However serious parricides[2] and matricides may be, even more serious, in our opinion, is, yet, parents’ violence on their own children (infanticides-murderous mothers).
When a child kills his father, after all he didn’t ask to be generated and the homicide might represent a violent refusal against the choice his parents made when he was begot (a genetic tendency to homicide). When, on the contrary, a parent kills his child, the event seems even more” monstrous ” when we think a parent voluntarily chooses to beget.
If yet, we consider the act of generating as the result of the order given by the genes,more worried about the survival of the species than the single individual[3], parents’ violence against their children might represent a belated refusal of the individual to obey the order of the genes.
Parents’ violence against their own children goes from abandonment to torture and homicide (murderous mothers).
Newborn babies’ abandonment is a very old practice the traces of which may be found in prehistory and in myth. Behind the myth of Moses who was hidden by his mother in a cradle, by the Nile, apparently to save him from the order given by the Pharaoh to kill all Jewish male babies, there is a classic abandonment of a minor.
The same happens to Romolo, the founder of Rome and Remus, his twin, who were abandoned by their mother and then, according to a legend, rescued by a shepherd and brought up by a she-wolf.
This practice went on during the centuries and so newborn babies were abandoned in the church courtyards ” exposed “(from here the origin of “Esposito”, a very frequent surname in Naples [4]) or more simply, like in Rome in 1200 thrown – “projected” – into rivers[5].
At present contraceptives, at least in developed countries, can be easily found and are very efficacious, abortion is legal in many countries, Italy among them, and finally it’s possible for a woman who has given birth to a baby, to refuse, to aknowledge and leave it in the hospital without her identity is mentioned.
A system like the one mentioned in the footnote of the Wheel of Borgo, seems a remote memory of the past, but its function, far from being obsolete, is carried out by the most modern and squalid rubbish bin[6].
In two years(1995-1996) in Italy, 650 living babies were thrown into rubbish bins.
As it were rubbish the newborn baby is slipped into a modern plastic bag that, preventing from breathing, condems it to a certain death. Sometimes, on the contrary, it has some chance of surviving.
Le Petit Poucet’ parents, very poor woodcutters, since they couldn’t feed him and his six brothers any longer, decide to abondon him in a wood. Le Petit Poucet, guessing something, has listened to his parents’ talking and while going into the wood, he leaves, behind himself a trace of pebbles and bread crumbs with which he had filled up his pockets so as to know how to go back. Many attempts of abondonment follow as long as one of them is successful.
Le Petit Poucet decides to ask the ogre’s wife for hospitality. The ogre has seven daughters he feeds lovingly on human flesh, for this reason he tells his wife he wants to kill the seven young guests during the night. Le Petit Poucet can save himself and his brothers by inducing, with a strstagem, the ogre to kill his seven daughters instead of them.
[2]Killing father by his children-brothers represents one of the main subjects of psychoanalysis.
[3]See Schopenhauer: Op.quot. Note 3 pag 91
[4]Besides others like Amodio, Diotallevi,etc.
[5]Beyond the scandal the latter practice might provoke, it caused a practical problem. In those days rivers like the Tiber were very fishy. Every morning fishers needed much time to disentangle, from their nets, little newborn babies who tangled more and more in the meshes during the pangs of death. A miniature which is preserved in the library of the hospital “Santo Spirito” in Rome, testifies these events. Finally a delegation of fishers claimed with Pope Innocent III Lotario who decided to put up all unwelcome newborn babies in the hospital so that they shouldn’t be thrown into the Tiber any more. But there was the problem how a woman could abandon her own baby without being recognized. Then the construction of the famous “Wheel of Borgo”was planned. A hollow wooden cylinder on the base of it there was a hole the diameter of which was large enough to let a newborn baby be introduced, not an older child, was placed in an aedicule out of the hospital. The aedicule was closed outside with a grating on the base of which there was a hole corresponding with the one of the cylinder. At night a woman who had decided to abandon her baby, would go to the Wheel of Borgo, place it in the hole of the grating and the cylinder and knock at the cylinder to inform the women on duty at the wheel, who were inside the hospital, that the “delivery” had been executed. The cylinder was rotated for 180° and the newborn baby, instead being projected into the Tiber, found hospitality inside the hospital. Its surname was often Proietti, as a memory of the event, a very famous surname in Rome. Once admitted inside the hospital the baby was branded on the left foot with the double cross of St. Andrew, the symbol of the hospital of “Santo Spirito”.
This apparently barbaric practice allowed the baby, once become an adult, to get free board and lodging in every diocese of Christianity. From here the expression ” son of a bitch”or ” son of a “mignotta” from filius matris ignotae, the way in which abandoned newborn babies were registered. At first in Rome and later in Italy it started meaning a cunning fellow who lives off others. The Wheel of Borgo is still well preserved and visible in Rome in Borgo Santo Spirito street with the alms-box” for the poor projected in the hospital”. A very beautiful picture of Gioacchino Toma’s which portrayed two women on night shift at a wheel of the innocents, testifies that this costum went on till ‘800.
[6]Probably it’s always a question of number: at the time of the construction of the Wheel of Borgo Rome was inhabited by about a few thousands people, a good percentage of which was made up of prostitutes and their pimps; some more innocents(the Wheel of Borgo like the ones of other cities was also called the Wheel of the Innocents or Wheel of the Exposed) could be convenient, also because many of them, who were supported till they were eighteen inside Santo Spirito, became priests or nuns. In eleven years, between 1727 and 1738, according to one of the many existing statistics, 7496 babies were left in the Wheel of borgo: an average of two a day.
Translated from “Il Virus Intelligente” by Enrica Narducci
To be continued in:
2) Murderous Mothers Second Part
3) Murderous Mothers Third Part
4) Murderous Mothers Fourth Part
5) Murderous Mothers Fifth Part
6) Murderous mothers Sixth Part
Ferdinando Gargiulo offers you a new perspective on why new viral epidemics, assaults, infanticides, suicide epidemics and even environmental catastrophes. Always engaged in his research decides to create a blog to offer his readers content of high value.