By Bert Olivier at Brownstone dot org.

In light of what one has witnessed in the course of approximately the last five years, most readers would probably not find it difficult to relate the notion of 'defiling (or desacralising, violating) the human body' to the time in which we live. Think of the accumulating evidence, that the so-called Covid 'vaccines' contain nanoscale items which change the human body into something it was not before the jab was administered (more on this below).

However, one may be less inclined to connect this idea with historical events dating back centuries, which may nonetheless be understood as providing a suitable backdrop for a comprehension of what has been happening recently, probably for a number of decades already.

The historical events in question date back to the beginning of the 14 century, when a papal bull (named after the leaden seal or 'bulla' which marked it as authentic) was issued (by Pope Boniface the 8), which decreed that it was prohibited by the Catholic Church to cut the body of a deceased person into pieces, because it was in conflict with the Church's sacraments.

The context in which this happened is interesting, to say the least, and concerns the seven Christian crusades aimed at liberating Jerusalem from Mohammedan occupation. My source is the first of the fascinating two-volume study of the Dutch phenomenologist, J.H. Van den Berg, titled Het Menselijk Lichaam, Part One - Het Geopende Lichaam (The Human Body - The Opened Body; Callenbach Publishers, Nijkerk, 1959).

These volumes trace the changing conceptions of the human body from approximately the 14 century until the 20 century, against the backdrop of Hippocrates's notion of medical treatment in ancient Greece.

During the Crusades, it seemed unacceptable to bury important figures among fallen soldiers in the soil of a foreign country, but sending their bodies back to Europe posed the intractable problem of the flesh decomposing in the heat - there were no cooling or freezing facilities like those of today.

A 'solution' that presented itself was to boil the bodies, remove the flesh from the skeleton, inter the flesh in the foreign land, and return the skeleton to the country where the deceased came from. The papal bull mentioned earlier addressed this state of affairs by rejecting this practice. Here is the explanatory subtitle of the papal bull (I translate from the Dutch in Van den Berg's book, p. 79):

Cutting the corpses into pieces and boiling them, with the aim of separating the bones, through this treatment, from the flesh, to send them for burial in their own country, is in conflict with the sacraments.

Van den Berg makes it clear that the papal bull concerned the procedure, during the Crusades, of cutting up and boiling bodies of important figures who had died, with the purpose of returning their bones to their home countries. He quotes from the bull, in which this practice was described as the 'cruel breaking apart of bodies,' which was 'hideous in the eyes of God,' to emphasise the gravity with which this matter was regarded.

The point of elaborating on this rather grisly historical phenomenon is to highlight the intrinsic value, even sacrosanctity, that was attributed to the human body during the late Christian Middle Ages, as manifested in the horror with which what was seen as an act of desacralisation was regarded. As Van den Berg proceeds to demonstrate, this was not limited to the papal bull's rejection of the dismemberment practice, described above, during the Crusades.

In fact, it is apparent from his perspicacious interpretive analysis of the attitude of two of the first anatomists in history, Mundinus (Mondino De'Luzzi) and Vigevano (Guido da Vigavano), that the people of the time - specifically those whose attention was focused on the human body - were, to use Van den Berg's term, 'pervaded' ('doordrongen') by this same 'rejection' (p. 82).

Put differently, all the available evidence suggests that...