by Green, Toby
These do not come across as societies where joy and spontaneity were prized or even possible but rather as places where everything was subordinated to the proclaimed requirements of religious orthodoxy. The Inquisition, as the champion of this orthodoxy, had been the main enforcer of this code and, as we have seen in this chapter, its move into moral censure in the late 16th century coincided with the emergence of the first symptoms of more widespread neurosis across society. Thus, while the Inquisition was not in itself the direct instigator of the sexual frolics of beatas and alumbradas and indeed prosecuted them, it was the moral force behind the social atmosphere which created them.
All this was a far cry from the situation in Portugal and Spain before the Inquisition. The Silesian noble Nicolaus von Popplau, visiting Lisbon in 1485, described how the Portuguese were ‘ardent in love’, how the women dressed so that you could see half of their bosoms and how they were ‘mad with sensuality, like the men, ready for anything’.79 The Italian traveller Federico Badoardo described in 1557, just as the Inquisition was beginning to censure moral behaviour, how the Spaniards ‘eat and drink with excess, and this combined with the heat of the climate means that they give themselves enthusiastically to the pleasures of love, and that the women are open to all types of vice’.80
It would appear then that there had been not a little sexual freedom in the late Middle Ages.81 Brothels had been widespread, opening up rapidly during the colonization of the Canaries in the early 16th century, for instance.82 At the start of the 16th century nudity was not taboo, and people were happy to dress and wash themselves in front of others.83 But all brothels would be closed by royal decree in Spain in 162384 and, as we have seen, by the beginning of the 18th century a different scale of values had come to dominate life in Portugal and Spain.
How then are we to explain these extraordinarily repressed societies? Where misplaced sexual energy melted candles. Where the level of delusion was such that women could believe themselves to have a pact with the devil, since the devil always appeared in the same form, as a student who wanted to have sex.85 Where priests and beatas believed that their sexual longings were divine blessings. Where violence, sadism and masochism were integral to the exorcism of the possessed. The measure of emotional violence and self-mutilation is difficult to take, but when we consider that a typical act of penitence in the late 17th century was to place a hand in the flame of a candle, keep it there for as long as possible, and reflect that the fires of hell were eternal,86 it becomes apparent that a level of repression existed which could only lead to the terrible expressions we have seen in this chapter.
In the Freudian interpretation of society repression is an essential part of the contract by which human beings enter civilization; we have to repress certain of our desires in order to interact with others and share communal goals. Where people are well adjusted, these repressed desires are expressed in Freudian slips, in dreams or literature, but where people develop fixations neuroses can develop. In such cases the repressed desires still exist, but repression forces the rejected aspects of the libido to express themselves in a roundabout, distorted manner.
Perhaps it will help to think back to the level of violence which accompanied the emergence of the new Inquisition in the late 15th century. As we have seen, that violence was eventually replaced by a more systematic, if less combustible, attitude to persecution. But repressive violence did not cease; in need of another outlet, it would appear, from the neuroses that we have observed, to have been redirected back at its original source, at the societies of Portugal and Spain.
This is a classic example of what Freud called the ‘return of the repressed’: the return of repressed desires. This in itself helps to remind us that violence, once unleashed, is difficult to reign back in. It festers. It is transferred – from converses to Lutherans to moriscos and then back to the Old Christians. This violence may emerge in imperial expansion, but eventually it will return home to roost.
So, once the Inquisition had been established and persecution institutionalized, the groundwork for the neurotic society was done. The exorcisms and their accompanying laughable delusions were merely reminders of the dangers which must always follow from persecuting an enemy when our biggest enemies are always, if we dare to be honest with ourselves, to be found within us. Violence and repression can perhaps only pursue their circular paths back to those from whom they originated.
FOR SEVERAL YEARS I trawled the archives of the Inquisition in Portugal and Spain. In both Lisbon and Madrid the national archives are located in neo-fascist buildings constructed under the Iberian dictators of the 20th century, Franco and Salazar. Each time one of the thick, yellowing bundles of paper was brought to my desk and I unbound the cloth ties around it and began to read, a little of the parchment would disintegrate. When I had finished and returned the documents, motes of dust would sit where I had been reading, reminding me of the fragility and impermanence of life, and of moral standards.
Like almost everyone I had heard of the Inquisition. But when I began to make those lonely trips to the archives I had no idea of the enormities I would discover. The world felt darkest during the tales of terrible woe, of sadism and the loss of self. For how could such systematic abuse be measured in systems, analyses, science? It went beyond words. At times I was saddened not so much by the stories I read as by the remorseless compulsion with which I returned to read, which often felt like a reflection of the remorse-lessness with which the inquisitors themselves had conducted their investigations. But then I would come across a story of resistance and the sadness of those heavy, dusty reading rooms would lift.
At times, too, the decline that accompanied the woe would console. By the first decade of the 18th century the Inquisition’s social architecture of moral and cultural inertia was reaping its reward. Yet its leaders still carried on as if little had changed. Once Philip V had been confirmed as the new king of Spain and the war of succession had ended, condemnations increased again; there were fifty-four autos during his reign (1700–46), and seventy-nine people were ‘relaxed’ in person and another sixty-three in effigy.87 In Cuenca five Judaizers were ‘relaxed’ in person in 1721; three more in person in Valladolid in 1722, and twelve more in Granada in 1723.88 In Portugal, where there was no great war to interrupt the inquisitorial process, the violence did not abate. Eight people were ‘relaxed’ in Lisbon in 1732 and another seven in 1735.89 Twelve more followed in 1737, including one from Brazil, and another eleven in 1739 (with another Brazilian case).90 And seventeen people were ‘relaxed’ between 1744 and 1746 in Lisbon alone.91 The vast majority of these cases in both countries related to crypto-Judaism – the ‘Portuguese heresy’.
In Spain the reforming government led by the Bourbons did attempt to curtail inquisitorial power. In 1713 Philip V’s minister Melchor de Macanaz proposed withdrawing subsidies from the Inquisition; the Inquisition responded by launching an investigation into Macanaz, who fled the country.92
This partial revival of the Inquisition in the early 18th century in Spain is again testament to the fact that the institution waxed and waned with royal power, and was thus fundamentally propelled by secular and not religious goals. It had declined in the second half of the 17th century with the drooling King Charles II, and now had a last spurt of vigour under the impetus of a new royal dynasty. Yet although the Inquisition looked to have recovered its dynamism, the neurotic societies which it had helped to create were about to get their own back. For in the first half of the 18th century the ‘crime’ which increased most in the Inquisition’s eyes was that of solicitation by priests in the confessional, something which itself was testament to the type of society which had evolved under its watch.
Valencia 1784–1805
AS THE 18th CENTURY drew to a close an extraordinary case began in Valencia which epitomized some of the currents running through society on the Iberian peninsula. It all related to the unusual disciplinary methods which the Franciscan friar Miguel de Palomeres
used on his ‘daughters of confession’. Palomeres first came to the attention of the authorities in 1784 after being denounced by one Ramona Rica, a twenty-nine year old from the city who wanted to become a nun. The story which emerged reads like a handbook of sado-masochism.
The problem with Rica’s desire to enter a convent was that she was unable to read, and one day, after seven months of tuition, Palomeres became angry because she had not learnt her day’s study portion. Thereupon he:
ordered her to lift up her skirt from the behind as he wanted to whip her, to which [Rica] resisted . . . but sensing that after receiving the punishment she would give more attention to her study, she decided to obey him, and did so a few days later, after which [Rica] fell ill with a minor indisposition and asked [Palomeres] to come and confess her. [Palomeres] complied coming to confess her in her bed, which he did before leaving the room at once without saying a word. After three or four minutes he came back in and gave her a study portion, at which point [Rica] told him that she would pay more attention if he punished her as he had done before; at which he gave her the punishment, ordering her to take off her clothes and to lie on her stomach, at which he whipped her, and then fondled the parts which he had whipped.93
Soon, Rica recovered. After a time she went to see Palomeres and said that she was worried that Palomeres did not administer this discipline with noble aims, and that he enjoyed touching her flesh. This led to a merry dance of further sado-masochistic activity, as over the coming weeks Palomeres whipped her often, sometimes with Rica on the floor, at other times with her on the edge of the bed; however, no longer did these acts of discipline follow Palomeres’ ritual confessing of his charge.94
Palomeres was called before the Inquisition to defend himself in 1784, but he argued successfully that Ramona Rica was a stubborn student who was pertinacious in her false beliefs and therefore required rigorous disciplining. Yet four years later he was accused again, this time by Gertrudis Tatay, another would-be nun who had gone to him for instruction. Again, at times he had whipped her buttocks, and at others he had looked her over in the flesh as he had administered his punishments: ‘and many times without it being a day of confession he made her go to his house to receive tuition, and sometimes he disciplined her with an iron whip and at others he pardoned her’.95
Once again the attention of the Inquisition had been drawn to the activities of Palomeres, but the prosecutor did not proceed. Then in 1805 two more women, Pasquala Monfort and Josefa Marti, denounced Palomeres. Marti described how she had frequented Palomeres’ house over a period of two months of confession during which he had forced her to kneel with her buttocks in the air, hitting her so hard with his iron whip that twice he broke it and the blood often reached the floor. One day he forgot his whip and used a hair shirt to tear the skin of her buttocks to shreds before fondling the results of his butchery. Marti became convinced that Palomeres ‘was not guiding her soul well’ and ceased to go for confession, but she continued to go to be disciplined for a further two years.96
People like Palomeres were known to the Inquisition as ‘flagellants’.*3 Whereas in the 16th and 17th centuries cases of soliciting priests were commonplace and cases of flagellants isolated, in the 18th century flagellants became increasingly common.97 This tells us that by the 18th century repression had worked its way right through society and was decisively affecting people’s emotional behaviour. When one thinks of Marti returning for her whipping for two whole years and of Rica saying that ‘she suspected Palomeres did not have noble intentions in whipping her, and that he enjoyed touching her flesh [i.e., she realised that her own intentions were not pure and that she enjoyed him touching her flesh]’, one has a glimpse of the mutual repression and coercion expressed in these acts of pseudo-religion, of domination, submission and inner despair. It was no accident that the women who responded to Palomeres wanted to be nuns; consciously, they desired their own repression, but unconsciously the repression wreaked wounding effects upon them.
The relationship between confessors and their ‘daughters’ had definite sexual connotations.98 The archives of the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions contain innumerable cases of priests who took advantage of the undercurrent of passion to solicit the women whom they confessed. During the inquisitorial visit to the islands of the Azores in 1618 numerous priests were denounced for soliciting in the confessional99 and in Lima in 1595 sixteen priests were tried for soliciting, including one, Melchor Maldonado, who was accused by sixty-seven women;100 one priest in Lima was denounced by ninety victims.101
It would be wrong to be too judgemental of these priests. If you put sexually repressed men in an enclosed place with sexually repressed women, this sort of thing is likely to occur. The level of the problem is revealed by a handbook called Antidote to Soliciting Priests, published in Spain in 1778 (and recommended by one correspondent to the Inquisition for censorship, since it could fall into the wrong hands).102 This and the way solicitation mutated into flagellation in the 18th century reveal the extent of the symptoms of the neurotic society by this time.
In pondering the emotions and desires which must have coursed around those confessionals during those centuries when the Inquisition was the moral enforcer of Iberian society, the priest Francisco Martínez comes to mind, accused in Zaragoza in 1683 of saying to a married woman, ‘The black eyes of your grace have stolen my heart’.103 Battered by his desires and the conflicting need to repress them, Martínez found his way to a certain poetry.
Yet not everyone was capable of cleansing their inner demons. The nature of inquisitorial repression ensured that neurosis deepened the malaise of the societies which it was supposed to guard. Repression had at first been projected outwards at the perceived enemy, but it had returned unerringly to haunt Iberia on the threshold of the industrial age.
Chapter Thirteen
PARANOIA
. . . the number of men enlisted in this Congregation is truly appalling, since according to their books and public pronouncements it reaches four million . . .
IN PORTUGAL THE DISCOVERY of gold in the Minas Gerais of Brazil led to Lisbon becoming one of the busiest ports in Europe in the 18th century. The king who benefited from most of the profits, John V, squandered them on the construction of a baroque palace at the small town of Mafra, to the north-west of Lisbon. Over the border in Spain the accession of the Bourbon dynasty with Philip V meant that the squabbles that had characterized the late 17th century were over, and Spain was connected to the wealthier kingdom of France to the north. In Iberia a period of consolidation had set in.
However, the influx of a new Francophile aristocracy brought its own problems to Spain. France was to be at the heart of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, and it was precisely the ideals of the Enlightenment which were seen by the Inquisition as the great enemy during the last century of its existence. The crypto-Jews from Portugal in the first years of Philip V’s reign were, increasingly, replaced by new targets, enlightened thinkers known as Jansenists, and Freemasons.
The way in which any group could be perceived as a threat is revealed in a case against the German bullfighter Antonio Berkmeier towards the end of the 18th century. Berkmeier was thrown into the jail of the Inquisition and accused of ‘trying to found a society to reform the world and with the purpose of realizing the goals of the Old Testament, claiming that not all of its prophecies have yet come to pass’.1 In order to further the aims of this seditious society, Berkmeier was said to fake visions and apparitions of God and Jesus Christ, which enabled him to ‘seduce’ various people to join his society.
Berkmeier’s first accuser was one Juan Joseph Heideck, a compatriot of his, who saw the danger of the group in part in its internationalism. ‘The said society’, he reported, ‘is composed not only of musicians and Swiss soldiers, but also of other Germans, Frenchmen and Spaniards’. The society aimed to subvert not only religion but also the state and the government, and each day new members were joining. Another witness
described how Berkmeier and his acolytes gathered by a fountain with a group of Germans to discuss their new religion; something of the danger of the group was shown by the fact that Berkmeier, in the words of his accuser, ‘has a book, and perhaps also some papers’.
Berkmeier was a freethinker typical of those the Inquisition saw as most threatening. He had written a book called El Tonto Sobrenatural – The Supernatural Fool – which suggests not so much a hankering after the Old Testament as scepticism of everything supernatural. Summoned at the end of August 1798 to answer the charges, he wrote long and detailed answers to the questions put before him. Something of the inequities of inquisitorial justice is revealed by the Inquisition’s choice of an interpreter for Berkmeier, none other than Juan Joseph Heideck, the man who had accused him, and by the fact that Berkmeier languished in jail for four years before his responses to their questions were condemned as heretical.
It is clear that the most important thing was seen to be to crush Berkmeier’s group immediately; once the agitator was incarcerated, the orthodoxy of his views could be examined at the inquisitors’ leisure. This attitude towards societies and gatherings of people stemmed directly from the fear which the Inquisition had developed of Freemasonry in the 1730s. Freemasonry had been condemned by Pope Clement XII in April 1738 in his bull In Eminenti; the bull had been confirmed by Cardinal Firrao, secretary of the Vatican state, on 14 June 1739, in a document in which the mere suspicion of Freemasonry was stated to be a capital offence.2
The rise of Freemasonry in Europe had begun in the early 18th century, and had been marked by the publication of the Constitution of Masonic Orders, published in 1723. The Masonic orders reinvented the initiation rites of the Masons of the Middle Ages, including keeping the secrets of the lodge. It was this secrecy which seemed so suspicious to their enemies, although the secrecy largely appears to have related to the interpretation of certain ritual ceremonies and to have had little to do with religion or politics.3