The Devils of Loudun

  In a word, the official attitude of the Church was such that, though disbelief in witchcraft was undoubtedly a heresy, the disbeliever was in no immediate danger of punishment. Nevertheless, he remained gravely suspect and, if he persisted in his false doctrine after being apprised of the Catholic truth, might get into serious trouble. Hence the caution displayed by Montaigne in the eleventh chapter of his Third Book. “The witches of my neighbourhood are in danger of their lives when anyone brings to bear fresh witness to the reality of their visions. To reconcile the examples which Holy Writ gives us of such things—examples most certain and irrefutable—and to bring them into comparison with those that happen in modern times, since we can see neither the causes of them nor the means by which they took place, needs a greater ingenuity than ours.” It may be that God alone can tell what is a miracle and what is not. God must be believed; but do we have to believe a mere man, “one of ourselves, who is amazed at his own telling—and he must necessarily be amazed, if he is not out of his wits.” And Montaigne concludes with one of those golden sentences which deserve to be inscribed over the altar of every church, above the bench of every magistrate, on the walls of every lecture hall, every senate and parliament, every government office and council chamber. “After all” (write the words in neon, write in letters as tall as a man!) “after all, it is rating one’s conjectures at a very high price to roast a man alive on the strength of them.”

  Half a century later Selden showed himself less cautious, but also less humane. “The law against witches does not prove that there be any; but it punishes the malice of those people that use such means to take away men’s lives. If one should profess that by turning his hat thrice, and crying ‘Buzz,’ he could take away a man’s life, though in truth he could do no such thing, yet this were a just law made by the State that whosoever should turn his hat thrice and cry ‘Buzz,’ with an intention to take away a man’s life, shall be put to death.” Selden was enough of a sceptic to disapprove the elevation of conjectures to the rank of dogmas; but at the same time he was lawyer enough to think that roasting a man alive for thinking he was a witch might be right and proper. Montaigne had also been bred to the law; but his mind had obstinately refused to take the legalistic stain. When he thought of witches, he found himself considering, not their punishable malice, but their perhaps not incurable malady. “In all conscience,” he writes, “I should rather have prescribed them hellebore” (a drug supposed to be effective in purging melancholy and therefore in curing madness) “than hemlock.”

  The first systematic assaults against the practice of witch-hunting and the theory of diabolic intervention came from the German physician, Johann Weier, in 1563, and from Reginald Scot, the Kentish squire, who published his Discovery of Witchcraft in 1584. The nonconformist Gifford and the Anglican Harsnett shared Scot’s scepticism in regard to contemporary instances of witchcraft, but could not go so far as he did in questioning the Biblical references to possession, magic and pacts with the devil.

  Over against the sceptics we find a notable array of believers. First in eminence as in time stands the great Jean Bodin who tells us that he wrote his Démonomanie des Sorciers, among other reasons, “to serve as an answer to those who endeavour, by their books, as far as possible to excuse sorcerers; insomuch as it seems as if they were influenced by the devil himself to publish these fine books.” Such sceptics, Bodin thinks, deserve to be sent to the stake along with the witches whom their doubts serve to protect and justify.

  In his Demonologie James I took up the same position. The rationalistic Weier, he says, is an apologist for sorcerers, and by his book he “betrays himself to have been one of that profession.”

  Of James I’s eminent contemporaries, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Bacon seem to have been on the side of the believers. Later in the century we find the case for witchcraft being argued in England by philosophers like Henry More and Gudworth, by learned physicians and scholars such as Sir Thomas Browne and Glanvil, and by lawyers of the calibre of Sir Matthew Hale and Sir George Mackenzie.

  In seventeenth-century France all the theologians accepted the reality of witchcraft; but not all of the clergy were practising witch-hunters. To many the whole business seemed extremely indecorous and a menace to good order and public tranquillity. They deplored the zeal of their more fanatical colleagues and did their best to restrain it. A similar situation existed among the lawyers. Some of them were only too happy to burn a woman “pour avoir, en pissant dans un trou, composé une nuée de grêle qui ravagea le territoire de son village” (this particular burning took place at Dôle, in 1610); but there were others, the moderates, who believed, no doubt, in the theory of witches, but were unwilling, in practice, to proceed against them.

  But under an absolute monarchy the decisive opinion is that of the King. Louis XIII was much concerned with the devil, but his son was not. In 1672 Louis XIV gave orders that all the persons recently condemned for witchcraft by the Parlement of Rouen should have their sentences commuted to banishment. The Parlement protested; but their arguments, the theological no less than the legal, left the Monarch unmoved. It was his good pleasure that these witches should not be burned, and that was sufficient, that was that.

  When considering the events which took place at Loudun we must clearly distinguish between the alleged possession of the nuns and the alleged cause of that possession—the magic arts employed by Grandier. In what follows I shall deal in the main with the question of Grandier’s guilt, leaving the problem of possession to be considered in a later chapter.

  Father Tranquille, a member of one of the earlier teams of exorcists, published in 1634 a True Relation of the Just Proceedings Observed in the Matter of the Possession of the Ursulines of Loudun and in the Trial of Urbain Grandier. The title is deceptive; for the pamphlet is not a true relation of anything, but merely a polemic, a rhetorical defence of the exorcists and the judges against what was quite evidently a general scepticism and an almost universal disapprobation. In 1634, it is clear, most educated people were doubtful of the reality of the nuns’ possession, were convinced of Grandier’s innocence and were shocked and disgusted by the iniquitous conduct of his trial. Father Tranquille rushed into print in the hope that a little pulpit eloquence would bring his readers to a more proper frame of mind. His efforts were not successful. True, the King and Queen were firm believers; but their courtiers, almost to a man, were not. Of the persons of quality who came to see the exorcisms, very few believed in the genuineness of the possession—and, of course, if the possession were not real, then Grandier could not be guilty. Most of the visiting physicians came away with the conviction that the phenomena they had seen were all too natural. Ménage, Théophraste Renaudot, Ismaél Boulliau—all the men of letters who wrote about Grandier after his death stoutly maintained his innocence.

  On the side of the believers were the great masses of illiterate Catholics. (The illiterate Protestants, it goes without saying, were in this case unanimously sceptical.) That all the exorcists believed in Grandier’s guilt and the genuineness of the possession seems certain. They believed even when, like Mignon, they had helped to fake the evidence which sent Grandier to the stake. (The history of spiritualism makes it very clear that fraud, especially pious fraud, is perfectly compatible with faith.) Of the opinions of the mass of the clergy we know next to nothing. As professional exorcists, the members of the religious orders were presumably on the side of Mignon, Barré and the rest. But what of the secular priests? Did they care to believe, and to preach, that one of their number had sold his soul to the devil and put a spell on seventeen Ursulines?

  We know at least that among the higher clergy opinion was sharply divided. The Archbishop of Bordeaux was convinced that Grandier was innocent and that the nuns were suffering from a combination of Canon Mignon and furor uterinus. The Bishop of Poitiers, on the other hand, was convinced that the nuns were really possessed and that Grandier was a sorcerer. And what of the supreme ecclesiastical aut
hority, what of the Cardinal-Duke? In one context, as we shall see, Richelieu was completely sceptical; in another he exhibited the faith of a charcoal-burner. The thing was obviously a hoax; and yet, in a Pickwickian sense, and sometimes even in a non-Pickwickian sense, it was all perfectly true.

  Magic, whether white or black, was the art and science of compassing natural ends by supernatural (though not divine) means. All witches made use of magic and the powers of more or less evil spirits; but some of them were also adherents of what in Italy was called la vecchia religione.

  “In order to clear the ground,” writes Miss Margaret Murray in the introduction of her valuable study, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, “I make a sharp distinction between Operative Witchcraft and Ritual Witchcraft. Under Operative Witchcraft I class all charms and spells, whether used by a professed witch or a professed Christian, whether intended for good or for evil, for killing or for curing. Such charms and spells are common to every nation and country, and are practised by the priests and people of every religion. They are part of the common heritage of the human race. . . . Ritual Witchcraft—or, as I propose to call it, the Dianic cult—embraces the religious beliefs and ritual of the people known in late mediaeval times as ‘Witches.’ The evidence proves that underlying the Christian religion was a cult practised by many classes of the community, chiefly, however, by the more ignorant or those in the less thickly inhabited parts of the country. It can be traced back to pre-Christian times and appears to be the ancient religion of Western Europe.”

  In that year of grace, sixteen hundred and thirty-two, more than a thousand years had gone by since Western Europe was ‘converted to Christianity’; and yet the ancient fertility religion, considerably corrupted by the fact of being chronically ‘agin the government,’ was still alive, still boasted its confessors and heroic martyrs, still had an ecclesiastical organization—identical, according to Cotton Mather, to that of his own Congregational Church. The fact of the old faith’s survival seems somewhat less astonishing, when we remember that, after four centuries of missionary effort, the Indians of Guatemala are not perceptibly more Catholic today than they were in the first generation after the coming of Alvarado.1 In another seven or eight hundred years the religious situation in Central America may have come, perhaps, to resemble that which prevailed in seventeenth-century Europe, where a majority of Christians bitterly persecuted a minority attached to the older faith.

  (In some districts the members of the Dianic cult and their fellow travellers may actually have constituted a majority of the population. Rémy, Boguet and de Lancre have left accounts respectively of Lorraine, the Jura and the Basque country, as they found them at the turn of the seventeenth century. From their books it is clear that in these outlying regions most people were, to some extent at least, of the old religion. Hedging their bets, they worshipped God by day and the devil at night. Among the Basques many priests used to celebrate both kinds of Mass, the black as well as the white. Lancre burned three of these eccentric clergymen, lost five who escaped from the condemned cell, and vehemently suspected a host of others.)

  The central ceremony of Ritual Witchcraft was the so-called ‘Sabbath’—a word of unknown origin, having no relation to its Hebrew homonym. Sabbaths were celebrated four times a year—on Candlemas Day, 2nd February; on Rood Mass Day, 1st May; on Lammas Day, 1st August; and on the eve of All Hallows, 31st October. These were great festivals, often attended by hundreds of devotees, who came from considerable distances. Between Sabbaths there were weekly ‘Esbats’ for small congregations in the villages where the ancient religion was still practised. At all high Sabbaths the devil himself was invariably present, in the person of some man who had inherited, or otherwise acquired, the honour of being the incarnation of the two-faced god of the Dianic cult. The worshippers paid homage to the god by kissing his reverse face—a mask worn, beneath an animal’s tail, on the devil’s backside. There was then, for some at least of the female devotees, a ritual copulation with the god, who was equipped for this purpose with an artificial phallus of horn or metal. This ceremony was followed by a picnic (for the Sabbaths were celebrated out of doors, near sacred trees or stones), by dancing and finally by a promiscuous sexual orgy that had, no doubt, originally been a magical operation for increasing the fertility of the animals on which primitive hunters and herdsmen depend for their livelihood. The prevailing atmosphere at the Sabbaths was one of good fellowship and mindless, animal joy. When captured and brought to trial, many of those who had taken part in the Sabbath resolutely refused, even under torture, even at the stake, to abjure the religion which had brought them so much happiness.

  In the eyes of the Church and of the civil magistrates membership in the Devil’s Party was an aggravation of the crime of witchcraft. A witch who had attended the Sabbath was worse than a witch who had strictly confined herself to private practice. To attend the Sabbath was to profess openly that one preferred the Dianic Cult to Christianity. Moreover, the witches’ organization was a secret society which might be used by ambitious leaders for political purposes. That Bothwell had thus made use of the Scottish covens seems almost certain. Still more certain is the fact that Elizabeth and her Privy Council were convinced, rightly or wrongly, that foreign and native Catholics were employing witches and magicians to take the Queen’s life. In France, according to Bodin, the sorcerers constituted a kind of Mafia, with members in every class of society and branches in every town and village.

  That his crime might seem more abominable, Grandier was accused at his trial not merely of operative witchcraft, but also of participation in the rites of the Sabbath, of membership in the diabolic church.

  The spectacle thus evoked of a pupil of the Jesuits solemnly renouncing his baptism, of a priest hurrying from the altar to do homage to the devil, of a grave and learned ecclesiastic dancing jigs with conjurers and tumbling in the hay with an assortment of witches, goats and incubi, was one well calculated to appal the pious, to tickle the groundlings and to bring joy to the Protestants.

  CHAPTER VI

  D

  E CERISAY’S preliminary investigations had left him convinced that there was no genuine possession—only a sickness, improved by some little fraud on the part of the nuns, by a great deal of malice on the part of Canon Mignon and by the superstition, fanaticism and professional self-interest of the other ecclesiastics involved in the affair. There could be no cure, it was obvious, until the exorcisms had been stopped. But when he tried to put an end to these suggestions which were systematically driving the nuns out of their wits, Mignon and Barré triumphantly produced a written order from the Bishop, charging them to go on exorcizing the Ursulines until further notice. Unwilling to risk a scandal, de Cerisay gave his permission for the exorcisms to continue, but insisted on being present during the performance. On one of these occasions, it is recorded, there was a terrifying noise in the chimney and a cat suddenly appeared in the fireplace. The animal was pursued, caught, sprinkled with holy water, signed with the cross and adjured in Latin to depart. After which it was discovered that this devil in disguise was the nuns’ pet Tom, who had been out on the tiles and was taking a short cut home. The laughter was loud and Rabelaisian.

  Next day Mignon and Barré had the impudence to shut the convent door in de Cerisay’s face. With his fellow magistrates he was kept waiting outside in the autumnal weather, while, contrary to his orders, the two priests exorcized their victims without official witnesses. Returning to his chambers, the indignant judge dictated a letter to the exorcists. Their actions, he declared, were such as to create “a vehement suspicion of trickery and suggestion.” Moreover, “the Superior of the convent having publicly accused and defamed Grandier, by saying that he had a compact with the devils, nothing thereafter should have been done in secret; on the contrary, everything must now be done in the face of justice and in our presence.” Alarmed by so much firmness, the exorcists apologized and reported that the nuns had calmed down and that consequently furth
er exorcisms would, for the time being, be unnecessary.

  Meanwhile Grandier had ridden to Poitiers to appeal to the Bishop. But when he called, M. de la Rochepozay was indisposed and could only send a message by his chaplain to the effect that “M. Grandier should sue before the royal judges and that he, the Bishop, would be most happy if he could obtain justice in this affair.”

  The parson returned to Loudun and at once applied to the Bailli for a restraining order against Mignon and his accomplices. De Cerisay promptly issued an injunction forbidding anyone, of whatever rank or quality, to harm or traduce the said Curé of Saint-Pierre. At the same time he expressly ordered Mignon to do no more exorcizing. The Canon retorted that he was answerable only to his ecclesiastical superiors and that he did not recognize the Bailli’s authority in a matter which, since it involved the devil, was wholly spiritual.

  In the interval Barré had returned to his parishioners at Chinon. There were no more public exorcisms. But every day Canon Mignon spent long hours with his penitents, reading them chapters from Father Michaelis’s best-selling report of the Gauffridy case, assuring them that Grandier was as great a magician as his Provençal colleague and that they too had been bewitched. By this time the behaviour of the good sisters had become so eccentric that the parents of their pupils took fright; soon the boarders were all withdrawn and such few day-pupils as still ventured into the convent brought back the most disquieting reports. Halfway through their arithmetic lesson, Sister Claire of St. John had started to laugh uncontrollably, as though someone were tickling her. In the refectory Sister Martha had had a fight with Sister Louise of Jesus. What screaming! And the bad language!