Somewhere in the foggy marches that stretch between a ceremonial Tyburn hanging and the many guises of lethal collective violence in the workaday world dwells the editorial discretion of Executed Today, keeping a lonely vigil at a forgotten customs-post.
Joined thematically as near-executions, these next three days are of themselves as different from one another as three different killings can be … suggesting the topical breadth spanned by the ultimate sanction.
In three wars that would define modern Europe, three women of different character and class met executions that would resonate with the exigencies of their changing times … and the lasting commonalities of social places structured by gender.
As a gauzy figure of Orientalist fantasy, the half-legendary (at least) Bronze Age queen Semiramis is hard to top.
Supposedly a Babylonian ruler, the exploits of Semiramis — erotic, politic, possibly magic — have been worthy of otherly projection from Dante on down.
Herodotus (to whom she was already archaic) has her a pan-Asian ruler; the guy whose proclivities gave us the term “masochism” wrote a novel about her (but good luck finding it in English). Of course, Queen S. was divinely descended and radiantly beautiful; in the general legend, she becomes queen when her husband King Ninus is killed (or in some versions, when she kills him), rules competently (or aggressively, or simply lustfully), then maybe gets killed by her son. This bare scaffolding will enact many a play. And the costumes!
In Boccaccio’s Famous Women, she’s a girl who knows how to have a good time, but invents the chastity belt to keep her female courtiers in line, or possibly to reduce competition. (More about this volume here (pdf), though this review doesn’t have a lot to say about our heroine.)
In the dour outlook of a particular brand of fundamentalist Protestant, Semiramis can also be a sort of proto-pagan, a former harlot (natch) who invented goddess-worship. (A seminal text in this theory is this 19th century pamphlet by Rev. Alexander Hislop.)
Does it say anywhere that she built Babylon? Eh. It does now!
Semiramis Building Babylon, by Edgar Degas (1861)
So what does Semiramis have to do with the ultimate sanction? Not much … but thanks for reading.
She breaks the monotony a little bit — and what do you know? She makes two blink-and-you’ll-miss-her cameos for totally unrelated (to each other or, really, to Semiramis) executions this weekend.
Update: And the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are sometimes attributed to her as the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis. So what if that’s almost certainly wrong … doesn’t the name just take you right there?
As the Enlightenment gave way to the West’s great revolutionary age in the late 18th and early 19th century, the crowned heads of Europe weren’t just sitting around — and with good reason. Regimes don’t get to be ancien without knowing how to dealwithtroublemakers.
For the next three days, Executed Today presents the mailed fist in three lands, and the agitators it smashed.
Abortion and the death penalty have never struck the Headsman as especially similar matters, but they’re interconnected as “life” issues for many.
Whether or not one conceives them as part of a seamless garment, the judgments one makes about abortion are as juridically charged as they are emotionally charged: if abortion is murder, one might punish it by death.
The next two dates’ executions reflect the seemingly intractable ethical and practical uncertainties entailed by extending the concept of “life” into the womb … and the different parties to whom the fatal result of the severest moral calculus might be charged.
Every entry on this blog is, of course, an ending of a sort.
But some endings are more final than others.
For centuries in the British Empire and its descendant countries, the hanging — and especially the public hanging — were the very image of the death penalty; its most characteristic venue at the corner of Hyde Park is still marked with a stone.
For many reasons, that model changed in the 19th and 20th centuries: gradually and unevenly, hangings moved behind prison walls or were replaced with (purportedly) more humane methods, even as capital punishment itself came under pressure.
For the remainder of the week, Executed Today remembers a few milestones in the changing landscape of hanging under English-inspired jurisprudence in the mid-20th century.
It is Thermidor — Month of Heat — by that queer artifact of the times, the Revolutionary calendar, and in the blistering summer the guillotine rots its own scaffold.
It is the climax of that emblematic moment of the French Revolution, often wrongly standing to casual observation as synonymous with the entire revolution. Jarring indeed how brief the span of those pregnant, dangerous days, that upon the storming of the Bastille the guillotine had not yet been erected and from that traditional birthdate of the Revolution were eclipsed successively the Bourbon monarchy, the Constitutionalist Assembly, the Girondin liberals, Marat, Danton … culminating in the bloody hegemony of Robespierre and the fatal test between the Jacobins and their enemies.
By the spring and summer of 1794, Paris is delivered fully to Robespierre. “Terror,” he says, “is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.” A blip on the screen chronologically, this period seems endless to those who survive it, and it reverberates endlessly to those who succeed it.
In this Revolution-era cartoon, legendary Parisian headsman Sanson (or Samson), having run out of victims, guillotines himself.
For the next week, join Executed Today in 1794’s Month of Heat as day by day the Terror rages at its apex, inscrutably suffering citizens to live or die — until of a sudden it succumbs to its own rot.
The human body can be a hardy creature, resistant to the best-calculated plans to kill it … and the ignominy of scaffold work has seen many an amateurish headsman trod the boards.
Between the two, we reap a cornucopia of botched executions that practically seem more normal than the “successful” ones.
A few data points to that effect in these next four executions over four different centuries: no mere miscalculated drop from the scaffold, but horrifically grim pratfalls to mock the solemnity of the proceedings and leave egg on the executioner’s face.
Still, if you think that’s bad, you should see the other guy.
Capital punishment’s limitless literary potential has drawn the written word to it since time immemorial.
We touch through the condemned, a living creature poised on the threshold of death, that most universal and awful mystery of existence: small wonder that one of history’s most successful religions traces its foundation, its symbology, and its most sublime literature, to the execution of a Roman subject 2,000 years ago.
Conversely, the condition of a human being — even an infamous malefactor — helpless before the scaffold elicits the interest of the empathetic soul, awakens it to the compelling challenges of life.
What are justice, goodness, mercy?
What is an individual’s place (for an execution is an intrinsically social event) among his or her fellows?
Sophocles poses this question in Antigone; so does Stephen King in The Green Mile; between and beyond them lie unnumbered works both immortal and obscure, from every land and time and genre that if they have no other virtues at least concur upon one essential fact:
The death penalty makes for damned good drama.
Just as artists draw Calvary into their work, that work has drawn artists themselves unto Calvary — or the specter of the Calvary drawn artistry from seemingly modest men and women. “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully” as Dr. Johnson had it, and we might observe this oft-repeated pith was issued in the most urgent context: a petition for clemency for a condemned clergyman who hanged at Tyburn nevertheless.
These stories — the fictional and the factual, borderless at the plane of the eternal; the gesture of saying what must not be said either in mortifying defiance of one’s milieu or from the ironic safety of certain death — these stories are mileposts marking a timeless path: from the bosom of a community to expulsion, where the corporeal death (however awful and real) is for its witnesses the metaphor of isolation, the lot alike of great heroes, great villains … and great artists.
From March 4 - 11, in the longest themed set yet employed in these pages, Executed Today takes an incomplete tour through the annals of artistry and execution.
The United Kingdom came out on the winning side of World War II, but its hold on its globe-spanning territorial dominions was irrevocably weakened. As its own imperial offspring, the United States, took up the hegemon’s place, British colonies started breaking free — and those social and political sunderings frequently brought violence.
The next two days’ executions were true calendar neighbors, merely hours apart in 1942, as an empire at the end of its run fought for its survival.
The United Kingdom came out on the winning side of World War II, but its hold on its globe-spanning territorial dominions was irrevocably weakened. As its own imperial offspring, the United States, took up the hegemon’s place, British colonies started breaking free — and those social and political sunderings 
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