The Devil Within

Possession & Exorcism in the Christian West

Brian Levack

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780300195385
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

A fascinating, wide-ranging survey of the history of demon possession and exorcism through the ages.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the era of the Reformation, thousands of Europeans were thought to be possessed by demons. In response to their horrifying symptoms—violent convulsions, displays of preternatural strength, vomiting of foreign objects, displaying contempt for sacred objects, and others—exorcists were summoned to expel the evil spirits from victims' bodies. This compelling book focuses on possession and exorcism in the Reformation period, but also reaches back to the fifteenth century and forward to our own times.

Entire convents of nuns in French, Italian, and Spanish towns, thirty boys in an Amsterdam orphanage, a small group of young girls in Salem, Massachusetts—these are among the instances of demon possession in the United States and throughout Europe that Brian Levack closely examines, taking into account the diverse interpretations of generations of theologians, biblical scholars, pastors, physicians, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and historians. Challenging the commonly held belief that possession signals physical or mental illness, the author argues that demoniacs and exorcists—consciously or not—are following their various religious cultures, and their performances can only be understood in those contexts.

"Riveting [and] readable... must-reading for students of history, psychology and religion." — Publishers Weekly

"Levak, a distinguished historian of early modern witchcraft, now sets exorcism in a long historical perspective, providing the most comprehensive and scholarly overview of the theme yet published." —Peter Marshall, Times Literary Supplement

CHAPTER 1

Making Sense of Demonic Possession

DURING THE SIXTEENTH and seventeenth centuries the reading public in Europe was treated to a steady diet of stories describing the extraordinary behaviour of people who were said to have been possessed by demons. The unfortunate victims of these attacks, usually referred to as demoniacs, reportedly experienced violent convulsions, their limbs stiffened, and they demonstrated extraordinary physical strength. Their faces became grossly distorted, their eyes bulged, and their throats and stomachs swelled. They experienced temporary loss of hearing, sight, and speech, vomited huge quantities of pins, nails, and other materials, spoke in deep animal-sounding voices, suffered various eating disorders, and engaged in self-mutilation. They conversed in languages of which they had no previous knowledge, uttered blasphemies and profanities, violated conventional standards of morality, went into trances, foresaw the future, and disclosed secrets unknown to others. A few of them were reported to have levitated.

These accounts of demonic possession were not the only stories of the marvellous, the wondrous, and the preternatural that literate Europeans read about in the books, pamphlets, and broadsheets that proliferated in the first age of print. These same readers might also have read about a race of people in distant lands who had only one large foot; a child in Saxony born with bovine feet, four eyes, and the mouth and nose of a calf; the occurrence of no fewer than three eclipses of the Sun and two eclipses of the Moon in a single year; and a woman in England who gave birth to fifteen rabbits.¹ A six-volume anthology of such wonders, including a number of demonic possessions, was first published in 1560,² and forty years later the French Huguenot minister Simon Goulart published another anthology of such occurrences.³ Some of the ‘prodigies in nature’ described in these collections, like the afflictions of the possessed, were assigned religious, prophetic, or even apocalyptic significance.⁴ But whereas many of the signs and wonders described in these ‘prodigy books’ gradually lost their religious significance, or were reclassified as ‘curiosities’ that were studied from an empirical, scientific perspective, or dismissed as fictional, the afflictions of demoniacs remained a subject of considerable religious and medical interest and controversy well into the eighteenth century.⁵

One reason for the enduring popular and learned interest in demonic possession was that the symptoms displayed by demoniacs differed only in degree from those of some people who were not believed to be demonically possessed. To be sure, the manifestations of demonic possession appeared to be wondrous, but only a few of these, such as levitation, were universally regarded as lying outside the order of nature. The possibility that an unschooled person might speak in a foreign tongue, while highly unusual, was not impossible, and many early modern Europeans knew of people who went into trances and prophesied the future.

Possession narratives struck a responsive chord with a large segment of the literate population because of their immediacy, their human dimension, and their moral relevance. Readers of these accounts tended to take the reported experiences of people who lived in their own countries more seriously than the sighting of creatures in foreign lands or the descriptions of monsters in classical literature. Readers could, moreover, sympathize with the plight of demoniacs and may well have wondered whether a member of their own families might become the next victim of demonic fury. And while wonders in nature were often accorded prophetic significance, they were not likely to have had as great an impact on a reader's religious practice or moral conduct as an account of a demonic possession. Descriptions of demonically inflicted human suffering, whether intended to tempt the pious or punish the sinner, were instructive, admonitory, and frightening.⁶

It is impossible to determine with any degree of precision how many people in Europe were reputedly possessed by demons during the early modern period. Judicial records mention the names of demoniacs only when they accused witches of causing their afflictions or when they were prosecuted for fraud. Since demoniacs were considered to have been involuntary victims of demonic assault, they were not liable to criminal prosecution for what they did while under the Devil's influence. But references to possessions in the records of witchcraft prosecutions, published narratives of possessions and exorcisms, demonological treatises by theologians and inquisitors, and records of exorcisms performed at shrines and other locations support the claim that the number of possessions in the early modern period was exceptionally large and probably greater than at any time before or since.

The number of people reputedly possessed by demons in early modern Europe certainly reached into the thousands. Many of these possessions were collective or group phenomena in which the symptoms spread rapidly among people living in close-knit communities. In 1554 a group of eighty-two women in Rome, most of whom were Jews who had recently converted to Christianity, became possessed within a very brief period of time.⁷ In 1593 more than one hundred and fifty adults and children were reportedly possessed in the Silesian town of Friedeberg, and another forty demoniacs were afflicted in the town of Spandau a few years later. The demonologist Henri Boguet claimed that people in Savoy experienced fits and convulsions on a daily basis in the closing years of the sixteenth century.⁸ Demons allegedly possessed hundreds of nuns in some fifty different French, Italian, and Spanish convents, the most famous being that of the Ursuline nuns in the French city of Loudun between 1632 and 1638. Between 1627 and 1631 as many as eighty-five persons in the village of Mattaincourt in Lorraine experienced demonic seizures which resembled those that took place in convents.⁹ An Italian inquisitor claimed that the entire population of the Italian village of Belmonte north of Rome became possessed in the 1650s, while more than one hundred men, women, and children were afflicted in the same way in the German diocese of Paderborn a few years later.¹⁰ Even if some of these figures were exaggerated, the phenomenon approached, if it did not actually achieve, epidemic proportions.

The historical sources

Demonic possession is a methodological land mine for historians. The most basic challenge is determining the factual accuracy of contemporary accounts of specific possessions. There is of course no such thing as a completely objective report of a historical event, but the separation of fact from fiction is especially difficult when the report includes apparently unnatural or preternatural elements. How, for example, can we take as observed fact the possession narrative of the French demoniac Nicole Obry when it claims that a black beast, believed to be a demon in animal form, crept out of this woman's mouth when someone tried to administer her medicine? Or the report that a Franciscan monk at Querétaro, Mexico in the late seventeenth century pulled a large toad out of the mouth of the demoniac by the leg and threw it on her bed?¹¹ Should one be expected to believe that the head of the young Scottish demoniac Christian Shaw really pivoted 180 degrees or that the possessed woman Katherine Gualter vomited a live eel, eighteen inches long, followed by twenty-four pounds of various substances ‘of all colours’ twice a day for two weeks?¹² Did the nuns at Loudun really understand questions put to them in Turkish, Spanish, and Italian as well as in the language of a ‘savage’ Brazilian tribe? Reports of such occurrences lead one to question whether any details of these accounts can be trusted. Should they not be treated in the same way as the observation of St Jerome when he reported that the Roman pilgrim Paula, while visiting the tombs of prophets in the Holy Land, saw female demoniacs hanging upside down in mid-air without their skirts falling down over their heads?¹³

The veracity of such reports can be questioned on a number of possible grounds. In some cases authors of possession narratives may have deliberately misrepresented the actual course of events to boost sales, much in the manner of the less reputable tabloid newspapers today. Alternatively the authors could have exaggerated the severity of the demoniacs’ afflictions or even invented some of the details of the case to heighten fear of the demonic, demonstrate the sanctity and power of the exorcist, or prove that only his Church had the power to cast out demons. The author of a possession narrative written in 1573 produced a second edition of the episode more than forty years later in which he incorporated a symptom of a completely different possession that had occurred in the intervening period.¹⁴ During the Reformation era reports of possessions and exorcisms were often designed to win converts to either Catholicism or a particular Protestant denomination, making the veracity of all such accounts of possession fundamentally suspect.¹⁵ The biblical reports of Christ's expulsion of unclean spirits from demoniacs during his public ministry provide an early example of such misrepresentation for confessional purposes. Although the historical Jesus probably did perform many exorcisms, the specific incidents reported in the Gospels should not be considered part of the historical record. The purpose of these stories was not to report what actually happened but to illustrate Christ's power and thus win converts to Christianity.

Even if the author of the narrative intended to present an accurate account of a possession, he might have unconsciously distorted what really happened. In many instances the author did not witness the actual possession but relied on the accounts given by others, which in turn might well have come to them second- or third-hand. Even if the author had been an eyewitness to the possession, his testimony was suspect. We know from criminal trials today that testimony by eyewitnesses can be just as unreliable as that given in a confession. In the case of possessions, observers shocked by the immoral behaviour of demoniacs or fascinated by their strength or disgusted by their regurgitations could easily have exaggerated the extent of their affliction or the level of their deviance. Clerical writers who were preoccupied with the presence of demonic spirits in the world could just as easily have exaggerated the physical or moral effects of demons on the behaviour of parishioners under their pastoral care.

When the demoniac was reported to have spoken in these possessions, there is good reason to think that the words of the possessed were those of the person who had written the account, not a transcript of what the demoniac had actually said.¹⁶ The prayer that the English demoniac Mary Glover reportedly delivered during her possession in 1602, for example, was almost certainly written by John Swan, a Puritan minister who witnessed the efforts to end Mary's torments and wrote a pamphlet to record her spiritual struggles. It is highly unlikely that Mary ever said the prayer.¹⁷ When a possessed twelve-year-old Silesian girl discussed theologically learned issues with Tobias Seiler, the author of this young girl's possession narrative, we can safely assume that Seiler, the educated pastor and school superintendent in the girl's parish, composed the entire discourse.¹⁸

The cultural assumptions that authors of narratives made regarding the Devil could easily lead them to exaggerate the physical symptoms of the demoniac.¹⁹ When for example the author of a possession narrative reported that witnesses smelled a loathsome odour during a possession, such as the members of the congregation that had observed the convulsions of Mistress Kingesfielde in London in 1564, it is impossible to tell whether they actually smelled the offensive odour or whether they thought they did because they had been told that there were terrible smells associated with the Devil and Hell.²⁰

Yet even if we accept the likelihood that all narratives of possession have been filtered through the lenses of observers who were predisposed to see and hear certain things, we cannot dismiss such reports as entirely fictional. Unlike confessions of witches, which could easily have been contaminated by the inducement of testimony under torture, accounts of demonic possession represented efforts to describe unusual human behaviour. Authors may have exaggerated the activities they had witnessed or read about, but they had little reason to invent the entire narrative. We have good reason to be sceptical of accounts of monsters sighted in the New World in the same way that we have good reason to be sceptical of the sightings of the Loch Ness monster today, but accounts of possessions that were witnessed by large numbers of people, sometimes in public venues, must be granted at least a measure of credibility, especially when observers who disagreed on the causes of the demoniacs’ behaviour did not deny that they had witnessed it.

The symptoms of early modern possession

What led early modern Christians to claim that one or more demons had entered the body of a person, known as the demoniac or energumen, and temporarily gained control of that person's physical movements, mental faculties, and speech? These ‘signs’ of possession varied significantly: there was no single model of demonic possession in early modern Europe. Rather there was a large repertory of signs that could appear in different combinations. The number of symptoms varied from case to case, but it was very rare for a person who manifested only one or two of these signs to have been diagnosed as a demoniac.

The signs of possession can be divided into those that were physiological, indicating that the afflicted person had experienced an alteration of anatomy or bodily functions, and those that were verbal or behavioural, in that they involved changes in speech, personality, or mora...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Plates
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Making Sense of Demonic Possession
• 2 Possession and Exorcism in Christian Antiquity
• 3 Possession in Christian Demonology
• 4 Expelling the Demon
• 5 Demonic Possession and Illness
• 6 The Performance of the Possessed
• 7 The Demoniac in Society
• 8 The Demoniac and the Witch
• 9 Possession in the Age of Reason
• 10 Possession: Past and Present
• 11 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index