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On several occasions, particularly on the periphery of the Habsburg Empire during the 17th and 18th centuries, dead people were suspected of being revenants or vampires, and consequently dug up and destroyed. Some contemporary authors named this phenomenon Magia Posthuma. This blog is dedicated to understanding what happened and why.
Saturday, 26 July 2008
A quartering from the Wickiana
This has nothing to do with magia posthuma, but is a sort of late post scriptum to an earlier post, in which I mentioned the method of quartering for torturing and executing a man. Some time ago, while browsing a collection of excerpts from the Wickiana, Die Wickiana (Raggi Verlag Küsnacht-Zürich, 1975), I noticed the illustration below, which vividly depicts a quartering, and I thought I would share it with those of you who are interested in - to paraphrase the title of Equiamicus's blog - the darker aspects of cultural history.
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