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Every year, at or around the summer solstice, Coney Island hosts a festival honoring Poseidon and the oceans…and sea maidens of course (hence this week’s theme). This year’s Mermaid Parade is tomorrow and I have been busy building a flounder float to show my esteem for the watery realms of Planet Earth. I’m sorry I was so busy on it that I didn’t get a chance to write my sirenian post…but don’t worry we’ll get back to dugongs and sea cows soon…
But for now here is the “Great Flounder” parade float. Here are some pictures of me building the giant novelty fish.
One side features a pulchritudinous mermaid waving her tail (since the leitmotif of the parade compelled me to include the titular mythical being). The other side is functional…sort of. There is an oracular wheel with all of the signs of the zodiac. A querant can learn their heavenly destiny (or the zodiac sign of their future mate or something) by merely spinning the wheel.
I have a costume and everything and I really hope that if you are in New York City you can swing by the parade tomorrow, but for right now I have failed to rent a box truck and I need to push my creation from central Brooklyn down to the ocean. Wish me luck and may Lord Poseidon smile upon you and all your ventures.
The Triumph of Death (Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1562, oil on panel)
Next week, as a lead-up to Halloween, Ferrebeekeeper will feature a week’s worth of dark harrowing spooky posts about…um, flowers. However, just in case botany, herblore, and gardening are not terrifying enough for you, today’s disturbing subject should provide ample horror to fill up your Halloween nightmares [He isn’t kidding, this is a grim subject and squeamish readers should go look at kitten pictures-ed]. I first encountered this subject when I was looking at The Triumph of Death, an epic painting by Pieter Bruegel which portrays an army of skeletons erasing all life from a sweeping sixteenth century landscape. The painting is a bravura combination of surrealist fantasy and extreme harrowing realism: the abstract and alien wave of death is sweeping away the realistically painted living humans . Among Bruegel’s most nightmarish inventions are the high torture wheels dotted around the landscape which feature tiny sad carcasses suspended and spinning in the sky–except it turns out this was not some invention of Bruegel’s dark imagination. The Catherine wheel or breaking wheel was in fact a common form of capital punishment from late antiquity up through the early modern era.
Saint Catherine of Alexandria (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1598, oil on canvas)
The Catherine wheel was named after Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a beautiful (and probably fictional) martyr who spurned the courtship of Emperor Maximinus and was then sentenced to die on the wheel. Fortunately Jesus intervened on her behalf. As soon as Catherine touched the wheel it broke to apart and the Romans were forced to merely behead her (sometimes I wonder if divine intervention could be more wholehearted in these sorts of stories).
The college shield of St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. Is a torture wheel their mascot?
Catherine’s wheel appears on a great many heraldic devices including the crest of Catharine’s College Cambridge and the coat of arms of Goa. With its metal spikes and hooks it looks rather different from the wagon wheels in Bruegel’s artworks and it seems like it might be a more fanciful interpretation of the actual torture device. Additionally Catherine’s wheel has given its name to a jaunty spinning firework!
Weeee!
The breaking wheel as historically known was a rather crude implement of torture. It was reserved for the lowest and most debased criminals—commoners who had killed their families, committed murder during the course of theft, betrayed their lords, or otherwise outraged the community with excessive crimes. The condemned prisoner was lashed to a large stout wagon wheel (or to a sturdy restraint if the available wagon wheel looked fragile) and then an executioner broke all of the prisoner’s limbs and joints with a cudgel or metal bar. Then the broken limbs were secured to (or threaded through) the spokes of the wheel and the prisoner was hoisted into the sky atop a pole. If the criminal was a gifted briber or a likeable person, the executioner would make sure the beating was fatal. If however the victim was despised or came upon a particularly sadistic torturer (what are the odds of that?) he would probably end up hopelessly maimed but still alive to contend with dehydration and birds. In fact there is an unhelpful looking bird perching on the wheel in the corner of that Bruegel painting (see the detail below).
This grisly punishment was popular throughout Northern Europe during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries (although apparently Russian overuse of the practice during the Great Northern War rather turned people off of it). The breaking wheel lingered for long enough in continental Europe that it dark left shadows lying across many different languages. To quote Wikipedia:
In Dutch, there is the expression opgroeien voor galg en rad, “to grow up for the gallows and wheel,” meaning to come to no good. It is also mentioned in the Chilean expression morir en la rueda, “to die at the wheel,” meaning to keep silent about something. The Dutch phrases ik ben geradbraakt, literally “I have been broken on the wheel,” the German expression sich gerädert fühlen, “to feel wheeled,” and the Swedish verb rådbråka (from German radbrechen), “to break on the wheel,” all carry a meaning of exhaustion or mental exertion.
Additionally the word roué, a French word which has made it into English as a borrow word, originally indicated someone so dissipated that they were destined to end up executed on the wheel.
"Remember me as an obscure idiom!"
Ugh enough of that. The moral of this story is to be thankful for the Eighth Amendment. Next week—the flowers of the underworld!
ferrebeekeeper 