“Kamala touched me!”

The Enduring Power of Political Thaumaturgy

“Kamala touched me!” some ninny squealed as I passed a television screen in the San Francisco airport on my way back to the Old World. It was a young person at the DNC in Chicago, covered head-to-toe in signifiers of Democratic partisanship, just as if she were a sports fan boosting her home team. If I interpreted the context of her exclamation correctly, it is not that the presidential candidate in question touched her heart with the contagion of her “joy”, nor that she touched her mind with the ideas making up her campaign platform, but rather that Harris physically touched her, no doubt only glancingly, during a round of good old-fashioned political baby-kissing and adult-embosoming.

Have you, I want to know, ever noticed how sometimes the exclamations of strangers, heard in passing, seem to have more reality than the people who make them? I often picture them as little sachets made of that fine cheesecloth-like material used for expensive teas, and tied with a ribbon at the top, but still somehow lighter than air, floating out of mouths and hovering in the air for a few seconds before disintegrating. Such entities, if they really existed, would be something like what certain currents of Buddhist thought describe as “momentary quality atoms” — they exist, for a moment, and at least for that moment their reality is entirely their own, and not dependent on some other more substantial entity.

Yet unlike the Buddhist quality atoms that flash in and out of existence, at least some of these language-sachets lodge themselves —parasitically?— in the minds of passing creatures, and end up living forever, or at least as long as their hosts do. In 1997 I was walking with my girlfriend up the steps of Morningside Park, towards 118th Street, when we heard a man say to his mate: “First ya fuck ‘em wit’ da elephant, then ya get da fuck out!” The two of us devoted significant hermeneutic labor to that deliriously esoteric phrase, yet came up with no satisfying gloss of it. Nonetheless, the phrase lives on. The man who said it, and the man to whom it was said, may well be long gone from this world, but the idea that was brought into the world that fine spring day, of fucking them with the elephant before getting the fuck out, now has something of the eternal about it.

And again years later, boarding my plane to Paris last week, standing behind one of those California families that flies to Paris to go to guidebook-recommended restaurants where everyone is speaking English and who order a crème brûlée with the pre-decided intention of declaring it “divine”, had among them a hyperactive boy in his terrible twos or thereabouts who was babbling all kinds of fascinating nonsense, and who at one point exclaimed, à propos of nothing but the storm-like activity of his fresh new neurons: “My weenis has a penis!” His mother looked at him dully and asked, just as if she were speaking to someone well into the age of reason: “That doesn’t make any sense honey. How can a weenis have a penis?” The kid laughed like the little devil he was, and she pressed on: “What is a weenis honey?”

At present it seems likely to me that both the weenis with a penis and the vice-presidential laying of hands will have a place in my memory for a long time to come. If the latter of these two seems at first consideration less memorable, my reason for predicting that it’s with me to stay may have something to do with the fact that I spent some considerable part of my summer reading Marc Bloch’s virtuosic 1924 work of historical anthropology, Les Rois thaumaturges. Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale, particulièrement en France et en Angleterre, translated somewhat inadequately into English as The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and in France.

Before I get to Bloch’s lessons for our current political moment, let me slightly digress again to draw out one of this essay’s sub-theses: that we are damned ill-equipped these days to discern what ought to be the obvious continuities between the way we conduct ourselves now and the way our ancestors conducted themselves in supposedly more benighted times. It would be bad form to use the word “ninny” twice in the same essay, so I will just introduce this most recent intervention from Gail Collins without bothering to give her an epithet:

What is this?! Not only does Collins boast in this piece about her tiresome repetition of the dog-on-roof story during Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, which is when the epithet I am not using here became indelibly linked in my mind to this columnist. She also completely fails to recognize that there might be some legitimate reason for a curious naturalist such as RFK Jr. to take an interest in fortuitously discovered dead animals. And the great majority of Times readers are, we all know, going to lap up her mockery with glee.

Honestly, Americans have become such a lot of squeamish suburban prisses. Consider, for some perspective, Thomas Jefferson. Our third president, great natural historian that he was, absolutely would have seized the opportunity to take home and dissect a beached whale’s head (read Lee Dugatkin’s wonderful Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America (2009) if you don’t believe me, and discover exactly how far that great American statesman was willing to go in his manipulations of an Alces alces carcass). Might we not then be more charitable with our now-formerly-independent presidential candidate, at least on this point if not on others, and propose that RFK Jr. is but another in this lineage, a latter-day Pliny the Elder? I might be exaggerating a bit here, yet I still think it is a great disappointment to find our opinion-makers unable to see Kennedy’s undertakings for what they are: the natural expression of a serious, life-long, and completely legitimate passion for the study of animals. And it is likewise disappointing to find that all the great majority of Americans know to do in reaction, when confronted by someone with such a passion, is to squirm and gag like cheerleaders on frog-dissection day in high-school biology class.

But let us get back to Bloch.

Scrofula, also known as the King’s Evil, or, if you prefer, mycobacterial cervical lymphadenitis, causes large purple growths about the neck, which often look horrific, but seldom have fatal consequences, and tend to disappear in time. It is therefore an ideal disease for a monarch to deign to cure. In the 11th century, just before the Norman invasion, King Edward the Confessor —also, significantly, a saint— was discovered to have the divine gift of healing, which he employed ceremoniously in the laying of hands upon the scrofulous. Most who received this treatment, with time, were indeed cured, and cause and effect appeared self-evident. Some historians have estimated that Edward touched nearly 2000 sufferers per year, except when away on a military campaign.

The French however claim primacy in this practice, with early modern historians commonly tracing it back all the way to Clovis, the first Christian king of the Franks, while the most recent historiography places it later than the practice’s origins in England, with the late-medieval king Saint Louis IX. Bloch himself believed it was King Phillip I (reigned 1059-1108). But whatever the truth in the matter of who got there first, it is a historical fact that for several centuries the French believed the English kings were only imitating the French practice, without any real divinely given power. Nor is this just any Anglo-French who-got-there-first debate, since for the French the Royal Touch was intimately connected to the special circumstances of the coronation of French kings, which from the late Middle Ages took place at the cathedral at Reims, and involved the application of chrism from the Holy Ampulla to the king’s hands. It was this anointing, with this chrism in particular, that was directly responsible for the healing power.

Legends of the Holy Ampulla had circulated since the period of the great Frankish conversion in late antiquity, but it was only in 1131 that it became identified with a particular vial of Roman glass discovered in the sarcophagus of St. Rémi (c. 437-533) in the Reims Cathedral. It seems the 12th-century Franks had entirely forgotten the ancient art of perfumery, so that when they opened that vial and sniffed the otherworldly Roman concoction of ambergris and bergamot and secretions from the anal glands of a civet and whatever else, they could only conclude they were in the presence of something divine. And because St. Rémi, or Remigius as he was known in his day, is the same person who baptized Clovis, and in that single gesture did more to found the nation of France than anyone else at any moment in history, the Royal Touch was for a long time deeply, and seemingly inextricably, connected to the very idea of France.

And they kept it going right up to the end, those French kings, though at some point, in an unmistakable sign of incipient secularization, the ceremonial words for the laying on of hands changed. By the early 18th century, the prescribed phrase seems now to remove the sovereign’s gesture from the actual causal sequence that might lead to the patient’s recovery: Le Roy te touche et Dieu te guérit. As with Nicolas Malebranche’s occasionalist theory of causality, sometimes sending responsibility for causal power all the way up the chain of command to God himself is more a way of getting rid of that power altogether than of earnestly seeking to trace it to its true source.

Most remarkably, even the Revolution of 1789 did not spell the definitive end of the Royal Touch, as it was introduced again with the Bourbon Restoration. Yet in the hands of Charles X its purpose was plainly and explicitly to symbolize continuity with the ancien régime. By now its real efficacy, or its mere status as a superstition, were largely beside the point. To ask whether it “worked” or not would be like asking for a numerological account of the 21-gun salute. The Royal Touch had become mostly a skeuomorph, and by the time of the July Revolution of 1830 it disappeared altogether.

Or did it?