Figure 1 – a colorful photograph by Infrogmation (from the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain under GNU attribution license) from New Orleans’ Mardi Gras showing a child’s wagon. decorated as mini-float entitled: “Going to Hell in a Handbasket.”

Yesterday I talked about how we are going to hell in a handbasket and this led to one of my tangents on space travel.  Sorry.  But I did want to return to the very curious phrase, “going to hell in a handbasket,” itself.  To make this photographic, I include, as Figure 1, a colorful photograph by Infrogmation, from New Orleans’ Mardi Gras showing a child’s wagon decorated as mini-float entitled: “Going to Hell in a Handbasket.”

I did some searching of the phrase, and the origin seems clouded in obscurity and there are many proposed possibilities.  I have a favorite that appeals to the antiquarian in me, but first want to point out that therein lies a major problem with the internet.  Misinformation is self-propagating on the worldwide web; so if this is wrong, well…

You may remember from world history Charlemagne (748-814), who founded, in what is now Germany, the Carolingian Empire.   Charlemagne fought a guerilla war (an affront to true guerillas for sure) with the teutonic goth tribes.  He was suspicious that his generals were exaggerating the enemy casualties (like this has never been done before or since). So he ordered that the right hand of his enemies be chopped off and sent to him as a kind of census.  It was an early form of digital counting.  They were sent in what came to be known as “handbaskets.” Yuck! The obvious result was that his generals also started sending the hands of their own fallen soldiers to inflate the numbers.  Isn’t this a lovely story?  And so much for the term “handbasket.”

Now as for “going to hell in a handbasket” it is said that the goths believed that if you were not buried intact, in particular if you did not have a hand, that the gate of Heaven would not open for you, and you would go to the other place with all due haste.  Hence, the expression.

I promise to return to the topic of photography for my next post.