Gluttony

These installments on the 7 Deadly Sins include:
-Short history of the sin of legend
-How I'm totally in violation of this particular sin, via reminiscences and jokes. Spoiler: I commit all of them!
-Some interesting cultural things relating to it in modern times if I feel like it.
-And because it's on my mind, how the vampire myth has incorporated the sin into popular stories. Because, hello, I always talk about vampires here.

It's Lent, which means very little to me as I'm not even Catholic. I mean, I was baptized Catholic, and I've been to church a handful of times, but I definitely don't observe Lent. Still, the thing that fascinates me most about this particular observance is its biggest byproduct: Guilt.

Guilt is a feeling, a very powerful one. It's the feeling that you've done something wrong, that you've violated some rule or standard. That you are solely responsible for your bad behavior. That's kind of why I wanted to look at the Seven Deadly Sins. I've got all kinds of guilt, and I wanted to investigate where it comes from, and if it's rightfully placed in my life. These 7 sins are the moral attitudes and behaviors those in Judeo-Christian culture are supposed to avoid. The list itself became very popular in art and literature during medieval times in Europe, but has been around in various forms ever since in popular culture. The 1995 movie Se7en with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman is a good example of the modern take on the list. There is a list of corresponding 7 Virtues, but I think I'll leave those for another time.

The seven deadly sins aren't all bad ideas, but they have been warped and twisted in different ways to make people feel guilty for having just about any feeling at all. My first choice: Gluttony.

GLUTTONY

Gluttony is about consuming much more than you require. The ideology behind its sinfulness has to do with being wasteful, but also the fact that hoarding things like food when others may go hungry causes a great imbalance and encourages being unkind to those less fortunate.

According to legend, those who are gluttons will be punished in hell by being forced to eat rats, toads, and snakes....which seems to be teaching the wrong lesson, I think. Wouldn't a better punishment be being given a plate with one pea on it for dinner forever? Gluttony is associated with pigs and the color orange for some reason. The obvious cultural symbol of gluttony is obesity, which was the focus of the serial killer in the aforementioned movie Se7en, but gluttony is about much more than just food.

The demon associated with this particular sin is Beelzebub (literal translation: lord of the flies). One of the seven princes of hell, he was invoked a few times during the Salem witch trials. Beelzebub was with me today when I was in Target, enticing me to put everything by Liberty of London in my cart. Seriously, I have no garden, and yet the gardening tools, they would be soooo cute in my future one day-maybe garden.

Medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas argued there were 6 ways to commit gluttony (because he apparently had tons of time on his hands and maybe he was also hungry a lot):

Eating too soon
Eating too expensively
Eating too much
Eating too eagerly
Eating too daintily
Eating wildly

Sweet Lady: A Glutton

I have been guilty on about 5 counts here. I doubt I've ever eaten too daintily. Perhaps that's some kind of eating disorder? I definitely eat too soon, when I'm not hungry. I've eaten a $70 plate of lobster before, which is ridiculous, and I've battled lately with eating too much, and too eagerly. There have been times in my life where I've eaten wildly. Most notably my frenzy over Porto's chicken pastry dish. Oh, and the day I gave up being vegetarian because a hamburger made me totally melt inside.

But my real gluttonous habit? Books. I could have books on just about any subject. I'll take them all. There are never too many. If I like a book, sometimes I'll have two copies, one to destroy with notes and highlighters, and one clean to make copies for students. I've gotten several desk copies of books and I'll keep one at home, one at the office, and put one on reserve at the library if I've required it for a class.

My fantasy future home has a room in it with an expansive ceiling so that I can have bookcases that go up into the air, requiring a rolling ladder. I have been getting digital copies of a lot of books lately, as well as audiobooks, but actual paper and fabric books are completely necessary to me. I can't envision a future where I don't have hundreds of spines to look at, just so I can browse and find something that interests me on a day when I'm bored. Looking through the list of books in digital format would not be as satisfying somehow.

This culture tends to encourage gluttony, or at least it seems to discourage saving things forever. Your clothes and furniture should look very new, your electronics shouldn't be more than a year or two old, your car should be new. Buying stuff that lasts forever isn't really stressed as important anymore.

Artist Rob Pettit has called attention to our throwaway culture through his use of old cell phones as art installations (above). Seattle based artist Chris Jordan also focuses on the excesses of this culture using items thrown away. His show from 2003, Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of Mass Consumption also used cell phones:

5000 Cell Phones

Cell phones aren't the only things we throw away just because they aren't new. His photographs use other items as well.

I tend to keep a lot of things, but it's sad to notice how much trash our tiny family makes on a weekly basis. We recycle, and we're in pretty bad shape economically lately so we can't waste too much, but as a country and a culture, I think we're doing pretty badly in this regard.

Artist Alex Martin tried to call attention to and combat this practice by wearing the same dress every day for a year. Her website, which has a really cool video about the project, details her 365 day art project. Here's a website geared towards kids that talks about the project as well.

Now, I know what you are thinking, what the hell? Where are the vampires? Well here they are!

VAMPIRE GLUTTONS

My favorite vampire glutton: Erzebet Bathory, the Hungarian princess who was rumored to bathe in blood she took from her virgin servants in order to stay youthful in appearance. One witness claimed over 600 girls and women were tortured and killed to supply her with these blood baths, though she was only convicted for 80-which still rates pretty high, I think, serial-killer wise. If she had used water, she may have been the cleanest person in Europe in the early 1600s.
I wonder if she cleaned up after the blood baths? I mean, did she just towel off the blood and slip into clothes? Did she rinse? The few paintings completed during her lifetime do show her wearing red, so maybe she coordinated her wardrobe with her creepy habit. She doesn't really become connected to vampire lore until Bram Stoker claims her story was partial inspiration for Dracula.

There are other depictions of vampires in popular culture eating wildly or overindulging in blood. Many vampire stories incorporate the idea of an insatiable hunger (1983's The Hunger comes to mind, as well as 1979's Thirst). The movie Blade showcases a variety of clubs and parties in which the bad-guy vampires are showered in blood, while Blade himself only drinks enough to stay healthy, from a sanitary blood bag of course.


Good vampires, like Buffy's Angel, Vampire Diaries' Stefan Salvatore, The Vampire Chronicles' Lestat, and Twilight's Edward, all try to keep their blood intake to a minimum, and when they can, they try to eat from anything other than human necks. Synthetic blood is offered as a more "civilized" alternative for Bill Compton on True Blood. Anti-hero Lestat does eat people, but he goes for evil-doers only. Mostly.



Most contemporary evil vampires are portrayed as insatiable consumers, driven to consume as much blood as possible with no regard for humanity. They are often depicted with blood running down their chins, all over their lips, in that messy way that insinuates they have blood to waste. And even when they aren't trying to be gluttons, it happens. Young vampires are often depicted as unable to control their thirst, often taking too much blood to keep the human alive, leading to some regrets for good guys like Louis de Pont du Lac from Anne Rice's books.


So we get contradictory lessons in pop culture about gluttony. We are rewarded for constantly purchasing and using new items, and encouraged to forget or deny the consequences (landfills, etc.), but some of our most evil characters are portrayed as excessive and over-indulgent. We convince ourselves we need things that are truly not necessary, and in fact, our economy depends on that lie. It's no wonder vampires make great characters in contemporary culture. The metaphor of the vampire works (depending on the vampire) to both reinforce and punish gluttony.