Sacrament poisoning

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Interior view of the Great Minster of Zurich

The last supper poisoning or supper poisoning was mass poisoning on the day of prayer , September 12, 1776, in Zurich .

The poisoning

When taking the wine of the Last Supper on Prayer Day in 1776 in Zurich's Grossmünster , intolerances arose. According to Samuel Hahnemann , the wine was examined with the so-called "Würtenberg sample", in which the addition of sulfur liver caused a black precipitate. This reaction was taken as reliable evidence of the addition of lead sugar with criminal intent. The procedure later became obsolete because of its low specificity . It also reacted to other heavy metals as well as iron compounds. According to Lavater's dossier on the poisoning of the Lord's Supper, on the other hand, the wine is said to have been mixed with a toxic brew, the components of which included thorn apple , iris and arsenic . However, the testimony of contemporary witnesses and the symptoms complained of are retrospectively most likely to suggest accidental contamination or bacterial decomposition or toxin formation.

The incident was immediately taken up by the Zurich clergy, who saw it as caused by a particular corruption of the Zurich people. The event was thematized by the city pastors for weeks in the sermons of the four main churches and spread through the newspaper press in Europe. In his two sermons on supper poisoning, which were printed several times, Johann Kaspar Lavater went so far that he ascribed the alleged act to a single criminal and godless criminal from the city's population. As a consequence, an attempt was made in 1780 to impose the crime on Johann Heinrich Waser, who had become criminal, but Waser vehemently contradicted this. In 1777 Lavater published an extensive dossier in the Teutscher Merkur , which was also separately entitled True History, which committed the 12th autumn month of 1776, when in the night of the general prayer penance and almost day, atrocity act, when the supper was poisoned. Weins, written by Mr. Joh. Caspar Lavater, pastor at the Waysen Church in Zurich . The reaction of the European public remained divided for a long time. Christoph Meiners was convinced by the attack theory during his visit to Zurich. Lavater's postulate of “radical evil”, on the other hand, was ironically refuted by Friedrich Nicolai in the Allgemeine Teutsche Bibliothek . Also Gottlieb Emanuel von Haller distanced himself in his review of Lavater's sermons also clear:

“Two terrifying sermons, which the author will certainly no longer approve of when he is older. About a crime, the existence of which has not yet been proven and perhaps is based only on sheer impurity ... "

literature

  • Jeffrey Freedman: The Last Supper poisoning in Zurich: Nicolai and Lavater on the radical evil. Presented to an international conference on “Public Debates in the German Enlightenment,” sponsored by the University of Potsdam, Germany, December 2004.

novel

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Samuel Hahnemann: Collected Small Writings. Georg Thieme Verlag, 2001, p. 81f.
  2. ↑ Lavater, True History ...
  3. ↑ The night meal poisoning. In: The face an obsession. Kunsthaus Zürich, 2001, p. 87.
  4. ↑ Christoph Meiners: Letters about Switzerland . 2nd letter. tape 1 . Spener, 1788, p. 57 ff . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  5. ↑ Friedrich Nicolai (Ed.): General German Library . tape 68 . F. Nicolai, 1786 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  6. ^ Günther Lottes, Iwan-Michelangelo D'Aprile: Court culture and enlightened public, Potsdam in the 18th century in a European context. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2006, p. 137.
  7. ↑ Gottlieb Emanuel von Haller: Library of Swiss History and All Parts, so related to it. Haller, Bern 1787, Volume 6, p. 191.

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