The Wind Beneath Our Wings: Divine Inspiration and Shadow Exaltation in Rites of (Gas) Passage
By Craig Titley
Adolf Hitler, according to Pulitzer Prize winning historian/biographer John Toland, “suffered from meteorism, uncontrollable farting” (402). To deal with this embarrassing ailment the F¸hrer began ingesting Dr. Kˆster’s anti-gas pills in 1936. By 1941, when he was invading Russia, Hitler was popping “120 to 150 anti-gas pills a week” (678). Three years later Dr. Erwin Giesling, the newest of Hitler’s private physicians, examined the pills and “was horrified to learn they contained strychnine and atropine”--two deadly poisons (825). The toxic effects of atropine: delirium, hallucinations, and paranoia (CFNP 35). Considering the thousands and thousands of these pills Hitler had been consuming during his rise and reign, it seems quite possible that farting, or rather the attempt to suppress the act of farting, may have driven Hitler mad(der), lead to World War II, and resulted in the extermination of over six million Jews.
Farts are, to be sure, no laughing matter.
As early as 420 B.C. Hippocrates had warned of the dangers of holding in a fart: “It is better for it to pass with noise than to be intercepted and accumulated internally” (2.24-25). In 1518, Sir Thomas More, in an epigram entitled In Efflatum Ventis, wrote “’Wind, if you keep it too long in your stomach, kills you; on the other hand, it can save your life if it is properly let out. If wind can save or destroy you, then is it not as powerful as dreaded kings?’” (qtd. in Dawson 5). And as recently as 1994, two scientists in Holland recommended, “for good health you need to fart about fifteen times a day” (Dawson 11). Yet despite the fact that fart suppression can lead to health problems, death, and the occasional world war, farts and farting are still considered taboo in most cultures, including our own.
Doctors Eric S. Rabkin, PhD, and Eugene M. Silverman, M.D., have detailed many of the punitive rites and practices associated with farting in their detailed study of multi-cultural flatulence. For example when a member of the Selkinam people of Tierra del Fuego breaks wind, “the whole group breaks up, running around and chasing the offender away” (45), and if an adult member of the Kapuaka of New Guinea willingly breaks wind they “may be punished by expulsion from the group while children may be beaten with sticks” (46).
Scientist John Gregory Bourke (1846-1896), who spent a decade of his life researching scatalogic folklore and rites for his book Scatalogic Rites of All Nations, notes that among many Arab tribes, “the voiding of wind is considered to be the gravest indecency” (89), resulting in expulsion, beatings, or even death...and not just for those who dealt the smell. According to Bourke, “[t]he Bedawi [...] has a mortal hatred to a crepitus ventris, and were a by-stander to laugh at its accidental occurrence, he would be at once cut down” (89). Beatings and violence seem to be a common response to the fart. One of the most interesting customs detailed by Rabkin and Silverman is that of the Thonga goatheards of South Africa:
[...] when one of them is detected to have let a fart, they yell Fakisa at him--what has happened? Everything is fine if he will just respond simply with the words Cita munyakanya goben--I have let wind out through the rectum. But if he does not know the formulaic admission, he is beaten and made to take over the herding until the end of that day. (46)
A variant of this confessional rite found its way to my own childhood backyard in rural Illinois. If anyone among us farted he had to call out “Beats” before any of the non-farters yelled “No Beats.” If a “No Beats” came first the non-farters were allowed to pummel the farter until he grabbed the nearest doorknob. A marital variation on these confessional rites was witnessed among the African Chagga where “if a man farts at the dinner table, his wife must pretend that it was she who let it fly. In fact, she must allow herself to be scolded about it by her husband” (Rabkin 51).
In other cultures, because the shame associated with farting is so intense, the punishment is often self-inflicted. When a young man of the Tikopia of Polynesia farted in front of his tribal chiefs he was so ashamed that he “committed suicide by impaling himself through the rectum” (Rabkin 49). Similarly, in the Truk Islands, “’a young chap let out a noise that filled him with such shame that he went into the forest, reviled his rectum, and ripped it open with a sharp shell so that he bled to death’” (Rabkin 49). Bronislaw Malinowski, who studied the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia, detailed one of their folk stories that seems to capture the general worldview of farting in both primitive and modern cultures:
In the tale of the louse and the butterfly, the joke consists in the louse emitting a resounding noise from the rectum, by which explosion he is thrown off the butterfly’s back and drowned in the sea. (Malinowski 403)
The moral of the story is quite clear: you fart, you die, and you deserve it. Suffice it to say that one must be very cautious before attempting the “pull my finger” gag in a strange land.
Although there are some examples of cultures that embrace farting, for the most part farts are, quite literally, on a culture’s “shit list.” In Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas posits that anything coming from the body’s margins is likely to suffer this type of negative stigmatism: “...all margins are dangerous [...]. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolise (sic) its specially vulnerable points. Matter [...] by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body” (122). Along with excrement, saliva, blood, and urine, the traversing fart is considered a pollutant and a defiler of all that is sacred and clean. Perhaps farts are even more dangerous because they are not solid, tangible matter, thus enabling them to disperse and penetrate like a toxic wind. Or like the sly Devil himself.
Norman O. Brown notes that the Devil is often associated with “a sulphurous or other evil smell, the origin of which is plainly revealed in the article ‘De crepitu Diaboli’ in an eighteenth-century compendium of folklore” (207). Martin Luther himself made “wood-cut sketches of small demons being forcefully expelled from the Devil’s asshole” (Dawson 90) and told the story of a Lutheran pastor “to whom the Devil appeared in the confessional, blasphemed Christ, and ‘departed leaving a horrible stench’” (Brown 208). This suggests that the fart is something evil, the spawn or tool of Satan if not the stench of his very own soul. Yet Martin Luther also believed that a fart could be used against Satan. In fact Luther himself had used this anal weapon, recording that “in one encounter, when Lutheran doctrines had not sufficed to rout the Devil, he had routed him ‘mit einem Furz’” (Brown 208). Now we know why Jesus, in the Gospels, said “Get thee behind me, Satan.”
Luther’s faith in and respect for the power of farting is not surprising considering that the foundation of the Protestant Reformation--the doctrine of justification by faith--came to Martin Luther, by his own documented admission, when he was more than likely breaking a little wind: “’This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower’” (qtd. in Brown 202). Apparently modern Christianity, like World War II, might also have been the indirect result of the common fart. This wind does indeed seem to have the power to save and destroy.
There is an ambivalent duality in the fart. They are at once repulsive and attractive (ever pull the covers over your head after letting on in bed?); filthy and healthy; silly and sublime. And, it would appear, sacred and profane. Is it possible that Sir Thomas More, no stranger to spiritual insights himself, was not merely discussing the medical implications of farting when he said they could save or destroy us like “dreaded kings”? Perhaps there is a salvific component to farts that transcends their physical properties and transforms farts and the act of farting into our spiritual saviors.
Freud’s psychoanalytical theory of infantile sexuality and its sublimation “insists that there is a hidden connection between higher spiritual activity and lower urges of the body” (Brown 203). Among certain Brahmins, a spiritual blessing was required after each bite of food:
He takes a little rice soaked in melted butter and puts it into his mouth, saying: “Glory to the wind which dwells in the chest!’ At the second mouthful, “Glory to the wind which dwells in the face!” At the third, “Glory to the wind which dwells in the throat!” At the fourth, “Glory to the wind which dwells in the whole body!” At the fifth, “Glory to those noisy embullitions which escape above and below!” (246)
The ancient Pelusians of northern Egypt prayed to a fart-god called Bel-Phegor and “did venerate a Fart, which they worshipped under the symbol of a swelled paunch” (Bourke 87), and Medieval Catholics suffering from an acute case of the wind britches could pray to Saint Erasmus who was in charge of the gastrointestinal system for fast relief (Bourke 86).
Where there is worship and praise, there is sacred and holy. Or, in this case, “holey.” It is interesting to note that the most common cause of farting is, according to Drs. Rabkin and Silverman, “lactose [...] ingested in milk or milk goods” (151-2). Mythically and historically, milk is “the nectar of life” (Chevalier, “Milk” 654) and is considered a symbol of “absolute knowledge” and “immortality” (Chevalier, “Milk” 654-5). Thus farting, at its most common source, may be related to enlightenment and spirituality. Furthermore, the word flatulent, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology is “borrowed from the Middle French flatulent, an irregular formation from Latin flatus (genitive flatus) a blowing, a breaking wind [...]” (389). Like the Holy Spirit or the Breath of God, the wind you hear passing down below might very well be playing the first notes of your “Redemption Song.”
How then can the fart lead us to enlightenment and salvation? The first step is through “the magical violation of prohibitions” (Makarius 68). In other words, we must learn to get dirty. Mary Douglas equates dirt--synonymous with farts and other marginal body matter--with disorder. And just as there is an ambivalent duality in the fart, so there is in disorder:
Granted that disorder spoils pattern; it also provides the material of pattern [...]. This is why, though we seek to create order, we do not simply condemn disorder. We recognise (sic) that it is destructive to existing patterns; also that it has potentiality. It symbolizes both danger and power. (95)
By violating the cultural prohibition against farting--after all farting may be the easiest and most enjoyable taboo to violate if the number of farting jokes and games is any indication--we can unleash this potentiality in ourselves and in the world.
Enter the Trickster.
A psychopompic mediator between heaven and earth (Makarius 84), the Trickster is often associated with anality. In the Trickster myth of the Winnebago Indians he “treats his own anus as if it could act as an independent agent and ally” (Douglas 80), and in one tale, after swallowing a strange bulb, he farted so much that he was lifted into the air. As the people piled on top of him to hold him down--
[...] he began to break wind again and the force of the explosion scattered the things on top of him in all directions. They fell apart from one another. Separated, the people were standing about and shouting to one another; and the dogs, scattered here and there, howled at one another. There stood Trickster laughing at them till he ached. (Radin 25)
Norman O. Brown views this as a creative act; Mary Douglas sees it as destructive. Perhaps both are right because the Trickster, like the fart, is ambivalent: “It is as though each virtue or defect attributed to him automatically calls into being its opposite” (Makarius 68). This makes him our perfect guide between the sacred and the profane.
Laura Makarius describes the Trickster as “a mythic projection of the magician who in reality or in people’s desire accomplishes the taboo violation on behalf of his group, thereby obtaining the medicines or talismans necessary to satisfy its needs and desires” (73). The all-powerful fart is one form that these medicines or talismans may assume. Claude Gaignebet and Marie-Claude Floretin detail an interesting fart-related ritual found in La Chandeleur, the French Candelmas ceremony (also known as “The Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord” and “The Purification of the Virgin Mary”):
It’s at the Chandeleur-Carnival that for the first time we see the rise of the psychopomp, the savage man or the bear that emerges from hibernation, bringing from the underworld in his belly or his bladder, in the form of farts or urine, the souls of the departed” (123-4).
This sacred bear fart at the end of hibernation “liberates [the souls] at this moment” (Gaigenbet 11). Here, the bear is an embodiment of the Trickster. Jung considers the bear “the symbol of the dangerous aspect of the unconscious” (Chevalier, “Bear” 76) and he describes the Trickster as “represented by countertendencies in the unconscious [...] of a puerile and inferior character” which he later calls “the shadow” (Jung 202). It is interesting to note that Candelmas, a celebration of light, is by default a celebration of shadow. Hence its transformation into our own Groundhog Day--when the duration of winter is based on a groundhog’s reaction to seeing or not seeing his own shadow.
Like the groundhog and Martin Luther, we must face our own shadow--in Luther’s case personified as the Devil--but rather than chase him away with a fart, we must ingest him, take his foul stench into our own bellies and make it our own. The process is one of “eating the shadow” (Bly 38) or honoring our shadow material. “The image of the Wild Man [or bear],” according to Robert Bly, “describes a state of soul that allows shadow material to return slowly in such a way that it doesn’t damage the ego” (Bly 53). By venturing down our very own bunghole into the literal bowels of the unconscious we, like the trickster/savage man/bear of La Chandeleur, can bag our shadow components, bring them back to the surface in the guise of farts, and liberate our souls.
The journey of the fart from bowel to break is our own journey. It is a rite of (gas) passage that transforms the profane and destructive into the sacred and creative. “The man who comes back from these inaccessible regions,” Mary Douglas reminds us, “brings with him a power not available to those who have stayed in the control of themselves and of society” (96). A very real farting custom in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries--immortalized in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame--provides a perfect metaphor for this transformative power. Prostitutes near Paris at the time were required to “make a payment of a fart when they crossed the toll bridge at Montluc” (Dawson 95).
It is fitting that prostitutes who, it could be said, are more in touch with their primitive animal instincts are the ones who can “fart” their way across the threshold. In fact three of the most common euphemisms for farting--“passing air,” “passing wind,” passing gas”--imply a Van Gennepian “passage,” a transition and transformation not only for the fart, but for the farter as well. Jim Dawson has noted that the root word pass in these phrases “is possibly derived from the Latin stem pass, “to suffer”--the source of the word passion, which [...] once referred to the torture and crucifixion of Jesus Christ” (22). The fart, by allowing us to embrace and integrate our shadow can be our savior. It can be the world’s savior as well.
“The culture,” says Bly, “has a longing for primitive modes of expression as an antidote to repression” (52). The early Christian tradition of Carnival once provided the perfect venue for these magical and disorderly modes of expression. Maria Julia Goldwassrer, in describing Carnival’s psychological and curative effects, analogizes “[...] just as fermenting barrels of wine sometimes need ventilation to prevent them from exploding, the wine of human madness must have an outlet at least once a year in order to transform itself into the good wine of pious devotion” (99-100). She may very well have been describing the fermenting activity within the gastro-intestinal system and the “fart of human madness” which produces the “good wine” of spirit and its intoxication byproducts: change, insight, inspiration, and dare we say, genius. But why wait for once a year when, according to Douglas, “purity is the enemy of change, of ambiguity and compromise” (163)? In A Tale of the Tub, Jonathon Swift writes:
“If the Moderns mean by Madness, only a Disturbance or Transposition of the Brain, by force of certain Vapours issuing from the lower Faculties; then has this Madness been the Parent of all these mighty Revolutions, that have happened in Empire, in Philosophy, and in Religion.” (qtd. in Brown 196).
The time is now. We must fart to grow smart. And in so doing, release the winds of change upon the world.
The products of Swift’s “Shadow eating”--his scatological satire and his “excremental vision”--were deemed by many to be “a product of insanity” (Brown 181). Yet, as Bly points out, “[i]f the ancients were right that darkness contains intelligence and nourishment and even information, then the person who has eaten some of his or her shadow is more energetic as well as more intelligent” (Bly 42). Indeed, farting and genius seem to go hand in hand. Both Mozart and Salvador Dali, for example, were obsessed with farts and farting. Mozart “had a strong coprophilic streak. He often joked about eating shit, licking or smelling assholes, and of course letting farts” (Dawson 111). Dali “had a lifelong fascination with farts” (Dawson 114). Benjamin Franklin wrote about the fart so often that all his “windy” stories were compiled into a single book: Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School. Like the young Apache warrior who “claimed to receive supernatural knowledge from his ass fart” (Rabkin 57), Mozart, Dali, Franklin, Swift, and countless other fartistes, because they had gleefully embraced their shadows through the veneration of the fart, were able to tap into the unconscious and to know (or at least smell) the very mind of God.
The fart is the perfect duality: a unity of sacred and profane; conscious and unconscious; shadow and light (just don’t try to light one). Consequently, a wholehearted embrace of farting can lead us across the threshold to a more spiritually intuitive existence, the touch of genius, and psychological wholeness. We, as individuals, as cultures, and as a unified race of human beings, must learn to fart boldly and proudly in private and public. If one man’s suppression of the fart might have lead to World War II, then it is not unreasonable to think that a nation or a world of farting enthusiasts might prevent the next World War and build the bridge to peace. The toll is only one measly fart. And it may very well be God’s will that we pay it. For what was he doing in Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” if not beckoning Adam, and us, to pull his finger?
Works Cited
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---. “Milk.” The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. 654-5.
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Makarius, Laura. “The Myth of the Trickster: The Necessary Breaker of Taboos.” Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Ed. William J. Hynes and William G. Doty. Tuscaloos, AL: U of Alabama P, 1993. 66-86.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. The Sexual Life of Savages in North Western Melanesia. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2005.
Rabkin, Eric S. and Eugene M. Silverman. It’s a Gas: A Study of Flatulence. Riverside, CA: Xenos, 1991.
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Posted by john at June 7, 2006 03:29 PM
