Inquisition

  Mexico 1691–1717

  AT LAST, BY 1717 the conflicts that had raged in Europe over the succession to the Spanish throne were over. The Bourbon Philip V had been acknowledged as king although not without some bitterness even within Spain, where many people feared the consequences of a French dynasty for Spanish society. Was France not the gateway to northern Europe and all manner of heresies? In the 18th century the French would embrace free thinking, and France would become one of the economic power houses of the Atlantic world and alien to the enclosed intellectual and cultural worlds of Iberia. Was this not, indeed, the beginning of the end for the neurotic society?

  In the colonies the end of the War of the Spanish Succession ought to have brought a measure of peace. Privateers such as William Dampier and Alexander Selkirk – model for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – were no longer able to attack Spanish provinces as enemy territory.53 Great settlements such as Mexico City, with their aristocrats, their riches hauled from the mines and the whitewashed walls of their houses, ought to have been secure. Yet in spite of the lancing of external boils, the inner demons which increasingly afflicted the societies of the Iberian world were not so easy to deal with.

  Thus in the convent of Jesus María in Mexico City, strange events began to beset Sister Margarita de San José in 1717. Sister Margarita found herself constantly beset by temptations to commit all sorts of sacrilegious acts. She wanted to remove her rosary. She longed to scourge crucifixes. She was suddenly overcome by the desire to extract the host from her mouth, stab it through the middle and then fry it in oil. Possessed by fury and a sort of inflamed rage, she would run out of sung mass during the creed. Sometimes she would even lose her temper with the priests officiating at holy ceremonies, and launch vleys of vituperative insults at them.54

  To Sister Margarita and those who brought her case to the attention of the inquisitors, it was clear that she was possessed by the devil. Indeed, Sister Margarita confessed as much. The devil tempted her continuously to offend God, and had led her to write a contract of slavery to him. She had done this, borne away by rapture; the contract had been signed by Margarita, in her own hand, as ‘the slave of Satan’. Now she found that whenever she tried to contemplate the divine mysteries and the works of Jesus Christ she was incapable of thought. And when she was advised to frequent the company of nuns of unimpeachable sanctity, she burst into maniacal floods of laughter.

  As the historian Fernando Cervantes recognized, this is a clear example of someone suffering from neurotic delusion. The furious subconscious hatred of her religion which coursed in her breast was attributed by her to the devil, and then everything was permitted. As Freud himself noted, ‘neuroses of . . . early times emerge in demonological trappings’.55

  It is easy to imagine what had led Sister Margarita to this state: forced by her parents into the convent, perhaps, forced to repress her desires, surrounded by symbols and teachings which told her that her desires were sinful and yet unable to resist the feeling that they held a truth which was equally as valid as the ideology which had corralled her into the ritual cycle of prayer, fasting and lamentation. How wretched this poor woman must have been; how blessed by her surrender to the promptings of the devil, which at least allowed her feelings some form of expression.

  This account is not pure hypothesis. In Iberian societies of the time girls chosen by their parents to be nuns were dressed in nuns’ clothing when small.56 Those passed over by men were asked if they were not soon planning to enter a convent for a life of contemplation.57 In such circumstances it should not be a surprise that repression so often led to neurosis.

  The way in which extreme religious orthodoxy – such as that encouraged by the Inquisition in Iberian societies – led directly to neuroses had already been revealed in a town to the north of Mexico City. In 1691 the case had come before the Inquisition of the demoniacs of Querétaro. These demoniacs had been uncovered by a group of austere Franciscan missionaries after the friars had embarked on an unusual form of preaching in the town.58

  The Franciscans of the Propaganda Fide movement had arrived in Querétaro in 1683 where they had set up a demanding routine of prayer and contemplation which involved mass sleep-deprivation. As soon as the hours of the choir finished at two thirty in the morning they would busy themselves by walking through the town with crosses, ropes and crowns of thorns. They forced their lay followers to slap their faces, drag them with ropes and trample on them. Soon their preaching had achieved a ‘universal reformation of customs’: games, feasts and parties stopped, as did dances and comedies. Some women gave up their dresses for coarse Franciscan habits and took to leaving the family home without a word and attending three-hour-long sermons, where they proceeded to cry almost continually – not, one suspects, with happiness.

  By December 1691 the asceticism of the missionaries was beginning to have startling effects. After each evening’s preaching a new demoniac emerged from the Franciscan mission. One woman, Francisca Mejía, was possessed by the devil, who spoke through her mouth, left bite-marks on her body and ripped her Franciscan habit to pieces. She herself was completely dumb and would only open her mouth if saintly relics were applied to it; whenever this occurred she suffered violent convulsions and tormenting pains elsewhere in her body. When the devil spoke through her he said that he had been placed in her by a group of four witches; on being exorcised, Francisca expelled four avocado stones, about half a pound of pebbles from a river which looked like small nuts, a small toad and a snake which slunk out of her ear.

  Another of those possessed was Juana de los Reyes. The strangest objects emerged from her body, especially from her private parts; these included an iron spindle, a bag containing twenty pins, and also a bundle of black wool from her lungs. By 1 January 1692, 400 devils were said to inhabit Juana’s body, although 200 were good enough to announce that they would be leaving immediately. She swelled and turned blue, and the Franciscans said the last rites; the next morning, miraculously, she gave birth to a baby, although as her Franciscan spiritual guide the friar Pablo de Sarmiento explained, devils were well able to obtain human semen and transfer it.

  The reality of such cases of exorcism, of confessions turning into sexual games, of inflamed manifestations of feeling, is the mass repression, coercion and abuse of women by men. The only cases where gender roles were reversed centred on beatas, and the Inquisition did its utmost to clamp down on these people.

  The spectacle of a gang of repressed men preying on a group of repressed women, sexually exploiting them and catalyzing the expression of their neuroses is not an edifying one. Nevertheless, this was precisely what happened in Querétaro. Some members of other religious orders recognized the nature of the phenomenon. One Carmelite wrote that ‘the number of the possessed [has] grown so large that it [surpasses] all possible credulity’ and that women roamed the streets of the town with mad, vacant expressions on their face. As we have seen, the Inquisition was less credulous than many members of the society as far as witchcraft and devil possession was concerned, and the case was rejected out of hand by the inquisitors of Mexico City.

  EVENTS LIKE THE EXORCISM of Juana de los Reyes in Querétaro remain a reality in the modern world. Exorcisms are far from uncommon, and we should not pretend that they themselves are proof of neuroses. There are many who devoutly believe that they deal with some kind of demonic possession. And yet, where religious manifestations clearly overlie repressed sexual urges expressed by uncontrollable bursts of energy and extraordinary acts of sexual catharsis, most reasonable people would agree that some form of neurosis is at work.

  Particular to the world presided over by the Inquisition was that exorcism was often related to sexual exploitation of the possessed woman – almost always it was a woman who was exorcized. Reading through the records, it becomes clear that while this was a mental form of possession, it was increasingly exorcized by a possession that was entirely physical.

  This was something which had indeed long b
een obvious in Mexico. Over one hundred years before the events in Querétaro, the Dominican Francisco de la Cruz was arrested in Mexico City in January 1572. He was said to have had disturbing visions. After several sessions of interrogation Cruz confessed that he had had an affair with a certain Leonor de Valenzuela, and that in December 1570 he had discovered that she was pregnant.59 Cruz had returned to his monastery in a state of deep agitation at the news and had begun to pray. Soon, he had been introduced to one Catalina Carmeño, whose daughter María Pizarro claimed to have visions. María Pizarro carried on absurd conversations with angels and saints, and on being introduced to Cruz informed him through an angel that his child with Leonor de Valenzuela, to be called Miguelico, would be a saint.

  With his conscience thus salved, Cruz went to tell Valenzuela that a saintly child was to be born and that he would be abandoned at her door. Not surprisingly, given his relief, Cruz was highly taken with Pizarro’s angel. The angel had even told him that he would not commit any further mortal sins (father any further children). Yet Cruz found temptation a difficult cross to bear. Valenzuela was one of five sisters, and finding himself with her and some of her siblings he kissed them repeatedly and almost, as he put it, fell into lasciviousness. Going to ask forgiveness from the angel (Pizarro), he was told by the voice of God (Pizarro) that the angel was very cross and, as Pizarro put it, was quite right to be so.60

  Perhaps it is not too cynical to suggest that it was Pizarro herself who was cross at Cruz, and secretly longed for him. Certainly, her impressive visions of angels now began to attract the attention of other members of Mexico’s religious communities. She described how the angel appeared to her in the shape of a beardless man, with long hair falling below his ears. She described how she spoke to the saints, and they told her to do good works, but then she confessed that she did in fact have a pact with the devil.61

  Such possession clearly needed exorcism. Two friars began to sleep in her room to protect her from the devil. The Jesuit Luis López tried to exorcize her, but the devil immediately possessed her and she had visions of terrible black slaves and felt as if her tongue was being tied down with iron bolts. The devil made insatiable demands for jewels and velvet and taffeta and pearls and necklaces, which she conveyed to her exorcists López and the Dominican Alonso Gasco.62 The devil also had sexual intercourse with her several times, appearing in the shape of a gentleman and promising to marry her.

  Whatever the truth of her relationship with the devil, she certainly had sex with her exorcist López. After several nights sleeping in the same room as her, kissing and embracing her in an attempt to exorcize the devil, López had extinguished the light and forced her to share his bed, where he had taken her virginity and caused her to bleed copiously.63 Thereafter, Pizarro noted a curious correlation. Whenever her exorcist Luis López slept with her, so did the devil. Then, another of the friars exorcizing her, Jerónimo Ruiz de Portillo, adopted the same technique as López, and slept with her several times.64

  The Inquisition held that this was all evidence of a pact with the devil, and María was reconciled in a sentence of 1 June 1573; by now seriously ill and increasingly insane, she died that December, aged just twenty-three. Yet the real cause of her illness was at hand, as one intelligent friar, Pedro de Toro, realized. He noted that ‘the origin of the illness with demons that overcame doña Maria . . . was that her mother wanted to enter her into a convent to be a nun, partly because she thought that she would never be able to run a house and serve a husband and partly because this was a way of getting her to forego her inheritance of a sum that had been left to her by her aunt’.65

  All the origins of neurosis were there: the need to seek attention, the despair of facing a lifetime of repression. The exorcists satisfied María’s inner need for sexual expression as they did their own, but her neurosis led inexorably to her death. One thinks of the good sense shown by the friar who understood the causes of her illness, and realizes that religion did not in itself lead to darkness and excess; people’s personalities allowed them to use religion in this way.

  Exorcisms became common in Iberian societies from around the middle of the 16th century. While in the first half of the 16th century, those claiming visions were suspected of seeking material gain or some sort of fame, such common-sense scepticism evaporated thereafter.66 This change coincided precisely with the rise of the Inquisition as guardian of the moral condition of Spain; from repression came fantasy and a sexual style of exorcism.

  By the 1620s and 1630s public exorcisms in churches were ordinary occurrences. Possession became an almost daily phenomenon and many of those requiring exorcism were none other than the beatas.67 The sort of exorcism which went on is revealed by a case from Alicante of the 1630s, where the beata Francisca Ruiz was exorcised by her spiritual guide, the canon of Alicante cathedral Lorenzo Escorcia. A witness who visited the house described what went on during the exorcisms:

  [She] found Francisca Ruiz on the floor with her mouth open and Lorenzo Escorcia hitting her and saying: ‘You are present, obey me, get out of there’. And Francisca Ruiz was still stretched out and unable to speak . . . and the said Lorenzo Escorcia put his arm under the skirts of the beata, putting in his hand and reaching so that the arm was covered beyond the elbow, between her shirt and her flesh, and [the witness] did not see what he did, although it seemed to her that he must have reached her natural vessel [vagina] . . . and then the canon took a slipper from his sister Lelia, and beat her repeatedly on her buttocks, above her dress, and then beat her on her whole body saying ‘Obey me, come out of there’. But nothing [else] happened.68

  Ruiz was not the only person to be exorcised by the sadist Escorcia. In the Augustinian convent of Alicante three nuns said to be possessed suffered his exorcisms; one of their colleagues noted how the devils only seemed to come to the convent when Escorcia himself arrived.69 Far from exorcizing devils, the exorcist, through his excitation of neurotic delusions, merely turned them from a fantasy into a reality. But then this should not surprise us, for this was merely another instance of the way in which, throughout its history, the Inquisition had invented enemies and heretics just in order to exorcize them.

  PERHAPS IT IS UNFAIR to blame the Inquisition for the sorts of neurotic symptom observed in this chapter. One can prove anything by pointing to extreme examples and every society has its neurotics; it is only necessary to watch one of today’s reality TV shows to confirm the truth of that. Perhaps, even, in treating the symptoms of the neurosis, the terrible fits, convulsions and delusions, did not the exorcists actually deal with their root cause – sexual repression – using their own form of sexual predation? Were not the priests who led the alumhrados in Extremadura in the 1570s right when they said, ‘these [sexual] contacts are not sinful, that they do them to make them happy, to console them and to help them to get rid of these feelings . . .’?70 And of course one ought to bear in mind that the Inquisition did not sanction any of these goings-on.

  Instead of concentrating on extreme symptoms, we should try to picture life in the villages, towns and cities of the 17th century. As Spain fell into the chaos of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701, Portugal was on the verge of an economic boom that would follow the discovery of gold in the Minas Gerais of Brazil. Lisbon was full of English merchants, who described life in the Portuguese capital with a mixture of admiration and bafflement.

  The houses of the city were plastered on the outside and the doors and windows made of a coarse marble; inside, the floors were of brick or tile, and each window had a balcony. The roads were paved as far as three leagues outside the city, and every league or so there would be a cistern with good water for pack animals.71 This physical reality was, however, pervaded by an atmosphere of religious zeal. One merchant wrote in 1701: The religious persons of all sorts are commonly reckoned one-third, and some say three-fifths of the whole. The clergy are thought to be posest [sic, possessed] of one-third of the land . . . If one strikes a priest one is liab
le to have ones hand cut off.’72 There were, he said, at least 6,000 mendicant friars in Lisbon, and they refused to eat mere scraps but wandered the streets begging in a loud singing tone, going from house to house with a linen bag thrown over their shoulders.73 Mass was said in the churches every day from six in the morning until noon – the priests had to have something to do – and people would commonly say their prayers in the middle of a conversation.74 At dusk bells rang from the churches; people were expected to stop what they were doing in the street to say the Ave Maria, and even street performers and carriages stopped in the street for this purpose.75 But at least there was now an agreement between Portugal and England not to try English Protestants under the Inquisition.

  Clearly, this was a society in which almost every action was determined by religion. The same was true in Spain, where by the 18th century great care was taken to stop even a crumb from the host becoming stuck in the communicant’s teeth; sick people were given a glass of water after taking communion and asked, ‘Has the Majesty gone down?’76 When the bells were rung in the evening, as in Portugal, actors and spectators at theatrical performances fell to the ground crying, ‘God! God!’ and parties were abruptly brought to a halt in people’s homes.77 If a priest passed bearing the eucharist, he would be in a chair carried by porters, and everyone had to stop and fall to their knees, beating their breast until he had passed; if anyone did not, there was the danger that the priest would call them a heretic.78