Tongue Torture – Worst Punishments In The History of Mankind
So you said some things that made somebody else mad- no big deal, that's pretty much
just an average afternoon on Twitter.
But you don't live in the age of Twitter, you live in the 1200s and the people you made
mad are really upset by what you said.
So upset, that the authorities believe you should never say anything again.
Now, a man in a leather apron and a black hood approaches you as you sit strapped to
a chair, unable to move.
He yanks your mouth open and brings a set of red-hot pliers to your mouth…
If you've watched the news or read the opinions section of any newspaper, you're probably
aware that people are very protective of their free speech.
But, while in modern America, the right to free speech is protected by the first amendment,
other societies throughout history haven't been so lucky.
While these days, making off-colour comments might run you the risk of getting “cancelled”
on twitter, in less enlightened times, crimes such as blasphemy, speaking out against the
state, or even just gossiping too much could result in you having your ability to speak
permanently cancelled in real life.
In other words, we're back with another one of the worst punishments imaginable, and this
time, we're going to show you all about the history of tongue torture.
Lick your lips real quick – trust us, you'll be grateful for it later.
Ritual tongue mutilation has been around seemingly as long as people have had tongues.
In Mayan culture, the tongue was a common place to draw blood for use in rituals.
Mayan tongue mutilation was usually self-inflicted and practiced by community leaders or other
members of the upper class.
The ritual involved piercing the tongue and pulling a barbed cord through the resulting
hole.
This tongue-twistingly painful act may sound like a form of torture, but amazingly, this
was most commonly practiced as a form of minor human sacrifice to commemorate the birth of
a child or the completion of a construction project.
That's right, instead of cutting the ribbon at the dedication ceremony of a new library
or block of apartments, a Mayan town mayor would have sliced his own tongue open.
The Code of Hammurabi, which was written in 1754 BCE, making it the earliest known set
of written laws, mentions tongue removal as a punishment for a number of crimes.
As we mentioned in our episode on scaphism, many ancient justice systems operated on a
principal known as Lex Tallonis, or, 'an eye for an eye', and Hammurabi's code is the prime
example of that.
Among other gruesome punishments, the code stated that under Babylonian law, spies would
have their eyes removed, those who stole another man's slaves would be branded, and doctors
who caused their patient undue loss of life or limb would have their hands severed.
Basically, Hammurabi's law took 'let the punishment fit the crime' to its logical extreme- and,
in his defence, it'd be hard to be a repeat offender for theft or surgical malpractice
when you don't have any hands to steal things or do surgery with.
So, naturally, instances of tongue mutilation mentioned in the code were punishment for
crimes that involved speaking.
The complete removal of the tongue at the base was called for in cases of perjury, as
well as in cases of adopted children publicly rejecting their foster parents.
You might be thinking that tongue removal isn't such a bad deal, especially when compared
to removal of the hands or eyes.
Sure, you wouldn't be able to communicate with anyone without carrying around a stone
tablet and chisel, and you wouldn't ever be able to enjoy the taste of your favourite
Babylonian-style kebab ever again, but other than that, you'd still be able to live a full
life, right?
Well, you have to remember that understanding of medicine back then was hardly what it is
today.
While the Babylonians understood the importance of sterilisation to stop the risk of infection
during surgery, and their surgical techniques were relatively advanced for the time period,
they still hadn't quite nailed the recipe for a fool proof antiseptic.
Even though you would survive the initial tongue amputation, there was still a high
chance of dying later from an infection.
Tough break.
The story of tongue mutilation doesn't stop there, because as time went on, it remained
a popular form of torture, and torturers only got more creative with the ways they chose
to go about it.
Torturers throughout history kept the theme of Lex Tallonis going, more often than not
preferring to go for the tongue in cases of blasphemy or heresy.
Cutting out a prisoner's tongue was the preferred form of lingual mutilation in the middle ages,
and torturers used a variety of grisly tools to get the job done.
The mouth would be held open and the tongue would be clamped in the rough iron grip of
a device simply known as the “tongue tearer” (use this image: https://tinyurl.com/yb6tgjd2),
which would then be tightened with a screw to ensure a vice-like hold on the victim's
tongue.
Sometimes the tongue was merely held in place and stretched out so that it could be severed
using a sharp knife, other times it was used on its own to roughly yank the tongue out
of the prisoner's head.
Another version of the tongue tearer had interlocking zig-zag teeth on the clamp, like pinking shears,
which would shred the tongue to ribbons as it was being pulled out.
Other methods of tongue torture included boring a hole through the organ with a red-hot iron.
This method was used on a Quaker man named James Nayler who, after re-enacting parts
of Jesus' arrival in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, was arrested for blasphemy in 1656.
Part of Nayler's punishment was to not only have a hole bored through his tongue, but
also to be branded with the letter B for, as you can probably guess, 'blashphemer'.
Nailing a prisoner's tongue to a table was another practice from around the same time.
If you think that sounds a lot worse than the way it was done in the days of Hammurabi
and his code, you'd be right.
For as little as the Babylonians knew about preventing infection, the people of medieval
Europe knew even less, not even bothering to clean their tongue clamps between uses.
The risk of infection was extremely high, but if you were lucky, your torturers might
kill you themselves, saving you from a long and painful death from infection.
While removal of the tongue was the go-to punishment for blasphemy, there were other,
less fatal forms of tongue torture for crimes that were considered less serious in nature.
The scold's bridle, also known as the gossip's bridle or the branks, was a supposedly more
soft-core form of punishment saved for British women who had committed the unforgivable crimes
of cursing, nagging, or gossiping to a degree that members of the community considered 'riotous'
or 'troublesome'.
It was also sometimes used on suspected witches, to stop them from being able to recite spells
or curses.
The scold's bridle was first recorded as being used for legal punishment in Scotland in 1567,
and while it may or may not have ever been legal in England, its use was also recorded
there around the same time period.
The device was a large metal cage placed around the head, with an iron plate attached to the
inside that would be forced into the wearer's mouth, sort of like a low-tech version of
Saw's infamous reverse bear trap device.
The iron plate, known as a 'curb plate', was spiked and studded on the bottom in a way
that would cause minimum pain if the wearer kept their mouth completely still, but would
shred the tongue if the wearer attempted to speak.
Once the device was applied, the 'scold' would be paraded around and often beaten in public
as both a form of humiliation and an example to other women.
To add insult to injury, the outside of the mask was sometimes decorated with features
like donkey's ears or pig noses, personalised to fit the exact kind of troublesome woman
who was forced to wear it.
An eavesdropping busybody might get a scold's bridle made to resemble a rabbit, while a
lazy woman might get one that looked like a cow.
Who would have guessed that the 16th Century was a little backwards in its views on women's
free speech?
In the English town of Walton on Thames, there is still a scold's bridle on display in the
vestry of the church.
It's dated to 1633 and accompanied by the following inscription - "Chester presents
Walton with a bridle, To curb women's tongues that talk too idle."
According to the local story, a man named Chester lost his fortune due to a local woman's
gossip, and out of spite, he donated a scold's bridle to the town jail, specifically so that
it could be used on her.
The scold's bridle remained used as a form of official punishment in England until as
late as 1856.
While it wasn't nearly as common in the New World, African-American scholar and abolitionist
Olaudah Equiano described seeing a similar device used as a way to control slaves in
18th century Virginia.
Elsewhere outside of Europe, tongue removal was also used as punishment in parts of Asia,
and the practice features in a story about Khana, a medieval astronomer, poet and folk
hero from Bengal.
When she presented her research to the king, he was so impressed that he requested her
presence in the royal court the following day.
Khana's father-in-law, a fellow astronomer by the name of Varahamihira, was so jealous
that he ordered his son to sever Khana's tongue.
In many versions of the story, Khana's husband refuses to go through with it, and the tongue-removal
is done by either Varahamihira himself or a hired hand.
In others, Khana cuts off her own tongue to save her husband from having to hurt her.
Regardless, all versions end with Khana being rendered tongueless.
Her story is still told today, and has been frequently discussed by feminist thinkers
in modern Bengal.
In fact, many examples of historical tongue trouble have a gendered element to them.
Backtracking a little bit to ancient Greece, stories of women suffering acts of tongue
terrorism are a common theme.
Philomela, an Athenian princess, was sexually assaulted by her brother-in-law, Tereus, who
later butchered her tongue when she threatened to name him for his crime.
According to legend, however, Philomela still got her revenge, as she was able to embroider
Tereus's name into a tapestry that she then gave as a gift to her sister, Procne.
Procne, realising that her husband was the one responsible for attacking her sister,
got revenge by killing her son and serving him to Tereus for dinner.
If this story sounds familiar, it might be because it served as inspiration for a plot
point in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.
Another Greek story of tongue mutilation is that of Timycha, a Greek soldier's wife in
the 6th century BCE, who, when captured and faced with interrogation by enemy forces,
chewed off her own tongue to ensure she would be unable to give up any information.
According to the version of events recounted in Iamblichus's Life of Pythagoras, once
Timycha had sufficiently mangled her own tongue, she spat it out at her would-be interrogator.
While this wasn't an example of tongue mutilation being used as punishment, we still felt we
had to give Timycha a shout out, since she sounds like she was tough enough in the face
of danger to make Die Hard's John McClane look like Paul Blart: Mall Cop in comparison.
Fast-forward to modern times and you might think that the days of tongue mutilation as
a form of punishment are long gone.
Unfortunately, due to tongue mutilation's unparalleled effectiveness at stopping people
from talking, the practice has survived in some isolated pockets well into the 20th and
21st centuries.
Survivors of Canada's infamously barbaric Residential School System, an initiative designed
to forcibly assimilate Aboriginal children into western culture, recount that a common
punishment for being caught speaking their native languages was to have their tongues
pierced with needles and, in extreme cases, shocked with electricity.
These punishments happened as late as the 1950's, when the Residential School System
was finally disbanded.
Possibly the most notorious example of modern-day tongue violence is the Colombian Necktie,
an execution method that was invented by political terrorists during the Colombian civil war
of the 1950's, but made famous worldwide by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in the 70's and
80's.
The name refers to the practice of cutting a large, deep, horizontal slit in the victim's
throat, then pulling their tongue through the resulting gap – like a flesh, bloodstained
necktie.
It's a horrifying way to go with a gruesome aftermath, making it a highly effective intimidation
tactic.
Even more recently, in 2007, Iraqi insurgent Muhammed Sulaiman was taken from his house
and had his tongue cut off when his superiors caught wind of his plans to defect.
Sulaiman was taken to the nearest hospital by his attackers, who told doctors he'd been
in an accident.
Three days after returning home, Sulaiman found a package on his doorstep which contained
both his severed tongue and a note warning him against ever trying to speak up about
insurgent activity again.
So, next time you're doing anything from voicing your opinions to licking stamps to
enjoying your favourite flavour of ice cream, be grateful you weren't around in any of
these times of places.
Cause if you were, well, you probably wouldn't have much to say about it…
Don't let this video leave you tongue-tied, tell us what you thought in the comments.
Then go check out “The Blood Eagle - Worst Punishments in the History of Mankind” and
“The Catherine Wheel - Worst Punishments In The History of Mankind.”
