Part 9

“Sorcerers,” says Bodin, “have the power to remove but a single organ from the body, that is, the virile organ; this thing they often do in Germany, often hiding a man’s privates in his belly, and in this connection Spranger tells of a man at Spire who thought he had lost his privates and visited all the physicians and surgeons in the neighborhood, who could find nothing where the virile organs had once been, neither wound nor scar; but the victim having made peace with the sorcerer, to his great joy soon had his treasure restored.”

There was no need of this kind of witchcraft, _pour nouer l’aiguilette_, in a timid boy, already subjugated by fear of the devil. Certainly, if the sorcerers had ideas of that force which is known to-day as _suggestion_, they could very easily destroy the virile power of the subject by governing his will and thoughts, his physical and moral personality. When we can confiscate the physical anatomy of a man he is reduced to all manner of impotencies. Who will affirm that suggestion is not one of the mysteries of sorcery?

DEMONOLOGICAL PHYSICIANS.

After the theosophists, theurgists, and the priests, we will now interrogate the writings of the physicians of antiquity and of the Middle Ages, as to this question of spirits and their connection with the affairs of mankind.

We see that Galen is often drawn away by the beliefs of his time, to the most ridiculous prejudices and fancies, and that he is the defender of magical conjurations. He claimed that Æsculapius appeared to him one day in a dream and advised bleeding in the treatment of pleurisy by which he was attacked.

After Galen, Soranus of Ephesus used magical chants for curing certain affections. Scribonius Largus, a contemporary of the Emperor Claudius, indicated the manner of gathering plants, so that they might possess the strongest healing properties (the left hand must be raised to the Moon). Plants thus gathered cured even serpent bites. Archigenes suspended amulets on the necks of his patients. And although Pliny often declared that he wished “to examine everything in nature and not to speculate on occult causes” he reproduces in his works all the superstitious practices employed in medicine.

In the sixth century, Ætius, physician to the Court of Constantinople, acquired great surgical renown by the preparation of applications of pomades, ointments, and other topical remedies, in which superstition played a leading _role_.[56] Thus, in making a certain salve it was necessary to repeat several times in a low voice, “May the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob accord efficacy to this medicine.” If one had a foreign body in the throat it was necessary to touch the neck of the patient and say, “As Jesus Christ raised Lazarus, and Jonah came out of a whale, come out thou bone”; or, better still, “The Martyr Blase and the Servant of Christ commands thee to come out of the throat or descend to the stomach.”[57]

After Ætius, we see Alexander of Tralles indulge in the same follies. In the colic he bids us use a stone on which is represented Hercules seated on a lion, a ring of iron on which was inscribed a Greek sentence, and, on the other, the diagram of the Gnostics (a figure composed of two equilateral triangles); and he adds that sacred things must not be profaned.

Against the gout, the same Alexander of Tralles recommended a verse from Homer, or, better still, to engrave on a leaf of gold the words _mei_, _dreu_, _mor_, _phor_, _teus_, _za_, _zown_. He conjured, by the words _Iao_, _Sabaoth_, _Adonai_, _Eloi_, a plant he employed in the same disease. In quotidian fever he advised an amulet made of an olive leaf on which was written in ink, _Ka Poi. A._[58]

In the thirteenth century, Hugo de Lucques said a _Pater noster_ and other prayers to the Trinity to cure fractures of the limbs. But in the following century astrology replaced the magic of religious superstition. Arnauld de Villeneuve attributed to each hour of the day a particular virtue which influenced, according to the influence of the horoscope, the different parts of the body. According to Arnauld, we can use bleeding only on certain days when such and such a constellation is in place, and no other time; but the position of the moon more particularly needed attention. The most favorable time for phlebotomy was when Luna was found in the sign of Cancer; but the conjunction of the latter with Saturn is injurious to the effects of medicines, and especially of purgatives.[59]

His contemporary, Bernard de Gordon (of Montpellier), gives as a sure method of hastening difficult accouchments the reading of passages from the Psalms of David. He explains the humors of certain hours of the day in the following manner: the blood in the morning moves towards the sun, with which it is in harmony; but it falls towards evening, because the greatest amount of sanguification occurs during sleep. In the third hour of the day the bile runs downwards, to the end that it may not make the blood acid;[60] the black bile moves at the ninth hour and the mucus towards evening.

The efficacy of precious stones for bewitching, and many other superstitious ideas, were likewise noted by medical authors, notably Italian writers, as, for instance, Michel Savonarola, Professor at Ferrara, one of the most celebrated physicians of his age. In Germany, Agrippa of Nettesheim, philosopher, alchemist and physician, had a predilection for magic and the occult sciences, if we are to judge from his works published in 1530 and 1531, _i.e._, _De incertitudianæ et vanitate scientiarum_, _De occulta philosophia_, in which he mentions action induced at a distance and forsees the discovery of magnetism.

Like him, his contemporaries, Raymond Lulle, in Spain, and J. Reuchlin, published books on the Cabala (_Kabbala_), and, in Italy, Porta founded, at Naples, the _Academy of Secrets_, for the development of occult sciences, which are explained in his treatise _De Magia Naturali_.

At almost the same epoch, Paracelsus, Professor at Basle, claimed that he possessed the universal panacea; that he had found the secret of prolonging life, by magic and astrology, for he diagnosed diseases through the influence of the stars. After him, Van Helmont defended animal magnetism, and gave himself up to the study of occult science, in company with his student, Rodolphe Goclenius.

In the sixteenth century, Fernel, who, inasmuch as he was a mathematician and an astronomer, published his _Cosmotheria_, where he indicated the means of measuring a meridian degree with exactitude; his remarkable works on physiology (_De naturali parte medicinæ_, 1542), on pathology and therapeutics, which gave him the nickname of the French Galen. Fernel fully admitted the action of evil spirits on the body of man; he believed that adorers of the Demons could, by the aid of imprecations, enchantments, invocations and talismans, draw fallen angels into the bodies of their enemies, and that these Demons could then cause serious sickness. He compared the _possessed_ to maniacs, but that the former had the gift of reading the past and divining the most secret matters. He affirmed that he had been witness of a case of delirium caused by the presence of the Devil in a patient, that which was denied by several doctors at the epoch.[61] He also believed in lycanthropy.... In the same century, another of our medical glories, Ambroise Pare, the Father of French surgery, also adopted the theory of the Inquisitors regarding sorcery in his works,[62] in which may be found his remarkable anatomical and surgical discoveries. We read the following quaintly conceived passage: “Demons can suddenly change themselves into any form they wish; one often sees them transformed into serpents, frogs, bats, crows, goats, mules, dogs, cats, wolves, and bulls; they can be transmuted into men as well as into angels of light; they howl in the night and make infernal noises as though dragging chains, _they move chairs and tables_, rock cradles, turn the leaves of books, count money, throw down buckets, etc., etc. They are known by many names, such as cacodemons, incubi, succubi, coquemares, witches, hobgoblins, goblins, bad angels, Satan, Lucifer, etc.

“The actions of Satan are supernatural and incomprehensible, passing human understanding, and we can no more understand them than we can comprehend why the loadstone attracts the needle. Those who are possessed by demons can speak with the tongue drawn out of their mouth, through the belly and by other natural parts; they speak unknown languages, cause earthquakes, make thunder, clear up the weather, drag up trees by the roots, move a mountain from one place to another, raise castles in the air and put them back in their places without injury, and can fascinate and dazzle the human eye.

“_Incubi_ are demons in the disguise of men, who copulate with female sorcerers; _succubi_ are demons disguised as women, who practice vile habits not only on sleeping, but wakeful men.”

“Ambroise Pare,” says Calmeil, “believed that demons _hoarded up all kinds of foreign bodies in their victims’ persons_, such as old netting, bones, horse-shoes, nails, horsehair, pieces of wood, serpents, and other curious odds and ends, and cites the wellknown case of Ulrich Neussersser.”

The celebrated surgeon concludes from this that “it was the Devil who made the iron blades and other articles found in the stomach and intestines of the unfortunate Ulrich.”

What would Pare have thought had he seen the strange objects so commonly found by modern surgeons in ovarian cysts? How many demons would it take to produce the numerous objects noticed at the present day?

Happily these demonological physicians accepted purely and simply the suggestion that demons could act on men, and abandoned the victims to the tender mercy of the theologians and their tools the lawyers. Yet, even in this time of atrocities there were a few courageous physicians who struggled for humanity as against ecclesiastical despotism. Let us quote, according to Calmeil, one Francoise Ponzinibus, who destroyed one by one all the arguments that served to support the criminal code against demons. It was this brave doctor who dared to write that demonidolatry constituted a true disease; that all the sensations leading the ignorant to believe in _spirits_ who adored the Devil were due to a depraved moral and physical condition; that it was false that certain persons could isolate their souls from their bodies at night and thus leave their homes for far off places inhabited by demons; that the accouplement of sorcerers and all the crimes attributed to them could not be logically supposed but must be legally proven; that it was cruel and atrocious to burn demented people at the stake for witchcraft.

Let us also quote from Andre Alciat, another courageous physician, who dared accuse an Inquisitor of murdering a multitude of insane people on the plea of witchcraft. He considered the vigil (_sabbat_) of sorcerers as an absurd fiction, and saw in so-called _possessed_ only so many poor demented women given over to fanatical delusions and wild dreams.

Paul Zacchias, the author of “Medico-Legal Questions” (_Questiones Medico-legales_), a work in which he shows himself to be as wise an alienist as Doctor of Laws. The avowed and open enemy of supernaturalism, he boldly denounced the cruelties committed against the demented.

Let us finally inscribe on the roll of honor, with our respects, the name of Jean Wier,[63] or rather of Joannes Wierus, physician to the Duke of Cleves, who studied in Paris, where he received the degree of doctor, and was afterwards the disciple of Cornelius Agrippa, a partisan of demonology. Like the latter, Jean Weir believed in astrology, alchemy, the cabala, sorcerers and female mediums; likewise in demons who possessed control of human beings through magic power. But in his works that he published in 1560 he proclaims the innocence of those unfortunates punished for witchcraft, and declares them to have been insane and melancholic; likewise asserting that they could have been cured by proper treatment. He declares that he is fully persuaded that sorcerers, witches, and lycanthropic patients who were burned at the stake were crazy people whose reason had been overthrown; and that the faults imputed to these unfortunates were dangerous to none but themselves; that the possessed were dupes to false sensations that had been experienced during the time of their ecstatic transports or in their sleep.

Weir[64] insisted that the homicidal monomania attributed to the inhabitants of Vaud should not be credited, and was not except by fools and fanatics; while the so-called vampires, whose blood was shed on the banks of Lake Leman, the borders of the Rhine, and on the mountains of Savoy, had never been guilty of crimes, nor murders especially, and cites cases of condemnation where the _insanity_ or _imbecility_ of the victims was incontestible. He declares, in general, that all sorcerers are irresponsible, that they are insane, and that the devils possessing them can be combatted without exorcism. “Above all,” says he to the judges and executioners, “do not kill, do not torture. Have you fear that these poor frightened women have not suffered enough already? Think you they can have more misery than that they already suffer? Ah! my friends, even though they merited punishment, rest assured of one thing, _that their disease is enough_.” Beautiful words, worthy of a grand philosopher. Born in the sixteenth century, he believed in magic and sorcery; but as a physician he pleaded for the saving of human life, and as a man he frowned down the crimes committed on the scaffold. “The duty of the monk,” says he, “is to study how to cure the soul rather than to destroy it.” Alas! he preached his doctrine in the barren desert of ecclesiastical fanaticism.

Although, less well known than those names just mentioned, we must not forget to note that group of talented men who contributed with Ponzinibus, Alciat, Zacchias and Jean Wier in the restoration to medicine of the study of facts, thus freeing the healing art of many speculative ideas derived from the Middle Ages; we allude to such men as Baillou, Francois de la Boe (_Sylvius_), Felix Plater, Sennert, Willis, Bonet, and many other gallant souls who assisted in freeing medicine from the religious autocracy that overshadowed it,—men who were the _avant couriers_ of modern positivism.

Many of those who had preceded these writers had been learned men and remarkable physicians, to whom anatomy, clinical medicine and surgery owed important discoveries, but the majority of these were not brave enough to defend their intelligence against religious superstitions. In some instances, indeed, they were even the criminal accessories of the theologians and inquisitors. In acting in adhesion to Demonological ideas, their very silence on grand psychological questions evidences their weakness,—we are sorry to say this,—and lowers them from the high position of humanitarians; the masses of the people of the Middle Ages owed the majority of their medical savants nothing on the score of liberty of conscience.

THE BEWITCHED, POSSESSED, SORCERERS AND DEMONOMANIACS.

In order to fully comprehend the Demonomania of the Middle Ages, it is necessary to previously analyze the different elements composing the medical constitution of the epoch, and, investigate under what morbid influences such strange _neuroses_ were produced.

These influences, we shall find from thence, in the state of intellectual and moral depression provoked by the successive pestilential epidemics, which, from the sixth century decimated the population of Western Europe; in the disposition of the human mind towards supernaturalism, which had invaded all classes of society; in the terrors excited by the tortures of an ever flaming and eternal hell; in the fright, caused by the cruel and atrocious decisions of brutal Inquisitors, and their fanatical tools, the officers of the law. We find too, that a frightful condition of misery had weakened the inhabitants of city and country, morally and physically, inducing a multitude of women to openly enter into prostitution for protection and nutrition, owing to the iniquity of a despotic regime; then too, there were added bad conditions of hygiene and moral decadence, so that intelligence was sapped and undermined, together with a breaking down of the vitality of the organism.

In the recital of the miseries of the Middle Age, made by a master hand, by an illustrious historian, who bases his assertions on antique chronicles whose veracity cannot be questioned, we read the following: “Society was impressed with a profound sentiment of sadness, it was as though a pall of grief covered the generation; the whole world given over to plagues; the invasion by barbarians; horrible diseases; terrible famines decimating the masses by starvation; violent wind storms; greyish skies with foggy days; the darkness of night casting its shroud everywhere; a cry of lamentation ascends to Heaven through all this gruesome period. That sombre witness, our contemporary Glaber, fully indicates the position of society devoured by war, famine and the plague. It was thought that the order of seasons and the laws of the elements, that up to that period governed the world, had fallen back into the original chaos. It was thought that the end of the human race had arrived.”[65]

When the epidemic of Demonomania attacked the earth, at the end of the fifteenth century, more than ten generations had undergone the depressive action of the superstitions and false ideas spread broadcast by religion. Heredity had prepared the earth, the human mind being in an absolute condition of receptivity for all pathological actions. The education of children was confined to teaching them foolish doctrines, diabolical legends, mysterious practices that weakened their judgments. With the progression, from childhood to majority, a vague sentiment of uneasiness was experienced with a constant preoccupation on the subject of conscience and sin. In full adult age, as we have observed, came religious monomania, with acute sexual excitement, and persistent erotic ideas.

Arriving at this phase of the situation, some became theomaniacs, others demonomaniacs, saying they were possessed by sorcery, under the influence of genesic and other senses, with psychal hallucinations, and in some cases, psycho-sensorial illusions. These fictitious perception were produced either through the influence of the mind, assailed by supernatural conceptions, or by morbid impressions transmitted most often by the great sympathetic, or, finally, by an unknown action arising from the exterior.

Under the influence of these hallucinations, which manifested themselves in a state of somnambulism, or during physiological sleep, the recollection persisting to the after awakening, the Demonomaniac responded to those asking questions, that he had heard the confused noises made by the sorcerers at their _vigil_, had heard also the conversation of the devils, and had seen scenes of the wildest prostitution enacted by the demons; that fantastic animals were perceived; that strange odors of a diabolical nature, the savor of rotten meat, and corrupt human flesh, tainted blood of new born babes, and other noisome things had been smelled; that these effluvias were horrible, repulsive, nauseating, combined with the stink of sorcerers and the sulphurous vapors of magical perfumes; that he felt himself touched by supernatural beings who had the lightness of smoke or mist, and wafted away in the air. The hallucinations of the genital senses had led him to believe he had carnal connection, always of a painful nature, with succubi. When the victim to these delusions was a woman, she had the impression of having been brutally violated or deflowered, and some women declared they oftentimes experienced the voluptuous sensations of an amorous coition.

These hallucinations developed one after the other; those belonging to the anesthetized class, coming first, those belonging to the genesic class, coming last. The complexity of their symptoms produced what we call _dedoublement_, or a dual personality. Those _possessed_, claimed to be in the power of a demon, who entered their body by one of the natural passages, sporting with their person, placing itself in apposition with any place in their organism, proposing all sorts of erotic acts, natural and unnatural, whispering shameless propositions in their ears, blasphemy against God, forcing them to sign a contract with the Devil in their own blood.

The nervous state in which such weak minded creatures were found, victims to nocturnal hallucinations, insensibly induced a species of permanent somnambulism, during which they acquired a particularly morbid personality. They affirmed themselves to be sorcerers possessed by demons. When this personality disappeared, and the patient returned to a normal condition, a simple suggestion was all sufficient to cause the reappearance of the hallucination. This explains why so many individuals accused of sorcery, denied at first what they afterwards affirmed. When the Judge demanded with an air of authority, what they had done at the witch meeting, (_vigil_), they entered into a most precise recital of minute details, and all the circumstances surrounding the nocturnal reunions of demons and their victims; and, by reason of this crazy avowal, or so called confession were burned at the stake for participation in diabolical practices.

In the _Chronicles of Enguarrand, of Monstrelet_, a truthful and trustworthy historian of the incidents of his time, we find a description of the famous _epidemics_ of sorcery in Artois, which caused such a multitude of victims to be burnt at the stake, by order of the Inquisition. The facts recounted by this celebrated writer support the interpretations we have given to these phenomena. He expresses himself as follows:

“In 1459, in the village of Arras, in the country of Artois, came a terrible and pitiable case of what we named _Vaudoisie_. I know not why.” “Those possessed, who were men and women, said that they were carried off every night by the Devil, from places where they resided, and suddenly found themselves in other places, in woods or deserts, when they met a great number of other men and women, who consorted with a large Devil in the disguise of a man, who never showed his face. And this Demon read, and prescribed laws and commandments for them, which they were obliged to obey; then made his assembled guests kiss his buttocks; after which, he presented each adept a little money, and feasted them on wines and rich foods, after which the lights were suddenly extinguished, and strange men and women knew each other carnally in the darkness, after which they were suddenly wafted through space, back to their own habitations, and awakened as if from a dream.

“This hallucination was experienced by several notable persons of the city of Arras, and other places, men and women, _who were so terribly tormented, that they confessed_, and in confessing, acknowledged that they had seen at these witch reunions many prominent persons, among others, prelates, nobles, Governors of towns and villages, _so that when the judges examined them, they put the names of the accused in the mouths of those who testified_, and they persisted in such statements although forced by pains and tortures to say that they had seen otherwise, and the innocent parties named were likewise put in prison, and tortured so much, that confessions were forced from them; and _these too, were burned at the stake most inhumanely_.