them. Swithun said a prayer for her and when the woman looked into the basket again the eggs had unscrambled themselves and returned to salable condition. To test his awesome powers of self-control, Swithun liked to sleep chastely between two beautiful virgins.

9

The feast day of St. Simeon the Stylite is January 5. The most famous of the “pillar hermits,” he was known for his thrift and for living on top of a column for thirty years. He demonstrated his divinity by standing on one leg for a year and tying a rope around his waist so tightly that his lower body became putrefied and infested with maggots. He simply ate the maggots, saying, “Eat what God has given you.” He passed out, but was revived with a few lettuce leaves. St. Simeon bowed in prayer one day and fell off his pole to his death.

10

The feast day of St. Catherine of Siena is April 29. She overcame her fear of bubonic plague victims by drinking a whole bowl of pus.

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Ten 10

Things You Are

Very Unlikely to Learn in

Sunday School

1

The Book of Esther is the only book in the Bible that neglects to mention God.

2

Although the Church has always frowned on adultery, it didn’t get around to banning sex with animals until the Council of Ankara in a.d. 314.

3

The modern confessional box was invented in the Middle Ages to help stop priests from sexually assaulting women.

4

The early Christian Church held that the Virgin Mary was impregnated by her ear: Fear of accidental aural penetration was so widespread that it led to the fashion for tight-fitting wimples.

5

The Catholic Church accepts cannibalism as a justifiable means of saving one’s life.

6

Onan, the son of Judah, who “spilled his seed” in the Old Testament (Genesis 38:9) is the Bible’s only masturbator.

The passage was the basis for the Church’s condemnation of the practice and gave rise to the word “onanism,” in Victorian times a popular term for self-abuse.

7

The Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes recommends clearing the stomach by throwing up before or during a big meal to make room for more food.

8

The Bible is full of lepers because it was written at a time when any skin defect, even a bad case of acne, was likely to get you branded as a leper and consequently shunned by society. Most “lepers” probably suffered from syphilis.

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9

The Church adopted celibacy as a code for the priesthood in 1123. Three hundred and fifty years later, Pope Innocent VIII became known as “the Honest” because he admitted that he had fathered several bastards. He owned up only to disprove a rumor going around Rome at the time that he was a woman.

10

Before the Reformation, men could be excommunicated for wearing wigs. The Church required men’s hair to be short, straight, and “unadorned.”

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Ten 10

Lesser-Known

Scientific Endeavors

1

Sir Isaac Newton spent thirty of the most productive years of his life trying to change base metals into gold and searching for hidden codes in the Bible, which he believed contained God’s secret laws for the universe. He said that the mathematical formulae in his
Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica
, which contains some of the cornerstones of modern science, were first revealed by God to a group of mystics at the dawn of civilization, a tradition to which he had been chosen as heir, and he predicted that the world would end in 2060. The man who possessed perhaps the greatest scientific mind of all also cut two cat-flaps in his front door, one for his cat and a smaller one for the cat’s kitten.

2

Charles Babbage, the “father of computing,” devoted much of his spare time to working out the statistical probability of the biblical miracles. He calculated that the chances of a man rising from the dead were 1 in 1,012. Babbage was also obsessed with fire and water. He once allowed himself to be baked in an oven at 265° F

for “five or six minutes without any great discomfort,”

and he almost drowned while testing a device for walking on water.

3

Charles Waterton, the eighteenth-century British adventurer-naturalist, became famous after the publication in 1826 of his book
Wandering in South
America
, the result of many years spent alone in unexplored rain forest. The book combined accurate observations of wildlife, including the very first account of sloths, with idiosyncratic notes on politics and
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[Ten Lesser-Known Scientific Endeavors]

taxidermy and a vicious attack on the Hanoverian monarchy. Waterton took a hands-on approach to his fieldwork, once spending six months sleeping with his foot dangling out of his hammock in the hope that he would be bitten by a vampire bat. He was “bitterly disappointed” when “the brutes failed to take the bait.”

4

Charles Darwin, having calculated the precise number of earthworms in his garden (an average of 53,767 per acre), piled thousands of them on his billiard table and subjected them to a series of experiments, including studies of what happened when he blew tobacco smoke at them and when his son played a bassoon at them.

After placing some worms close to the keys of a piano, which was played as loudly as possible, Darwin deduced:

“Worms do not possess any sense of hearing.” He later repeated the experiment by playing a bassoon to his plants and again deduced that his subjects were deaf.

5

Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, was said to have had an IQ of 200, the highest ever recorded. He invented fingerprinting, was a pioneer in the science of eugenics, and was the first to describe high- and low-pressure weather patterns. He also invented a pocket counting device used to clock the number of attractive women he passed in the street to help him compile a

“beauty map” of Great Britain: After many years of dedicated research, Galton determined that Britain’s ugliest women lived in Aberdeen. His finest hour came in 1850, when he became the first European to explore Damaraland in Southwest Africa. Upon encountering the
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Hottentot people, he turned his analytical mind to the measurement of African ladies’ bottoms.

6

Alexander Graham Bell, who kept his windows permanently covered to keep out the “harmful rays” of the full moon, tried to teach his dog to talk and dissected the family cat in order to study its vocal cords. Bell also experimented with livestock: Convinced that sheep with extra nipples would give birth to more lambs, he spent thirty years counting sheep nipples. He abandoned his research when the U.S. State Department officially announced it could find no link between multiple nipples and increased fertility.

7

The English scientist J. B. S. Haldane, a pioneer in genetics, subjected himself to various experiments. He once drank a bottle of hydrochloric acid and then bicycled home to see what effect it would have; he then swallowed a near-fatal dose of calcium chloride, which resulted in violent diarrhea followed by painful constipation. To test his lung capacity, he swallowed one and a half ounces of bicarbonate of soda, then ran up and down a 150-foot flight of stairs twenty times, causing himself to have a fit, during which he crushed several of his vertebrae. Haldane was also prepared to experiment on others without necessarily asking for permission.

While lecturing at a public meeting on the dangers of gas in trench warfare, he vaporized a spoonful of pepper over an oil lamp, causing the hall to fill with pungent smoke. As people fled for the exits, eyes streaming and lungs gasping for air, he shouted after them, “If that
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upsets you, how would you like a deluge of poison gas from an air fleet in real war?”

8

The pioneer of the miner’s lamp, Sir Humphrey Davy, was an avid angler and thought he could baffle his quarry if he disguised himself as a form of natural greenery by wearing a green coat, green trousers, and a green hat. According to a fellow angler, “Davy flattered himself he resembled vegetable life as closely as it was possible to do.” When Davy went shooting, however, he did exactly the opposite. Not very trusting of the marksmanship of his fellow sportsmen, he made himself as conspicuous as possible to avoid being accidentally shot by wearing bright-colored clothing and a huge, wide-brimmed, bright red hat.

9

Nikola Tesla, whose name ranks with those of Thomas Edison and Guglielmo Marconi as one of the greats in the history of electricity, studied birds in the local woods and then jumped from the roof of the family barn, clutching an umbrella, convinced he could fly. This line of research was abandoned after he spent six weeks in traction.

10

The aviator Orville Wright numbered the eggs that his chickens produced so he could eat them in the precise order in which they had been laid. He also had a morbid fear of public appearances. When President Franklin Roosevelt went to Wright’s hometown, Dayton Ohio, to campaign for reelection, Orville reluctantly agreed to
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have lunch with him. Later, however, when he found himself in the back of the president’s touring car being driven though cheering crowds, at the first opportunity he jumped out, thanked the president for lunch, and then walked home.

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Shot in the Foot:

Ten Military Bloopers

532 b.c.: Croesus, king of Lydia, asks the Delphic oracle if he should attack the Persians. She replies, “Cross the river Halys and attack and you will destroy a great nation.” He does, and destroys his own.