November 10, 2009

“Free as a bird,” one step ahead of this dreaded secret tribunal

As you know, Stephen, one of my regrets during the composition of the book was having to omit the Sacred Vehm. This was done, of course, on the grounds that its secret court sittings, at which the only sentence imposed was death, were held in the open air, so that finding precise locations today, to which we could direct our readers, would have been more than difficult. Since the book was primarily about places, we reluctantly decided to pass on this otherwise fascinating topic – which even made its way into Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story as well as into the more contemporary Illuminatus! trilogy of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

Watching the celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, and recalling all the secret executions that notoriously took place in communist East Germany brought back to me what we unearthed about the Vehm and its place in ancient Germanic traditions of arbitrary justice, a kind of Teutonic star chamber. I thought a very brief outline might profitably be sketched here for the interest of our readers.

The Vehmgericht, or Vehmic courts, first attained prominence in the 13th century. They were centred on Westphalia in Germany – also the location of the notorious SS Wewelsburg Castle featured in the book, of which more anon – and derived from the ancient “free courts” which disappeared in the 14th century. In Westphalia their place was taken by the Vehm, a secret court system originally authorised by the Holy Roman Emperor and local rulers. Any free man could become a judge, but he had to take strict vows of secrecy, even from his family.

The Vehm’s base was Dortmund, where it met in a square between two linden trees, until 1437 when it transferred to Arnsberg. Judges were privy to an elaborate system of passwords and it was death for any unauthorised person to attend a meeting. Initiation ceremonies so resembled later Masonic rites that it seems possible the lodges borrowed from the Vehm. Initiates were given a rope and a knife engraved with the esoteric initials S.S.G.G., representing, in German, “Stone, Rope, Grass, Green”.

Nobody ever escaped the vengeance of the Vehm whose invariable punishment was death by hanging. An accused had a summons nailed to his door or displayed somewhere in his neighbourhood, after which he had six weeks and three days to present himself before the Vehm. The Vehm also tried cases of heresy and witchcraft. Sentence by hanging was carried out on the nearest tree. The Vehm was not a criminal organisation. Many princes belonged to it and King Sigismund of Hungary was himself initiated into it in 1429; he became Holy Roman Emperor four years later.

The expression “Free as a bird” is said to derive from an alleged Vehmic practice of giving a convicted offender several hours’ head start on the executioners and then hunting him to death. None escaped. The Vehm survived, in a much weakened condition, until 1811. The last “Free Count” (presiding judge) of the Vehm died as late as 1835. The Vehm has had a bad press, but it seems to have enjoyed the sanction of the authorities and of society generally, possibly out of fear, but equally likely because it represented the only judicial power capable of dealing with late-Medieval anarchy.

What occurred to me, however, considering the Vehm’s Westphalian location, was the possibility that the so-called “Honour Courts” of Himmler’s SS, ideologically headquartered at Wewelsburg, might consciously have been modelled on the Vehm. If we ever write a sequel to the book (and I see there is a gratifying demand from reviewers that we should do so), perhaps we could include a much more detailed study of the Vehmgericht than this sketchy outline.