From the sixth century on, the Catholic Church denied formal funeral rites to people who died by suicide. One touchstone for medieval Christian understandings of suicide was the story of Judas, who, at least according to the Gospel of Matthew, hanged himself after feeling remorse for betraying Jesus. In medieval Christian thought, this narrative connected the act of killing oneself with the sin of despair—the loss of faith in God and divine forgiveness.
Between 1000 and 1200, the secular justice system began to condemn suicide more harshly as well. In the twelfth century, many parts of Europe began defining self-murder as a felony, in part because it deprived an individual’s feudal lord of his possession. Depending on the specific time and place, the possessions of someone who had died by suicide could be seized by a lord or by the monarchy. In early fifteenth-century France, the law called for the house of a suicide victim to be pulled down, his fields burned, and his woods felled.
Not only did laws demand that the wealth of someone who died by suicide be seized, but they often called for the “torture” of their bodies.
(Gershon, 2021)
Enough of it that the ruling clerical and monarchical class felt threatened by their perceived material losses to outlaw it.
Gershon, L. (2021, March 22). Why Suicide Was a Sin in Medieval Europe. JSTOR Daily.
I believe the first suicides were due to feeling like a burden because of old age or physical damage/disability. Like, there are a lot of disconnected myths about elderly traveling elsewhere to die. I recall watching japanese The Ballad of Narayama (1983) wiki about that this year, but I’ve heard folk stories and tales about such phenomenon since I was a slav child. I believe it started to happen when life of humans became more or less stable so majority of them started to predictably reach some age over their physical prime and their year-to-year survival became a stable routine rather than daily fight. So, wehw, they had ability to choose death, rather than it being choosen for them by their tribe or a lucky animal.
Nowadays though, we have a lot of additional constructs that inspire us to take our lives, like being born into the wrong place, race, family, material conditions, being ugly and unpopular, having no way to succeed in life playing by house rules. We have a lot of lines we can cross to end our social life or harden it too much, making it virtually or literally unsalvageable. Our ancestors could kill themselves by an animal or a high enough cliff when they felt they can’t hold a spear, and in a sense, the system we built on top of us can artificially condition us to be able or unable to survive in the same way, but it is crushing that it rarely depends on our own willpower, but some preconditions out of our reach. If you don’t have specific skills to network and learn, was born as a foreigner and also gay, you have no one to give you a hand - it’s harder than get out and hunt a rabbit, or look for berries, these penalties would decide your whole life, and you’d need to work extra each day to compensate them.
Farmers can have bad and good years, they can change crops or figure out something to not die in winter. They fight with something real, something they can touch, and if they are resourceful enough, nothing is going to be lethal for them, they can get over it.
In contrast, multiple highscoolers in my city hanged themselves over the years because they failed their final exams, for from day one all they heard is that these grades define their whole future, from being wealthy and/or doing what you like to end up everyone’s embarasment on subpar jobs until you die in a shoebox. The pressure, the importance of such made-up thing made isolated young people decide they failed at life never to recover, and so they did the thing. I’m never tired of referencing Kafka, and being speedily judged by a black box test system that you have no future ahead for no valid reason is, well, completely heart-cracking.
My answer is: suicide wasn’t invented, but we found new reasons for it, and ways to systematically encourage that.
I’m overrationalyzing stuff so I don’t know where exactly to put it. When, like, people could do it for the first time. I can see even pre-tribal people dying to save their kin, but I’m not able to imagine where unresolved or lost love could take it’s toll on someone. Talking through my ass, I can suspect, it occured somewhen near the dogmatization of relationships, as they started to take focus in our minds as stable things instead of random free for all. Where it began to become a long-term thing and when local globalization between caves, families - where everything was like a given thing - became more competitive.
self-hanging, probably. seems more doable than stabbing yourself in the throat.
or eating/drinking poison, i’m sure they had access to some spicy stuff.
the trick was to make sure whoever finds your body is willing to hide the fact that you committed suicide (which was a crime and a sin in lots of places).
I don’t know how many animals are capable of suicide, but people in the middle ages definitely did it sometimes. The ways requiring the least setup are probably jumping from a high place, like a really tall tree or off a cliff. Then with the benefits of civilization, you can jump out a high window or stab yourself with a knife or other sharp object or use some rope creatively, all entirely possible in the middle ages.
If we assume that depression has always been around, the “jump off a cliff” method was probably used by the occasional caveman tbh.
im wondering did people even do suicide in the middle ages
how do animals do it
edit: i think suicide was invented
(Gershon, 2021)
Enough of it that the ruling clerical and monarchical class felt threatened by their perceived material losses to outlaw it.
Gershon, L. (2021, March 22). Why Suicide Was a Sin in Medieval Europe. JSTOR Daily.
Depriving your feudal lord, god damn.
If anything, you had to try really hard not to die.
I believe the first suicides were due to feeling like a burden because of old age or physical damage/disability. Like, there are a lot of disconnected myths about elderly traveling elsewhere to die. I recall watching japanese The Ballad of Narayama (1983) wiki about that this year, but I’ve heard folk stories and tales about such phenomenon since I was a slav child. I believe it started to happen when life of humans became more or less stable so majority of them started to predictably reach some age over their physical prime and their year-to-year survival became a stable routine rather than daily fight. So, wehw, they had ability to choose death, rather than it being choosen for them by their tribe or a lucky animal.
Nowadays though, we have a lot of additional constructs that inspire us to take our lives, like being born into the wrong place, race, family, material conditions, being ugly and unpopular, having no way to succeed in life playing by house rules. We have a lot of lines we can cross to end our social life or harden it too much, making it virtually or literally unsalvageable. Our ancestors could kill themselves by an animal or a high enough cliff when they felt they can’t hold a spear, and in a sense, the system we built on top of us can artificially condition us to be able or unable to survive in the same way, but it is crushing that it rarely depends on our own willpower, but some preconditions out of our reach. If you don’t have specific skills to network and learn, was born as a foreigner and also gay, you have no one to give you a hand - it’s harder than get out and hunt a rabbit, or look for berries, these penalties would decide your whole life, and you’d need to work extra each day to compensate them.
Farmers can have bad and good years, they can change crops or figure out something to not die in winter. They fight with something real, something they can touch, and if they are resourceful enough, nothing is going to be lethal for them, they can get over it.
In contrast, multiple highscoolers in my city hanged themselves over the years because they failed their final exams, for from day one all they heard is that these grades define their whole future, from being wealthy and/or doing what you like to end up everyone’s embarasment on subpar jobs until you die in a shoebox. The pressure, the importance of such made-up thing made isolated young people decide they failed at life never to recover, and so they did the thing. I’m never tired of referencing Kafka, and being speedily judged by a black box test system that you have no future ahead for no valid reason is, well, completely heart-cracking.
My answer is: suicide wasn’t invented, but we found new reasons for it, and ways to systematically encourage that.
Are we going to ignore the oldest historical reason for suicide? Love
What is love?
Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more.
I’m overrationalyzing stuff so I don’t know where exactly to put it. When, like, people could do it for the first time. I can see even pre-tribal people dying to save their kin, but I’m not able to imagine where unresolved or lost love could take it’s toll on someone. Talking through my ass, I can suspect, it occured somewhen near the dogmatization of relationships, as they started to take focus in our minds as stable things instead of random free for all. Where it began to become a long-term thing and when local globalization between caves, families - where everything was like a given thing - became more competitive.
Japanese even went so far as to ritualize the whole honorable suicide process through Seppuku
For the uninitiated, that is the process by which one folds a greased up Frisbee in half and jams it down their throat until they die.
Damn; must’ve been brutal before they started making them out of plastic…
They’re really only used in emergencies when you don’t have access to the usual Ninja weapons like nunchuks or lasers.
self-hanging, probably. seems more doable than stabbing yourself in the throat.
or eating/drinking poison, i’m sure they had access to some spicy stuff.
the trick was to make sure whoever finds your body is willing to hide the fact that you committed suicide (which was a crime and a sin in lots of places).
I don’t know how many animals are capable of suicide, but people in the middle ages definitely did it sometimes. The ways requiring the least setup are probably jumping from a high place, like a really tall tree or off a cliff. Then with the benefits of civilization, you can jump out a high window or stab yourself with a knife or other sharp object or use some rope creatively, all entirely possible in the middle ages.
If we assume that depression has always been around, the “jump off a cliff” method was probably used by the occasional caveman tbh.
Hanging was common and accessible I’d think