Excommunicating Exoskeletons: The Case of Gregarious Grasshoppers
Almodóvar del Campo, Spain, 1545: the sky darkens with onyx bursts of locusts who set their twitchy mandibles in a frenzied heat upon precious crops. This image is not unusual for those who pay attention during Pesach to the recitation of the ten plagues YHWH sets upon Egypt in the Book of Exodus. Plagues of locusts are a subject of concern in the Mahabharata, the Iliad, the Qur’an, and even ninth-century BCE Chinese governmental records on anti-locust officers. What may be surprising, however, are the relatively more modern Roman Catholic resolutions to the problem of locusts.
“Basilica of San Gregorio Ostiense. Sorlada, Navarre, Spain,” 2017. Photographer: Baso
Desperate to be rid of the swarm, Catholic Almodóvar dispatched a representative to the Kingdom of Navarre in search of the shrine of St. Gregory Ostiense perched atop a stony peak in Sorlada. In the eleventh century, Gregory, who was the cardinal-bishop of Ostia, successfully led the people of Navarre in a triduum of prayers and fasting to counter a plague of locusts. Since his death in 1044, he is regularly invoked in prayer to ward off locusts. More interestingly, on his feast day (May 9) his skull is still filled with water to be sprinkled onto the earth of Navarre in protection. Using skeletons to battle exoskeletons, the courier from Almodóvar grabbed a vial and irrigated their fields with the holy skull aqua, saving the small town from certain ruin.
Another, more astonishing method for dealing with the foodstuffs of John the Baptist (who ate them with wild honey) was to set them before a judge. For nearly 250 years, French, Italian, Swiss, and Spanish legal systems put vermin of all kinds on trial in ecclesiastic courts. Should they be found guilty, grasshoppers could be—and were—excommunicated.
In the words of Franciscan friar, inquisitor, and bishop, Martín de Castañega, in 1529, “excommunication . . . is a knife to cut the rotten member out of the healthy body, that is, to separate the disobedient from those obedient to the Church, which is Christ’s mystical body, whose members are all those who are obedient.”
“Diagram of Locusts seen in England (potentially Wales),” 1748. Artist: Thomas Pennant.
Why excommunicate these leggy litigants who had never been communicated? Whose chirps of defense fall on unwitting human ears? Why expel them from God’s kingdom with the gravest spiritual punishment when already they could not receive the sacraments nor articulate a kind of ideological contumacy?
First, it deserves to be said that in this period bridging the high middle ages to the modern, disasters such as deluges, wildfires, earthquakes, and sudden attacks by pests were understood as coherent signs related to the day on which they occurred rather than a gradual infestation or slow-building epidemic. In Christian areas, these afflictions were apparent indications that devotion was not being properly accorded to the local saint. Catholic villagers across Spain would turn to local saints whose established specialty—be it to end droughts, rabies, or vine pests—could receive petitions through votos. Votos or vows were commitments made between villages and saints, deliberate promises made to a saint to resolve any kind of problem which were to be fulfilled corporately over long periods. Attending and caring for local chapels and shrines was the principal form of fulfilling the vow.
The squalls of grasshoppers descending upon the land were therefore perceived as a retributory message for failure to keep the vow. They were winged agents of maintenance for a judicial hierarchy which positioned saints as legates in a celestial circuit of justice.
Second, while vows were taken for help against grasshoppers at least since the mid-fifteenth century, the laity sometimes took additional measures beyond these contracts in the form of lay professionals such as necromancers, cloud-chasers, and enpsalmers. The Synodal Constitutions of Toledo in 1566—a diocesan enactment of the Tridentine decrees—prohibited such unregulated “sorcery” and encouraged their clergy to attend to such cases “decently and without scandal.” So, while “locust trials” were not emphatically supported by early modern theologians, they were not exactly forbidden.
In 1650, for example, a trial was held near Segovia at the Hieronymite Monastery of Santa María Real de Párraces after two long years of failure to remove the locusts—including votos, novenas, exorcisms, and the classic skull sprinkling. Witnesses for the Prosecution? Village saints. Prosecutors? Three different Saint Gregories. Judge? None other than the holy mother, Mary, who articulated her desires to a member of the monastery. Before announcing her verdict, the prior cited as precedent the excommunication of some rats in Osma, some swallows who had left their detritus all over a Córdoba shrine, and two groups of locusts in Valladolid and Avila. In the end, Mary ruled a sentence that automatically excommunicated the locusts excepting their departure from the territory.
“Saint Augustine vanquishing the Plague of Locusts at Toledo,” 1734. Oil on canvas. Artist: Miguel Jacinto Meléndez
The doctors of the church were especially revered as having unique power over insects. Before the Gregories were the go-to combatants against locusts, Saint Augustine was known in Spain as a grasshopper specialist. According to a sixteenth-century chronicle, Augustine-the-exterminator came to Toledo in 1268 to drive locusts into the Tagus. Theologians known for their skills of rhetoric, such as Saint Ambrose of Milan and Thomas Aquinas, were ideal lawyers in an ecclesiastical trial like the one at Párraces.
Peter Leeson suggests that vermin trials were not instances of “impoverished primitivism,” but opportunities for ecclesiastics to “evidence their supernatural sanctions’ legitimacy by producing outcomes that supported them.” He finds that the public exercise of supernatural sanctions before an audience of citizens was to strengthen belief in the validity of punishments for tithe evasion (which included anathema and excommunication).
That may explain the theatre of divine justice to some extent, but it doesn’t demonstrate that the laity understood these punitive measures in the ways clerical authorities had intended. After all, Toledo was the center of the Inquisition; Catholic Spanish villagers were all too aware of shows of ecclesiastical chauvinism and coercion. Since poverty was of essential concern to them, it is more probable that they were inclined to take any and all measures that would prevent the chaotic itinerancy of grasshoppers that could obliterate one’s grainstock.
Local saints were frequently exchanged by the laity for ones who could prove their efficacy. Villagers didn’t have the time to waste at shrines whose saints could not help them. They would put up with the fanfare of ecclesiastical trials of insects if it meant that grasshoppers, for whatever reason, would be turned out of their soil for good.
For ecclesiastics, then, excommunicating grasshoppers was a demonstration of divine ordinance. For villagers, it may have simply meant that it was the most effective solution to the plundering plague.
Excommunication, excising creatures from God’s realm with a blunt knife, is one response to the presence of “uninvited guests.” But there are others.
Grasshoppers are usually solitary, but in conditions of drought followed by rapid vegetation growth, they experience a blast of serotonin. They become gregarious, breed abundantly, and whip into a migratory swarm in search of grub: Locusta. Like participants at a feast day, they too become excited with the prospect of food and drink in large numbers.
For most of recorded human civilization, it has been their sudden descent in hordes ravaging crops which accrues such malice and contempt. We can see that reputation extend even into the recent depiction of Hopper in Disney’s A Bug’s Life (1998), who storms into a colony of ants and demands food they have reaped.
“Locust detail from a hunt mural in the grave-chamber of Horemhab, Ancient Egypt,” circa 1422–1411 BC
Yet, perhaps we can forge a better relationship with these typically innocuous creatures when we consider what we do have in common. Even earlier than Moses’ days in the land of Pharaohs, locusts were depicted in Egyptian tombs in the period of 2470-2220 BCE. Although their symbology is not perfectly understood, we can conjecture that, despite the rancorous relationship between the Egyptian peoples and plagues of locusts, this representation communicates that in death we are equally matched.
In medieval Japan, this emphasis on our shared mortality is beautifully encapsulated by the poet-monk Saigyō Hōshi (西行法師) (1118-1190 CE).
With each night of Fall
Grown colder than the one before,
The cricket’s cry seems
More feeble—as each night it
Moves farther into distance.
When the time comes at last
My head will lie down forever
Pillowed by sagebrush
So this insect’s sharp cry is
What will become most close to me.
“Garden locust (Acanthacris ruficornis), Ghana,” 2017. Photographer: Charles Sharp
It is in their stillness, in their power of silence and buzz that they render our collective experience of life as fleeting, impermanent. From winged hemipterans to the highest priest, we are together in our inevitable expiry. And we break sound together—in poetry, carved relief, the cricket’s cry—in our reckoning of the end.
Maggie Slaughter is a PhD student in Religious Studies at Indiana University studying Jewish and Christian histories. Material culture, mortuary practices, and devotional art-making generate and complicate her thinking on religion.