Bewitched and Bedeviled

A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Early English Possession

K. Uszkalo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137498229
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Narratives of possession have survived in early English medical and philosophical treatises. Using ideas derived from cognitive science, this study moves through the stages of possession and exorcism to describe how the social, religious, and medical were internalized to create the varied manifestations of demon possession in early modern England.

Chapter 1

Early Diagnostics

Possession is a corporeal proof of the importance and immediacy of the incorporeal. The experiences of the bewitched and bedeviled, in raw and visceral terms, argue for the inexorable interconnectivity of the physical, verbal, and social articulations of the divine and the demonic in early modern England. The demoniac moves beyond performing piety and possession, madness and rationality, the diabolical and the beatific. She makes manifest the demonic. She becomes her afflicted body, and it comes to move, and scream, and be filled with the objects, diseases, and familiar spirits that define the demoniac.

The demoniac physically, emotionally, and cognitively experiences what she feels is demonic in the texts that recount her tale. Elizabeth Orten, for instance, is said to be experiencing the pains of purgatory, in front of a live and engaged audience in 1582.¹ When he is prayed over during his torments in 1603, Thomas Harrison, the Boy of Northwich, “passions were strongest and his rage, and violence greatest, ready to fly in their faces, and to drown their voices by his yellings.”² He taunts the divines praying for him by suggesting that, “if they had come to cast out the evil spirit they should have come better provided.”³ Faith Corbet quickly learns that accusing a witch of theft would cost her more dearly than the price of her stolen gloves. Corbet, who allegedly suffered from four years of fits (1660–1664), cursed by Alice Huson, “did often Screech and Cry out vehemently, sometimes scratch and bite any she could lay hold on, and say, Ah, Alice, Old Witch, have I gotten thee?”⁴ Sometime in 1689 Mary Hill commits a trifecta of acts guaranteed to get her bewitched: she threatens an old woman to reclaim a ring, declines to help her with spinning, and refuses to give her an apple as a requested act of charity.⁵ The families, doctors, and ministers who saw the demoniac’s experience called it extraordinary; they held her down; they bolstered her up; they collected and counted the pins she vomited; they debated with her demons. Her experience was interiorized and exteriorized: intimate, social, and cultural. She became an amalgam.

In the light of modern knowledge demoniacs seem diseased. They are represented as vessels infected by spiritual, emotional, and physiological contaminants. In the most fanciful possession accounts, familiars, spirits, and the Devil himself entered and exited demoniacs like unwelcome body fluids: through their ears, nostrils, mouths, vaginas, and anuses.⁶ Bewitchments often included elaborate accounts of the supposed evacuation of objects: hair, sticks, pins (believed to be snuck into mouths and spit or regurgitated). Although women like Rachel Pinder allegedly began vomiting objects as proof of spiritual infiltration as early as 1574, those accounts that appear mid-to-late sixteenth century are the most fantastic. Margaret Muschamp, whose torments began in 1645, vomits fir branches, coal, pins, straw, wire, brick, lead, and stones.⁷ In 1656, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Mallory, supposedly vomits paper, towe, and wool stuck with pins, two feathers, and a stick.⁸ In 1658, two bewitched women from Yorkshire have wonderful fits and strange visitations before they vomit wool and parts of knives.⁹ Until the year 1662, the Lowestoft demoniacs (Elizabeth and Deborah Pacy, Anne Durrant, Susan Chandler) were noted to puke pins. In 1670, the anonymous daughter of a gentleman allegedly vomits searing hot coals, hay, hair, and rags.¹⁰ John Tonken vomits sixteen or seventeen pins, walnut shells, pieces of straw and rush, a piece of dry bramble, flat sticks, a very rusty pin, and a beading needle half an inch broad and an inch and a half long in 1686.¹¹ Mary Hill vomits over two hundred crooked pins, clusters of sixteen or seventeen pins, seven pieces of pewter, four pieces of brass, six pieces of lead, six pieces of latten, five pieces of iron, and twenty-two nails in 1689.¹² The anecdotal examples of alleged material infiltration stretched on and on (see figure 1.1). The demoniac was said to get into other people as well, to make them bruise, bleed, and live in terror, to control people’s homes and their minds. If demoniacs were vessels, they were also that which needed containment.

Figure 1.1 Woodcut illustration of a victim of bewitchment or possession vomiting objects. Image provided courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

The Devil was always present in a world where most people managed to avoid murderous rampages, falling into fits, and having visions of demons. The Devil was not, therefore, the first explanation for bizarre bearing. There were contemporary efforts to provide simple and logical explanations; we find possession when those explanations fail. In his skeptical dialogue on possessions, A Summarie Answere (1601), John Deacon’s character Orthodoxus argues that fits that look demonic, including the supernatural symptoms of “rending, foaming, crying aloud, leaving for dead, and so forth,” can arise from myriad “natural” maladies, including melancholy, mania, lunacy, frenzy, epilepsy, hysteria, and convulsions.¹³ Following Deacon’s lead, this chapter will explore a number of alternative diagnoses of possession behaviors derived from medical, theological, and philosophical treatises. By demonstrating how the wild symptoms of possessions were at times confused with or interchangeable with disorders like melancholia and hysteria, disorders that we read as likewise ‘real’ and culturally constructed, these examples begin the work of demonstrating how possession is not a spiritual phenomenon but bodily disorder. Although melancholia and hysteria were natural disorders (with a well-known and well-articulated symptomatology), the Devil could tempt faith and affect a person’s temperament. This allows for a simultaneity of natural and preternatural disease; it also allowed for the confusion we see in the interpretation of histrionics.

Hysteria, menstrual retention (retentio menstruis), and ova-retention (retentio seminae), manifest symptoms similar to those of bewitchment; consequently, as diagnoses they prove flexible. They likewise cast bewitchment-like afflictions as women’s diseases, and make the female reproductive system the cause of these frightening emotional and physical paroxysms. The treatment regimens for these disorders, as recorded by Amatus Lusitanus¹⁴ and Petrus Forrestus,¹⁵ were approved by the contemporary medical community, but are gendered and sexually invasive. Not all explanations and treatments for women’s rage are necessarily spiritual or sexual.¹⁶ Thomas Willis’ theory of spasmodic passions links the emotional and the physical. Although “internal explosions” is an obviously unsound theorem, his treatment of emotions as somotovisceral suggests the idea of embodied grounding, which will be explored in the next chapter. In the above examples, diagnosis came down to a process of elimination and to a collection of medical, philosophical, and personal opinions. Diagnoses are constructed in much the same way today.

The evolving diagnoses of possession behaviors offered in this chapter are illustrative examples of possession understood as the manifestation of illness in a disordered body. An awareness of the demoniac’s experience as it was grounded in early English symptomotologies thus prepares the reader to study the demoniac’s sickness through currently circulating medical models as they weave across this project. Acknowledging that possession is an embodied experience allows us to then look to possessions that begin and end in an otherwise healthy body to understand how the demoniac’s condition is best explained as a manifestation of rage.

* * *

The following section will provide a primer on the early English medical, philosophical, and neurobiological theories of humors, melancholy, hysteria, mental perturbations, and animal spirits, as they make up an embryonic form of early English neurobiology. These medical terms are represented in the early English pamphlets and as such appear throughout this project. Possession, as seen in early English texts, was always, necessarily, a cognitive and embodied phenomenon.

Neurobiology is concerned with the study of the whole of the nervous system and deals with how neurons are organized into circuits that process information and mediate behaviors. What constituted the “mind” in terms of early English accounts of possession might be up for debate, but a closer look reveals that there isn’t much of a difference from recent approaches. The mind is the seat of imagination and reason, influenced by passions and worries; it creates emotion and affect and can throw a body into focus or fits. In Shakespeare, for instance, Katherine’s anger is a means of self expression: “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart / or else my heart concealing it will break.”¹⁷ Coriolanus’ anger is a means of clarifying his thoughts or at least moving him forward: he cries, “I have a heart as little apt as yours / But yet a braine, that leades my use of Anger / To better vantage.” Most famously, however, anger without sufficient focus leads Hamlet’s troubled mind, because of a “continuance and weakness of the brain / Into this frenzy which now possesseth him. Which puzzles the brain, and doth confound the sense.”

From a medical point of view, the brain was represented in diplomat and scholar Thomas Elyot’s massively popular English language medical book The Castle of Health (1539)—a book widely considered to have publicized humoral theory—as one of four principle bodily members, served by sinews and powered by animal spirits (like neurons, they are responsible for electrical impulses and cognition), which are “ingendred in the brayne, and is sente by the senewes throughout the body, & maketh sence or feelyng” and create “Imagination in the forhe[a]d, Reason in the brayne, and Remembrance in the model [back of the head].”¹⁸ Philip Barrough, the first author to compose a significant medical treatise on neurological disorders in English, The Method of Phisicke (1583), a book that went through seven editions, diagnosed a number of conditions that one sees in bewitchments as natural.¹⁹ According to Barrough, epilepsy was caused by an affliction in the brain, or in the stomach, which “offended the brain.” “Frenzie” is the result of too much blood or choler that came to “occupy the brain.” Madness made one poised to attack, causing “readiness to bloodlust.” Melancholia made one hallucinate by causing “strange imaginations.”²⁰

By 1660, as the monarchy was restored, scientific publishing also reached new heights; Thomas Willis “improved on these accounts, and made the first attempt to attribute a function to the anatomy that he described.”²¹ In Cerebri Anatomy (1664; see figure 1.2), Willis theorized that intercostal nerves mediate between the heart, the brain, and the viscera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Grounding Rage Possession
• Chapter 1  Early Diagnostics
• Chapter 2  Contemporary Theories
• Chapter 3  Embodied Spirituality | Embodied Cognition
• Chapter 4  Performance | Contamination
• Chapter 5  Reconciliation | Dispossession | Exorcism
• Conclusion: Reproducing and Representing Demoniacs
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index