Laudator Temporis Acti

An Occitan poem from Clermont-Ferrand, Bibliothèque communautaire et interuniversitaire, ms. 201, f. 89^v, in William D. Paden and Frances Freeman Paden, Troubadour Poems from the South of France (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007), p. 15:

Tomida femina
in tomida via sedea;
tomid infant
in falda sua tenea;        4
tomides mans
et tomidas pes,
tomidas carnes
que est colbe recebrunt;        8
tomide fust
et tomides fer
que istæ colbe donerunt.
Exsunt en dolores        12
d'os en polpa
[de polpa en curi]
de curi in pel
de pel in erpa.        16
Terra madre susipiat dolores.

The supplement in line 14 is due to Bernhard Bischoff.

Translation (op. cit., p. 16):

A swollen woman
Sat in a swollen road;
A swollen child
She held in her lap;
Swollen hand
And swollen feet,
Swollen flesh
That will take this blow;
Swollen wood
And swollen iron
That will give this blow.
The pain goes out
From bone to flesh,
From flesh to skin,
From skin to hair,
From hair to grass;
Let mother earth receive the pain.

Here is an image of the manuscript page:


Here is an image of the manuscript page upside down, on which the poem can be seen starting at the third line and then extending down the margin at the right side:


See also William D. Paden and Frances Freeman Paden, "Swollen Woman, Shifting Canon: A Midwife's Charm and the Birth of Secular Romance Lyric," PMLA 125.2 (March 2010) 306-321 (at 309):

Bischoff cited two Latin charms that resemble the second part of "Tomida femina." One, found in a late-ninth-century manuscript at Saint Gall, summons a worm in the hand:

Movat de ossa in pulpa,
de pulpa in pelle,
de pelle in pilo,
de pilo in terra.
Suscipe....
            ("Adiuva me, Deus" [Reiche])

Let it move from bones to flesh,
from flesh to skin,
from skin to hair,
from hair to earth.
Receive [it]

The other, in a Verona manuscript from about 900, conjures a puncte, a sore or abscess:

Coniuro te...
exi de osso in pulpa,
de pulpa in pelle,
de pelle in pilo,
de pilo in terra.
Terra matre, suscipe.
             ("Oratio ad puncte" [Meersseman])

I conjure you ...
go out from bone to flesh,
from flesh to skin,
from skin to hair,
from hair to earth.
Mother Earth, receive [it].

The Occitan poem and the Latin charms are examples of epipompē, or banishment of evil to a particular place. Richard Wünsch (1869-1915) first used the terms apopompē and epipompē to describe two different ways of banishing evil in "Zur Geisterbannung im Altertum," Festschrift zur Jahrhundertfeier der Universität zu Breslau = Mitteilungen der Schlesischen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde 13-14 (1911) 9-32. The difference between apopompē and epipompē can be seen most clearly in the Gospels. In most of the exorcisms recorded in the Gospels, Jesus simply drove demons away from the possessed (apopompē). But at Gadara (or Gerasa or Gergesa), Jesus drove the demons away to a particular place (epipompē), into a herd of pigs (Matthew 8.30-32; par. Mark 5.11-13 and Luke 8.32-33).

In our examples, the pain is progressively moved from one part of the body to another, until finally it is expelled from the body onto Mother Earth.