Cranioklepty (13 page)

Jeremy Bentham in his “Auto-Icon.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL REEVE.

In 1875 the Anthropological Society of Paris founded a Society of Mutual Autopsy, not only to
further the destigmatization of dissection but to recast autopsy as a form of immortality: Upon death a member would be immortalized in a detailed description of his body, particularly his brain— which would be added to the society's collection for all time.

But most people were not about to let their mortal remains be used as scientific toys or gothic mementoes. The fear of grave robbing was still strong through much of the nineteenth century, and new technologies arose to foil the resurrectionists. There was, for example, the “mortsafe,” an iron grid that encased the coffin to prevent any molestation of one's remains, and in 1818 an Englishman named Edward Bridgman introduced the first device invented specifically to combat grave robbing: the “patent coffin,” a cast- or wrought-iron coffin with spring catches hidden on the inside of the lid, configured in such a way that it was impossible to pry off the lid with a crowbar. The patent coffin was such a sensation that a man named Charles Dibden composed an ode to this “prince of coffin makers” and sold it as a broadsheet, an upbeat ditty that included the following choice verses:

Each age has boasted curious selves,

By patent notoriety,

Whose inventions have enriched themselves,

For advantage of society.

I, an immortal artisan,

Pray, gents, favour your scoffing,
Produce tonight, muse, sing the man

That made the patent coffin.

CHORUS:

Then toll the knell, each passing bell

Shall of the mighty name of this wondrous man be talking,

While foremost in the ranks of fame

His coffin shall be walking.

Resurrection men, your fate deplore,

Retire with sore vexation,

Your mystery's gone, your art's no more,

No more your occupation;

Surgeons, no more shall ye ransack

The grave, with feelings callous,

Tho' on the Old Bailey turn'd your back,

Your only hopes the gallows.
¹¹²

That the inventor of a resurrection-proof coffin would be hailed as a national hero reveals the extent to which the general public still feared such a postmortem fate. Certainly the average citizen did not see the prospect of putting his or her skull on display as anything like a worthy tribute to a famous mind—after all, it was still primarily the case that if a skull was on display or under the eye of science, it had probably come from the gallows
or the insane asylum, and few wanted any such institutions associated with their own heads.

A
ND SO, AS
expressed by that most basic tenet of capitalism, the dearth of famous skulls coupled with increasing demand made them that much more valuable, and their theft that much more lucrative. In 1809 Joseph Carl Rosenbaum had to pay only 25 gulden to secure a grave digger's help; in 1827 those interested in Beethoven's head were willing to go as high as 1,000 gulden.

A few rare skulls could be had through legal channels. When the German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller's body was exhumed in 1826, twenty-one years after his death, the Duke Carl August had the skull mounted on a velvet cushion in a glass case and displayed in his library. In order to keep the duke from being confused with the religiously superstitious or macabre treasure hunters, much was made of the fact that the skull was to be kept in the library—the proper place for a skull of genius, which could be read phrenologically, almost as if it were another book on the shelf. As a private, special book, it was not for everyone. As the director of the duke's library put it, the skull was to be made available only to those “of whom one can be certain that their steps are not governed by curiosity but by a feeling, a knowledge of what that great man achieved for Germany, for Europe, and for the whole civilized world.”
¹¹³

If anyone had that feeling, it was this librarian, no less than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who would become the bedrock on which much of Germanic literature was based. Either way, after a year the Duke got nervous about the skull and ordered it reinterred with the body. Respectable sources simply could not be relied on; if you wanted a skull, you had to steal it yourself.

S
UCH WAS THE
case with the head of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, which showed up for sale in England in 1816 or '17 (the reports varied). A polymath who had excelled in physics, geometry, and chemistry, Swedenborg turned to spiritual questions in his middle age and in the last thirty years of his life published over thirty books of spiritual revelations. In the years following his death a small but fervently devoted branch of Christianity was born.

Swedenborg stressed that the Second Coming was already upon us—not as a literal reappearance of Jesus Christ but his return in spirit, which affected all the world, ushering in a new age—what Swedenborg called the New Church. His writings depicted a parallel spiritual world which can be fully realized only in death, once we have left our mortal remains and when each of us is revealed as who we truly are.

Swedenborg was traveling in London in 1772 when he suffered a stroke and shortly thereafter was liberated from his own mortal remains. He was buried in the Swedish Church, which had been founded by his father to serve the small Swedish community
of London and Swedish naval personnel passing through the port. Swedenborg was buried in the vault below the church, which was kept sealed and opened only occasionally to accept new occupants.

Swedenborg's coffin was first disturbed in 1790, though not by grave robbers. Rather it was an American Rosicrucian, traveling in England, who flatly refused to believe that Swedenborg had died and contended instead that he had discovered the secret to immortality, drunk an elixir of eternal youth, and then had a fake funeral performed so as to avoid discovery. After a heated discussion over dinner with friends one night, the American and his party resolved to settle the matter. Bribing the sexton, the American descended into the crypt with a small entourage, which included Gustav Broling and Robert Hindmarsh, who both later recounted the story. The coffin, it turned out, was airtight and had to be opened with the aid of a solderer called in to break the seal. Because no air or moisture had been able to aid in decomposition, Swedenborg's body was almost perfectly preserved—and smelled. Broling recalled how, upon opening the coffin, “there issued forth effluvia in such abundance and of such a sort that the candles went out, and all the observers were obliged to rush head over heels out of the burial vault in order not to be smothered.” This was, finally, enough to satisfy the doubting American.
¹¹⁴

Once the vault was cleared out, they returned to find Swedenborg's body unchanged after eighteen years. “We all stood for a few minutes in silent astonishment,” Hindmarsh wrote, “to observe the physiognomy of that material frame now prostrate in the hands of death, which had once been the organ of so much intellect.” In awe, Hindmarsh placed his hand on the philosopher's face, triggering the sudden decomposition that had been postponed for so long: “The whole frame was speedily reduced to ashes, leaving only the bones to testify to future inspectors of the coffin that a man had once lived and died.”

The coffin was never resealed, so anyone who happened to be in the vault might easily have had access to Swedenborg's remains. With phrenology spreading like wildfire through Great Britain, it was only a matter of time before curiosity got the better of someone.

The skull was stolen in either 1816 or 1817—the circumstances surrounding the theft were never very clear—but not much was made of the theft until 1823, when the
Times
of London ran a short notice on the skull's reunion with the rest of the philosopher's bones. The ensuing confusion regarding the circumstances and motives of the theft speaks volumes of the changing attitudes toward the dead body during this time. The
Times
article, which appeared on March 31, 1823, offered a particularly colorful version of the events. The newspaper related how a Swedish disciple of Swedenborg, “whether prompted by supernatural inspiration or by his own blind superstition,” had in fact

The skull of Emanuel Swedenborg.

contrived, by means of bribing the sexton or gravedigger, to gain admittance to the cemetery where his body was deposited. Here, in the silent hour of midnight (having previously supplied himself with the necessary implements)
he broke open the coffin, and severed the head from the trunk of the departed saint, with the former of which he safely decamped to his own country. This
relic
he preserved with the greatest care and veneration till the day of his death, when it was discovered by his surviving relatives.

The writer went on to relate how the thief's friends, “alarmed at the consequences that might follow such an unhallowed violation of the tomb, and being desirous of atoning in some measure for the sins of him who had been guilty of so great a crime, caused the head to be forthwith transmitted” back to London so that it could be reunited with Swedenborg's body, “with due solemnity in the presence of the elders of the church.”
¹¹⁵

Alas, the story was almost entirely an invention of the
Times
writer. Oddly, it bore a striking similarity to the saga of Haydn and Rosenbaum: a devoted disciple motivated by a misguided passion and devotion, a midnight theft to retrieve a prized relic. Odd because at that time the story was not known at all beyond those few involved, many of whom (including Nicholas II) did not know the whole story. It was almost as if Rosenbaum's story had percolated into the collective unconscious of the age, as if from some common Romantic wellspring.

A series of letters quickly reached the
Times
to correct the erroneous account. The first of these, by one Reverend Samuel
Noble, was by far the most indignant. Noble was not only a minister in the New Church but was also the founder of the Society for Printing and Publishing the Writings of Swedenborg (now the Swedenborg Society) and editor of the leading Swedenborgian journal in Britain, the
Intellectual Repository.
To Noble, the
Times's
account was “certainly sufficiently ridiculous, and calculated, with all who might believe it, to throw unmerited obloquy on the whole body of the admirers of [Swedenborg's] writings,” and he had written to correct this miscarriage of justice. Yes, Noble confirmed, Swedenborg's head had been stolen, “but
it is not true
that the person who executed this singular robbery was
one of his disciples
.” Rather than anyone connected with Swedenborgianism or the New Church, the thief was, Noble claimed, someone affiliated with phrenology, the New Science: “I understand that the motive which led him to obtain possession of this ‘relic,' was the same as led Drs. Gall and Spurzheim to posses themselves of similar relics of other eminent men.” The phrenologist, Noble explained, had been at the Swedish Church for the burial of Baroness von Nolcken, who had died in 1816, and after the funeral had been wandering in the tomb when he had noticed the opened coffin.

The reinterment, Noble went on, was carried out not by friends of this thief but by the Swedish Countess von Schwerin, who had heard of the situation and “requested an English gentleman of rank to wait upon the possessor, and request that he would allow the skull to be restored to its former situation.” Most important
for Noble were the motives for this reinterment: “
It is true
, then, that its re-interment took place; but
it is not true
that this was attended with any solemnity, or ‘excited unbounded (or any) interest among his numerous followers.'”
¹¹⁶

The erroneous claim that a Swedenborgian had done this was bad enough for Noble. But what was doubly insulting was any suggestion that the Swedenborgian community cared one way or another about the body: “Some of them knew that the skull had been taken away: but I believe that none of them (or not more than one) knew when it was restored; and I am sure that none of them cared anything about the matter.”

Swedenborg in life had been a mystic, and those who valued his teachings above all valorized the spirit over the body. As David George Goyder, a phrenologist, Swedenborgian, and contemporary of Noble, wrote, “Of all the different classes of Christians, the Swedenborgians are the least accessible to relics of any kind, but more especially relics of the dead.” As a temporary vessel, once the body has “fulfilled its use in this world, which use is principally to prepare the soul for heaven, it will be consigned ‘to the earth as it was, while the spirit will return to God who gave it.'”
¹¹⁷
No matter who had taken the skull, he couldn't have been involved with Swedenborgianism.