Read Online Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking by James Champagne - Free Book Online Page B

criminals. It was believed that when the soul left the body at death, it did so via either the mouth or the nostrils. But when one was strangled, the soul would be unable to escape the corpse using those routes, and would instead be forced to escape via the anus, or the ‘dung gate’ as it was called. It’s common knowledge that when one is hanged one often ejaculates, but explosive defecation is also quite common in such situations. By forcing the soul to flee from the body side-by-side with shit, they believed they were condemning it to an ill-starred afterlife. Anyway, reading all this reminded me of my father’s observation about the farts of God years ago, and got me looking into the topic of intestinal exorcism. One day while I was paying a visit to the Thundermist Rescue Mission I happened to bump into a friend of mine, Padre Pendragon. We got to talking, one thing led to another, and he eventually got around to lending me a book called Glory of the Confessors by Gregory of Tours. In this book he writes about this bishop from the 5 th century named Martin of Tours who was known for his ability to exorcise demons from people who had been possessed. At one part of the book Gregory mentions how one of the afflicted men that Martin exorcised ended up expelling the demon from his body in a ‘blast of air from his bowels.’ So I got to researching the topic a bit more and I found out how in the Middle Ages it was believed that flatulence was seen as a way of casting demons out from one’s body. The idea of demons being expelled by flatulence isn’t unique to Western Christianity, however. For example, Ethiopians also believe that when one farts demons escape from the body. And there’s also a certain mysterious voodoo cult in Haiti that worships Ti-Moufette, the lwa of bad smells. The priesthood of this cult conducts rituals in which they try to emit as many bad smells as they possibly can: I’m sure you can imagine what that entails.”
    “Interesting,” Dr. Roxy said. The method in which she worked with her patients was that she liked to let them talk a lot first before she gradually began joining in with her questions, and that day’s session was no different. “So could it then be claimed that the stage act of Le Pétomane was a form of public exorcism?”
    “Not quite,” I said. “It is often mistakenly believed that the passing of intestinal gas was a part of Pujol’s theatrics, but such was not the case. Rather, it was his extraordinary control of his anal muscles, his ability to inhale air up his rectum and then control the release of said air by a manipulation of his sphincter muscles, which allowed him to achieve the anal auditory effects he was able to recreate onstage. But I digress. We were talking about my fear of the sky. I can’t believe that I neglected to mention my crippling childhood fear of rainbows.”
    “What you’re describing is iridophobia,” Dr. Roxy told me. “That means ‘the fear of rainbows.’”
    Upon receiving this tidbit of trivia, I had to smile. “My, they really do have phobias for everything, don’t they?” I asked with a laugh.
    “More so than most people think. To name just a few of the more exotic ones, there’s anatidaephobia, which is the fear that somewhere in the world, a duck is watching you, and ectophobia, which is the fear of vomit, and masklophobia, the fear of costumes and mascots, and xanthophobia, which is the fear of the color yellow, and who could forget Paraskavedekatriaphobia, which is the fear of Friday the 13th? To use myself as an example: growing up, I had a fear of buttons, especially buttons on clothing,” Dr. Roxy told me with a grin.
    “Really?” At that I laughed a little harder. “You were afraid of buttons?”
    “The clinical name for such a fear is koumpounophobia,” Dr. Roxy went on. “It’s more common than you would assume. Steve Jobs suffered the same fear, which is one of the reasons why the elevator in Apple’s