At the commencement of my possession I was almost three months in a continual disturbance of mind, so that I do not remember anything of what passed during that time. The demons acted with abounding force and the Church fought them day and night with exorcisms.2
My mind was often filled with blasphemies and sometimes I uttered them without being able to take any thought to stop myself. I felt for God a continual aversion and nothing inspired me with greater hatred than the spectacle of his goodness and the readiness with which he pardons repentant sinners. My thoughts were often bent on devising ways to displease him and to make others trespass against him. It is true that by the mercy of God I was not free in these sentiments, although at that time I did not know it, for the demon beclouded me in such a way that I hardly distinguished his desires from mine; he gave me, moreover, a strong aversion for my religious calling, so that sometimes when he was in my head I tore all my veils and such of my sisters’ as I could lay hands on; I trampled them underfoot, I chewed them, cursing the hour when I took the vows. All this was done with great violence, I think that I was not free.1
… As I went up for Communion the devil took possession of my hand, and when I had received the Sacred Host and had half moistened it the devil flung it into the priest’s face. I know full well that I did not do this action freely, but I am fully assured to my deep confusion that I gave the devil occasion to do it. I think he would not have had this power if I had not been in league with him. I have on several other occasions had similar experiences for when I resisted them stoutly I found that all these furies and rages dispersed as they had come, but alas, it too often happened that I did not strongly constrain myself to resist, especially in matters where I saw no grievous sin. But this is where I deluded myself, for because I did not restrain myself in little things my mind was afterwards taken unawares in great ones.…2
At this reply the evil spirit got into such a fury that I thought he would kill me; he beat me with great violence so that my face was quite disfigured and my body all bruised with his blows. It often happened that he treated me in this way.3
As for outward things, I was much troubled by almost continual rages and fits of madness. I found myself almost incapable of doing any good thing, seeing that I had not an hour of the liberty to think of my conscience and prepare myself for 3 general confession although God caused me to be moved towards it and I was so minded.4
By far the best account that we possess of these states comes from the French mystic Surin, who, already much exhausted by a long and rigorous life of asceticism, himself fell a victim in the course of his exorcisms to the great seventeenth-century epidemic of possession at Loudun.
His narrative is so interesting that it should be reproduced in all its details so far as these have hitherto been given to the public. One important manuscript is still unpublished, and unfortunately the war precluded me from consulting this document, which the authorities of the Bibliothèque Nationale had, with a kindness deserving of thanks, expressed readiness to communicate to me,5 and which may be presumed to contain many further matters of interest. It is so easy to divest Surin’s writings of the theological form in which he describes his condition that this necessitates no explanations. He holds his state to be possession in the true sense of the word, and construes it as a result of his sins.
Surin’s chief testimony is a letter to a spiritual friend written on May 3rd, 1635, and which seems in the first place to have been printed separately. It is generally quoted from the extracts of Calmeil1 and Ideler,2 but their versions are not very complete and Ideler’s translation is slightly inaccurate in places. I shall therefore go back to the presumably complete version found in the work: Cruels effets de la vengeance du Cardinal Richelieu ou Histoire des Diables de Loudun. This book appeared anonymously, and is by a writer called Aubin.
There are scarce any persons to whom I take pleasure in recounting my adventures, save your Reverence, who listens to them willingly and derives from them reflections which would not readily occur to others who do not know me as does your Reverence. Since the last letter which I wrote you I have fallen into a state very different from anything I had anticipated, but in full conformity with the Providence of God concerning my soul. I am no longer at Marennes, but at Loudun, where I received your letter recently. I am in perpetual conversation with the devils, in the course of which I have been subject to happenings which would be too lengthy to relate to you and which have given me more reason than I ever had to know and to admire the goodness of God. I wish to tell you something of them, and would tell you more if you were more private. I have engaged in combat with four of the most potent and malicious devils in hell. I, I say, whose infirmities you know. God has permitted the struggles to be so fierce and the onslaughts so frequent that exorcism was the least of the battlefields, for the enemies declared themselves in private both by night and day in a thousand different ways. You may imagine what pleasure there is in finding oneself at the sole mercy of God. I will tell you no more, it suffices that knowing my state you should take occasion to pray for me. At all events, for the last three and a half months I have never been without a devil at work upon me.
Things have gone so far that God has permitted, I think for my sins, what has perhaps never been seen in the Church, that in the exercise of my ministry the devil passes out of the body of the possessed woman and entering into mine assaults and confounds me, agitates and troubles me visibly, possessing me for several hours like a demoniac. I cannot explain to you what happens within me during that time and how this spirit unites with mine without depriving me either of consciousness or liberty of soul, nevertheless making himself like another me and as if I had two souls, one of which is dispossessed of its body and the use of its organs and stands aside watching the actions of the other which has entered into them. The two spirits fight in one and the same field which is the body, and the soul is as if divided. According to one of its parts it is subject to diabolic impressions and according to the other to those motions which are proper to it or granted by God. At the same time I feel a great peace under God’s good pleasure and, without knowing how it arises, an extreme rage and aversion for him, giving rise to violent impulses to cut myself off from him which astonish the beholders; at the same time a great joy and sweetness, and on the other hand a wretchedness which manifests itself by cries and lamentations like those of the demons; I feel the state of damnation and apprehend it, and feel myself as if transpierced by the arrows of despair in that stranger soul which seems to be mine, while the other soul which is full of confidence laughs at such feelings and is at full liberty to curse him who is the cause; I even feel that the same cries which issue from my mouth come equally from the two souls, and am at a loss to discern whether they be caused by joy or by the extreme fury with which I am filled. The tremblings with which I am seized when the Holy Sacrament is administered to me arise equally, so far as I can judge, from horror of its presence which is insufferable to me and from a sincere and meek reverence, without it being possible for me to attribute them to the one rather than the other or to check them. When I desire by the motion of one of these two souls to make the sign of the cross on my mouth, the other averts my hand with great swiftness and grips my finger in its teeth to bite me with rage. I scarcely ever find orisons easier or more tranquil than in these agitations; while the body rolls upon the ground and the ministers of the Church speak to me as to a devil, loading me with maledictions, I cannot tell you the joy that I feel, having become a devil not by rebellion against God but by the calamity which shows me plainly the state to which sin has reduced me and how that taking to myself all the curses which are heaped upon me my soul has reason to sink in its own nothingness. When the other possessed persons see me in this state it is a pleasure to see how they triumph and how the devils mock at me saying: “Physician, heal thyself; go now and climb into the pulpit; it will be a fine sight to see him preach after he has rolled upon the ground.” Tentaverunt, subsannaverunt m
e subsannatione, frenduerunt super me dentibus suis.
What a cause for thankfulness that I should thus see myself the sport of the (evil) spirits, and that the justice of God on earth should take vengeance on my sins! What a privilege to experience the state from which Jesus Christ has delivered me, and to feel how great is the redemption, no longer by hearsay but by the impress of that same state; and how good it is to have at once the capacity to fathom that misery and to thank the goodness which has delivered us from it with so many labours! This is what I am now reduced to almost every day. It is the subject of great disputes, and factus sum magna quœstio, whether there is possession or not, and if it may be that such untoward accidents befall the ministers of the Gospel. Some say that it is a chastisement of God upon me to punish an error; others say some other thing, and I am content and would not change my fortune with another, having the firm persuasion that there is nothing better than to be reduced to great extremities. That in which I am is such that I can do few things freely: when I wish to speak my speech is cut off; at Mass I am brought up short; at table I cannot carry the morsel to my mouth; at confession I suddenly forget my sins; and I feel the devil come and go within me as if he were at home. As soon as I wake he is there; at orisons he distracts my thoughts when he pleases; when my heart begins to swell with the presence of God he fills it with rage; he makes me sleep when I would wake; and, publicly, by the mouth of the possessed woman, he boasts of being my master; the which I can in no way contradict. Enduring the reproach of my conscience, and upon my head the sentence pronounced against sinners, I must suffer it and revere the order of Divine Providence to which every creature must bow. It is not a single demon who torments me; there are usually two; the one is Leviathan, the adversary of the Holy Spirit, for according to what they have said here, they have in hell a trinity whom the magicians worship: Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Leviathan, who is third in hell, as some authors have already observed and written. Now the works of this false Paraclete are quite contrary to those of the true, and impart a desolation which cannot be adequately described. He is the chief of all our band of demons and has command of this whole affair which is perhaps one of the strangest ever seen. In this same place we see Paradise and Hell, nuns who taken in one way are like Ursula and in the other worse than the most abandoned in all sorts of disorders, filth, blasphemy, and rages. If it please your Reverence, I do not at all desire that you should make my letter public. You are the only one to whom, except for my confessor and my superiors, I have been willing to say so much. It is but to maintain between us such communication as may assist us to glorify God in whom I am your very humble servant.
JEAN-JOSEPH SURIN.
And by way of post-scriptum, I beg you to have prayers said for me of which I have need, for during whole weeks I am so stupid towards heavenly things that I should be glad if someone would make me say my prayers like a child and explain the Pater Noster to me simply. The devil has said to me: I will deprive thee of everything and thou shalt have need to keep thy faith for I will make thee besotted. He has made a pact with a witch to prevent me from speaking of God and so that he may have strength to keep my spirit broken, and I am constrained, in order to have some understanding, to hold the Holy Sacrament often against my head, using David’s key to unlock my memory.…
I am content to die since Our Lord has done me this grace to have retrieved three consecrated Hosts which three witches had delivered into the hands of the devil, who brought them back to me publicly from Paris where they were under the mattress of a bed and left the Church in possession of this honour, to have given back in some measure to her Redeemer what she had received of Him, having ransomed it from the devil’s clutches. I do not know if Our Lord will soon take my life, for being hard put to it in this affair I gave it to Him and promised to part with it for the price of these three Hosts. It seems that the devil, by the bodily ills which he inflicts on me, desires to exercise his right and gradually wear me out.
This narrative is a document of the utmost value, which offers striking confirmation of all that we have hitherto said as to the nature of possession. At the same moment Surin feels himself full of profound peace and furious rage. His soul is “as if divided,” he is filled simultaneously with different sentiments;1 one of these is normal, it is that of Surin in the narrowest sense; the other is of a compulsive and coercive nature, and is regarded by Surin as belonging to the demon. It is very evident from his account how false is the conception which supposes that there are really two egos in the consciousness, as has hitherto been maintained by the majority of authors treating of possession, (an error which I also shared until I made a closer study of the problems of the ego.) He says as clearly as possible that both groups of sentiments belong to him in person; he is filled at the same time with serene joy and foaming rage. And if he does not accept the rage it nevertheless appears to him that the strange soul is “like to his own.” In reality it is his also, only these states have a character of compulsion. If he is of opinion, like all analogous cases, that his state is dual, it is an illusion which tries to impose itself upon him, but to which he never completely surrenders; it always remains clear to him that the second sentiments are states which belong to him equally. This is particularly well demonstrated by his remark that he seems to himself to have become Satan: in fact, this individuality is a new and extremely complex state of himself, as is his original individuality. Up to this point he has a certain right to say that he has assumed a Satanic personality.
The conception that there are really two different subjects and not merely two different states of one and the same subject presents insurmountable difficulties of interpretation. How, indeed, would it be possible for Surin to say of himself that he feels the rage and anger of the demon, that he finds himself in a dual affective state and that the second soul is also similar to his own? How could he feel sentiments immediately if they were not his own sentiments? How is it possible to imagine one ego entering into another with subsequent direct apprehension thereby?
Whichever way we turn, it is impossible to avoid the conviction that the impressions of others are only experienced indirectly (nacherlebt) and not immediately like our own. This “after experience” has not necessarily an active character; it may also be purely passive or compulsive.
There is really a separate problem, as we are beginning to perceive, in the fact that the interpenetration of mind by mind is not possible, and that no one ever experiences anything but his own emotional states. This is evidently not a purely empirical statement, for then the contrary state of things might also formerly have been realized. We shall have to establish a necessity in the realm of empirical knowledge, exactly as we affirm in all certitude that the movement of a body can take place only in the present and the future, but no longer in the past. As a matter of fact, the position of such judgments from the point of view of the theory of knowledge is not yet explained, however obvious they may be.
The quotations which we have made from Surin are supplemented by the still unpublished manuscript of the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. Delacroix has given extracts from it in his excellent work, Etudes d’histoire et de psychologie du mysticisme.1 I have borrowed from him the following:
Surin’s turbulent state of possession, to which the quotation given above relates, ceased after he had succeeded in his exorcisms at Loudun and brought about the recovery of the principal case of possession in the convent, Jeanne des Anges. It was, however, not given to Surin to regain his first state; he traversed a peculiar state of depression which did not show the same excitement as the first, but which visibly belongs to the group of phenomena of possession. He came out, as he himself relates, “of the manifest obsession which rendered the presence of the Evil One in his person sensible to him, and passed into an inner travail of the most extreme nature.”
These torments lasted no less than approximately twenty-five years.
… He came to lose all power of movement and even of speech, and to
wards the autumn of that year he left Loudun. He became so overwhelmed that he lost all ability to preach or to take part in conversation.… His suffering rose to a pitch of violence where he even lost the power of speech and was dumb for seven months without being able to say Mass, read or write, even to dress and undress himself, or, in short, make any movement. He fell into a sickness unknown to all the doctors, whose remedies were of no avail. Thus he passed the whole winter.
Surin describes his state as a “constriction” (resserrement). It was a case of motor inhibitions due to autosuggestion, but other phenomena also supervened.
One morning he found himself troubled in his natural mind by fits of rage which rendered him altogether contemptible in his own eyes; that is to say, there appeared in him compulsive sentiments for which he imputed blame to himself.
He had temptations to suicide and even made a serious attempt. He had an “extreme and vehement impulse to kill himself.” Even when he was conscious of doing some good action he thought he was disobeying God by leaving the ranks of the damned to which he had been relegated. He also had fits of hatred against Jesus Christ.… He had heretical ideas, notably that of Calvin on the Eucharist, and very violent temptations against chastity.
Possession, Demoniacal And Other Page 8