Diaconescu, Marius (szerk.): Mediaevalia Transilvanica 1999 (3. évfolyam, 1-2. szám)
Mentalităţi
26 Mária Makó Lupescu blessed with holy water and transformed by long prayers of benediction into somebody more than a “natural human being”; he is no longer part of a human lawsuit. He entered — through the trial by hot iron - in “God’s sphere”, where the ordeal itself got another explanation. It is not a judgment by God; it is the judgment of God. Seen from the outside, the trial by hot iron was a spectaculum to which everyone flocked.158 159 The ritual itself, but also the trial-ceremony was reassuring and peace-creating. It also had the role of a demonstrative ceremony. It attempted by dramatic gestures to make a lasting impression on the public memory of the community who witnessed the trial. The trial by hot iron may also be seen from outside as a single united whole, but each piece of this whole is so joined as to allow free movement. If we are thinking of the participants at Oradea, one hundred and twenty had time to climb down.157 Others withdrew at different stages along the ritual. Those three days between the moment of holding the hot iron and the opening of the sealed bandage were too much for twelve subjects of the Oradean register: sentiens se combustum confugit ad ecclesiam. As I mentioned above, the sealing-moment was one of the most important steps of the ceremony of the trial by hot iron. The hand that has to hold the hot iron was solemnly sealed and would be reopened again before witness's three days later. If the wound heals “normally”, the result is clear: God has spoken in the most elemental way, “by an assertion of the integrity of a man’s rights symbolized by the surviving integrity of his physical body in contact with extreme heat.”160 In other words, the efficacy of the ordeal remains a function of the strength of feeling in the group. Certain conclusions might follow from this examination of the trial by hot iron and its ceremony. We have found in this particular form of the “mixing” of sacred and profane an elegant solution to some problems of the community who “created” it and used it. \VTien the type of community survives intact, the ordeal survives with it. The growth of rationalism and clerical condemnation of the ordeal is irrelevant to this process. In Oradea, ordeals continue long after 1215. In this way the role of the supernatural in the “Oradean community” could be seen as part of a style of life. A representative of such a style of life could argue also that recourse to divine judgment was preferable to the use of human reason, since God could know intention and men could not. In other way the “judgment of God” became dependent on belief and on the notion of this “supernatural” authority. From this point of view the trial by hot iron could even be seen as a way in which God was perceived. 158 Bartlett, Triat by Fire and water, 21-22. 159 Kantira, A váradi regestrum, 46-48. 160 Brown, “Society and the Supernatural,” 139.
