Windbags and Skinsongs 7: Tattoos

Windbags and Skinsongs

7. Tattoos

One of the most distressing effects of hysterical swelling was known as tympanitis, which nowadays refers to an inflammation of the inner ear, but previously named a condition in which the belly was so tightly distended with wind that it sounded like a drum. Perhaps the slang expression ‘tight’ to signify ‘drunk’, along with the expression ‘tight as a drum’, may derive from the sense that the condition of the drunkard is to be swollen with the liquid he has guzzled.

The drum is a competitor for the bagpipe and the harp as image of the sounding body. Although the drum is a percussion instrument, it has elements in common with both string and wind instruments. The compression and resiling of the stretched skin of the drumskin, and the corresponding compression and relaxation of the air inside the drum, approximate to the effect of a plucked string, in which tension is first increased and then released as sound energy. The amplifying resonance chamber of the drum is a feature of many stringed instruments. I said earlier that Ovid’s rendering of Marsyas’s torture turns him into an ironic lyre: but Ovid also writes that his stripped body can be seen pulsating, as though to reveal the action of percussion in him. Indeed, one might say that the bag stretched with wind is a kind of drum. Even the word ‘blow’ seems to suggest a link between the buffets delivered by the air and the buffeting of air enclosed in skin to produce sound.

The Aeolian Harp does not at first sight look like a form of skin-instrument. It is, after all, a string instrument, rather than a wind, or percussion instrument. But the Aeolian Harp is not played like a stringed or wind instrument, in that it is not plucked or blown. Rather it is brushed, swept or strummed, as one brushes hair or the skin of a friction drum. The Aeolian Harp suggests ghostly visitation. There seems to be a particular fondness for instruments involving touch in evoking the idea of survival beyond mortal life, either as unquiet ghost or emparadised spirit. That the harp has become the instrument of choice, not only in many ghost stories, but also as the instrument played in heaven may have something to do with the implication of the skin in it. The characterising sound of the harp in orchestral music is, after all, the swept arpeggio.

Where the bagpipe signifies and enacts the commerce of living bodies, conjoining inside and outside, human and animal, the role of the drum is to enact the meeting of or passage between the natural and supernatural worlds, or the worlds of the living and the dead. The use of drums and percussion is associated in many cultures with divination and the summoning of or communication with spirits, as well as with initiation rituals and rites of passage (Worms 1953; Strömbäck 1956; Macdowell 1957). Sometimes these rituals involve the making of secret drums or percussion instruments, on which enormous care is lavished, as though the making of the drum were itself the making of a new body. Rodney Needham has suggested that percussion and the sound of the drum in particular is typically employed in transitions and meetings between worlds or conditions, either in the form of the meeting of the human and the superhuman, or in the form of a transition from one ordered state to another via an intermediary condition of noise, or formless disorder (Needham 1967). Anthony Jackson's 'Sound and Ritual' (1968) extends and particularises Needham's proposals regarding the role of sound in effecting symbolic transitions. Those making their appearance from the 'other side' in European and American culture often knock at surfaces: pounding on the door, like the imperious knocking heard by the drunken porter in Macbeth, ‘stamping on the floor’ like the ‘grisly ghost’ who invades the king’s hunting hall in the ballad ‘King Henry’ (Child 32), rapping on tables and banging on walls.

Perhaps the most well-known and suggestive case of such a percussive visitant is that of the ‘Daemon of Tadworth’, or Tadworth Drummer of 1661-2. John Mompesson of Tadworth in Wiltshire had brought a lawsuit against a local drummer, who had been found guilty of obtaining money by fraud. His drum was confiscated and handed over to Mompesson. Soon afterwards, Mompesson's house was afflicted by ghostly drummings. Presuming that it was the spirit of the convicted man or a spirit conjured by him who was responsible for the tumult, Mompesson sought him out and had him arraigned and committed to Salisbury Gaol, though he was eventually released on appeal. The case was investigated by Joseph Glanvill, Fellow of the Royal Society and vigorous defender of the reality of witchcraft and sorcery, who included a detailed account of it in his book A Blow at Modern Sadducism (1668). The title indicates how physical a rebuff Glanvill hoped to offer to those who doubted the reality of spirits and demons with his account of this case of demonic assault and battery. Henry More reinforces this in a letter of commendation at the beginning of Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), in which the Tadworth Drummer case is recapitulated. More tells the story of a rationalist friend of his, who would not believe anything unless it were supported by palpable experience. In his case, this takes a percussive form, for ‘while his Servant was pulling off his Boots in the Hall, some invisible Hand gave him such a clap upon the Back, that it made all ring again’. More records the difficulty he has in convincing his friend later in life by argument of the reality of the spiritual realm, for ‘nothing of such subtile consideration did any more execution on his mind, than some Lightning is said to do, though it melt the Sword, on the fuzzy consistency of the Scabbard’. But when reminded of the spiritual clap on the back, ‘he was more confounded by this rubbing up his memory, than with all the Rational or Philosophical Argumentations that I could produce’ (Glanvill 1682, 12-13).

Drums enact the tangible-audible commerce between worlds in other cultures too. Michael Oppitz has described in detail the figuring in the decorations of shamanic drums from the Himalayan region of West Nepal of the different worlds that it brings together: the upper world of gods and spirits, the lower world of animals and demons, and, as it were stretched between them, the middle world of earth and humans (Oppitz 1992, 69-72). Interestingly, the principal decorative motif among the drums of the Magar people who are Oppitz's subject is the drawing on the drum of the figure of a drum, incorporating on its pictorial surface the idea of the skin's liminality. The large number of examples of purgative flogging, flaying and thrashing assembled in Frazer's Golden Bough suggests that an important part of the process may have been the making of noise on the drubbed skins and bodies of those subjected to such ritual assaults, since inchoate noise is as effective at driving away evil spirits as it is at summoning them. Frazer thinks that these malignant influences may be imagined as not just hovering in the vicinity, but as 'clinging…to their persons' , or 'sticking like a leech or a bur to the skin of the living' (Frazer 1936, 9.260, 262).

Drums are also associated with resurrection through the skin. One of the most famous stories of tympanic afterlife is told of John Zisca, the leader of a radical group of Waldensians and Wycliffites who engaged in a bitter struggle against papal power in Bohemia the early 1420s. After Ziska's death, stories began to spread that, in the words of Montaigne, he had 'wished to be flayed after death and his skin to be made into a drum to bear in battle against his foes' (Montaigne 1991, 14). Ziska's wish became proverbial for the idea of resolution maintained beyond death and there were reports that his request had been fulfilled and that the enemy had fled at the terrifying sound of his beaten skin. Montaigne tells the story in his essay 'Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us' (Nos affections s'emportent au delà de nous) in illustration of the principle that, as he puts it, 'we are never "at home": we are always outside ourselves' (Montaigne 1962, 18-24). Related to this is the widespread belief in the antagonism between the wolf and the sheep that survives even after death, making it unwise to mix their skins when making a drum. As Robert Heath explains in a poem of 1650:

Such is the strange Antipathie between
The Wolfe and sheep; that a Drum with Wolves skin
Headed and beat, the parchment bottome breaks,
And soundless to the stick no answer makes:
So the Wolfe’s by, the Lambstrings break, so dumb
Is th’other, when you sound a Wolves-skin’d Drum. (Heath 1650, Elegies , 9)

The raucous Marsyas also has a particular mythical affiliation to the drum, since he is said in some traditions to be the companion of the Phrygian goddess of fertility and wild nature, Cybele, whose ecstatic cult centres on the music of the pipe and the tabor, this latter being struck by the palms of the hands. Though it has recently been suggested that the attribution of the tabor or tympanum to Cybele, and Meter, her Greek equivalent, may actually have been Greek in origin, the percussiveness of her rituals was the distinctive sign of the dangerous, delicious outlandishness of her cult (Roller 1999, 148-51).

The kind of corybantic revelling associated with the cult of Cybele experienced a revival in the epidemics of tarantism or dancing mania that flared up in Europe from the fourteenth century onwards. The frenzied dances, which would go on for hours and even days on end were attempts to cure the effects of the at the bite of the Lycosa tarantula spider of Southern Europe (a wolf spider which is named after the Italian town of Taranto in Apulia and unrelated to the South American tarantula). The spider bite was believed to produce a condition of deathly torpor, paralysis, melancholy and, eventually, death, symptoms which could only be eased by lengthy periods of energetic dancing which left sufferers exhausted but purged of the poison. Nico Staiti has charted in detail the iconographical mergings of the representations of tarantismo with traditions of Dionysian procession and revelry, the two traditions being held together by the shared importance in them of the drum or tambour (Staiti 1990, 94-106).

Tarantism seems to draw together rhythmic sound and the skin in a particularly intense way. Just as the sound of the struck drum, associated often with pipe music, was central to the attempt to stimulate and maintain frenzied dance, so the skin of the sufferer was implicated both in disease and cure. The spider's bite had entered through the skin, and the skin was reciprocally the most important organ in the expulsion of the poison, which was thought to be sweated out by means of the dance. Not only was disorderly rhythm necessary to diffuse the lethargy of the sufferer by opening up the skins in which they had become as it were too tightly confined, sufferers would be compelled to dance annually at the precise time at which they had received their bites (Hecker 1970; Russell 1979; Bartholomew 2000). Some would need to be beaten or would beat themselves into the necessary condition of purgative frenzy.

Among the many medical writers and natural historians to investigate tarantism was Giorgio Baglivi, physician to Pope Innocent XII and professor of anatomy at the Sacred College in Rome, who included a lengthy account of the disease and its cure in his De praxi medica of 1699, translated into English as The Practice of Physick in 1704. Baglivi offers some interesting speculations about how music might effect its cure. Relying on an atomist account of the nature of matter, he lays emphasis on the percussive nature of music, arguing that 'considering that the Operations of Motion are performed by the Contact of Bodies, tis no Wonder that the slightest Impressions of Motion produce admirable Effects, by communicating the Impetus of the Contact to the very remotest Parts' (Baglivi 1704, 404). He represents the skin as a receiver, amplifier and transmitter of the percussive impressions of music to the unhealthily congested spirits of the sufferer. The music of the tarantella seems to have been thought both to pulverise the fixated body and to rearticulate it.

[A]ll of us are sensible that upon Hearing an unwonted and agreeable Harmony of Musick, we feel first a gentle Shivering over the Skin. And a sort of Erection of the Hair… 'Tis probable, that the very swift Motion impress'd upon the Air by Musical Instruments, and communicated by the Air to the Skin, and so to the Spirits and Blood, does in some Measure dissolve and dispel their growing Coagulation; and that the Effects of the Dissolution increase as the Sound it self encreases [sic], till, at last, the Humours retrieve their primitive fluid State, by vertue of these repeated Shakings and Vibrations; upon which the Patient revives gradually, moves his Limbs, gets upon his Legs, groans, and jumps about with Violence, till the Sweat breaks and carries off the Seeds of the Poison. (Baglivi 1704, 406, 408)

The spider, which can be thought of as an epidermal creature, not only because of the common revulsion at the thought of insects and arachnids running across the skin, but also because of its light and tenuous constitution, was itself thought to be particularly sensitive to the effects of music and itself to be able to dance. Baglivi described the substance of the 'tarantula' spider as 'almost all brittle, membranous, and most subtile, filled with a peculiar sort of nutritious Lymphe (for I seldom or never observ'd any appearance of blood in it) so that it is no wonder if the slightest motion from without causes involuntary Throws' (Baglivi 1704, 383). Baglivi sees the spider's own tarantella as induced by the rattling tattoo of vibratory sound:

[T]he undulatory or wavering Motion of the Air…being struck pretty sharply by the Musical Instruments, and terminating upon the membranous Body of the Insect, makes it not at all strange, if it seem to move at the sound of the Musick, altho that dancing proceed from these external Motions, rather than any pleasure or natural instinct inclining it to move so on that occasion. (Baglivi 1704, 383-4)