The history of magic

by Éliphas Lévi

The phenomena of hysteria were little understood at the time, and somnambulism was quite unknown; the convulsions of nuns; their bodily motions exceeding all normal human power; their astonishing evidences of second sight were things of a nature to convince the least credulous. A well known atheist of the day, being the Sieur de Kériolet, counsellor in the parliament of Brittany, came to witness the exorcisms and to deride them. The nuns, who had never seen him, addressed him by name and published sins which he supposed to be unknown to anyone. He was so overwhelmed that he passed from one extreme to another, like all hot-headed natures; he shed tears, made his confession and dedicated his remaining days to the strictest asceticism.

The sophistry of the exorcists of Loudun was that absurd unreason which M. de Mirville has the courage to sustain at the present day: the devil is the author of all phenomena which cannot be explained by known laws of Nature. To this illogical maxim they joined another which was, so to speak, an article of faith: the devil who has been duly exorcised is compelled to speak the truth and can therefore be admitted as a witness in the cause of justice.

The unfortunate Grandier was not therefore delivered into the hands of malefactors but rather of raving maniacs, who, strong in their rectitude of conscience, gave the fullest publicity to this incredible prosecution. Such a scandal had never afflicted the church—howling, writhing nuns, making the most obscene gestures, blaspheming, striving to cast themselves on Grandier like the Bacchantes on Orpheus; the most sacred things of religion mixed up with this hideous spectacle and drawn in the filth thereof; amidst all Grandier alone calm, shrugging his shoulders and defending himself with dignity and mildness; in fine, pallid, distraught judges, sweating profusely, and Laubardemont in his red robe, hovering over the conflict, like a vulture awaiting a corpse: such was the prosecution of Urbain Grandier.

Let us say for the honour of humanity that one is compelled to assume good faith in exorcists and judges alike, for such a conspiracy as would be involved in the legal murder of the accused is happily impossible. Monsters are as uncommon as heroes; the mass is composed of mediocrities, equally incapable of great virtues and great crimes. The holiest persons of the day believed in the possession at Loudun; even St. Vincent de Paul was not unacquainted with its history and was asked to give his opinion about it. Richelieu himself, though he might in any case have found some way of getting rid of Grandier, ended by believing him guilty. His death was the crime arising from the ignorance and prejudice of the period; it was a catastrophe rather than a murder.

We spare our readers the details of his tortures: he remained firm, resigned, patient, although confessing nothing; he did not even affect to despise his judges but prayed mildly for the exorcists to spare him: “And you, my fathers,” he said to them, “abate the rigour of my torments, and reduce not my soul to despair.” Through this moan of complaining nature, one discerns all the meekness of the Christian who forgives. To hide their emotion, the exorcists replied with invectives, and the executioners wept.[290] Three nuns, in one of their lucid moments, cast themselves before the tribunal, crying that Grandier was innocent, but it was believed that the devil was speaking by their mouth,[291] and their declaration only hastened the end. Urbain Grandier was burnt alive on August 18, 1634. He was patient and resigned to the end. When he was taken from the cart, his legs being broken, he fell heavily face down on the earth without uttering a single cry or groan. A Franciscan, named Father Grillau, squeezed through the crowd and raised up the sufferer, whom he embraced weeping: “I bring you,” said he, “the blessing of your mother: she and I pray God for you.” “Thank you, my father,” answered Grandier; “you alone pity me; console my poor mother and be a son unto her.” The provost’s lieutenant, deeply affected, then said to him: “Sir, forgive me the part I am compelled to take in your anguish.” And Grandier answered: “You have not offended me and are obliged to fulfil the duties committed to your charge.” They had promised to strangle him before the burning, but when the executioner sought to tighten the rope it proved to be knotted, and the unfortunate Curé de St. Pierre fell alive into the flames.

The chief exorcists, Fathers Tranquille and Lactance, died soon after in the delirium of violent frenzy; Father Surin, who succeeded them, became imbecile; Manoury, the surgeon who assisted at the torturing of Grandier, died haunted by the phantom of his victim. Laubardemont lost his son in a tragical manner and fell into disgrace with his master; the nuns remained idiots. So is it true that the question was one of a terrible and contagious malady, the mental disease of false zeal and false devotion. Providence punishes people by their own faults and instructs them by the sad consequences of their errors.

Ten years after the death of Grandier, the Loudun scandals were renewed in Normandy, where the nuns of Louviers accused two priests of having bewitched them. Of these priests, one was already dead, but they violated the sanctity of the tomb to disinter his corpse. The details of the possession were identical with those of Loudun and Sainte-Baume. The hysterical women translated into foul language the nightmares of their directors. Both priests were condemned to the flames, and—to increase the horror—a living man and a corpse were bound to the same stake. The punishment of Mezentius, that fiction of a pagan poet, came so to be realised by Christians; a Christian people assisted coldly at the sacrilegious execution, and the ministers did not realise that in thus profaning at once the priestly office and the dead, they gave a frightful precedent to impiety. When the call came, the eighteenth century arrived to extinguish the fires with the blood of priests, and, as it happens almost invariably, the good paid for the wicked. At the beginning of that century the burning of human beings still proceeded; though faith was dead, hypocrisy abandoned the youthful Labarre to the most horrible tortures because he refused to uncover when a procession went by. Voltaire was then in evidence and conscious in his heart of a vocation like that of Attila. While human passions were profaning religion, God sent this new destroyer to remove religion from a world which was no longer worthy of it.

In 1731, a young woman of Toulon, named Catherine Cadière, accused her confessor, the Jesuit Girard, of seduction and Magic. She was a stigmatised ecstatic who had long passed as a saint. Her history is one of lascivious swoons, secret flagellations and lewd sensations. Where is the sink of infamy with mysteries comparable to those of celibate imagination disordered by dangerous mysticism? The woman was not believed on her mere word and Father Girard escaped condemnation; the scandal for this reason was not less great, but the noise which it made was echoed by a burst of laughter: we have said that Voltaire was among us.

Superstitious people till then had explained extraordinary phenomena by the intervention of the devil and of spirits; equally absurd on its own part, the school of Voltaire, in the face of all evidence, denied the phenomena themselves. It was said by the one side that whatsoever we cannot explain comes from the devil; the answer on the other side was, that the things which we cannot explain do not exist. By reproducing under analogous circumstances the same series of eccentric and wonderful facts, Nature protested in the one case against presumptuous ignorance and in the other against deficient science.

Physical disturbances have, in all times, accompanied certain nervous maladies; fools, epileptics, cataleptics, victims of hysteria have exceptional faculties, are subject to infectious hallucinations and produce occasionally, in the atmosphere or in surrounding objects, certain commotions and derangements. He who is hallucinated exteriorises his dreams and is tormented by his own shadow; the body is surrounded with its own reflections, distorted by the sufferings of the brain; the subject beholds his own image in the Astral Light; the powerful currents of that light, acting like a magnet, displace and overturn furniture; noises are then heard and voices sound as in dreams. These phenomena, so often repeated at this day that they have become vulgar, were attributed by our fathers to phantoms and demons. Voltairian philosophy found it more easy to deny them, treating the ocular witnesses of the most incontestable facts as so many imbeciles and idiots.