It’s the year 91 AD. We’re in Rome where Cornelia, high priestess of the Vestal Virgins, is about to meet her end. And it won’t be a quick end either. Cornelia is to be bricked up in a small hollow within the city wall and left there to rot. Essentially, she’ll be buried alive.
So Cornelia is bound, chained, and led through the Roman streets to the site of her execution. The crowds jeer at her, taunt her. This once revered priestess has brought shame to Rome. After all, her wantonness, they believe her impropriety has put them all in danger. But Cornelia is defiant to the last. Above the yells of the baying crowd, she cries out:
“Caesar thinks that I am impure. I who have performed so many rites by which he conquered and triumphed.”
Some in the crowd lower their voices in shame. Others simply ignore her and continue with their curses and insults. At the site of her execution, the grim procession comes to a halt. There are no gallows here, no chopping block, no stake ready for burning.
There’s only a small hole with a chamber beneath. Into this hole, Cornelia is pushed. And in this chamber, she will spend the rest of her days, however many of those may remain. As she maneuvers into the dusty cell beneath the city wall, stepping over the awkward jumble of bricks that will be used to seal her prison, her long stola garment catches on the masonry. The priestess stumbles.
Her executioner pauses and reaches out a hand for her to take, but she refuses. She insists that she’ll take these last steps alone. And as she looks upon the light for one last time, its column shrinking then disappearing in the darkness of her cell, she knows that she dies, an innocent woman.
But that death will not be swift in coming. There are agonized hours ahead of her, days even, in which the physical and psychological torment of her imprisonment will work its way over her. As the skin-crawling shudder of claustrophobia begins to set in, she wonders just how long it will take her to step across into the other world.
And what will deal that final blow? Will it be starvation or thirst that finally takes her? Or will she perhaps succumb to creeping madness? Cornelia is being put to death through what we now call immurement, a word that has its roots in the Latin of ancient Rome. Im meaning in or into and murus meaning wall. Quite literally being put into a wall.
And now the process of bricking up begins. The hole in Cornelia’s chamber grows smaller as bricks are added one by one. Sturdy Roman cement holds them in place, perhaps reinforced by pozzolana, the volcanic sand taken from the Bay of Naples. As the final stone is placed in Cornelia’s prison, the last vestige of sunlight disappears from her view like a solar eclipse.
Only this will be permanent. She will never again feel the warm Mediterranean sun upon her skin. Anxiety begins to rise within Cornelia. The sudden knowledge that escape is now impossible pulls at the fraying edges of her sanity. In the constricted space, her heart begins to gallop almost immediately. Breathing becomes difficult.
Her capacity for rational thought starts to fail. But this anxiety won’t be what kills her. We can’t know exactly how long Cornelia remained alive in her prison. The priestess had enough oxygen to survive and did have shelter from daily heat and nightly cold, but beyond that, she had nothing else. No food and no water.
Without this, Cornelia would have died within three days. But with no reference point for day or night, or the passage of time itself, those three days will stretch into an eternity of limbo. A state of not quite living, but still not quite dead. As she navigates this lonely journey into death, sensory deprivation will take a heavy toll.
With no light for Cornelia to see by, a significant portion of her brain’s function is impaired. Focus and concentration become impossible as she grows disoriented. Deep within the wall, her brain begins to work overtime. She begins to experience what will later become known as the Ganzfeld effect, derived from the German for “whole field.”
This is a sequence of hallucinations that occur when the brain is starved of visual stimuli and begins filling in its own gaps. She witnesses strange shifts in color. The sensation of fading out as if her whole being is shutting down. Strange shapes, lines, textures begin to swim back and forth across her eyes as they struggle to make sense of the gloom.
Minute patterns, whether they’re etched into the walls of her prison or just carried in the little columns of dust that float on the air. All of this begins to transmogrify into eerie beings as the brain experiences pareidolia, the instinctual conjuring of human faces which are not really present. Auditory hallucinations add to the disturbing sensory cocktail.
In the cramped darkness of her cell, sounds are muffled and extinguished. Again, Cornelia’s brain fills in the gaps, creating hushed voices out of nothing, even whole conversations between the ghostly imaginary beings locked in there with her. At first, Cornelia will be able to manage these hallucinations. She’ll understand what’s going on and be aware that her brain is playing tricks on her.
But as the hours pass and as the knowledge that she’s going to die in here settles in upon her, this resolution will begin to change. The borders between reality and hallucination begin to blur, then come apart altogether. Within a day or two, she’ll experience a total psychological breakdown, her mind simply unable to process its seclusion.
But all of this begs the question, what had Cornelia done to deserve such a miserable end? Well, as a Vestal Virgin, Cornelia was a member of one of the most important priestly orders in Rome. And as a Virgo Maxima, she was the most senior and most important of them all. It was these priestesses who oversaw the sacred hearth of Vesta and the flame that burned within it.
And this wasn’t just any flame. It was an eternal flame for the eternal city. The flame must be kept burning, otherwise they believed, Rome would fall. So, six Vestals worked day and night to make sure the flame stayed lit. These six enjoyed quite a high status, but their task was an unenviable one.
Each was chosen in early childhood, giving up family and personal attachments to devote 30 years of their lives to the flame. All six of the Vestals must take responsibility for the flame’s survival and also for its purity. Curiously, it seems this purity was more important than the flame’s survival. And the purity of the flame seems to depend entirely on the purity of each Vestalis herself.
A Vestalis who allowed the flame to go out might be whipped. A horrendous and humiliating punishment for anyone and an immense insult to a woman who’s devoted 30 years of her life to the service of a flickering flame in a drafty temple. But at least she would have kept her life. If, though, on the other hand, a Vestalis was found guilty of incestum—which means just the loss of chastity, basically having a sexual partner—then, well, then she had to die. And that death was an execution, but it wasn’t supposed to appear as such. It was supposed to look voluntary. A devoted priestess laying down her life for atonement following an inexcusable sin. It must also be bloodless. Harming a Vestalis was an affront to the goddess Vesta, and spilling the blood of a Vestalis was out of the question. So there would be no gory head chopping here, no unedifying, inelegant tearing of flesh. Oh no.
The Vestalis must meet her end in a manner befitting of her station. So a Vestalis guilty of incestum would go voluntarily to a chamber within the wall of Rome where she would be bricked up for all eternity or at least for the day or two it would take for dehydration to end her life for her.
As it is, as you can imagine quite difficult to commit incestum solo, there must have been other culprits involved too: the man or men with whom the unchaste act had supposedly been committed. Unlike the Vestalis, however, these men would not be offered a voluntary bloodless end, and instead they’d be taken out into a public place and beaten to death.
As a result, in some cases, the authorities wouldn’t need to go through with the immurement itself. Just the threat of the punishment would be enough to break any insubordination within the ranks of the Vestals. Roman historian Livy tells us of Postumia, a Vestalis who was put on trial. The fact that she dressed well and talked rather more freely and wittily than a young girl should justified the suspicion against her.
Even in the brutality of ancient Rome, dressing well and talking witty were hardly enough to end someone’s life. The court was simply using the idea of the immurement to scare Postumia straight. As Livy continues, she was afterwards acquitted with a warning from the emperor to stop making jokes and to dress in future with more regard to sanctity and less to elegance.
So Postumia was spared. But as we know, Cornelia had no such luck as she was accused of having actual sexual relations during her time as Virgo Maxima. Her crime was considered far greater. Emperor Domitian, who had executed three Vestals in a similar fashion in recent years, was in no mood to acquit the priestess.
Although historian Pliny the Younger, who observed her march to death, was not totally convinced, she repeated her calls to Vesta and to other gods until she was led away to punishment. Whether she was innocent or not, I do not know, but she certainly acted innocent. Pliny was also touched by the fact that she refused her executioner’s hand in her final moments above ground.
Thus, she preserved her sanctity to the last and displayed all the tokens of a chaste woman. The names of the men Cornelia had supposedly committed incestum with are lost to history. In fact, little is known about Cornelia and her life at all other than her status as the Vestalis Maxima. Historians have found some records of Cornelia serving in the college of the Vestals around this time and there is actually some debate over which one of these rose to become the Virgo Vestalis Maxima.
In a way, this just makes Cornelia’s story all the sadder. A girl taken from her family devotes almost 30 years of her life to the goddess Vesta only to be accused of a non-crime and put to death in one of the most horrible ways possible. We don’t even know exactly when she died. We just know it was sometime in 91 AD, no more than 3 days after she was sealed up in her prison.
By this point, there would have been no way back for the priestess. The lack of fluid would have reduced her blood volume and blood pressure to a lethal degree; organs would have begun to fail. The sensation of shutting down would have very much been a real feeling. A heart attack, brain damage, or multi-organ failure would probably have spelled the end for Cornelia—a truly unpleasant way to go.
But she is perhaps the most famous example of immurement and the practice is closely associated with ancient Rome. However, it’s not unique to the empire. The process plays upon one of humanity’s fundamental fears: the fear of being buried alive. The universal nature of this terror made it a common punishment across medieval and early modern Europe with subtle variations and peculiarities.
Take another famous example, this time from the Kingdom of Hungary. In January 1611, a Hungarian countess endured a similar process. This time within a small chamber in her own home, the castle of Csejte in modern-day Slovakia. Placed within this chamber, the wall behind her was bricked shut. Only a tiny hole remained, essentially a hatchway through which food and water could be passed.
For the countess, death came slowly. She was essentially on life support, receiving the basic sustenance her body needed to stay alive, but nothing more. Her torment was subtler than that of Cornelia, but no less harrowing. It was a purely psychological torture for the countess as she rattled around her chamber, losing grip on reality.
Day and night became meaningless. Time ceased to be of relevance. She actually managed to survive three and a half years of this mind-bending torment, but she couldn’t endure forever. She eventually met her death in 1614, aged 54. But whether you feel sympathy for the poor countess or not will depend on which side of the story you believe.
The lady in question was Elizabeth Báthory of Ecsed, the famous “Blood Countess” of Hungarian folklore who bathed in the blood of virgins to keep herself young and may have murdered up to 650 young women. Or did she? She may have simply been a victim of jealousy and political maneuvering. Báthory’s main accuser was György Thurzó, the man appointed by the countess’s late husband, Count Ferenc Nádasdy, to take care of her as well as her children and her fortune once the count had passed away.
Took care of her all right. With the count now safely in his grave, her supposed protector leveled a series of damning accusations at Elizabeth and essentially had her executed with no trial and no proof. She was simply bricked into a wall in her castle. A case of out of sight, out of mind. The nature of Báthory’s execution shows us the other side of immurement.
Yes, the idea of being bricked up in a chamber is terrifying, but it’s also secretive, hidden from view. Domitian wished to put Cornelia to death, but he had to be careful in doing so. A bloody beheading of a once-revered high priestess would have been a direct insult to the gods and would have created a flashpoint between the emperor and his people back here on Earth.
Far better to let her rot silently in a hole away from prying eyes. Similarly, Thurzó had his eyes on Báthory’s vast fortune. A trial and a judicial execution would have brought unwelcome scrutiny upon the man and his motives. It served Thurzó much better to just brick her up, keep her alive for a bit and co-opt all of that delicious wealth.
This seems to have also been a common practice a little further north around the Baltic Sea. From Olavinlinna in Finland to Visby in Sweden and from Kuressaare in Estonia to Grobiņa in Latvia, there are legends of luckless knights and maidens bricked up into secret chambers within castles and stately homes. Elsewhere in Europe, immurement was specifically used on monks and members of the clergy.
Witches and heretics might be brutalized upon the rack or burnt at the stake. But perhaps the idea of spilling non-heretical holy blood was too much for the authorities to stomach. In Moravia, modern-day Czechia, Duke Otto III bricked up 20 monks and their abbot in the refectory of their monastery in 1149 after one of the young monks allegedly groped the Duke’s wife.
In Augsburg, Germany, 1409, four clerics accused of molesting a child were stuffed together into a small wooden casket which was then hung in the city’s 70-meter tall Perlachturm tower. Non-clerics accused of this crime were simply burned alive. This quiet, drawn-out nature of immurement also made it perfect for erasing names from history, like at Thornton Abbey just south of England’s Humber estuary.
Today, the abbey is a striking monument to the country’s monastic past. But in 1722, it was the scene of a grim discovery, a hidden chamber walled up for centuries from the outside world. Inside, a table with a book and a candlestick upon it, and besides this, a skeletal body seated in a chair.
The body may be that of Walter Multon, 14th Abbot of Thornton, executed in 1443. But the true identity of the lonely cadaver has never been confirmed. The process of immurement essentially wiped the victim from history. This process is also far from just a European phenomenon. In the ancient Sumerian city of Ur, today part of Iraq, two human sacrifices have been found from the 3rd millennium BC.
It’s thought they’d been drugged and then placed still living in the graves of their masters. In the first millennium BC, Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria was a big fan of using immurement to terrify his enemies as well as all other manner of unsavory techniques. To quote the man himself:
“I erected a wall in front of the great gate of the city. I flayed the chiefs and covered this wall with their skins. Some of them were walled alive in the masonry. Others were impaled along the wall. I flayed a great number of them in my presence, and I clothed the wall with their skins. I collected their heads in the form of crowns, and their corpses I pierced in the shape of garlands.”
More recently than that, though, the practice of immurement seems to have taken place in Mongolia right into the early 20th century. While newspaper reports from the time tend to be a little sensationalized and can’t always be trusted, there is a famous and rather disturbing photograph from the Mongolian plains that seems to suggest forms of immurement were practiced.
But to wrap this video up, we’ll cover a more recent case of immurement and one that is truly chilling. In 1906, the shoemaker Hajj Muhammad Mesawi was convicted of murdering 36 women in Marrakesh in the Sultanate of Morocco. Mesawi’s crimes caused real public outrage in Marrakesh and across the Sultanate. This is unsurprising.
The cobbler committed unspeakable acts, drugging, decapitating, and mutilating three dozen victims. Moroccans were rightly appalled and it was decided that the killer should meet a similarly horrific fate. Only no one seemed quite sure what that fate should be. Crucifixion was suggested, or burning. But pressure from the international community made this difficult.
Beheading was another option, but this was deemed too quick a death for a man who had inflicted such anguish upon the young women of the community. Daily public lashings were prescribed using a rod made from thorny acacia or shita which tore at his flesh and drew great welts upon his back. And then finally, after weeks of this, it was time for Mesawi to die.
He was walled up alive in a Marrakesh bazaar. Chained upright in a space two-foot square and six-foot high, Mesawi was taunted by Marrakesh’s citizens, who pelted him with rotting meat and excrement as his living tomb was sealed. From then on, passersby would jeer and yell at Mesawi, who screamed back at them in anguish from beneath the layer of masonry.
His screams continued for two days, growing gradually fainter, and then by the third day, witnesses said that he had ceased altogether. Even in this later incarnation, immurement had achieved its grizzly double purpose. The execution was carried out quietly, avoiding international opprobrium for a country walking the precarious tightrope of independence at the beginning of a new century.
But understated as it might have been, it was also very brutal. Horrific enough to inflict maximum suffering and to give outraged locals the vengeance that they craved. And for a punishment so often associated with unfair displays of power and arbitrary punishment, some would say that in this case at least, immurement was justice well served.
