In his account of the possessed nuns of Loudun, Rossell Hope Robbins rejects even the ‘psychological’ explanation, and declares that the nuns only pretended to be possessed in order to cause a downfall of the lecherous priest Urbain Grandier. The nuns went into violent convulsions, spoke in hoarse voices, and ‘blasphemed’ after the usual manner of demons. When Grandier himself was called in to exorcise them, they accused him of being the cause of their possession. In 1634, Grandier was tried and found guilty, and burned alive. But the possession of the nuns continued after his death.
In the case of the possessed nuns of Aix-en-Provence (1609-11), the ‘focus’ was a young nun, Madeleine de la Palud. She fell in love with her confessor, Father Louis Gaufridi, who seems to have been as much a ‘man of the world’ as Grandier, and began to go into convulsions, howling and blaspheming. Other nuns caught the ‘infection’; Gaufridi was horribly tortured and burned, being first strangled.
Poltergeists are thought to be mischief-making ‘low-grade’ entities feeding on surplus energies exuded by certain people.
CHAPTER 22
The Louvier Nuns
No case illustrates more strikingly the curious mixture of sexuality and religious emotion that lies at the root of witchcraft than that of the Louviers nuns.
Madeleine Bavent was an orphan who was born in Rouen in 1607, brought up by relatives, and apprenticed to a dressmaker.Together with other girls she sewed Church vestments; naturally, they saw a great deal of priests. One of these, a Franciscan named Fr Bonnetemps (a symbolically appropriate name) had already seduced three of the girls, and now did the same with Madeleine. Madeleine decided to enter a Franciscan convent—of St Louis and Elizabeth—at Louviers.
The convent had been founded recently—in 1616—and if the later confessions of the nuns are to be accepted, was a hot-bed of vice from the beginning. The elderly priest, Fr David, was (according to Montague Summers) an adherent of the sect of Manichees—that is to say, a dualist who believed that this world is created by the Devil (i.e. a Cathar.) But this hardly explains why he seems to have encouraged sexual licence, encouraging the nuns to walk around naked, and had no objection to their engaging in lesbian practices. Madeleine later declared that Fr David had habitually made her receive communion with breasts exposed. Rossell Hope Robbins states that the Louviers nuns received communion naked ‘in token of poverty and humility’. But Madeleine later alleged that she and Fr David engaged in mutual masturbation, and that he was in the habit of fondling her indecently.
When Fr David died, his place was taken by Fr Mathurin Picard, who became chaplain in 1628, and his assistant, Fr Thomas Boullé. At her Easter confession, Fr Picard told Madeleine he loved her, and continued Fr David’s practice of indecent caresses. Thereafter he made a habit of handling ‘the most private parts of my body’ during confession; he also raped her—or at least, forced intercourse on her—several times, so she became pregnant. As no mention is made of a child she presumably miscarried—possibly not through natural causes. She was only one of many nuns who were the mistresses of the priests.
In 1634, two sisters became ‘possessed’, writhing on the ground and foaming at the mouth, but the matter was hushed up. Picard died in 1642, and Boullé took over. Now the signs of demonic possession reappeared more violently than ever, with many nuns writhing and screaming on the ground. In the following year, the matter came to the attention of M. François Péricard, Bishop Evreux, and with the help of ‘several Capuchin fathers of great experience’, he began to investigate. Soon, the horrified priests were listening to incredible confessions of witches’ Sabbats and intercourse with demons. Madeleine alleged that she was usually awakened before midnight—several nights a week—and conducted to a Sabbat in a nearby house. There a number of priests, sometimes dressed ‘half as animals’, performed a Black Mass, reading from a ‘book of blasphemies’, and performing various sexual rites with sacred wafers. She claimed that when everyone stabbed the Host with sharp knives, small drops of blood gathered underneath it. She also claimed that on one occasion, a woman brought her newly born baby, which was crucified. Two men who had come to watch were so horrified that they wanted to leave; they were not allowed to escape alive.
The nuns seem to have confessed to all these abominations, and laid the blame on Madeleine Bavent—who, together with the Mother Superior, seems to have been Picard’s favourite. Madeleine declared that she had also been visited by the Devil in the form of a huge black cat, which she found sitting in her cell ‘exhibiting a huge penis just like a man’s’; when she tried to fly, it ‘dragged me forcibly on the bed, and then violently ravished me, causing me to experience the most peculiar sensation’.
Madeleine was condemned as a witch and expelled from the convent; she was placed in an Ursuline convent in Rouen, where she attempted suicide, was treated with great harshness, and finally died in 1647 at the age of forty.
Boullé and several others—including priests—were arrested, and Boullé and another priest named Duval were publicly burned. The corpse of Fr Picard was exhumed and burned. Two other priests were acquitted because the evidence against them came from convicted criminals. The nuns were scattered throughout other convents.
In retrospect it is hard to see what truth lies behind this incredible story. A Dr Yvelin, a royal physician, who examined the ‘possessed’ nuns, said he detected imposture and deceit, and thought they had been rehearsed for their exorcisms. Another witness declared that his evidence about the Black Mass had been suggested to him by the Bishop of Evreux. (He made this confession before being burned for heresy, so it seems likely that it was true.)
The likeliest explanation is that the nuns had been drawn piecemeal into corruption by Fr David, whom Robbins declares to have been a member of the Illuminati. This does not refer to the later sect founded by Adam Weishaupt, but to a sect of the late Middle Ages that believed that sex is a holy sacrament. It seems just possible that Fr David was a member of the ‘Old Religion’ of the moon goddess. (The mention of men dressed ‘half as animals’ suggests this.) Being younger and more virile, his successor Fr Picard made more active use of his opportunities. After Picard’s death, some of the nuns convinced themselves that they were damned and—like Janet’s patient Achille—began to suffer delusions. The Capuchin investigators, horrified by these tales of sexual orgies—possibly envious—felt that if the matter was to be dragged into open court, it would be preferable to involve the Devil and his legions, just to emphasise that everyone concerned was damned; otherwise, other convents might begin to find the whole tale morbidly fascinating ...
CHAPTER 23
Matthew Hopkins—The Rise and Fall of The Witchfinder General
The career of Matthew Hopkins had the effect of virtually ending the witchcraft persecution in England. Even the Revd. Montague Summers admits that his insincerity ‘made his name stink in men’s nostrils’, and described him as ‘the foulest of foul parasites, an obscene bird of prey..’
The career of Hopkins snowballed from his first denunciation of a witch in 1644. Hopkins was a not-particularly-successful lawyer, son of a clergyman, who moved to the small village of Manningtree in Essex because he was unable to make a living in Ipswich. It was during the Civil War, East Anglia was on Cromwell’s side, but tensions were considerable. In March 1644, Hopkins became convinced that there were witches who lived in Manningtree, and that they held meetings close to his house. He may possibly have been correct—country areas are full of witches. Hopkins decided that an old woman named Elizabeth Clarke was involved, and denounced her. She was arrested and stripped, to be searched for devil’s marks. They discovered, apparently, something like a supernumerary teat. After being deprived of sleep for days, she confessed to suckling her familiars with it—a spaniel, a rabbit, a greyhound and a polecat. The witch fever spread through the village, and five other women were arrested. Four of these confessed readily to possessing familiars. Thirty two women were eventually thrown into jail, where four
of them died. Twenty eight stood trial in a special court at Chelmsford.
Hopkins now had four assistants to help him in routing out witches, and no doubt this taste of power convinced him that he had discovered the road to fame and success. But it seems fairly certain that he was willing to perjure himself freely from the beginning—he asserted in court that he had seen Elizabeth Clarke’s familiars, and his assistants backed him up. Nineteen women were hanged, on charges ranging from entertaining evil spirits to bewitching people to death. Five of these were reprieved, and the remaining eight were thrown back into jail for further investigations.
Before the Chelmsford trial was finished, Hopkins found himself greatly in demand. In times of war and public misfortune, distractions are welcomed. Hopkins moved around Essex, finding more witches, and accepting payment for his trouble; at Aldeburgh he was paid £6 for finding a witch, and at Stowmarket the local authorities paid him £23. In the days when a working wage was sixpence a day, these were large sums. During his year as witchfinder, Hopkins and his assistants made about £1,000, according to Summers. In Bury St Edmunds, he played his part in having two hundred people arrested; 68 of whom were hanged. He moved around Suffolk and Norfolk, finding witches in every place that invited him, and in a few that he selected for himself.
In April 1646, a Huntingdon clergyman named Gaule attacked Hopkins from the pulpit and published a pamphlet about his methods of ‘torture’. Torture of witches was still forbidden by law in England, but Hopkins used other methods—‘pricking’ for Devil’s marks (areas the Devil had touched were supposed to be insensitive to pain), ‘swimming’—which meant that the bound victim was tossed into a pond, and if she floated, she was innocent—and depriving of sleep for days on end, a method still used in ‘brain washing’. The pamphlet was widely read, and it turned the tide against Hopkins. One historian of witchcraft relates that Hopkins was seized by an angry crowd and made to endure the water ordeal. He was in any case, a sick man. He retired to Manningtree, and died there later that year of tuberculosis.
Robbins estimates that Hopkins was responsible for several hundred hangings (witches in England were never burnt, although the North Berwick witches in Scotland were burned for having plotted against the king’s person). And with his downfall, mass witch trials ceased in England.
CHAPTER 24
The Witches of Salem
The explosion of superstition and violence that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, is still one of the most puzzling episodes in American history. For most writers on the case—including Arthur Miller, who dramatised it in The Crucible—there is no mystery. A few bored and naughty children became obsessed by the voodoo tales of a black servant, and decided to pretend they were bewitched. Egged on by the local minister, a man of paranoid tendencies, they accused various people of witchcraft. The whole thing snowballed until over two hundred people were accused, twenty two of whom were executed or died in prison. Then, as suddenly as it began, the hysteria faded away. And the Salem witchcraft trials virtually ended the ‘witchcraft craze' in America as the downfall of Matthew Hopkins ended it in England.
The case may not be as simple as it looks. Even Rossell Hope Robbins admits ‘motives are very elusive’. Clearly, these children were not really ‘bewitched’. But they behaved in some ways like the ‘possessed’ nuns of Loudun or Aix-en-Provence, or like some teenagers who are the ‘focus’ of poltergeist occurrences.
The Revd. Samuel Parris was not a popular man, for he seems to have been an unpleasant character, mean and bad tempered. He had brought with him from Barbados a number of black servants, including a woman called Tituba, and her husband, ‘John Indian’. During the long winter evenings, Tituba talked to the children about witches and spirits. His daughter Elizabeth, aged nine, her cousin Abigail Williams, aged eleven, and a friend called Ann Putnam, twelve, soon began behaving very oddly, having convulsions, screaming and talking disconnected nonsense. A doctor called in to ‘cure’ Elizabeth said he thought she was bewitched. Other ministers were consulted, and decided that the devil was involved. Questioned—and beaten—by Parris, Tituba agreed that the devil had inspired her to ‘work mischief against the children, and named a pipe-smoking beggar woman named Sarah Good as an accomplice. The children also mentioned Sarah Good as well as a bedridden old woman, Sarah Osborne. When a magistrate named Hathorne asked the girls about their convulsions, they began to moan with pain, and declared that the ‘spirit’ (or spectre) of Sarah Good was biting and pinching them. Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne both denied in court that they knew anything about witchcraft, but Tituba admitted it all with a certain relish; she went on expanding her confessions for three days. Tituba declared that Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne had been present at a witches’ Sabbat, and added that there were two more local women whom she did not know. This caused widespread gossip and speculation. Twelve year old Ann Putnam put an end to this by declaring that one of the witches was a woman called Martha Cory—who had laughed unbelievingly when the girls threw their convulsions—and that the other was a saintly old lady named Rebecca Nurse. A farmer named Proctor—another sceptic—was also accused.
The whole area was now in the grip of a witchcraft scare; people were afraid to go out after dark because witches were supposed to be able to turn themselves into animals or night birds—a remnant of legends of werewolves and vampires. Eight more local children became ‘afflicted’ and screamed out the names of ‘witches’ who were tormenting them. A woman named Bridget Bishop—who had a reputation for being ‘fast’—was tried and executed in June 1692. Sarah Osborne died in prison, but Sarah Good was tried and executed, together with four others, in July. A minister named George Burroughs was denounced, and he was also tried and executed.
The more hysteria increased, the more the girls—now eleven of them—seemed to be tormented by devils. By September, the death toll had increased to twenty, and one unfortunate man—Giles Corey—was literally pressed to death under enormous weights in an effort to force him to confess. He refused (although it would have saved his life) because his goods would have been forfeit to the state, and he had no intention of dying a pauper. His wife was hanged as a witch.
The various girls were called to neighbouring towns to identify witches, and it looked as if the trials and executions would spread to Andover and Boston. The Andover magistrate declined to sign more than forty warrants and had to flee with his wife to escape being tried as a witch. Then the girls began to overreach themselves. They named the wife of the governor, Sir William Phips, as a witch, and the president of Harvard College; the magistrates told them sternly that they were mistaken, and this was the beginning of the end of the persecutions. When Governor Phips returned from fighting Indians on the Canadian border, he dismissed the court and released many of the accused. In further trials, ‘spectral evidence’—the notion that the disembodied spirits of witches could torment their victims—was disallowed, and only three people out of fifty two were condemned. Phips reprieved them, released all others from prison, and the Salem craze ended abruptly about a year after it began. One of the girls Ann Putnam, later confessed that she had been ‘deluded by Satan’ when she accused Rebecca Nurse and others. The Reverend Parris, now attacked and denounced, left Salem with his family. Abigail Williams, according to legend, became a prostitute.
Even Montague Summers agrees that the Salem trials were the result of hysteria and the ‘diseased imaginings of neurotic children’. But he was convinced that there is positive evidence of involvement in witchcraft in a few of the cases. It seems probable that George Burroughs, Bridget Bishop and Martha Carrier were members of a coven—although they had nothing to do with ‘bewitching’ the children.
And what about the children? All writers on the affair assume that they were mischievous, ‘prankish’, and that the whole thing snowballed out of a harmless game. But what was this game? The answer, fairly certainly, is some form of ‘magic’. Tituba was familiar with voodoo and obeah. And the essence o
f voodoo rituals—as David St Clair emphasises in Drum and Candle and Guy Playfair in The Flying Cow—is the evocation of ‘low grade’ spirits to do the bidding of the magician. The three children, bored with the long winter in the dreary New England village, undoubtedly ‘tried out’ what Tituba had taught them. Their intentions were harmless enough—rather like a modern child playing with an ouija board or automatic writing. But two of them at least were at the dangerous age when children become the focus of poltergeist phenomena—Ann Putnam was twelve and looked older. We do not know very much about ‘possession’, and the usual theory is that it is pure hysteria; but again, anyone who takes the trouble to read T. K. Oesterreich’s classic Possession: Demoniacal and Other, or Martin Ebon’s anthology Exorcism: Fact not Fiction will see that there is a very thin dividing line between ‘possession’ and being a focus of poltergeist activity.