WARNING:This section contains very disturbing images and descriptions,
possibly apt to cause nightmares and depression.
Please go back now if you aren't feeling really strong. This is not a joke.
(These pages are NOT meant to glorify torture. Torture is abominable;
perhaps the vilest of all crimes. The point here is to show the
dangers of rampant fundamentalism of ANY stripe- and to reveal parts of
history censored out by pious, hypocritical, corporate religionists.)
You want more? Here it is.
Breaking With The Wheel
After hanging, "breaking with the wheel" was the most common means of execution throughout Germanic Europe from the early Middle Ages to the beginning of the 18th century.
Wooden crosspieces were placed under the limbs of the victim, and the executioner then smashed the wheel into the bone between, and onto the blocks themselves, also smashing the shoulders and hips, avoiding fatal blows.
The victim was transformed, according to the observations of a seventeenth-century chronicler,"into a sort of huge screaming puppet writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster, of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh [rohw, schleymig und formlos Fleisch wie di Schleuch eines Tundenfischs] mixed up with splinters of smashed bones'. 2
Then, the pulverized limbs were braided into the spokes of the wheel, which was hoisted to the top of a pole, where the unfortunate wretch expired slowly, crows fighting over the eyes and other tidbits.
Together with burning at the stake and drawing-and-quartering, this was one of the most popular spectacles among the many similar ones that took place in all the squares of Europe more or less every day. Hundreds of depictions from the span 1450-1750 show throngs of plebians and the wellborn lost in rapt delight around a good wheeling, better if of a woman, best of all if of several women in a row.
The man on the left in this 1540 woodcut by Nicolas Stoer is having his tongue
cut out. In the background and on the right, people are being scourged, or whipped.
Scourges often had sharpened barbs at the tips of the flails; the victim on
the right has been whipped to the point that the ribs are showing through. Usually
the lungs, kidneys liver and intestines would begin to protrude without their
skin covering. Scourges were commonly dipped in boiling salt-sulphur water between
strokes, to heighten the pain.
Here is a diagram for the construction of thumbscrews, from Constitutio Criminalis Theresiana published in Vienna in 1769. Thumbscrews were popular because of their portability and simplicity, while still being quite effective.
Below is panel
#11 from "Les Miseres et les Mal-heurs de la Guerre" (the miseries
and the unfortunates of the war) by Jacques Callot published in Paris in 1633.
The caption refers to the "tree of unlucky fruit".
SOURCES FOR THIS PAGE:
1 Woodcut from the Schweizerchronik of Hans Stumpf, Lucerne, 1548
2from: "Trewlicher Bericht eynes scrocklichen Kindermords beym Hexensabath...(etc.) a newsletter in 8vo, Hamburg, 12th June 1607.
"The Inquisition" by A. Hyatt Verrill, D. Appleton and Company, New York, London, 1931), pp. 138-148
"Inquisition- A Bilingual Guide to the exhibition
of Torture Instruments presented in various European Cities-by Robert Held-
Qua d'Arno, Publisers/Editorial, Florence, Italy, 1985
The Gulags, Footbinding, Aztecs and Lobotomies.
Bloodshed for the Prince of Peace
Borgia Popes/ Vatican Orgies/ The Black Plague
The Founding Fathers were NOT Christians.
