In a slight deviation from the regular theme of this channel,
this video brings us away from the wilds of the Great White North to one of the
ancient cities of old Christendom, to the birthplace of a little-known European legend.
Many of the traditional nursery rhymes and fairy tales with which Western children are often
inundated are tinged with a strain of the macabre. The nursery rhyme ‘Ring Around the Rosie,’ for
example, is popularly believed to be an allusion to some outbreak of bubonic plague that swept
across England in centuries past, like the Great Plague of London or the infamous Black Death.
The lullaby ‘Rock-a-Bye Baby’ describes the likely injury and possible death of the eponymous infant,
who falls from the canopy of a tree when the branch supporting her cradle breaks.
The famous German folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm in the early 19th Century are far
darker than their modern whitewashed derivatives, Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters mutilating their
feet in order to fit them into the magic slipper, and the villainous witch being roasted to death in
her own oven in the story ‘Hansel and Gretel’. And Humpty Dumpty, whose body is shattered
beyond repair after a high fall is not, despite popular perception, verbally portrayed as an egg.
In keeping with this pattern, the beloved English nursery rhyme ‘The Muffin Man’ has a surprisingly
dark origin. Although conventional wisdom holds that the titular muffin man is probably based
on a baker or grocer who once practiced his trade on Drury Lane, a historic London street
marking the eastern boundary of the city’s West End, many modern video adaptations of the rhyme
depict this character as an anthropomorphic muffin with arms, legs, a mouth, and eyes.
Disturbingly, this quaint interpretation, which many of us might reflexively dismiss as the
charming but baseless product of childlike imagination, is far closer to reality.
In this video, we will explore the chilling true story of the Muffin Man.
The historic event behind this nursery rhyme was alluded to in the 1675 book A Journey by
Horse and Sail Throughout the Christian Kingdoms, During the Years 1667 and 1668,
by Prussian scientist, soldier, and travel writer Gustavus von Binkellheim.
In the spring of 1667, while touring the city of London, England, still reeling from the Great
Fire of the previous year, Binkellheim met an elderly chemist and alchemist named John Hooke,
who invited him to spend an evening with him at his sister’s home on Drury Lane.
“This gentleman,” Binkellheim wrote in German, “told me a most remarkable story pertaining to
a baker by trade who, prior to the event I shall shortly describe, lived on the very
same street as that of the house in which we were presently occupied, which is called Drury Lane.
This baker, as well as my host, lived under the rule of those joyless Reformers who call
themselves the Puritans, whose tenuous hold on the reins of England was broken by the return
of the present King Charles II, restored after long exile to his rightful throne.
“In those days of austerity, the Puritans welcomed with open arms the sons and daughters of Israel,
those roving peoples who were banished from that country on pain of death in the time of
the Holy Wars in Palestine. Among the first to avail himself of this change of fortune
was a Jew by the name of Gomes, who, with his family, made his abode in a house on Drury Lane,
to which my host directed my attention.” Binkellheim went on to explain how Gomes
and the baker quickly became bitter enemies, their feud being occasioned by a romance that blossomed
between their eldest children, which resulted in Gomes’ daughter converting to Christianity.
As retribution for this offence, Gomes solicited the services of a prominent rabbi who had also
taken up residence in London, who was well-versed in the arcane arts of the Jewish mystics.
After consulting a variety of esoteric texts, the rabbi crafted a humanoid effigy from flour,
water, and oil, using those ingredients in mockery of the baker’s profession.
The original German word which Binkellheim used to describe this pastry was muffe, which
designates a small cake vaguely resembling the breakfast food we know today as an English muffin.
In a footnote in the 1895 English translation of the book,
the editor proposed that the effigy was a sort of traditional Jewish pancake called a mofletta.
Whatever the case, the rabbi inscribed the effigy with strange symbols and pronounced a
series of incantations over it, thereby imbuing the dough with some terrible form of life.
“Although the figure itself could not speak,” Binkellheim wrote of this horrific creation,
“it understood what was said to it and commanded of it. By and by, it grew each day;
though very small at first, it ended its expansion by becoming as large as a man.”
The author went on to explain how the rabbi, at Gomes’ request, instructed the monster to
torment the baker every night as punishment for his son’s actions. The creature so terrorized the
craftsman that, after enduring several months of nightly intrusions, he fled to the country with
his family, never setting foot in London again. Binkellheim concluded his anecdote by stating
that, absurd though the tale may seem to educated readers, Hooke assured him that
several of his neighbours, whom he regarded as sober and respectable, claimed to have
witnessed the creature quickly and methodically trudging down Drury Lane in the dead of night,
apparently heedless of its surroundings, as if under the influence of some sort of spell.
In the mid-late 17th Century, the nursery rhyme ‘The Muffin Man,’ now known and beloved
by children throughout the English-speaking world, developed organically in London, perhaps
serving as a warning against or a reminder of the mysterious muffin-like automaton said to have once
haunted Drury Lane. According to the Roud Folk Song Index, a collection of nearly 25,000 songs
from English oral tradition, the rhyme had acquired its familiar tune by at least 1820.
In addition to its contribution to Anglo culture, Binkellheim’s
story had a profound yet seldom-acknowledged legacy in the travel writer’s native Germany,
which was outlined by American folklorist Dr. Avril Prima in her spring 1981 article for the
Journal of the Commonwealth Folklore Institute. In 1875, Austrian playwright Heinrich Klinker wrote a
theatrical tragedy based on the Muffin Man story, which, in 1924, was adapted into a silent film.
In 1926, while speaking at a Nazi Party meeting in Munich, Hitler’s future Reich Minister of
Propaganda, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, alluded to Klinker’s play, characterizing the Muffin Man
as the embodiment of the Judeo-Bolshevik threat to the Volksgemeinschaft, or the German people.
This metaphor was the subject of several papers written by members of the Reich Institute for
German Volkskunde, an organization established for the purpose of justifying the Nazi ideology
through the study of German folklore, and survived well into WWII, evident in a derisive
label which German soldiers applied to Jewish partisans active in German-occupied Belgium,
namely Muffinkommandos. In the aftermath of WWII,
as part of the denazification of Germany, Klinker’s play was banned
from public performance on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and in fact remains banned today.
Incredibly, one final flourish to the saga of the Muffin Man was added one year ago to this
very day. While appraising a 17th Century chest in a home in Drury Lane, which had been handed
down through the owner’s family for generations, a British antiquarian discovered a false bottom,
beneath which was a sheet of parchment which proved to be the lost final page
of Binellheim’s handwritten manuscript – a document which never made it into print.
Curiously, the page bore only two words.