Robber superstitions: Become invisible

At all times, thieves have been looking for ways to steal without consequences in the form of deserved punishment. Now they use technical innovations for this purpose, and earlier resorted to Frank mysticism. It is often drank in the horrible and senseless crime.

For several centuries, thieves and robbers have had a widespread superstition that there is a way to gain invisibility in order to Rob and steal with impunity.

The villains did not believe in the fairy-tale invisible hat, but they seriously believed that it was possible to become invisible with the help of blood magic.

Different places had their own recipes for invisibility, but the General principle was that you can only acquire supernatural abilities with the help of human flesh and blood.

How to become invisible

So, in Germany in the Middle ages, thieves and robbers seriously believed that you can become an invisible man by collecting several innocent human hearts in one bowl and eating them. The hearts of unborn babies were considered the most innocent. And only boys ' hearts were good. Medieval Chronicles tell of creepy stories that give you the creeps.

So, in the middle of the XVII century in the city of Emerland (the territory of present-day Austria), a gang of robbers was brutalized, the leader of which was called King Daniel, and others - Cyrus, the devil from hell. When the robbers were caught, they confessed that, among other things, they had killed 14 pregnant women who had had their fetus removed from their stomachs.

If a male child was found in the womb, they cut out its heart and let it go around in a circle. Each member of the gang had to take a bite out of the raw heart of the unborn boy. According to the thugs, they sincerely believed that the one who tried the hearts of 9 babies could be sure of their thieving fart. No matter what crime he had committed, he could no longer be caught. In an extreme situation, it became invisible and could elude any pursuit.

The chronicle says that the robbers from the gang of Cyrus the devil did not have time to talk to the hearts of 9 boys, since most of the babies he found in the wombs of women turned out to be girls. The criminals believed that this was the reason for the defeat of their gang.

Another band of robbers, operating in Germany at the same time, set a more modest task. Its members decided that the hearts of only three babies would be enough for them to gain invisibility. They had devoured two hearts, and there was only one left to reach the goal. On October 7, 1645, this gang attacked and robbed Heinrich Erkelenz, a peasant from the small town of Angermund, on a forest road. Henry begged the robbers not to deprive him of the last of his money:

"I am poor, and my wife is about to give birth," he swore.

The robbers were kind of weird. A little after, they announced Erkelenz:

"Tell you what, traveler. We'll keep your money for now. But if you prove your words right, we will return them to you and add another 100 guilders. However, to do this, you must bring your wife to us in the forest, so that we can make sure that she is really pregnant.

When Henry returned to Angermund, he was deep in thought. He really wanted to get his money back, and even get the robbers ' guilders. Finally, he came up with a plan to lure his wife into the woods. He told her that he had sold their house when he was drunk. And he asked his wife to go with him to the buyer, so that she could help him refuse the deal.

Apparently, Erkelenz was not very convincing, and his wife suspected something was wrong. She told her brother everything and asked him to secretly follow them on the trip.

As Henry and his wife went deeper into the forest, two robbers suddenly appeared from behind the trees. One of them went up to Erkelenets and handed him a heavy purse of coins, while the others seized his wife and dragged her into the thicket. Henry was taken aback and stood still, not trying to follow them.

Meanwhile, the robbers dragged the woman into a thicket, tied her to a tree, tore off her clothes, and gagged her. Then the leader of the gang approached the poor girl with a large knife in his hand to cut open her stomach. Suddenly a shot rang out, and the mortally wounded leader fell to the ground. This is the woman's brother, who was secretly following her, came to the rescue. After shooting the leader, he attacked the second robber and pinned him down.

Soon the surviving robber might have been jealous of the dead man. On 12 October 1645, he was publicly executed in front of the rietinger Gate in Dusseldorf. First, the executioner tore his body with red-hot tongs, and then wheeled him alive. The judges were more lenient with Heinrich Erkelenz: they simply hanged him.

While the candle is burning

Fortunately, thieves ' beliefs were gradually humanized over time.

If earlier robbers believed that they needed the hearts of unborn children to gain invisibility, then at the beginning of the XIX century they already believed that the hearts of those born would also come down for this purpose. In this regard, their atrocities did not stop, but the victims were at least half as many. However, there were still a lot of them.

On December 12, 1815, in the city of Geida, in the Norderditkarsh district, a certain Klaus Dau was executed for killing three children and eating their hearts. He believed that in order to get away with it, he needed to eat 7 children's hearts, but he did not have time to complete his bloody experiment.

In the second half of the XIX century, thieves ' beliefs were even more liberalized. Thieves and robbers began to believe that the hearts of children to become an invisible man, do not have to eat. The meat of innocent girls will do, and not necessarily raw.

In 1888, Blifernicht, a handyman, was convicted in Oldenburg for killing two girls, 6 and 7 years old, cutting a piece of meat from the sciatic region of one of them and eating it. During the interrogation, the Ogre admitted that he wanted to become invisible in this way and steal from his rich neighbor.

During the same period, a new idea became popular among thieves. They began to make so - called thieves ' candles- from human fat. And at the same time, they seriously believed that if they went to work with such a candle, everyone around them would fall asleep, and the thief himself would become invisible.

Moreover, according to their beliefs, with such a candle it was very convenient to search houses in search of valuables, allegedly they did not go out from the draft, and they could only be extinguished with milk.

However, rumors about the superpowers of thieves ' candles turned out to be greatly exaggerated. Gottfried Dallian of Neukirch was one of The first to realize this. First, on December 31, 1864, during a robbery, he killed a girl named Elizabeth Zernickel and cut out a piece of flesh from her stomach.

Then the meat was fried and eaten, because it was believed that the one who tasted the meat of his victim, will get rid of the pangs of conscience. And having calmed down, Gottfried made a thief's candle from the melted human fat with the addition of beef fat, so that he could continue to Rob with impunity. On February 16, 1865, he decided to test the candle and went to work with it, but was caught in the act. On June 23, 1865, a jury in Elbing sentenced him to death.

The "glorious hand" of a dead man

Fashion for thieves ' candles migrated from the West to Russia. So, in 1887, a peasant Efim Zemlyanin in the Belgorod district of the Kursk province strangled a girl in the forest and prepared a thief's candle from her fat. After 7 months, he came under suspicion of theft.

During a search of his home, police found boiled human meat wrapped in a bundle from the dead girl's handkerchief. According to the court verdict, The Earthman was exiled to Sakhalin.

Another thieves ' relic in Europe was considered the so-called "glorious hand". To make it, it was necessary to cut off the hand of a thief who was hanged at a road intersection. Then wrap it in a shroud, squeeze the blood out of it, and then cook it in a clay pot according to a special recipe. The ultimate goal was to turn the dried hand into a kind of candle holder.

Before going to work, the thieves set fire to the fingers of the "glorious hand". If one of the fingers didn't light up, then someone was awake in the house they were going to climb into, and they should have waited until they fell asleep.

Russian thieves also tried to get a fart with a severed hand. Only in Russia her name was not "glorious", but "dead hand - thief". But since its preparation required a long ritual, the lazy thieves acted easier.

They used any bone of the deceased in the plot for good luck. It was believed that if you said in a conspiracy: "Let the people in this house fall asleep and Wake up no earlier than this bone", then you could safely enter the house and take whatever you like there.

However, how effective this plot was is unknown.

Ivan SMYSLOV