“We, Benedict of Montferrand, Bishop of Lausanne, etc., having heard the entreaty of the high and mighty lords of Berne against the inger and the ineffectual and rejectable answer of the latter, and having thereupon fortified ourselves with the Holy Cross, and having before our eyes the fear of God, from whom alone all just judgments proceed, and being advised in this cause by a council of men learned in the law, do therefore acknowledge and avow in this our writing that the appeal against the detestable vermin and inger, which are harmful to herbs, vines, meadows, grain and other fruits, is valid, and that they be exorcised in the person of Jean Perrodet, their defender. In conformity therewith we charge and burden them with our curse, and command them to be obedient and anathematize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, that they turn away from all fields, grounds, enclosures, seeds, fruits and produce, and depart. By virtue of the same sentence I declare and affirm that you are banned and exorcised, and through the power of Almighty God shall be called accursed and shall daily decrease whithersoever you may go, to the end that of you nothing shall remain save for the use and profit of man. Adiungendo aliquid in devotionem populi.” The phrase das si beswärt werden in die person Johannis Perrodeti irs beschirmers does not imply that the vermin or the devils, of which they were supposed to be incarnations, were to be conjured into him, but refer to him merely as their proctor and legal representative. The results of the prosecution, which had been awaited with intense and anxious interest by the people, were received with great joy, and the Bernese government ordered a full report of the proceedings to be made. The ecclesiastical anathema, however, proved to be brutum fulmen; nothing more came of it, says Schilling, “owing to our sins.” Another chronicler adds that God permitted the inger to remain as a plague and a punishment until the people repented of their wickedness and gave evidence of their love and gratitude to Him, namely, by giving to the Church tithes of what the insects had not destroyed.
The Swiss priest in his malediction declares that the inger were not in Noah’s ark and even denies that they are animals properly speaking, stigmatizing them as living corruption, products of spontaneous generation perhaps, or more probably creations of the devil. This position was assumed in order to escape the gross impropriety and glaring incongruity of having the Church of God curse the creatures which God had made and pronounced very good, and afterwards took pains to preserve from destruction by the deluge. This difficulty, always a serious one, was, as we have seen, one of the chief points urged by the counsel for the defence in favour of his clients.
Malleolus gives the following formula for banning serpents and expelling them from human habitations, inculcating incidentally the iniquity of perjury and judicial injustice: “By virtue of this ban and conjuration I command you to depart from this house and cause it to be as hateful and intolerable to you, as the man, who knowingly bears false witness or pronounces an unjust sentence, is to God.” Sometimes the exorcism was in the form of a prayer, as, for example, in that used for the purgation and disinfection of springs and water-courses: “O Lord Jesus, thou who didst bless the river Jordan and wast baptized in it and hast purified and cleansed it to the end that it might be a healing element for the redemption from sin, bless, sanctify and purify this water, so that there may be left in it nothing noxious, nothing pestiferous or contagious, nothing pernicious, but that everything in it may be pure and immaculate, in order that we may use whatever is created in it for our welfare and to thy glory, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.”
In a Latin protocol of legal proceedings in Crollolanza’s Storia del Contado di Chiavenna it is recorded that on June 26, 1659, Capt. J. B. Pestalozzi came, in behalf of the communes of Chiavenna, Mese, Gordona, Prada and Samolico, before the commissioner Hartmann Planta and brought complaint against certain caterpillars on account of the devastations committed by them, demanding that these hurtful creatures should be summoned by the proper sheriff to appear in court on June 28 at a specified hour in order to have a curator and defender appointed, who should answer for them to the plaintiffs. A second document, dated June 28, 1659, and signed by the notary Battista Visconti, certifies that the said summons had been duly issued and five copies of the same been posted each on a tree in the five forests in the territory of the aforesaid five communes. A third document of the same date required the advocate of the accused, Cesare de Peverello, to appear before the court on the following Tuesday, July 1, in behalf of his recusant clients, who were charged with trespassing upon the fields, gardens and orchards and doing great damage therein, instead of remaining in their habitat, the forest. The prosecutors required that they should seek their food in wild and wooded places and cease from ravaging cultivated grounds. A fourth document contains an account of the trial; the pleadings of the respective parties, so far as they are preserved, do not differ essentially from those already quoted. In the fifth and final document the court recognizes the right of the caterpillars to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, provided the exercise of this right “does not destroy or impair the happiness of man, to whom all lower animals are subject.” Accordingly a definite place of abode is to be assigned to them and various places are proposed. The protocol is incomplete, so that we are left in ignorance of the ultimate decision. The whole is written in execrable Latin quite worthy of the subject.
More than half-a-century later the Franciscan friars of the cloister of St. Anthony in the province of Piedade no Maranhão, Brazil, were greatly annoyed by termites, which devoured their food, destroyed their furniture, and even threatened to undermine the walls of the monastery. Application was made to the bishop for an act of interdiction and excommunication, and the accused were summoned to appear before an ecclesiastical tribunal to give account of their conduct. The lawyer appointed to defend them urged the usual plea about their being God’s creatures and therefore entitled to sustenance, and made a good point in the form of an argumentum ad monachum by praising the industry of his clients, the white ants, and declaring them to be in this respect far superior to their prosecutors, the Gray Friars. He also maintained that the termites were not guilty of criminal aggression, but were justified in appropriating the fruits of the fields by the right derived from priority of possession, inasmuch as they had occupied the land long before the monks came and encroached upon their domain. The trial lasted for some time and called forth remarkable displays of legal learning and forensic eloquence, with numerous citations of sacred and profane authorities on both sides, and ended in a compromise, by the terms of which the plaintiffs were obliged to provide a suitable reservation for the defendants, who were commanded to go thither and to remain henceforth within the prescribed limits. In the chronicles of the cloister it is recorded, under date of Jan. 1713, that no sooner was the order of the prelatic judge promulgated by being read officially before the hills of the termites than they all came out and marched in columns to the place assigned. The monkish annalist regards this prompt obedience as conclusive proof that the Almighty endorsed the decision of the court. [Cited by Emile Angel on the authority of Manoel Bernardes’ Nova Floresta, ou Sylva de varios apophthegmas e ditos sentencios espirituaes e moraes, etc. Vol. V., Lisboá, 1747.]
About the middle of the sixteenth century the inhabitants of several villages in Aargau were greatly annoyed by swarms of gadflies and petitioned the Bishop of Constance for relief. In the episcopal rescript, written and signed by the vidame Georg Winterstetter, the people are enjoined to abstain from dancing on Sundays and feast days, from all forms of libidinousness, gambling with cards or dice and other frivolities. These injunctions are followed by prayer and the usual formulas of conjuration and exorcism. The original document was written in Latin and preserved in the archives of Baden in Switzerland, but is now lost. In 1566 the Landamman of Unterwalden, Johannes Wirz, took a German translation of it home with him to be used in case of need against the “vergifteten Würmer,” and deposited it in the archives of Obwalden, where it still remains. It was published in 1898 by Dr. Merz.
In Protestant communities, the priest as exorcist has been superseded, to a considerable extent, by the professional conjurer, who in some portions of Europe is still employed to save crops from devouring insects and similar plagues. A curious instance of this kind is recorded in Görres’ Historisch-Politische Blätter for 1845 (Heft VII. p. 516). A Protestant gentleman in Westphalia, whose garden was devastated by worms, after having tried divers vermicidal remedies in vain, resolved to have recourse to a conjurer. The wizard came and walked about among the vegetables, touching them with a wand and muttering enchantments. Some workmen, who were repairing the roof of a stable near by, made fun of this hocus-pocus and began to throw bits of lime at the conjurer. He requested them to desist, and finally said: “If you don’t leave me in peace, I shall send all the worms up on the roof.” This threat only excited the hilarity of the scoffers, who continued to ridicule and disturb him in his incantations. Thereupon he went to the nearest hedge, cut a number of twigs, each about a finger in length, and placed them against the wall of the stable. Soon the vermin began to abandon the plants and, crawling in countless numbers over the twigs and up the wall, took complete possession of the roof. In less than an hour the men were obliged to stop working and stood in the court below covered with confusion and cabbage-worms.
The writer, who relates this strange incident, fully believes that it actually occurred, and ascribes it to “the force of human faith and the magnetic power of a firm will over nature.” This, too, is the theory held by Paracelsus, who maintained that the effectiveness of a curse lay in the energy of the will, by which the wish, so to speak, concretes into a deed, just as anger directs the arm and actualizes itself in a blow. By “fervent desire” merely, without any physical effort or aggressive act, he deemed it possible to wound a man’s body or to pierce it through as with a sword. He also held that brutes are more easily exorcised or accursed than men, “for the spirit of man resists more than that of the brute.” Similar notions were entertained nearly a century later by Jacob Boehme, who defines magic as “doing in the spirit of the will,” an idea which finds more recent and more scientific expression in Schopenhauer’s doctrine of “the objectivation of the will.” Indeed, Schopenhauer’s postulate of the will as the sole energy and actuality in the universe is only the philosophic statement of an assumption, upon which magicians and medicine-men, enchanters, exorcists and anathematizers have acted more or less in all ages. We have a striking illustration of the workings of some such mysterious, quasi-hyperphysical force in hypnotism, the reality of which it is no longer possible to deny, however wonderful and incomprehensible its manifestations may appear.
It is natural that a religion of individual initiative and personal responsibility, like Protestantism, should put less confidence in theurgic machinery and formularies of ex-cathedral execration than a religion like Catholicism, in which man’s spiritual concerns are entrusted to a hierarchical corporation to be managed according to traditional and infallible methods. This tendency crops out in a decree published at Dresden, in 1559, by “Augustus Duke and Elector,” wherein he commends the “Christian zeal of the worthy and pious parson, Daniel Greysser,” for having “put under ban the sparrows, on account of their unceasing and extremely vexatious chatterings and scandalous unchastity during the sermon, to the hindrance of God’s word and of Christian devotion.” But the Saxon parson, unlike the Bishop of Trier, did not expect that his ban would cause the offending birds to avoid the church or to fall dead on entering it. He relied less on the directly coercive or withering action of the curse than on the human agencies, which he might thereby set at work for the accomplishment of his purpose. By his proscription he put the culprits out of the pale of public sympathy and protection and gave them over as a prey to the spoiler, who was persuaded that he was doing a pious work by exterminating them. It was solemnly enjoined upon the hunter and the fowler to lie in wait for the anathematized sparrows with guns and with snares (durch mancherlei visirliche und listige Wege); and the Elector issued his decree in order to enforce this duty on all good Christians. (See [Appendix E].)
A faded and somewhat droll survival of ecclesiastical excommunication and exorcism is the custom, still prevailing in European countries and some portions of the United States, of serving a writ of ejectment on rats or simply sending them a friendly letter of advice in order to induce them to quit any house, in which their presence is deemed undesirable. Lest the rats should overlook and thus fail to read the epistle, it is rubbed with grease, so as to attract their attention, rolled up and thrust into their holes. Mr. William Wells Newell, in a paper on “Conjuring Rats,” printed in The Journal of American Folk-Lore (Jan.-March, 1892), gives a specimen of such a letter, dated, “Maine, Oct. 31, 1888,” and addressed in business style to “Messrs. Rats and Co.” The writer begins by expressing his deep interest in the welfare of said rats as well as his fears lest they should find their winter quarters in No. 1, Seaview Street, uncomfortable and poorly supplied with suitable food, since it is only a summer residence and is also about to undergo repairs. He then suggests that they migrate to No. 6, Incubator Street, where they “can live snug and happy” in a splendid cellar well stored with vegetables of all kinds and can pass easily through a shed leading to a barn containing much grain. He concludes by stating that he will do them no harm if they heed his advice, otherwise he shall be forced to use “Rough on Rats.” This threat of resorting to rat poison in case of the refusal to accept his kind counsel is all that remains of the once formidable anathema of the Church.