The Devils of Loudun

1

The following extracts are taken from H. C. Lea’s summary of conditions in the French Church after the Council of Trent. In the earlier part of our period “the influence of the Tridentine canons had been unsatisfactory. In a royal council held in 1560… Charles de Marillac, Bishop of Vienne, declared that ecclesiastical discipline was almost obsolete, and that no previous time had seen scandals so frequent, or the life of the clergy so reprehensible…. The French prelates, like the Germans, were in the habit of collecting the ‘cullagium’ from all their priests, and informing those who did not keep concubines that they might do so if they liked, but must pay the licence-money whether or no.” “It is evident from all this that the standard of ecclesiastical morals had not been raised by the efforts of the Tridentine fathers, and yet a study of the records of church discipline shows that with the increasing decency and refinement of society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the open and cynical manifestations of licence among the clergy became gradually rarer.” The avoidance of scandal became a matter of paramount importance. If concubines were kept, they were kept “under the guise of sisters and nieces.” By a code of regulations issued in 1668 it was decreed that friars of the Order of Minims should not be excommunicated if, “when about to yield to the temptations of the flesh, or to commit theft, they prudently laid aside the monastic habit.” (Henry C. Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy, Chapter xxix, “The Post-Tridentine Church.”)

All this time spasmodic efforts were being made to enforce respectability. In 1624, for example, the Reverend René Sophier was found guilty of committing adultery in a church with the wife of a magistrate. The Lieutenant Criminel of le Mans condemned him to the gallows. The case was appealed to the Parlement of Paris, which sentenced him, instead, to be burnt alive.

2

When we are in the temple, kneeling, we shall act the part of the devout, in the manner of those who, to praise God, humbly bow themselves in the most secret corner of the Church. But when we are in bed, intertwined, we shall act the part of wantons, in the manner of those lovers who, free and frolicsome, practise a hundred fondling arts.

3

Thus every race on earth of men and beasts, the creatures of the sea, the herds, the birds of brilliant hue, are swept with fiery passions; love is the same for all.

4

In mutual bond the palm trees sway, the poplars sigh in harmony together, together sigh the plane trees, the alder whispers to the other alder.

5

An old man’s soldiering is foulness, and foulness an old man’s love.

6

How broad, how fine a flank, what a youthful thigh!

7

“From the proceedings of the Huguenot synod of Poitiers in 1560, it is evident that priests not infrequently secretly married their concubines, and, when the woman was a Calvinist, her equivocal position became a matter of grave consideration with her Church.” (Henry C. Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy. From Chapter xxix, “The Post-Tridentine Church.”)

8

The legal truth is great, and shall prevail.

9

Tallemant des Raux, Historiettes (Paris, 1854), Vol. II, p. 337.

10

Ibid., Vol. I, p. 189.

11

See Appendix, p. 361.

12

“The consolations and pleasures of prayer,” Surin writes in one of his letters, “go hand in hand with bodily mortification.” Unpunished bodies, we read elsewhere, “are hardly capable of receiving the visits of angels. To be loved and caressed by God, one must either suffer much inwardly, or else maltreat one’s body.”

13

“The Jesuits have tried to combine God and the world, and have gained only the contempt of both.” (Pascal.)

14

See Le Gouvello. Armelle Nicolas (1913): H. Brémond, Historie Littéraire du Sentiment Religieux en France (Paris, 1916).

15

See J. P. F. Deleuze, Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism. Translated by T. C. Hartshorn (New York, 1890).

16

See William James, Varieties of Religious Experience.

17

“I exorcize thee, most unclean spirit, every onslaught of the Adversary, every spectre, every legion, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ; be thou uprooted and put to flight from this creature of God.”

18

“I conjure thee, ancient serpent, by the Judge of the living and the dead, by thy maker, by the maker of the world, by him who has the power to cast thee into gehenna, that from this servant of God, who hastens back to the bosom of the Church, thou with the fears and afflictions of thy fury speedily depart.”

19

Barré was not the inventor of this adjunct to exorcism. Tallemant records that a French nobleman, M. de Fervaque, had used it successfully on a possessed nun of his acquaintance. Today, in South Africa, there are Negro sects which practise baptism by colonic lavage.

20

In the medical practice of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the clyster was employed as freely and frequently as is the hypodermic syringe today. “Clysters,” writes Robert Burton, “are in good request. Trincavellius esteems of them in the first place, and Hercules of Saxonia is a greater approver of them. I have found (saith he) by experience that many hypochondriacal melancholy men have been cured by the sole use of clysters. For without question,” Burton adds in another passage, “a clyster, opportunely used, cannot choose in this, as in most other maladies, but to do very much good.” From earliest infancy all members of the classes that could afford to call in the physician or the apothecary were familiar with the giant syringe and the suppository—with copious rectal doses of “Castilian soap, honey boiled to a consistence or, stronger, of Scammony, Hellebore, etc.” It is, therefore, not surprising to find that, when he describes his childish diversions with the petites demoiselles who used to come and play with his sisters, Jean-Jacques Bouchard (the Prioress’s exact contemporary) speaks, as of a thing known to everyone, of the petits bastons, with which small boys and girls were in the habit of pretending to give one another clysters. But the child is father of the man and mother of the woman, and for generations the apothecary’s monstrous syringe continued to haunt the sexual imagination, not merely of the small fry, but also of their elders. More than a hundred and fifty years after M. Barré’s exploit, the heroes and heroines of the Marquis de Sade, in their laborious efforts to extend the range of sexual enjoyment, were making frequent use of the exorcist’s secret weapon. A generation earlier than the Marquis, François Boucher had produced, in L’Attente du Clystère, the most terrific pin-up girl of the century, perhaps of all time. From the savagely obscene and the gracefully pornographic there is an easy modulation to Rabelaisian fun and the smoking-room joke. One remembers the Old Woman in Candide with her little witticisms about cannulas and nous autres femmes. One thinks of the amorous Sganarelle, in Le Médecin malgré Lui, tenderly begging Jacqueline for leave to give her, not a kiss, but un petit clystère dulcifiant. M. Barré’s, with its quart of holy water, was a petit clystère sanctifiant. But, sanctifying or dulcifying, the thing remained what it was intrinsically and what, by convention and at that particular moment of history, it had become—an all but erotic experience, an outrage to modesty, and a symbol enriched by a whole gamut of pornographic overtones and harmonics, which had entered into the folkways and become a part of the circumambient culture.

21

In the letter which he wrote after a visit to Loudun in 1635, Thomas Killigrew describes the treatment meted out to that ravishing Sister Agnes, whose good looks and startlingly immodest behaviour had earned her, among the habitués of the exorcism, the affectionate nickname of le beau petit diable. “She was very young and handsome, of a more tender look and slender shape than any of the rest…. The loveliness of her face was clothed in a sad sable look which, upon my coming into the chapel, she hid, but presently unveiled again.” (Killigrew was only twenty at the time, and uncommonly handsome.) “And though she stood now, bound like a slave in the friar’s hand, you might see through all her misfortunes, in her black eyes, the unruined arches of many triumphs.” Like a slave in the friar’s hand—the words are painfully apt. A little later, as Killigrew records, the wretched girl was a slave under the friar’s feet. For after having thrown her into convulsions and made her roll on the floor, the good father triumphantly stood on his recumbent victim. “I confess it was so sad a sight,” says Killigrew, “I had no power to see the miracle wrought of her recovery, but went from thence to the inn.”

22

“…Urbain…. Tell his rank…. Priest…. Of what church?… Saint Peter’s.”

23

Kramer and Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, translated by the Rev. Montague Summers (London, 1948), pp. 5–6.

24

Op. cit., p. 122.

25

So great the evil religion has aroused.

26

Kramer and Sprenger, op. cit., p. 228.

27

Op. cit., p. 147.

28

Op. cit., p. 134.

29

Op. cit., p. 137.

30

George Gifford, A Discourse of the Subtill Practices of Devils by Witches, as quoted in W. Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England, p. 71.

31

Notestein, op. cit., p. 91.

32

Kramer and Sprenger, op. cit., p. 56.

33

See Maud Oakes, The Two Crosses of Todos Santos (New York, 1951).

34

Gabriel Legué, Documents pour servir à l’Histoire Médicale des Possédées de Loudun (Paris, 1874).

35

Full and accurate accounts of psychiatric treatment and its results exist from the latter part of the eighteenth century onwards. A well-known psychologist, who has studied these documents, tells me that they all seem to point to one significant conclusion: namely, that in mental disorders the proportion of cures has remained, for nearly two hundred years, remarkably constant, whatever the nature of the psychiatric methods employed. The percentage of cures claimed by modern psycho-analysts is no higher than the percentage of cures claimed by the alienists of 1800. Did the alienists of 1600 do as well as their successors of two and three centuries later? No certain answer can be given; but I would guess that they did not. In the seventeenth century the mentally sick were treated with a consistent inhumanity, which must often have aggravated the disease. We shall have occasion, in a later chapter, to return to this topic.

36

Paracelsus, Selected Writings (New York, 1951), p. 318.

37

T. K. Oesterreich, Les Possédés. Translated by René Sudre (Paris, 1927).

38

Consult in this context Sir Charles Sherrington’s Gifford Lectures, published in 1941 under the title of Man on His Nature.

39

In Satan, a volume of the Études Carmélitaines (Paris, 1948).

40

See L. Sinistrari, Demoniality (Paris, 1879).

41

ESP=extra-sensory perception; PK=psycho-kinesis.

42

‘Whom do you worship?’ Answer: ‘Jesus Christ.’

43

‘Who is it whom you worship?’ She answered, ‘Jesu Christe’ (instead of Jesum Christum).

44

‘I worship thee, Jesus Christ.’

45

See Jan Ehrenwald, M.D., Telepathy and Medical Psychology (New York, 1948).

46

When Sister Claire was ordered by the exorcist (as a test for ESP) to obey an order, secretly whispered by one of the spectators to another, she went into convulsions and rolled on the floor “relevant jupes et chemises, montrant ses parties les plus secrétes, sans honte, et se servant de mots lascifs. Ses gestes devinrent si grossiers que les témoins se cachaient la figure. Elle répétait, en s’… des mains, Venez donc, foutez-moi.” On another occasion this same Claire de Sazilly “se trouva si fort tentée de coucher avec son grand ami, qu’elle disait étre Grandier, qu’un jour s’étant approchée pour recevoir la Sainte Communion, elle se leva soudain et monta dans sa chambre, où, ayant été suivie par quelqu’une des Sœurs, elle fut vue avec un Crucifix dans la main, dont elle se preparait… L’honnêteté (adds Aubin) ne permet pas d’écrire les ordures de cet endroit.”

47

See Ischlondsky, Brain and Behaviour (London, 1949).

48

In a letter dated 26th January 1923, Dom John Chapman writes as follows: “In the 17th-18th centuries most pious souls seem to have gone through a period in which they felt sure that God had reprobated them…. This doesn’t seem to happen nowadays. But the corresponding trial of our contemporaries seems to be the feeling of not having any faith; not temptation against any particular article (usually), but a mere feeling that religion is not true…. The only remedy is to despise the whole thing and pay no attention to it except (of course) to assure our Lord that one is ready to suffer from it as long as He wishes, which seems an absurd paradox to say to a Person one doesn’t believe in.”

49

Behold the cross of the Lord, let its enemies take flight; the lion of the tribe of Juda has conquered, the root of David. I exorcize thee, creature of wood, in the name of God the Father Almighty, and in the name of Jesus Christ his Son our Lord, and in the power of the Holy Ghost….”

50

“These extraordinary sufferings, such as possession and obsession, are, like revelations, subject to ILLUSION; it is clear that we must never desire them; we must merely accept them, in spite of ourselves, as it were. If we desire to suffer, we have means of doing so by mortifying our pride and sensuality. In this way we avoid plunging into hazards, which we are powerless to control, and of which we do not know the issue. But our imagination delights in the marvellous; it requires those romantic virtues that take the public eye….

“And further; trials such as possession and obsession are a serious embarrassment, not only to the person involved, but to directors and the whole community where he or she resides. Charity forbids us to desire this kind of suffering.” (A. Poulain, S.J.—The Graces of Interior Prayer. English edition, p. 436.)

51

These outward manifestations of diabolic infestation did not appear until Good Friday, 6th April. From 19th January until that date, the symptoms of obsession had been purely psychological.

52

Printed for the first (and apparently the last) time in the European Magazine, February 1803.

53

“Superstition—Concupiscence,” says Pascal. And again: “A natural vice, like incredulity, and no less pernicious—superstition.”

54

For the only complete and authentic text of the autobiographica sections of this work, consult Vol. II of Lettres Spirituelles du P. Jean-Joseph Surin, edited by Michel and Cavalléra (Toulouse, 1928).

55

Surin’s condition, it is interesting to remark, is described and specifically prescribed for on p. 215 of Dr. Léon Vannier’s authoritative work, La Pratique de l’Homéopathie (Paris, 1950): “The Subject who is amenable to Actaea Racemosa has the impression that ‘his head is surrounded by a thick cloud.’ He sees badly, hears badly; around him and within him ‘everything is confused.’ The patient ‘is afraid of going mad.’ Oddly enough, if pains appear in any part of the organism (facial or uterine neuralgias, intercostal pains, or pains in the joints), he or she at once feels better. ‘When the patient is in pain, the mental state improves.’”

56

J. D. Unwin, Sex and Culture (London, 1934).