Flaying

The Assyrian tradition

Assyrians flaying their prisoners alive

Ernst G. Jung, in his "Kleine Kulturgeschichte der Haut" ("A small cultural history of the skin"), provides an essay in which he outlines the Neo-Assyrian tradition of flaying human beings.^[2] Already from the times of Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883-859 BC), the practice is displayed and commemorated in both carvings and official royal edicts. The carvings show that the actual flaying process might begin at various places on the body, such as at the crus (lower leg), the thighs, or the buttocks.

In their royal edicts, the Neo-Assyrian kings seem to gloat over the terrible fate they imposed upon their captives, and that flaying seems, in particular, to be the fate meted out to rebel leaders. Jung provides some examples of this triumphant rhetoric. Here are some from Ashurnasirpal II:

I have made a pillar facing the city gate, and have flayed all the rebel leaders; I have clad the pillar in the flayed skins. I let the leaders of the conquered cities be flayed, and clad the city walls with their skins. The captives I have killed by the sword and flung on the dung heap, the little boys and girls were burnt.

The Rassam Cylinder, in the British Museum demonstrates this.

Their corpses they hung on stakes, they stripped off their skins and covered the city wall with them.^[3]

Other examples

Searing or cutting the flesh from the body was sometimes used as part of the public execution of traitors in medieval Europe. A similar mode of execution was used as late as the early 18th century in France; one such episode is graphically recounted in the opening chapter of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1979).

In 1303, the Treasury of Westminster Abbey was robbed while holding a large sum of money belonging to King Edward I. After arrest and interrogation of 48 monks, three of them, including the subprior and sacrist, were found guilty of the robbery and flayed. Their skin was attached to three doors as a warning against robbers of Church and State.^[4] The Copford church in Essex, England, has been found to have human skin attached to a door.^[5]

In Chinese history, Sun Hao, Fu Sheng and Gao Heng were known for removing skin from people's faces.^[6] The Hongwu Emperor flayed many servants, officials and rebels.^[7][8] In 1396 he ordered the flaying of 5000 women.^[9] Hai Rui suggested that his emperor flay corrupt officials. The Zhengde Emperor flayed six rebels,^[10] and Zhang Xianzhong also flayed many people.^[11] Lu Xun said the Ming Dynasty was begun and ended by flaying.^[12]

Artistic

Apollo flaying Marsyas by Antonio Corradini (1658-1752), Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The Flaying of Marsyas after challenging Apollo. Painting by Titian.

The Judgement of Cambyses, part 2, half of a diptych painted by Gerard David in 1498.

• One of the plastinated exhibits in Body Worlds includes an entire posthumously flayed skin, and many of the other exhibits have had their skin removed.

Mythological

• In Greek mythology, Marsyas, a satyr, was flayed alive for daring to challenge Apollo to a musical contest, which he lost.
• Also according to Greek mythology, Aloeus is said to have had his wife flayed.
• In Aztec mythology, Xipe Totec is the flayed god of death and rebirth. Slaves were flayed annually as sacrifices to him.

Historical

• Yahu-Bihdi, ruler of Hamath, was flayed alive by the Assyrians under Sargon II.
• According to Herodotus, Sisamnes, a corrupt judge under Cambyses II of Persia, was flayed for accepting a bribe.
• The Talmud discusses how Rabbi Akiva was flayed alive by the Romans for publicly teaching Torah.
• Catholic and Orthodox tradition holds that Saint Bartholomew was flayed before being crucified.
• Mani, founding prophet of Manichaeism, was said to have been flayed or beheaded (c. 275).
• In March 415, Hypatia of Alexandria, a Neoplatonist philosopher, was murdered by a Christian mob of Nitrian monks who accused her of paganism. They stripped her naked, skinned her with ostraca (pot shards), and then burned her remains.^[13]
• Totila is said to have ordered the bishop of Perugia, Herculanus, to be flayed when he captured that city in 549.
• In 991 AD, during a Viking raid in England, a Danish Viking is said to have been flayed by London locals for ransacking a church. Alleged human skin found on a local church door has, for many years, been considered as proof for this legend, but a deeper analysis made during the production of the 2001 BBC documentary, Blood of the Vikings, came to the conclusion that the preserved skin came from a cow hide and was part of a 19th-century hoax.
• Pierre Basile was flayed alive and all defenders of the chateau hanged on 6 April 1199, by order of the mercenary leader Mercadier, for shooting and killing King Richard I of England with a crossbow at the siege of Châlus, in March 1199.^[14]
• In 1314, the brothers d'Aulnoy, who were lovers of the daughters-in-law of king Philip IV of France, were flayed alive, then castrated and beheaded, and their bodies were exposed on a gibbet (Tour de Nesle Affair). The extreme severity of their punishment was due to the lèse majesté nature of the crime.
• In 1404 or 1417, the Hurufi Imad ud-Din Nesîmî, an Islamic poet of Turkic extraction, was flayed alive, apparently on orders of a Timurid governor, and for heresy.
• In August 1571, Marcantonio Bragadin, a defeated Venetian commander, was flayed to death by the Ottomans, causing enormous outrage in Venice and perhaps inspiring Titian's Flaying of Marsyas.^[15]
• In 1657, the Polish Jesuit martyr, Andrew Bobola, was burned, half strangled, partly flayed alive, and killed by a sabre stroke by Eastern Orthodox Cossacks.
• In 1771, Daskalogiannis, a Cretan rebel against the Ottoman Empire, was flayed alive, and it is said that he suffered in dignified silence.
• In the United States, Nat Turner, leader of an unsuccessful slave rebellion, was hanged on November 11, 1831. His body was then flayed, beheaded, and quartered.
• In the year 1689, Aurangzeb captured Sambhaji, the second ruler of the Maratha kingdom. He was ordered to bow before Aurangzeb and convert to Islam. It was his refusal to do so, Aurangzeb brutally tortured Sambhaji for more than 40 days where his skin was flayed along with other tortures before he was finally killed.
• The Rawhide Valley in Wyoming is said to have acquired its name from a white settler who was flayed alive there for murdering a Native American woman.
• In Marcel Ophüls' documentary, Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, the daughter of a French Resistance leader claims her father was tortured, including being flayed, by Klaus Barbie during his time at Lyon, 1942-44.
• In 1957, a victim of Ed Gein was found "dressed out like a deer". His story fueled the inspiration of movie characters of Norman Bates (Psycho), Jame Gumb "Buffalo Bill" (The Silence of the Lambs) and Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).

Fictional

• In Thomas Harris' novel, The Silence of the Lambs, the character Buffalo Bill is a serial killer whose modus operandi includes flaying his victims.
• In the fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, the Boltons of the Dreadfort flay their prisoners. The sigil of House Bolton is a flayed man. The Boltons allegedly gave up this practice 1,000 years before the series begins; however, the sadistic bastard of the family, Ramsay Snow/Bolton, delights in flaying people and wants to restore its use.
• The titular monster of Predator flays its victims.
• In Haruki Murakami’s novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-1995), the character Mamiya is traumatised by having witnessed a colleague being flayed to death in Manchukuo, in the late 1930s.
• The opening case of the French crime thriller TV series, The Frozen Dead (2017), concerns a valuable horse which has been flayed and beheaded.
• In the sixth season of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the witch Willow Rosenberg notoriously used dark magic to flay Warren Mears alive in retaliation for the murder of her girlfriend, Tara Maclay. The fallout from this incident plays a significant role in Rosenberg’s arc during both the show’s seventh and final season, and in the canonical comic continuation, where Mears is revealed to have survived the incident thanks to the timely magical intervention of Amy Madison.