The available information on epidemics of possession which have occurred since the Renaissance in civilized Europe is collected in the work of L. F. Calmeil,2 where early sources have been thoroughly utilized and quoted at length, and which is still authoritative on the subject. The work of K. W. Ideler,3 Leubuscher,4 and P. Richer5 is in turn based on Calmeil’s researches. It contains, partly in abridged form, good accounts of several of these epidemics, and as the documents are easily accessible I have for my own part decided to give no descriptions.
So far as I am aware there are as yet no corresponding researches dealing with the Middle Ages, owing no doubt to the fact that the materials, where they exist, must lie buried in manuscript form in the archives. Perhaps, moreover, documents are generally more plentiful in the subsequent centuries, thanks to the growth of interest in psychology since the Renaissance of Learning and the continuous influence of printing in facilitating and stimulating research. But naturally it may also be that veritable epidemics were lacking and only occurred after belief in the devil had reached its height in Europe—that is to say, in the time of the witchcraft trials extending from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century.
All the epidemics referred to in the following pages are taken from Calmeil except those for which I have indicated other sources. Those mentioned by him relate almost entirely to convents of nuns and detailed accounts are available in some instances. They took place at the following periods:
1491–1494, in a convent of nuns at Cambrai (county of la Marche, near Hammone).
1551, at Uvertet (Grafschaft of Hoorn).
1550–1556, in the cloister of Sainte Brigitte, near Xanten.
1552, at Kintorp, near Strassburg. The epidemic spread like a patch of oil, and seized several inhabitants of the town of Hammone.
1554, at Rome; an epidemic which affected eighty-four persons, amongst whom were twenty-four baptized Jewesses.1
1555, at Rome; eighty little girls in an orphanage. 1560–1564, at the Nazareth convent in Cologne.2
1566, at the Foundling Hospital in Amsterdam: thirty children (seventy according to another version) were attacked, the majority being boys.
1590, thirty nuns were possessed near Milan.
1593, a small epidemic at Friedeberg, in Neumark.3
1594, eighty cases of possession at Friedeberg, Spandau and other places in the Mark of Brandenburg.
1609–1611, at Aix, in the convent of Ursulines.
1613, at Lille, in the convent of Sainte Brigitte. The possession of Aix had been heard of there, and several nuns had on the occasion of a visit, seen cases in that town, by reason of which one of them already began to feel herself possessed.
1628, at Madrid in a convent of nuns.
1632–1638, in the convent of the Little Ursulines at Loudun, whence the epidemic spread to several women of the town and also to Chinon, Nîmes and Avignon. In the last-named town Cardinal Mazarin cleverly arrested the progress of the epidemic by giving orders as soon as the first case occurred that no publicity should be given to the possessed persons.
1642, in a convent at Louviers (eighteen sisters).
1652–1662, in a convent at Auxonne.1
1670, at and around Mora (Sweden) amongst children.
1670, at Hoorn (Holland) in an orphanage, amongst children of both sexes under twelve years old.
1681, around Toulouse; this budding epidemic came to nothing owing to skilful measures taken by the authorities.
1687–1690, around Lyon (fifty sisters).
1732, in the district of Landes near Bayeux.
1740–1750 (it lasted ten years), in a convent at Unterzell, in Lower Franconia: only ten nuns indubitably attacked.2
In the nineteenth century several epidemics of possession are also known:
1857–1862, at Morzines, a little village in a region of Haute-Savoie remote from civilization: at least 120 people were attacked.
1878, at Verzegnis, in Friuli.
1881, at Plédran, in the neighbourhood of St. Brieuc.
1881, at Jaca, in Spain.3
The most famous of all these epidemics was that of Loudun. The documents concerning it are exceedingly abundant, the most important being the Histoire des Diables de Loudun, already mentioned more than once.1
I have earlier called attention to the analogy between the general run of cases of possession, at least when isolated, and attacks of hysteria. Can this observation, about which doubt is no longer possible, be acceptably generalized? Have all the possessed, even those affected in consequence of epidemics, been hysterical? Naturally an affirmative reply has often been given, but we must approach the subject with scepticism; there is very little evidence to substantiate such a statement. At all events, the patients were not in all cases hysterical before in the same way as they appear to have been after the onset of possession. This state certainly gives most people occasion to regard it as hysteria, but such a diagnosis would only be justified if previous hysterical symptoms had existed; the mere fact that a person is attacked by a spiritual epidemic does not show that he is mentally unsound. It should rather be recognized as evident that psychically normal subjects may, when placed in a sufficiently favourable environment, succumb to psychic infection. The excitement and tension produced by the continual sight of the possessed and the fear of being oneself seized by the devil may produce an autosuggestive state such that similar psychic experiences begin to be manifested. No detailed researches into the genesis of such a state of autosuggestion yet exist, the conditions and chances of exact observation being as unfavourable as well may be, but its reality cannot be doubted. This acute suggestibility due to abnormal conditions is therefore the soil on which possession springs up, for it would be difficult to maintain that the possessed become hysterical at the moment when they are psychically contaminated and remain so until exorcism has been successfully accomplished, a theory which we should only be driven to adopt if it could be demonstrated that those who were attacked by the epidemic really presented all the symptoms of hysteria and were not simply and solely victims of certain epidemic phenomena of imitation.
It is evident that this subject bristles with problems of mass-psychology which have not yet been subjected to really adequate study.
According to Esquirol, the famous French psychiatrist of the early nineteenth century, possession was often the subject of legal proceedings at the time of the Reformation. The devil was summoned “before a court of law, and the possessed were condemned to be burnt upon a pile. Doubly victims of the prevailing error, demonomaniacs were burned both as bewitched and as possessed, after a confession had been wrung from them that they had made a pact with the devil.”1
This quotation is surprising. In the history of witchcraft, so far as I have studied it, I have met with no case of possession. Can it be that the explanation lies in a mere confusion between witches and possessed persons, permissible in the lay writer, but which we should not be asked to tolerate in a scholar such as Esquirol? His remarks on witchcraft trials and the battle waged against them transform this presumption into certainty. Moreover the cases of “demonomania “which he has reported are not all cases of possession in our sense of the world, but often mere hallucination and delusion. The only connection between witchcraft and possession lies in the fact that persons believing themselves bewitched often seem forthwith to have presented symptoms analogous to those of possession.
The not infrequent cases of zooanthropy found in the early Middle Ages show no slight resemblance to possession. The persons affected believed themselves to be wild animals, generally wolves (werewolves, lycanthropy), and behaved as such. They took refuge in the forests, let their hair and nails grow long, sometimes fell upon children whom they rent and devoured, in short behaved like savage beasts. There was also transformation into dogs (cynanthropy). But zooanthropy differed from true possession in that it produced, so far as we know, permanent states, whereas possession was never manifested except in fits.
It
is true that we occasionally meet transitory zooanthropic states in epidemics of possession. Thus a writer, Dom Calmet, relates of an epidemic which had attacked a German convent that the nuns believed themselves changed into cats, and at a certain time of day mewed and behaved as such.1 Another case is found in Luys:
It had sufficed for a hysterical girl to pass a few days in the country for her to imitate in her fits the bark of big watchdogs and smaller dogs which she had seen there. When she was seized with a fit there was a curious succession of all sorts of barkings, which she uttered involuntarily.2
In Germany the influence, so noxious to civilization, of belief in the devil, owes its defeat principally to Christian Tomasius, who waged especial war against belief in witchcraft.
Belief in possession found its chief critic in Johann Salomon Semler,3 the founder of the new Protestant theology.
Semler, who was the first seriously to tackle a survey of the Bible from the historical point of view, sees in the statements of the New Testament author relating to Jesus and the possessed no doctrine of healing, but ideas which, like many others, form part of the stock-in-trade of the time. He also finds a metaphysical difficulty: the alleged substantial indwelling of the devil appears to him impossible.
As early as 1767 Semler gauged the temper of his time to be such that a complete exposition of the history of possession would go far towards the general abolition of this belief, in so far as it still existed:
If I desired to collect the thousands and thousands of stories of possessed persons and their cure, it would be a vast labour and would constitute a history of the devil in the Middle Ages. It would be of relatively large proportions, but would infallibly produce a happy, profound and lasting impression on all readers, inasmuch as they themselves, however simple-minded and credulous, would judge that it must be far from the truth. The frightful superstition which still brings forth many dark fruits would be very rapidly and generally weakened thereby.4
Nicolai participated in the struggle against belief in possession by his Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek, which published many accounts of research on the subject of the possessed and the miracles of the New Testament.
These two were naturally not alone, but found many coadjutors.
The sceptical attitude of the enlightened and its social repercussion seem to have resulted in a marked falling-off in cases, readily explained by the auto-suggestive character of these states.
The conquests of enlightenment were not lost again. Schleiermacher, who was also profoundly hostile to demonology, considers possession as a sickness. Like Semler he takes liberties with any texts of the Gospels not in accordance with this theory, explaining that Christ would not in a general way have established the doctrine of the devil, but had merely made use of prevailing ideas to exorcise demons, “for he was always immediately intelligible and restricted himself to the use of ideas of the accepted type.” Demonology, by admitting the existence of a great power of evil, must either imply a limitation of the divine omnipotence or else make Satan and evil a deliberate work of God, which is irreconcilable with the divine essence.1
The theologian Paulus, generally known as the adversary of Schelling, conceived at least Jesus’ apostrophe to the demons at the moment of expulsion as a concession to the morbid ideas of the possessed themselves, a concession to which the doctor should lend himself for psycho-therapeutic reasons; but in other cases Paulus could not avoid the conviction that Jesus Himself had shared these ideas.2 In Strauss we meet a completely critical impartiality and the abandonment of all striving after novelty of interpretation. He naturally rejects the theory of possession, and apart from his general scruples about admitting the existence of devils and demons, sees a further difficulty in the psycho-physical relation of the soul and body. However it may be conceived, “no one could ever imagine how the bond which unites them can be loose enough for a strange consciousness to push its way in, and, dislodging that which belongs to the organism, take possession of the latter.”1 On the other hand, of course, the orthodox opinion continued to prevail amongst other theologians.
Strauss already and very rightly recognizes the curative virtue of exorcism as autosuggestive, except that the word autosuggestion is naturally not found in his works:
As the cause of such maladies was often really psychic or resident in the nervous system which may be wrought upon to an incalculable degree by the spiritual side, this psychological proceeding was not completely fraudulent, but thanks to the conviction induced in the patient that the demon possessing her would be unable for long to hold out against a magic formula, release from the malady was really effected.2
In another place Strauss further admits a certain telepathic action in Jesus’ will:
If the sick person conceived Jesus as the Messiah, and if his conception was acquired not merely according to rationalistic theory by communication from without, but by a personal magnetic sympathy, the words and will of Jesus to put the demons to flight also passed into him with immediate force and efficacy.3
Thanks to Semler, Schleiermacher and David Friedrich Strauss, belief in possession has in the Protestant world received its death-blow even if it is not completely dead.
Thus the general reaction of the romantics against the Age of Enlightenment was partially effective as regards belief in possession. In other words, Swabian romanticism of the school of Schelling reverted to belief in spirits, a reaction evidenced by the writings of Kerner and Eschenmayer which we have so often utilized (see above, pp. 9, 13, etc.). Its principal representative in the camp of the Catholic Church is Görres. But these authors cannot have exercised a very profound influence on the scientific views of the period: the latter maintained the conviction that possession is an abnormal psychic state and not the visitation of an individual by spirits of any description. Truth to tell, this conviction did not succeed in gaining a decisive victory; it rather seems that the number of cases of possession rose again in regions where they were once more taken seriously by persons in authority, showing particular increase in the very remote province of Swabia which inclines to a transcendental faith. I refer the reader to the publication issued by Kerner in the years 1831–38: Blätter aus Prevorst. From Bavaria comes Baader’s case.1
J. von Görres in his Mystik reports a case dating from 1830 in the diocese of Lüttich.2
In the forties of the nineteenth century occurs the case of possession described by Pastor Blumhardt. This also comes from Würtemberg.3
In France the eminent psychiatrist Esquirol (1772–1840) himself saw possessed persons and professes often to have observed a strong smell which they exhaled.4
Other examples of true possession in France are given in the biography of a modern Catholic saint who died in 1859, the curé of Ars, Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney. In his biography published by Alfred Monnin, we read:
At different times and from various quarters there came to Ars persons who, in a more or less evident fashion, were possessed. Two of these unfortunates, a man and woman, are known to everyone in Ars; they often came and almost always found at the feet of Vianney relief and consolation in one of the most extraordinary and frightful of states.5
Colloquies between the curé and the possessing spirits are reproduced in detail.
The Westminster Review reported in 1860 the case of a nun in Paris who was possessed and had to be exorcised.6
That possession is a perfectly well-known phenomenon in
England appears from the observations of Giraldus Cambrensis who saw analogous states in Wales.
… A race of prophets who, when consulted, were agitated and tortured like men possessed. Their first answers were incoherent, but the true revelations generally came to them in dreams in which, they said, they had received in their mouths milk and honey.7
Let us add to this a quotation taken by Bastian from another English author:
The voice was often heard (1840). On one occasion it told them that Mary’s (Jobson of Sunderland) own spirit had lef
t her body and a new one had taken possession, making her frame a mere instrument or as it were a speaking-trumpet.1
The poet Walter Scott has written a little-known historical survey of demonology in England, under the title, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft,2 but it really deals throughout with magic and scarcely touches on possession.
An ecclesiastic on the Volga published in 1838 in the Blätter aus Prevorst an account of cases of possession in the interior of Slavonic Russia.
Amongst the Russians, and especially the peasantry, there are astonishing psychological manifestations which may with good reason be called demoniac…. The upshot of conversations which I have had with an enlightened German who, knowing Russian perfectly, carries on a great trade with the Russians is as follows:
These demoniacs fall with or without warning into a fit, have violent convulsions and generally break out into blasphemy. They cannot go into the churches without falling into this unhappy state immediately after the reading of the Gospel, and each divine word, each spiritual exhortation, every prayer throws them into a furious rage which is expressed by outrages and maledictions on God and Christ. When the fit has passed they are conscious of their deadly sin, are afflicted thereby and willingly castigate themselves. These unfortunate people number quite fifty, both of the male and female sex. They have a sickly look. The Russians call them the “tainted” (Verdorbene). At the consecration of a new Russian Church, when the bell is rung outside amongst the crowd to announce that the Gospel is being read, more than fifty men and women, old and young, will drop down and fall into this terrible state.…
A father whose daughter, aged thirteen years, had fallen into this state spoke thus to the evil spirit during the fit: “What evil has my daughter done that you should seize her thus? She is a young and tender child.” As if an evil demon made use of her mouth she replied: “Yes, but the young creature pleases me and I will not let her go.”3
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