In the Middle Ages, Europeans believed that the coffin with the body of the Prophet Mohammed (Muhammad) hovers, held by magnets, in the middle of Mecca. Historian Svetlana Luchitskaya explains where this myth came from and what does it have to do with the ancient gods, Babylon and the fear of levitation
This miracle was reported by many medieval chroniclers, travelers and pilgrims: in Mecca, the iron coffin of the Prophet Muhammad soars in the air without any support due to the action of powerful magnets. And the pilgrims, seeing the coffin, gouge out their eyes, confident that they will not see anything more surprising.
These ideas were quite tenacious throughout the Middle Ages, despite the fact that Mohammed, as you know, died and was buried not in Mecca, but in Medina. One of the evidence is the famous Catalan world map of the late XIV century. On it we see the temple of the Prophet Muhammad in Mecca, decorated with five minarets, where the body of the prophet is buried in a golden sarcophagus, and the inscription next to the image of the temple reads: "After the visit to the tomb of Muhammad, the pilgrims are blinded, as they no longer want to look at the mortal world." …
Where does this legend originate?
The death of the prophet Muhammad and the transformations that took place with his lifeless body were of great interest to medieval writers. First, Eastern Christians, who were the first to come into contact with the world of Islam, and then the inhabitants of Spain, conquered by Muslims, create polemical biographies of the prophet, in which he is portrayed as a voluptuous person, a false prophet and even the Antichrist. The authors of these texts, written in the 8th-10th centuries in Arabic, Greek, Syriac and Latin, as a rule, did not refer to Islamic sources, using the well-known legends about the saints and the Antichrist.
In one of the biographies, retold by the Bishop of Cordoba Eulogius, the prophet predicts that on the third day after death he, like Christ, will be resurrected, and when he really dies, his followers leave the body unburied. But after three days, Mohammed does not rise again, and instead of angels, dogs come running to the stench of the corpse and devour the ashes. How did medieval Christians understand the moral of this story? The Prophet tried to impersonate the Messiah, but his shameful death testifies that he is not the Messiah, but the Antichrist. It doesn't matter that none of the Muslims believed in the Messiah, and the creator of Islam never spoke about his ascension. According to Christians, Mohammed was supposed to play the same role in Islam as Christ did in Christianity.
To the north of the Pyrenees, Islam was even less interested, and Mohammed was portrayed as a golden idol worshiped by idolatrous Saracens. The prophet of Islam was part of an imaginary pagan pantheon, which, as a rule, consisted of three main gods, and this devilish trinity (Tervagan, Apollen, Mohammed) was considered a replica of the Christian Trinity. In the epic and Latin chronicles, the Saracens serve their gods: they promise to pour out their golden idols if they help them defeat the Christians, and after their defeat they break the statues of Mohammed and other deities into pieces.
Promotional video:
But in the XII century and in the north of Europe biographies of Mohammed appeared, in which the legend of his flying tomb was first mentioned. Why exactly during this period? This is easy to explain: the beginning of the Crusades, on the one hand, heightened interest in Islam, and on the other, intensified confrontation with the Muslim East. In new, often poetic texts, writers of the 12th century do not so much refute Islamic dogmas (which they often have no idea about), but, for ideological purposes, create a distorted image of the prophet, implicitly comparing him with Jesus and Christian saints.
In these biographies, written by Embrico of Mainz, Guibert Nozhansky and others, Mohammed is no longer a golden idol and not the Antichrist, but a deceiver and a heretic who achieves his goals with the help of witchcraft. It is no coincidence that in the composition of Mainz, the magician becomes the teacher of Mohammed, and the Magician is his name. He teaches the future prophet the demonic arts. With the support of his mentor, Mohammed first becomes the king of Libya, and then, posing as a saint and performing fake miracles, declares himself a prophet and creator of a new false teaching based on incest and debauchery. God punishes Mohammed, who begins to suffer from an epileptic illness, then the prophet is suddenly overtaken by a shameful death: his body, dismembered and mocked (Guibert Nozhansky has only heels left from Mohammed), is devoured by pigs. It is because of this,as Christian writers will explain, Muslims have a ban on eating pork.
According to Embrico of Mainz, the teacher of Mohammed and his followers collected the remains of the prophet and built a temple for him from white Parian marble. From a distance, this building looked like a mountain of pure gold because of the radiance of precious stones with which it was showered, just as the night sky is strewn with bright stars. This structure, raised up only thanks to the action of magnets built into it, was held in the air in the middle of the heavens and looked like an arch, under which, as Embrico says, the coffin intended for Mohammed was:
He, I tell you, was made of copper, And since in reality the magnet attracted the copper coffin in which the king rested, the sarcophagus hung in the air, What was the result of the impact of stones.
That is why ordinary people, seeing this miracle with a magnet, Revered this thing for a divine sign, Believing - unfortunate! - that this miracle is performed by Mohammed himself.
And seeing this - stupid! - they worship Mohammed.
This is what magical art has done to the people of Libya!
It is known that in medieval symbolism all flights and soaring, which were considered as a caricature of the ascension of Christ, have always been attributed to demonic forces and associated with magic. The coffin of Mohammed soaring in the sky of Mecca is the last false miracle, with the help of which the prophet, even after death, manages to support the ignorant people in their delusion. Did Christian writers invent this image themselves? In fact, tales of statues and idols hanging in the air have been known since Antiquity. Many early Christian writers, including Blessed Augustine, reported that the pagans were able, with the help of magnets, to install in temples, as it were, hovering between heaven and earth, iron images of the ancient gods - Mars, Venus, Serapis, etc., and so they deceived gullible people. Talking about the idols that ascended into the sky supposedly at the beck of a deity,the fathers of the Christian Church exposed paganism with its false tricks. And the Christian polemicists of the XII century simply borrowed the already familiar image, continuing with Mohammed a number of pagan pseudo-gods.
Since in Latin biographies, Mohammed is implicitly compared with Christ, then the image of a floating tomb does not appear at all by chance. The floating sarcophagus of Mohammed is a kind of replica of the Holy Sepulcher. For Christians, this is the main shrine, like the Church of the Holy Sepulcher itself in Jerusalem. From their point of view, the Saracens should also have their own "temple", in which there is a coffin with the remains of the body of Mohammed, and medieval writers place this "sanctuary" in Mecca, which becomes a real spiritual center of the Muslim world. But if the Holy Sepulcher in the eyes of Christians is a real shrine, then the tomb of Mohammed is a profanation, created with the help of a fake magic art, just as the teaching of a prophet is a lie and falsification.
But it's not only that. The medieval Christian writers' ideas about the location of the tomb of Mohammed were rather vague. Some placed the sarcophagus in Mecca, while others - in Babylon, which in the Apocalypse was considered as the center of evil, the city of Antichrist. And Christian writers are happy to rename the name of the city: it turns out that this is not Mecca (Mecha), but Mœcha, which in Latin means “harlot”, “lecher”. Over time, Mecca-Mokka begins to occupy in the eschatological imagination of medieval Christians a place opposite to Jerusalem: as Jerusalem is the city of salvation, so Mokka-Babylon is the city of destruction. It is clear that the image of the city of sin takes on enormous importance during the Crusades, each of which exacerbated apocalyptic and eschatological sentiments. Latin Europe firmly linked the final triumph of Christianity predicted in the Revelation of John the Theologian with the successes of the crusaders. It was believed that with the onset of the end of the world, Mecca, the spiritual capital of the Saracens, would suffer the punishment of Heaven - it would be completely destroyed. These sentiments were especially tenacious during the Fifth Crusade (1217–1221), when prophecies were spread in the crusader camp about the imminent victory of Christians and about help from the East. The basis for such sentiments was distorted rumors about the military expansion of the Mongols taking place in Central Asia, among whom, as the crusaders knew, there were many Nestorians. At this time, one of the leaders of the campaign, the church writer Oliver of Cologne, wrote in his chronicle:that with the coming of the end of the world, Mecca, the spiritual capital of the Saracens, will suffer the punishment of Heaven - it will be completely destroyed. These sentiments were especially tenacious during the Fifth Crusade (1217–1221), when prophecies were spread in the crusader camp about the imminent victory of Christians and about help from the East. The basis for such sentiments was distorted rumors about the military expansion of the Mongols taking place in Central Asia, among whom, as the crusaders knew, there were many Nestorians. At this time, one of the leaders of the campaign, the church writer Oliver of Cologne, wrote in his chronicle:that with the onset of the end of the world Mecca, the spiritual capital of the Saracens, will suffer the punishment of Heaven - it will be completely destroyed. These sentiments were especially tenacious during the Fifth Crusade (1217–1221), when prophecies were spread in the crusader camp about the imminent victory of Christians and about help from the East. The basis for such sentiments was distorted rumors about the military expansion of the Mongols taking place in Central Asia, among whom, as the crusaders knew, there were many Nestorians. At this time, one of the leaders of the campaign, the church writer Oliver of Cologne, wrote in his chronicle:when in the camp of the crusaders, prophecies were spread about the imminent victory of Christians and about help from the East. The basis for such sentiments was distorted rumors about the military expansion of the Mongols taking place in Central Asia, among whom, as the crusaders knew, there were many Nestorians. At this time, one of the leaders of the campaign, the church writer Oliver of Cologne, wrote in his chronicle:when in the camp of the crusaders, prophecies were spread about the imminent victory of Christians and about help from the East. The basis for such sentiments was distorted rumors about the military expansion of the Mongols taking place in Central Asia, among whom, as the crusaders knew, there were many Nestorians. At this time, one of the leaders of the campaign, the church writer Oliver of Cologne, wrote in his chronicle:
“A certain Christian king, the ruler of the Nubian Christians, will destroy the city of Mecca and scatter the bones of the false prophet Muhammad outside the city. He predicts other events that have not yet happened. If his prophecies come true, this will lead to the rise of Christianity and the destruction of the Hagarians - Muslims."
During this period, Europe witnessed other events that strengthened the apocalyptic mood. The Christian mission has acquired an ecumenical character: missionaries reach the ends of the earth, going to Central Asia and the Far East. The chroniclers spoke of unusual natural phenomena: stars fell, eclipses occurred, mysterious signs appeared in the heavens. But the religious enthusiasm of Christians reached a limit when in 1258 the Mongols took Baghdad, which was considered the political center of the Saracens. For medieval people, this event was a sign of the imminent end of the Muslim world. The English chronicler Matthew Paris, in his Big Chronicle, responded to what was happening with the following lines:
“Some devilish fire, perhaps descending from the ether, suddenly engulfed the temple of Mohammed with fire and destroyed it to the ground … Then the same force plunged the temple into the bowels of the earth, and for the third time lowered it even deeper and destroyed it in the abyss itself. And so the whole city of Mecca and its surroundings were destroyed by an inextinguishable fire."
This devilish fire was, from the point of view of Christians, the divine punishment of the city and all the Saracens and a sign of the onset of the apocalypse … After a while it became known that the Mongols had converted to Islam, and hopes for help from the East collapsed. But if now it was impossible to count on the legendary Eastern Christian rulers, then there was still to expect help from God. And medieval people did not stop dreaming about the end of the world and the victory of Christianity, about the destruction of Mecca and the death of Islam.
Therefore, the image of a golden sarcophagus hanging in the air continued to excite the imagination of pilgrims, travelers, theologians. At the beginning of the 15th century, the Burgundian pilgrim Bertrandon de la Broquiere, who traveled in the East on behalf of the Duke Philip the Good, talks about the soaring coffin of Mohammed, which Saracens come to see from all over the world, after a visit voluntarily depriving themselves of their sight. The German traveler of the late 15th century, Bernhard von Breidenbach, with fear and disgust, describes the sarcophagus of the prophet hanging in the air, and his contemporary, the Dominican Felix Fabri, who made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, reports that, according to rumors, the heavenly fire finally devoured the temple of Mohammed and the coffin sank to the abyss. Over time, the image of the soaring tomb of the prophet penetrates into fiction and folklore - into Italian knightly novels,Hungarian proverbs …
When did the legend of the floating coffin of Mohammed end? At the end of the 17th century, Pierre Bayle, a French thinker and critic of theology, was one of the first to try to debunk this legend. In his Historical and Critical Dictionary, he writes:
“A huge number of people say that the iron coffin of Mohammed hovers, suspended in the air, under a magnetic vault. They believe this, as well as that the followers of Mohammed consider it the greatest miracle. The followers of the prophet's teachings laugh when they learn that Christians refer to this as a fact."
The philosopher considers the idea even more ridiculous, according to which "many pilgrims, seeing the coffin of Mohammed, gouge out their eyes, as if the rest of the world became unworthy of their contemplation after they looked at such an amazing and unusual thing." Pierre Bayle rejects these inventions and reminds that the prophet of Islam "was buried in Medina, where he met his death."
The real exposure of the myth took place in the 18th century, during the Enlightenment. Edward Gibbon, in his famous work A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, calls this legend “funny” and “barbaric” and indignantly devotes several lines to its exposure. Judging by the fact that the British politician is not stingy with emotions, it can be assumed that even in those days, naive ideas about the temple of Mohammed continued to live. In the 18th century, new biographies of the hero will appear, belonging to the pen of the French historian Henri de Boulenville, the philosopher Voltaire, where there will no longer be a place for a medieval legend, and the prophet himself will be portrayed not as a heretic and false saint, but as a legislator and conqueror. Only after this do the Christians of Europe free themselves from the religious myth and allow the bones of Mohammed to rest in Medina.