The Day the Tiber Flowed Backwards

*Pater noster, qui es in caelis*, forgive this servant his trespasses, for even the holiest of us must sometimes speak of the latrine. Not for its own sordid sake, you understand, but for the lesson it teaches in humility, and in the perils of… advanced sanitation.

Our sorry tale begins with Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, a man whose ambitions for his abbey were matched only by the dampness of its *garderobe*. He saw Gothic arches and stained glass, but smelt only the lingering consequences of a communal diet rich in beans. A visit from Pope Innocent II was imminent, a pontiff known for a nose so sensitive he’d once excommunicated a bishop for excessive flatulence during a synod. Suger, in a fit of piety and panic, retired to the scriptorium not to pray, but to draft schematics. His inspiration? Roman aqueducts and, it seems, a profound misunderstanding of basic fluid dynamics.

Suger’s device, the *Machina Sancta ad Purgationem*, was a thing of terrible beauty. A vast cistern, fed by a diverted stream, was situated directly above the papal privy. The plan was simple, *deo volente*: a system of levers would release a cleansing deluge, washing all impurities down a modified chute and into the Parisian sewers. What Suger failed to account for was the sheer, glorious, unrestrained *pressure*. The cistern held the better part of a small river. The chute was the size of a penitent’s guilty conscience. The privy below was, well, papal.

When Pope Innocent II, mid-benediction, pulled the ceremonial cord, he did not get a gentle flush. He got a roaring column of water that, as one witness later wrote, ‘did smite the Holy Father upon his fundament and lift him clean from his seat, as if by the hand of a wrathful God.’ The torrent, having nowhere else to go, blasted back up the chute. It blew the privy door off its hinges and propelled the Sovereign Pontiff, sputtering and soaked, down the main hall on a wave of what can only be described as previously consecrated matter. He came to a halt halfway through the nave, looking, in the words of a shocked cardinal, ‘like a river god who had lost a very unfortunate argument with a sewer.’

Suger was immediately placed under interdict. The Pope, once he had been thoroughly dried and aired, banned all further hydraulic experimentation in monastic settings, declaring it ‘an unholy marriage of engineering and hubris.’ The last we heard, Abbot Suger was assigned to a remote clifftop monastery in Ireland, tasked with calculating the exact number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin. In the rain.