Date of publication : 7.6.20
Since the dawn of time, human beings have had a problem with bats. Why is that? They are furry and kind. They can fly. They are not stupid. What on earth is our problem?
PROLOGUE
AN ALLEGORY : REASON & CONFUSION DISCUSS BATS
What follows is a short allegorical dialogue, between the figures of Confusion and Reason. If it helps, you may voice the voice of Confusion, and imagine me, as Reason, responding.
Reason: Why do you have a problem with bats?
Confusion: I can’t say exactly. But it’s no accident that bats rhymes with rats -
Reason: Let me stop you there. You can’t trust language so blithely. Bats are not like rats. Nor are they like mice. The old English term ‘Flittermouse’ is misleading - as is the French, ‘Chauve-souris’. A bat is more like me, or even you, in terms of its DNA, than it is like to a mouse. They are just somewhat weird looking warm-blooded mammals, as we are. But, unlike us, they can fly. Does that make you envious?
Confusion: I suppose it does yes, I suppose it makes me horribly envious -
Reason: I thought as much. It is good for you to voice these feelings. Did you know they are in fact the only mammal that is capable of sustained flight?
Confusion: I did not know that.
Reason: Well. I have found it out and I know it to be true.
Confusion: They have wings like the devil.
Reason: But which came first? Is it not more correct to say that the devil has wings like a bat?
Confusion: Perhaps.
Reason: They have unusual wings because they are unusual creatures. Does that make you nervous?
Confusion: Very. They are so unusual.
Reason: Yes. The way they fly is particularly unusual. For bats have heavy, rotund little bodies, that they have to work extremely hard to keep aloft.
Confusion: They are fat?
Reason: Absolutely not. They are immensely fit, from all that flying about. But they have such heavy, rotund little bodies that it is hard for them to lift off the ground, and their short legs aren’t powerful enough for a running take off (compared, say, with owls). So, the bat must instead clamber to a high point, and tumble into the air. This is why they famously sleep upside down: to be ready to fly away should a threat come along.
Confusion: They are furry, though, not like birds, and they are friends to witches -
Reason: They’re just unusual -
Confusion: They are horrible and dirty -
Reason: They are not dirty, they are clean. They preen themselves often. A bit like cats. They are as clean as you, or even me.
Confusion: I did not know that. I thought they were dirty. I know if they bite us, we get sick -
Reason: Perhaps.
Confusion: They get in your hair -
Reason: (with a wry smile) Do they? Have you ever got a bat caught in your hair?
Confusion: They are to blame for the coronavirus -
Reason: Let me stop you there. You are obviously very confused. And yet, there is a nugget of reason within your ravings. It is true that bats have a tendency to pass us sicknesses, which we don’t like.
Confusion: It’s weird how they hang from trees upside down.
Reason: I know. Let me explain. All this exercise flying about and hanging upside down means that they have developed a very very fast metabolism. With this comes a very high immune system, so if they catch a virus or disease, they don’t feel sick. Which means that they keep flying about willy nilly carrying viruses all over the place.
Confusion: Casual.
Reason: Maybe. Maybe they are a bit casual. Or maybe they just don’t feel the illness so they don’t know they are contagious.
Confusion: So they don’t feel sick even if they have a horrible disease?
Reason: Yes, that is the historic interpretation. However, a professor of the natural sciences came along recently with a new interpretation. She said: ‘How do we know they aren’t feeling sick? Maybe they do feel sick, but they are just carrying on regardless.’
Confusion: So they just have a good work ethic?
Reason: It seems so, yes. Like who?
Confusion: What?
Reason: Who else has a good work ethic?
Confusion: Protestants?
Reason: Yes. Now, if you were to think of bats as the Protestants of the animal kingdom, rather than as the Devil incarnate, you’d see that it changes your perception of them. There they are, pushing through, going to work, getting on with things, feeding themselves and their families, despite feeling poorly. Despite having nasty viruses.
Confusion: Like the flu?
Reason: No. Not like the flu. Like SARS, or MERS, or Ebola, which have all come to us from bats. These big viruses are simply an everyday part of the bat’s world. But if a human being happens to stumble into their habitat -
Confusion: With some friends?
Reason: Absolutely. With some friends -
Confusion: Or a spade?
Reason: Yes. With a deforestation plan -
Confusion: Or a saucepan?
Reason: Perhaps…
Confusion: Or a city?
Reason: Yes. Even a whole city might stumble into a bat’s habitat. Well. In that eventuality, the bat might - in friendly manner - give us a kiss. As a greeting.
Confusion: Salutari!
Reason: You speak Romanian!
Confusion: Do I?
Reason: Yes. So now, if this happens, this salutation, this kiss, then the virus may well transmit to us…
Confusion: I hate bats.
Reason: …but we can’t fly…
Confusion: I wish I could fly.
Reason: …so we have slower metabolisms and even the strongest of us has a feeble immune system in comparison to that of the bat and so we do get sick.
Confusion: I knew it!
Reason: And when we get sick, we don’t change our own behaviour but instead we blame the bat, who actually was doing lots of useful work for the world before we came along, but by this point we are dying, and the bats are dying too and all the other animals. And so we see that innocent the kiss of a bat, which should be a nice thing, turns out to be the eye of the storm of a global catastrophe through no fault of the bat itself.
Confusion: Libera me domine de morte eterna.
Reason: Amen.
Confusion: Amen.
FINIS
What does this dialogue reveal to us?
It reveals how a kiss from a bat can turn out to be the eye of the storm of a global catastrophe.
Now, can you remember another, rather different, kiss that we have studied that turned out to be the eye of the storm of a - rather different global catastrophe…?
From Lesson Two?
That’s right.
The kiss of Judas.
Could there be a connection between Judas and bats?
It certainly feels like there should be a connection between Judas and bats doesn’t it?
I’m going to pin my colours to the mast and say, if it feels like there is a connection, there must be one!
Let’s see. Let’s see if we can find the connection.
THE KISS OF BLOOD
If you look at the above pictures, you will see pictures of Judas with Jesus, and pictures of vampires. And I’ve thrown in a picture of a bat and a cow. For those of you who are visually minded, this should be enough to join the dots.
For the rest of you, what is happening here is that I have drawn a connection between Judas and vampires through pictures of kissing. From there I move from vampires to bats and thus -
Slow down a minute! - you say.
What on earth does Judas have to do with vampires?
JUDAS AND VAMPIRES
According to the very Reverend Montague Summers, writing in 1929, European vampires were actually known as The Children of Judas in Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia since the dawn of Christianity. It seems that after Judas’ death, he was damned to walk the earth until the last judgement and along the way he had some children who sucked blood for a living.
But who exactly was the very Reverend Montague Summers and can we trust his scholarship? For certain, Montague was no slouch. He famously translated the MALLEUS MALEFICARUM (THE HAMMER OF WITCHES), which is a fifteenth century German guide to hitting witches. He declared that he found the book a ‘wholesome and needful antidote’ to the ‘feministic age’ in which he found himself and he reminded his readers of the Christian maxim: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
He was, according to The Times, ‘in every way a character’.
Summers’ strongly worded defence of the Spanish Inquisition makes it difficult for me to trust him 100%. However, in fairness to the good Reverend, he did not make up the notion of Judas as patriarch to the vampires all on his own. It features in a short story in Pall Mall Magazine as far back as 1893 :
They say that the Children of Judas, lineal descendants of the arch traitor, are prowling about the world seeking to do harm, and that they kill you with a kiss.
So that seems to be that. However, I am not one to leave a scholastic stone unturned, so just before we move on to bats, let us return to our notes on Judas from lesson two :
The Kiss of Betrayal - Key Revision Points
According to the gospels of Matthew, Mark & Luke:
1. Judas kissed Jesus.
2. This kiss led to the death of Jesus.The next bits of the story are only noted only in the gospel of Matthew:
3. Judas made money from this kiss - 30 pieces of silver.
4. Judas despaired and said he had betrayed innocent blood.
5. He threw the money back at the Pharisees in their temple.
6. He hanged himself.
7. The Pharisees used the blood money to buy a cemetery for strangers.
8. The people of Jerusalem saw the death of Jesus and said - ‘His blood be on us, and on our children’. This is definitely the worst verse in an otherwise pretty good book.
As you probably know, THE BIBLE was very popular in medieval England, even though sadly it was all in Latin plus peasants couldn’t read. Thus it was that Medieval English Christians came to the false conclusion that the people of Jerusalem - or more accurately, their Medieval English Jewish neighbours - literally drank human blood (in a bad way as opposed to how Christians did it in a good way) and used it to make snacks.
Then a terrible thing happened. In 1255, an eight year old boy called Hugh was killed in the city of Lincoln. Obviously everyone was horrified and wondered who could have done it, but the Christian people of the city remembered what it said in the book they hadn’t read and declared, ‘Ah ha! Our Jewish neighbours must have killed Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, to drink his sweet Christian blood!’. So then the Christians rounded up their Jewish neighbours and threatened them horribly and the situation became so volatile and frightening that King Henry had to intervene to help the people of Lincoln execute nineteen Jewish people for the crime.
Then he expelled all the Jews from the Kingdom of England and took their things.
A Frenchman, Thomas of Cantimpré, heard about all this and was understandably shocked. He wanted everyone to know so he wrote down in his famous ENCYCLOPAEDIA that Jewish people definitely drank human blood. He went on to explain that, according to the gospel of Matthew, Jewish people needed to drink human blood because their own blood kept bleeding out of them. Thomas said Jewish men bled ’like they were women’. The King of France wanted to know if this was true so he checked and found that, in a certain sense, it was.
And so he expelled all the Jews from the Kingdom of France and took their things.
A Spaniard read Thomas’ ENCYCLOPAEDIA and said, ‘This Frenchman is absolutely right. And I would like to add that drinking blood turns hair red - look at Judas!’ and he pointed at a picture that his Christian friend was painting of a red-haired Judas Iscariot. The Inquisition were listening, as always, and they scribbled down that red hair was a sure sign of Jewishness and then they rounded up all the red headed Jews and purified their souls in the fires of heaven.
Those who survived were expelled from the Kingdom of Spain.
Horror.
Horror.
Meanwhile in Eastern Europe…
Another sort of horror was in its infancy…
A more metaphysical type of horror…
Because in Eastern Europe, corpses had started coming back to life all over the place. Apparently, they would escape their graves and fly back to town, perhaps in the form of a butterfly, and generally make a nuisance of themselves. These corpses were ugly and rotten and they were known for stealing shoes, hassling their widows for sex, and spreading disease. The Serbs called them : VAMPYRS.
By the eighteenth century, the vampyr problem was out of control, so the town councils had to act and act fast. They started putting stakes through the hearts of the dead, but it was too little too late - the epidemic was beyond containment and the craze started to spread through Europe. Soon enough, these vampyrs reached England, where things went a bit lesbian, which led to an exponential improvement in the kissing, which in turn heightened their popularity until it finally became clear : vampires were here to stay.
Then, in 1895, Edvard Munch painted LOVE AND PAIN.
LOVE AND PAIN is, as you can see, a beautiful painting of a woman cradling a man gently in her arms.
Edvard’s critic friend (Stanisław) saw it and wrote down, ‘This is a man who has become submissive, and on his neck a biting vampire’. Indeed, all who saw the picture agreed she must be a vampire. For vampires drank blood which turned their hair red. Edvard quietly riposted, ‘It’s actually just a picture of a woman kissing a man on the neck,’ but no one listened and now the picture is called THE VAMPIRE.
It was the very next year (1896), that Pall Mall magazine ran a story about vampires being the children of Judas. The year after that, Bram Stoker wrote DRACULA. Karl Marx had already noted that Kapital was vampire-like. And a few years later, Julius Streicher (editor of the nazi rag, DER STÜRMER) half nodded but corrected him, ‘Not capital precisely.’
Julius Streicher hated Marxists. But he loved loved LOVED the image of the wealthy blood-sucking vampire immortalised in the hit 1922 movie, NOSFERATU. He went to the movie theatre day after day.
He pointed at the screen and said, ‘we could use that’.
And he did.
So it turns out that there is a connection between Judas and Vampires after all.
A connection built out of a series of false associations.
Misinterpretations.
Mistranslations.
A net of connections that would collapse with the merest hint of sunlight.
A mirage.
A killer.
The connection is antisemitism.
For those of you who have not previously come across antisemitism, it is the irrational and extreme envy of a people who just happen to be very good at kissing.
THE VAMPIRE BAT
And how did our friend the bat get caught up in this stupid human horror?
The story goes something like this…
One day, in the seventeenth century, a Spanish conquistador discovered a distant cousin of the European Bat family. The little fella was eeking out an existence in the jungles of Brazil by sucking warm blood from living creatures - mostly cows, pigs and other mammals. Now, being as it was that the Spanish did not speak the local tongue, it took ages for them to learn the bat’s real name but eventually, in 1807, they discovered he was called Desmodus Rotondus Bat, so-called for his rotund little body, but he was affectionately known as Vampire Bat to his friends. Desmodus was a minor celebrity on the conquistador circuit (due to his infamous liquid lunches) and his many children roam the jungles of South America to this day.
When the conquistadors returned home, they bragged to anyone who would listen of the wonders they had seen: the wild naked women, the waterfalls, the tropical diseases, the human sacrifices, the gold, and, of course, the bat who lived on blood alone.
Those listening would always gasp in terror and cry, ‘Human blood? This bat lives on human blood alone?’, at which point the conquistadors would normally half nod, drink deep of their wine, and say nothing, leaving a good story to lie. Over the years, in the cumulative effect of these silences, the Brazilian bat and the Transylvanian vampire butterfly mingled, and finally Bram Stoker wrote down that vampires became bats. So it was that Desmodus became inescapably tethered to the horror show of the European vampire.
A sad day for bats.
In happier news, a descendent of Desmodus was recently caught on camera kissing a fellow bat, French style.
French Kissing? Yes, but with a twist. You see, a vampire bat can only survive for three days without sustenance and often it is hard to find cattle to nibble in the jungle. And so it is that, on the third day, the bat’s rotund little body is mortally weakened and it fears there is nothing to do but await the death which comes to us all. But as it lies there in all its frailty, suddenly, another vampire bat appears from out of the shadows. It draws close and put its mouth over the mouth of the enfeebled one. In this kiss, blood is transfused from the healthy visitor and the poor enfeebled little bat is brought back from the brink of death. The blood-giving vampire bat will check in that everything is OK and fly on its way.
Bats, as we have noted, are very professional and conscientious. They do this procedure all the time.
We may call it : The Kiss of Life.
LESSON SUMMATION
Poor old bats.
They are just flying about, doing their batty thing, in their batty way, supported by their extraordinary immune systems, not giving a shit about us or our stories, or our violent fictions, as is their right.
The lesson ends here.
END NOTE : IN DEFENCE OF ANIMALS
Today we have spent a bit of time with bats and I’ve been sticking up for them against some pretty nasty slander. I want to stick up a bit more for the animals, because they don’t talk.
It is a widely floated opinion in modern society that the bat’s kiss is to blame for coronavirus. Others say that a bat kissed a pangolin and then a human being touched the pangolin inappropriately. But in any which way, the fault lies with us, my friends, and not with the animals.
Go in peace, Pangolin. On your merry way.
Right. Who says that the devil looks like a bat? Who says that witches go around kissing the arse of the devil in the form of a dog? Or that Cathar monks kiss the arse of a devil in the form of a cat? Or that the osculum infame - the kiss of shame - was given to rams and goats and toads in Berwick upon Tweed?
What have animals to do with our stupid notions of shame and lust? Nothing!
Have you ever met an animal who understands lust? I haven’t. Ask any animal what they think about lust and see what response you get : they just look at you in that way they have. They don’t get the concept. I have never even met an animal who has read THE BIBLE. They can’t read, half of them. They don’t understand lust or envy or avarice. The sloth doesn’t even understand sloth.
Humans need sin in the same way we need speed bumps. They make us feel like we are going hell fast at only 24 mph.
A cheetah runs comfortably at 60.
EXERCISE LESSON SIX
Try doing that.
Date of publication : 7.6.20