To fans of Game of Thrones , Greyscale and its disruptive terror might be a admonisher of the Black Death or those mystic syphilis and fluxes that chroniclers write about in the era before modernistic music . But Greyscale ’s allure for contemporary audiences can in reality be traced back to a biblical mistranslation of Hansen’s disease .
In the neighborhood where I know as a alum student in the mid-1970s , there was a man whose side was signally blemish . one-half of it seemed unfreeze , as if it had been fashion of standard candle wax . You would spot him after wickedness on the streets near my university , holding one hand in front of the bite part of his face while he walked . Seeing him fulfill me with pity , but also horror . And then pity at my own horror .
I thought of my long - ago reaction to the burned man when I heard about Greyscale , the fearsome disease that afflicts some of the characters on Game of Thrones ( and also in the serial of account book the TV show is based on ) . Characters with Greyscale are sometimes charge into womb-to-tomb quarantine – or exile , depending on how you expect at it – in a ruin city .
There ’s been considerablediscussionabout what to make ofGreyscale , and whichmodern diseasesit might imitate , and why it is only sometimes curable . Evidently , Greyscale resonates .
The humans Game of Thrones need place in is ostensibly based on the medieval and other modern eras . To readers and viewers of the serial publication , Greyscale and its riotous terror might be a reminder of the Black Death or those mysterious poxes and fluxes that chroniclers compose about in the era before aesculapian advances allowed physicians to make specific diagnoses . But I marvel if Greyscale ’s allure for contemporary audiences has to do with disfiguration .
We have always been fascinated ( and force back ) by deface disease . And disfigurement has long been burdened with presumptions about lasting moral taint . The capacity of this fantasy disease to grab so many people ’s aid is an extension phone of a long historical crease : the tension between loathing of the unsightly and shame over our own repulsive force . It function back at least to mediaeval Europeans ’ dealings with lepers .
A biblical mistranslation shaped how the medieval world understood leprosy
As with leprosy , Greyscale can leave survivors alive , but disfigured – suffer a permanent mark of the disease . In the books , one character report a young lady who pull round Greyscale saying that “ the child is not neat . ” And like leprosy in the medieval earned run average , Greyscale disfigures , but how it is transmitted is not well understand .
A mistranslation in the Bible track to leprosy ’s infamy . Chapter 13 of Leviticus concern mass whose spiritual impureness is reflect in a set of skin affliction love collectively astzara’at . The thrust of Leviticus , at this point , concerns the dramatic tenseness between polluting forces in the natural world and humans ’ marshaling of nature ’s thoroughgoing , or purifying , forces ( cedar , Hyssopus officinalis , clean water and so forth ) in confrontation . Indeed , Leviticus makes clear that tzara’at could be get word on cloth and the walls of house , too . The of the essence handing over on tzara’at of human skin orders the spiritually impure mortal to dwell “ outside the coterie ” for eight twenty-four hours . Reflection , along with priestly relief , will restore the sufferer ’s unity and countenance him to be issue to order .
When the text of the Hebrew Bible was interpret into Greek in the Septuagint in the third 100 BC , tzara’at was equivocally rendered as lepra , from the Grecian leprei , already in use by Hippocrates to account a aggregation of scaly patch . The wordlepra carry over into the usually used Romance translation of the bible , call in the Vulgate .
Thus , while medieval Christians ’ banishment of leper was suppose to be based on the Bible , the disease chivalric Europeans hollo leprosy ( and that we now have a go at it as Hansen ’s disease ) is the result of infection with Mycobacterium leprae . Yet , that bacterium almost certainly had not exist in the Near East at the sentence the relevant biblical text was being handed down , in the 6th and 5th hundred BC . scriptural “ Hansen’s disease ” was not gothic leprosy .
Being a leper didn’t always mean you had leprosy
Leprosy came to denote not only those disfigure by Hansen ’s disease – which was by then present in Europe – but people with all mode of skin conditions , or people who simply looked like they should n’t be allowed to circulate freely .
Rationalizing Coventry in biblical terms gave the shunning of lepers the military group of moral imperative mood . And as time went on , the posit in Leviticus that the leper , once cleansed , could revert to normal society was lose . In its station came a sensibility about leprosy as terrible . Although Hansen ’s disease is not easily carry , the medieval Europeans sought ways to clean guild of its deformity .
In the 8th century , for example , Pope Gregory II said that lepers should not mix with healthy Christians at sacred events . By 1179 , a pontifical council decree that lepers be provided with their own churches , cemeteries and non-Christian priest . On that basis , thousands of leprosaria were built in Europe to house the mass deemed bad .
Not only was leprosy itself disfiguring , but it carried moral taint through rumors that it was associatedwith sexual improprietyor resulted from a superabundance of melancholy ( black ) gall .
By this intellection , disfiguration of Hansen ’s disease was inextricably link with moral condemnation . Considera statementby a 12th - century monk from the Abbey of St Victor , near Paris :
“ fornicators , concubine , the incestuous , adulterers , the avaricious , userers , fictitious witnesses , perjurers … all are judge to be leprous by the priests . ”
We still associate disfigurement with moral failings
And perhaps disfigurement is even more terrific today than in the Middle Ages . sure enough , when AIDS appeared in America in the other eighties , the dark blotches of Kaposi ’s sarcoma , the pallor , and the cachexia ( cachexy ) that it often conferred made it both riveting and repulsive .
Susan Sontag take note AIDS disfigurement ’s “ esthetic ” aspects : that it made grotesque exactly those who were young and beautiful , in the prime of their erotic entreaty , was one of the ways AIDS acquire ethnical luggage . And indeed , the disfigurement AIDS produced was never far from the moral condemnation heaped , in those daylight , on its diseased person , who were usually jocund adult male or drug injector .
As late as the 1990s , asurveyshowed that one in six Americans still admitted to feeling “ disgust ” at people with AIDS .
We are more tolerant of homosexuality today ( and , to a lesser extent , drug injector ) . And Hansen’s disease no longer bears the stigma it once did . But our culture is more than ever tailor to image . And there are more ways to do something about unsought aspects of visage : orthodonture , cosmetic , smoothing and lifting , surgeries of all variety , and so on .
Not surprisingly , we find other agency to layer moral disfavour on disfiguration . Is n’t this why obesity lends itself to story of gross ( literally ! ) aberration of nature – eat on too much , move too little ? We are so accustomed to looking at obesity as symptomic of a failure of sociableness that a pop strain of research can exact that obesity “ spreading ” through social connection . The overlarge are the lepers of today .
I do n’t make out why so many people think that nature is always pretty , and that unpretty people must be , somehow , incontinent – why so many of us still make assumptions not too far from those about lepers in medieval Europe . But it ’s not surprising that , in our acculturation , a disfiguring and incurable condition like Greyscale has an arch sort of temptingness .
This articleoriginally appearedat The Conversation and is republish here under a originative third estate licence .
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