An Easy Other

(First published on Kiltr two months ago)

Although much of this is catharsis, like lifting a huge stone slab from my chest, its not just personal. If it makes you feel a little uncomfortable, I guess its supposed to.

A week spent waiting, watching, having, trusting a latent hope in the individual empathy for others lurking in the human condition. A week spent waiting for the hashtags, for the memes, for the mass showing of solidarity on social media profile pics. A week spent waiting in vain hope; it had me thinking about Lilias Adie.

As a Scottish Ethnology undergraduate, many moons ago, I used the witch trials of West Fife (which persisted relatively late in the area due to the fervour of a local minister and self appointed witch finder general, who took up a post in Torryburn and sought to become the scourge of ‘witches’ all around) as a basis for research into local custom and belief which persisted into the modern era. Some of it has gained new relevance in my current research. A source of much material was the case of Lilias Adie.

In 1704, under duress of trial and tortures, Lilias confessed to being a witch and having sex with the devil at a local gathering place for witches. Initial accusations of Lilias’ crimes came from neighbours who witnessed her acting strangely and leaving her dwelling at unusual hours. The accusations came after a familiar, to any contemporary sociologist or cultural anthropologist, 'moral panic' had built up locally following a few other high profile trials which stamped the new minister’s authority on the parish and which engendered a culture of suspicion, fear and distrust among locals.

Following her confession, whilst awaiting sentencing in her cell, Lilias took her own life. According to the heightened custom and belief of the locale and time, Lilias was now in compounded danger of returning to do harm as a ‘revenant’, a corpse of someone who has died an un-Christian death and could come back from the grave to torment the living. Folk belief was such that these walking corpses were seen as a very real threat, animated by the devil, with certain corpses being more vulnerable to this devilish reanimation. The most vulnerable among them were thought to be suicides and witches. If a fear of Lilias as something ‘other’ had grown whilst she was alive, it had multiplied with the manner of her death and confession.

Compounded, extraordinary steps were taken to ensure Lilias’ body could not become a dreaded revenant (It is also worth pointing out that belief would have been such that Lilias’ coupling with the devil would have been thought to have been with another revenant, animated by the devil’s dark forces; the apparent strengthening of dark power and threat to the parish would have been facilitated further should the thus propagated Lilias return. There is even mention in the trial of misgivings over the possibilities of her carrying the devil’s child.) So Lilias was buried, as was customary for suicides unentitled to Christian burial, beyond the foreshore, between the high and low tide mark. Where there was a belief that a corpse could return as a revenant it was also a relatively common practice to ‘weigh down’ the corpse in its grave with a large, heavy stone slab. Given her confession and suicide, according to folk belief, leaving Lilias as a double revenant threat, this was done too.

Archeologists believe they rediscovered Lilias’ grave back in 2014 and that the dimpled slab is the only known witch’s grave of its type in Scotland. Its also thought that, despite being raided by nineteenth century antiquary hunters, which led to Lilias’ skull being sent to St Andrews University, where it was photographed more than one hundred years ago, parts of Lilias were still under there. The grave robbers would have seen the skull as the main prize, highly sought after by practitioners of the nascent (pseudo)science of phrenology, and would have been paid handsomely for their efforts by the university. Sometime in the twentieth century, the skull itself went missing and all attempts to trace it have failed. Some of the photographs taken are still on display at the National Library of Scotland.

Earlier examinations of the skull and later of the photographs have determined that Lilias was likely in her seventies when she died. She was also likely to be of strikingly unusual appearance with highly prominent front teeth and areas of her face and head misshapen. Rear areas of the skull are malformed and there are, here and in other areas, clear signs of pressure being exerted on Lilias’ brain. Some of these seem to be due to earlier life trauma. There are clear indents around the fronto-temporal areas, indicating it was highly likely Lilias was not only a person with complex needs and learning difficulties but was also a person with at least one form of epilepsy (many people with Frontal Lobe Epilepsies have seizure patterns consistent with Lilias’ reported behaviours, particularly somnambulism, uncoordinated ‘wanderings’ or difficult to understand bodily movements, which even now can confuse some neurologists.). Clearly, lately, given that my initial studies were some years before my own diagnosis, I’ve come to a deeper understanding of Lilias personal as well as her cultural predicament.

I’ve written before about how some beliefs around disabilities, and epilepsy in particular, have their roots in medieval custom and belief; despite how much more science understands, some aspects of culture, of behaviours, move at a slower pace and it becomes difficult for us to acknowledge it as a society. So they remain, festering, buried beneath a great, stone slab.

But those beliefs are the revenant. Even just as far back as the mid-1980s, during the Miners’ Strike, my Uncle, who brought me up from the age of nine (in a wheelchair due to a virulent bout of polio when he was a toddler, who I’d watched deal with the ignorance and indignities surrounding disabilities all throughout the 1970s and early ‘80s) found himself banned from the local Miners Welfare Club, of which he’d been a member for fifteen years, because he’d torn a woman’s tights whilst dancing in his wheelchair. He was told his chair was a danger to others and a fire risk. He’d been a huge supporter, being still in work and able to donate, of the local Strike Fund, and as a family we’d all taken an active role in community efforts to support the miners, of which we had several family members involved. We stopped. Nice understanding and solidarity, nice work comrades!

Despite the many advances, despite the safeguards of legislation, people with disabilities have still been the most disproportionately hit by current ideological austerity budget cuts. Amidst a nascent culture of fear and anxiety, which for some exacerbates debilitating conditions, amidst the uncertainty of the post Brexit vote milieu and the threat of removal of guarantees for protections of disabled people’s rights which EU membership gave, now, just as in 1704, people with disabilities are the easy other its difficult for people to talk about, to find appropriate means of showing solidarity with.

The outpourings of solidarity in the wake of the Orlando tragedy for the LGBTI community, the continuing outrage and support for the #BlackLivesMatter movement are rightful and righteous. The memes, the social media profile pic additions after terrorist incidents and abuses of power show how we can find simple ways to reassert our humanity over hatred. Whilst I may not use social media much personally, often because, my company is saturated in it due to us conducting social media marketing campaigns on behalf of our clients, I’ve made damned sure they were all actively aware of the need to express and spread that humanity.

So, I’ve waited, working with, supporting those companies; and I’ve done my usual work with people with disabilities, people with epilepsy, head hung heavy. I’ve waited for the mass show of solidarity with a growing sense of rage and frustration as I’ve felt the fear and anxiety palpably increase. But you cant force people to feel empathy, compassion, solidarity. That’s not to say there has been none, just no movement, no mass showing of it when it was most needed, for those who maybe needed it more than others, needed to be able to see it.

Just in case you missed it, a week ago was when this happened:

 …every newpaper, every channel, every online news source carried the story. Every one emphasised that 19 people died and more than that were injured in the brutal attack. Every one also quoted the attacker as saying ‘It is better that disabled people disappear’. Then the story quietly went away, leaving every person with a disability, able to process the information fully or not, feeling a little less safe, even more vulnerable, even more the other. More than ever they needed that sign, needed to hear, the world, the good people at least, stand with you. Jeez, the deaths of political satirists, cartoonists, at the hands of extremists started a worldwide outpouring of solidarity and rightfully so, but where the fuck was Je Suis Invalide? Or more appropriately, its Japanese equivalent?

Japan is not some obscure, disconnected place (not that it should matter at all!), in our cultural consciousness. It has the third largest economy in the world, it is globally interlinked with us all financially and culturally. The distance from Edinburgh to Tokyo and that from Edinburgh to Los Angeles isn’t all that different, what's a few hundred miles when you've already bridged thousands, yet somehow we are so much more ready to sympathise with causes originating in the US than any originating in Japan.

In this case, the lack of empathy, the lack of mass showing of solidarity, has sunk me, for myself and everyone I work with, advocate on behalf of, into a darker despair than ever I felt when moved to write ‘Kafkaesque’ or the three parts of ‘Landscape of Fear’. I have three other half written pieces, deliberately all on lighter themes, which I haven’t been able to complete, to fully engage with, despite them being on subjects I’m generally quite passionate about. With them, I wanted to try and move away from the anxious, the fearful and, yes I’m aware of it, the preachy; but when I wrote at the end of ‘Kafkaesque’ about us all being the next easy other, I hoped it was implicit from my other writings who I thought would be next firmly in the crosshairs.

And right now, a week out from brutal tragedy, both directly and indirectly affecting a worldwide community among the most vulnerable humankind has, solidarity, mass empathy feels too late. When we’re gone, don’t forget, between the high and low tide mark with a great, heavy stone slab on top and everyone else can rest easy.