Inquisition

  Nonetheless, authorities such as the papacy moved swiftly to condemn the movement. Following the papal prohibition of 1738, the major impact of Cardinal Firrao’s activities was in Portugal, where he wrote to Inquisitor-General Cardinal da Cunha ordering him to pursue the Masons. Da Cunha prohibited Freemasonry in an edict of 28 September 1738, and five major trials followed in 1743.4 One victim, the Swiss Protestant John Coustos, described his experiences with a certain amount of artistic licence.5 He recounted how the cells were so dark that it was impossible to read. Prisoners were not allowed to groan, sigh, pray loudly or sing psalms, and were beaten if they did. When he was tortured, the door of the torture chamber was covered with mattresses so that his cries would not reach the rest of the prison, while the cords were tightened so much in the potro that they cut through to his bone. The torture only lasted for fifteen minutes, but it reduced him to such a state that for three months afterwards he could not bring his hand to his mouth. When he was eventually sentenced to four years in the galleys, where he was chained to another prisoner by the feet and had to perform menial tasks, he wrote how the relief of being away from the fear of the Inquisition was such that the galleys seemed comparatively pleasant.6

  With the Inquisition, little seems to have changed. This held for both the system of inquisitorial practice and the grounds for arrest in the first place. For something of the darkness in which this question was mired had been revealed in Cardinal Firrao’s original instructions to Inquisitor-General Da Cunha regarding the Freemasons, in which he had urged him to ‘find out fully the nature and recondite purpose of this company or institution of [the Masons], so that the papacy can be informed with precision’.7

  Inquisitor da Cunha had followed Firrao’s instructions. He had summoned people who had attended Masonic dinners before him to find out what their nefarious purposes might be (even though those purposes had already been condemned) only to be told that ‘in the said places nothing whatsoever was discussed against the Catholic religion, and that their purpose was simply to eat well and entertain themselves with a little music, each of them contributing a few escudos towards the cost, with some money also to be given to the poor’.8 Moreover, Da Cunha went on in a letter to Firrao, as soon as they heard of the Papacy’s condemnation of Freemasonry, ‘they entirely abandoned these conventicles’.9 After the thorough interrogation of nine members of these lodges, even the examining inquisitor declared that ‘the said meetings and society are in no way opposed to the faith or to good customs’.10 Yet none of this prevented the banning of Freemasonry and the arrest and torture of Coustos and other Masons in 1743. In other words, the papacy and the Inquisition had prohibited something and set about punishing it without even knowing what it was, and had then continued the persecution despite discovering nothing heretical. This was to take that inquisitorial speciality, the invention of heresy, to new heights.

  ON 18 MAY 1751 Pope Benedict XIV confirmed the bull of prohibition of the Masons issued by his predecessor Clement XII. An anonymous memoir described the reasons behind this move: ‘Although up till now it has not been possible to find out with any degree of certainty the mysterious secrets of this sect, these can only be abominable to God and the authorities, swearing as they do a profession of complete freedom, and admitting people of every class and religion into their society’.11

  Such equalities of class and religion were deeply heretical and, coincidentally, challenged the status quo as well. Benedict XIV was convinced of the vast army of heretics to be found within the ‘mysterious sects’ of the Freemasons. He had written a letter pointing out that there were 90,000 members of Masonic lodges in Naples ‘so it is said’.12 The master of the Neapolitan lodges wrote to him politely to point out that there were four lodges in Naples with a combined membership of around 200.13

  In Spain King Ferdinand VI, who had succeeded Philip V in 1746, issued an edict against the Masons on 2 July 1751 at the urging of his confessor, the Jesuit Francisco Rávago. Rávago had written a long memorial in which the threat to the Spanish nation indeed appeared stark. After all, as Rávago had pointed out, ‘the number of men enlisted in this Congregation is truly appalling, since according to their books and public pronouncements it reaches four million’.14 Rávago, however, was sceptical of such outlandish claims, and was happy to limit membership to an eighth of this, around half a million. Nevertheless these 500,000 Masons were, said Rávago, a terrible threat to the monarchy. For one thing, most of them were soldiers. Moreover, their leader was ‘a bellicose king of whom it is not impertinent to say that he would aspire to a universal conquest and monarchy if he had the means for it’.15 And this threat was not merely hypothetical, since if these half a million people were joined in an army they would be able to conquer the whole world, and it was not inconceivable that they would be put up to this by the king of Prussia. Therefore one was obliged to wonder or suspect if the Freemasons did not desire the conquest of all Europe; and since in a matter of such gravity mere suspicion was enough, even without evidence or certainty measures needed to be taken at once.16

  One can only wonder at the sheer insanity of Rávago. Yet such insanity had long been brewing. The charges echoed those levelled at the moriscos, similarly accused of planning to invade Spain with the help of large numbers of foreign allies, put up to it by the duke of Berne and various French/Turkish/Portuguese supporters.*1 They, too, had had a ‘desire’ for ‘universal conquest’. It does not take the most unreconstructed Freudian to imagine that the desire for worldwide domination was in fact the saintly Rávago’s.

  Ferdinand VI nevertheless heeded his confessor’s advice. With the edict published and hordes of Freemasons supposedly spreading the length and breadth of Spain, strings of vague denunciations followed. One friar, Torrubia, published a book in 1752, the year following the edict, saying that Freemasons were homosexuals who deserved to be burnt. Torrubia admitted that he did not actually know the precise characteristics of Freemasons, but this did not appear to matter. After all, as he pointed out,

  The blacks are certainly black, even though we do not know the origin of their Aethiopic tincture. Cockerels sing at a certain time in the day even though we do not know what makes them do it. No one so far has denied their black colour to the blacks or their songs to the cockerels, just because they are ignorant of where these attributes come from . . . so Freemasons can hide from us what they know and what they have sworn not to say, but not what we see. We already know their colour and song. And we know that they are wicked.17

  In the light of such inexorable logic, the die was cast. The following year a series of letters reached the Inquisition of Cordoba, claiming that there were 6,000 Masons at court, although some said there were 12,000. The members of the sect met twice a week in the house of one Zenón de Somodevilla, in front of a picture ‘of an especially lascivious woman with a naked man who is committing the base act of fornicating [with] her’.18 This Zenón de Somodevilla was grand master of a sect of 14,000 families, all of whom were paid salaries. He must, however, have been a devastatingly inept scion of darkness, since even with such a following he never did quite manage to bring about his wicked revolution.

  In the face of such terrible threats and tremendous armies of Masons one would expect there to have been thousands of inquisitorial trials, yet in the entire archive of the Spanish Inquisition just two cases exist: one from 1751, when Ignacio Le Roy denounced himself as a Mason, and another in which a Frenchman called Tournon confessed to being a Mason and was expelled from Spain.19 There were a few more cases in Mexico, where 200 lashes were given to the Venetian painter Felipe Fabris for Freemasonry in 1789, and further isolated cases followed there in 1793 and 1795.20 Yet this is a low count for a situation in which half a million soldiers were said to be clamouring for the destruction of the monarchy.

  The threat to the nation had been invented. Freemasonry had been denounced as a crime, even though the Inquisition did not know how to define it and it would not in all probabil
ity exist in Spain until the Napoleonic Wars.21 Moreover, those who did join Masonic lodges may also often have been motivated by interest in something forbidden; as the master of the Neapolitan lodges wrote to Benedict XIV ‘my curiosity was piqued to get to know personally something that was attacked so vituperatively by some, and praised to the hilt so much by others’.22

  THE FREEMASORY FANTASY which developed in 18th-century Iberia was but one of many. There had been the converse plot to deliver Castile into the hands of the Mosaic law at the end of the 15th century; the Lutheran plot which led to the great conflagrations of Valladolid and Seville in 1559; the extraordinarily complex plots of the moriscos in the late 16th century to hand Spain over to the Muslims, Protestants and converses;23 and the great plot of the Portuguese converses in Lima in the 1630s – all meticulously documented, and thoroughly foiled by the Inquisition. There was the inquisitorial document in Portugal which referred to 200,000 converse families existing in Portugal in 1624 when there were no more than 6,000 ‘full-blooded’ conversos left in the country.24 Then there was the threat posed by heretical books, when the existence of a few copies of Calvin and Bibles in the vernacular prompted claims that 30,000 books by Calvin were circulating, together with 6,000 such copies of the Bible in vernacular.25 There was, it is true, some threat to Catholic ideology in Spain from the printing press, but the number of forbidden books was magnified beyond all proportions.

  In order to assess the substance of these fears, one must ask: was there ever a plot of the nature which the Inquisition claimed to have uncovered? The answer lies in the facts. The moriscos never did ally themselves with the Calvinists and the conversos, or with the Turks or Huguenots, to destroy Spain. The conversos never did overwhelm Portugal with their birthrate. No hordes of Freemasons allied themselves with the king of Prussia to destroy the Bourbon monarchy. Some enlightened members of the aristocracy did possess banned books in the 17th and 18th centuries, but only a few – there were never thousands of ‘licences for heresy’ in circulation threatening to destroy the nation.

  Not once did any of the complex plots which the Inquisition claimed to have uncovered come to fruition. Not once were any of them close to success. One must, therefore, conclude that the plots were often invented and that where there were plots, the hostility of the enemy groups stemmed mainly from their persecution. The church had often compartmentalized people’s fears so as to deal with them more thoroughly, and it was this tradition which the Inquisition put into practice in Iberia as it purported to deal with first one threat, and then another.26 Yet in spite of the threats to their existence, the Church and the monarchies of Portugal and Spain stubbornly lived on, even as the society around them decayed. It was easiest to blame this decay on internal and external threats, and on the constancy of their attacks, yet the biggest damage was done precisely by the unceasing pursuit of the largely invented enemies.

  In studying one particular aspect of the Inquisition, one can get sucked in by the paranoia, to sympathize with the ‘threat’ posed by the moriscos, or by the Lutherans sweeping Spain (but curiously not Portugal), or by the converses. Inquisitorial functionaries wrote persuasively of the problems which they faced and of the dangers which everywhere were to hand. But when one considers the common factors at work in each case, it becomes clear that what we are dealing with is paranoia, a constant search for threats in order to crush them. It is only by considering the whole that the individual threads within the Inquisition become clear.27

  There is one final case which should be described, to remind us just how the paranoid society developed under the Inquisition. This is one of the most extraordinary cases in the records, that of the witches’ of Urdax and Zugarramurdi in the Basque country in the early 17th century. This was the last occasion when people were burnt for sorcery under the Inquisition in Spain but it also shows just how near paranoia was to the surface of everyday life in Iberia.

  Zugarramurdi 1608–10

  IN THE HILLS OF the Basque region just south of the border with France, inner conflicts were reaching a crisis in the early 17th century. Mutual enmities were many, but while the regions of Aragon and Valencia were purging their distress through the expulsion of the moriscos, no such outlet was available in the Basque country. Thus it was that the enemy – who was ubiquitous and ready to pounce – manifested itself through the discovery of witch covens. These covens had made terrible inroads into the communities of these isolated regions, as an officer of the inquisitor described in some detail.

  The inquisitorial official told how when a person decided to become a witch, they were visited two or three hours before midnight on the chosen night by a member of the coven, who ‘anoints them with some stinking dark green water on their hands, temples, breast, genitals and on the soles of their feet, and then takes them flying through the air, leaving by the door or through the window which are opened for them by the devil’.28 At the coven meeting the devil would appear in a chair made of gold or dark wood which looked like a great throne. He had an ugly, sad face, appearing ‘like a black man with a crown of little horns and three big ones, so that as if like a ram he had two of them at the sides and one on the forehead, and with these horns he illuminates all those who are at the coven with a light that is brighter than the moon’.29

  It was hardly surprising that most people who met the devil were frightened. When the devil spoke he sounded like a braying mule. He always seemed annoyed, his expression was always melancholic, and he always spoke in a sad voice; this, combined with his ‘round, large, open, shining and terrible’ eyes, his goat’s beard and his goat-like torso, was enough to cow most people.30 They adored him, kissing his left hand, his mouth, his chest and his genitals, and then lifting his tail and kissing his ugly, dirty, stinking behind. The devil then made a mark on the novice with his fingernail, drawing blood, and gave them a toad as a guardian angel. The novitiate was taken to dance around a fire with the other witches, where they entertained themselves in sinful excess, to the sound of flutes and tambourines, until dawn.31

  This sort of account is familiar today, in particular in the light of The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s portrait of witch-hunts in Salem, Massachusetts. Miller’s classic play, written in part as a commentary on McCarthyite America in the 1950s, has become part of the cultural furniture for those who wish to examine the psychology of paranoia and persecution. The Crucible was a reminder of the power of the past to speak to the present, and of how the particular can be universal; its imaginative portrait of a witch-hunt could be substituted for the persecution of supposed communists in America, or for events in Urdax and Zugarramurdi more than three centuries before.

  The goings-on in the Basque region first came to the attention of inquisitors when María de Ximildegui, a twenty-year-old woman, returned to Zugarramurdi from south-west France; here she claimed to have attended covens numerous times. Arriving back at her home village, Ximildegui claimed that another woman, María de Yurreteguía, was a member of the local coven in Zugarramurdi. Confronted by this accusation, Yurreteguía denied it repeatedly, but her accuser spoke so persuasively that the villagers began to believe her. Eventually, Yurreteguía fainted, and when she came round she confessed that it was all true.32

  Having confessed, Yurreteguía found herself pursued by witches. The devil called for her personally, and the witches disguised themselves as:

  dogs, cats, pigs and goats, and put the queen of the coven Graciana de Barrenechea in the figure of a mare, and then went to the house of María de Yurreteguía, which belonged to her father-in-law . . . and entered the house by the doors and through the windows which were opened for them by the devil: and there they found that María de Yurreteguía was in the kitchen surrounded by many people who had gathered with her that night to keep her company and protect her from what had happened on the previous nights, and because she had told them that that night there would be a coven meeting and that the witches would come to abuse her. And the devil and Miguel de Goyburu, kin
g of the coven, and other witches, hid themselves behind a seat, and raised their heads to locate her and see what she was doing, making signs to show that she should go with them. And her aunt and teacher, María de Chipía, and one of her sisters, positioned themselves high up on the chimney, making signs to ask if she wanted to go with them, and she defended herself, shouting and indicating where the witches were; but those who were with her could not see them, because the devil had bewitched them and thrown shadows over them so that only María de Yurreteguía should see them, and she shouted out: ‘Leave me alone, traitors, do not pursue me, I have already had enough of following the devil!’33

  The next day the astonished residents of Zugarramurdi found that the devil and his acolytes had been so furious that they had torn up fruit trees and vegetables and destroyed the water mill by splitting the wheel and leaving the millstone on the roof.34

  There is an evident connection between these extraordinary fantasies and the repressed energies and neurotic symptoms that we saw in the last chapter, but what emerges in Zugarramurdi is how the neurosis quickly fed into paranoia. The neurotic delusions of Ximildegui and Yurreteguía rapidly spread along with their fears. Shortly before New Year 1609 a dozen or so neighbours broke into the houses of those they suspected of being witches to look for the demonic toads they thought were protecting them. None were found, but those under suspicion were dragged to the priest to be tortured if they did not confess. By January many had admitted the ‘truth’, and a commissary of the Inquisition was sent for to compile a report.35

  It soon became apparent that the case was a farce. Yurreteguía told her aunt María Chipía that she had confessed falsely to save herself and advised her to do the same. Six of those who had confessed went to the Inquisition’s headquarters in Logroño to say that they had declared falsely under threat of torture. But the fears, once unleashed, were not so easy to put away. An inquisitorial visitor who arrived in Urdax in August 1609 was informed that the friar Pedro de Arburu was a witch even though he was found sleeping in bed at the time of the coven meetings. Was it not obvious that this was a counterfeit body, placed there by the devil to give him a false alibi?36