In the sacristy the Creed and Our Father were recited, two passages on prayer (from John xvi. and xiv.) were also read aloud by Luther. Then he, together with the other ecclesiastics present, laid hands on the head of the girl and continued reciting prayers. When no sign appeared of the devil’s departure, Luther wished to go, but first took care to spurn the girl with his foot, the better to mark anew his disdain for the devil. The poor creature whom he had thus insulted followed him with threatening looks and gestures. This was all the more awkward since Luther was unable to escape, the key of the sacristy door having been mislaid; hence he was obliged, he the devil’s greatest and best-hated foe on earth, to remain cheek by jowl with the Evil One.
The satirical description Staphylus gives of the situation cannot be repeated here, especially as the writer seems to have added to its colour.[436] Luther was unable to jump out of the window, so he says, because it was protected with iron bars; “hence he had to remain shut up with us until the sacristan could pass in a strong hatchet to us through the bars; this was handed to me, as I was young, for me to burst open the door, which I then did.” In place of all this, Fröschel merely says of the girl, who was taken home the following day, that afterwards “on several occasions” reports came to Wittenberg to the effect that the evil spirit no longer “tormented and tore her as formerly.”
In the pulpit the Deacon immortalised the incident for his Wittenberg hearers and made it known to the whole world in his printed sermon “Vom Teuffel.”[437]
Luther himself says nothing of it, though disposed in later life to lay great stress on stories of the devil.[438] Earlier than this, in 1540, he had hastened to tell his Katey of the supposed deliverance of a girl at Arnstadt from the devil’s power through the ministrations of the Evangelical pastor there; the latter had “driven a devil out of the girl in a truly Christian manner.”[439] He does not, however, mention this incident in his published works.
On the other hand we have in the Table-Talk a full account of his treatment of a woman “possessed,” or, rather, clearly ailing from a nervous disorder. Her symptoms were regarded, as was customary at a time when so little was known of this class of maladies, as “purely the work of the devil, as something unnatural, due to fright and devil-spectres, seeing that the devil had overlaid her in the shape of a calf.” Luther, on visiting the woman thus “bodily persecuted by the devil,” again laid great stress on the need of praying that she might be rid of her guest, though this time he did not scorn the use of the formula of exorcism. “The night after, she was left in peace, but, later, the weakness returned. Finally, however, she was completely delivered from it;”[440] in other words, the malady simply took its natural course.
Another much-discussed case which occurred after the middle of the ’thirties was that of a girl at Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, a report of which came to Luther from Andreas Ebert, the Lutheran pastor there (see above, vol. iii., p. 148). In his reply to the circumstantial account of how the “possessed” girl was able to produce coins by magic Luther shows himself in so far cautious that he is anxious to have it made clear whether the story is quite true and whether the coins are real. Nevertheless, he does not hesitate to declare, that, should the incident be proved, it would be a great omen (“ostentum”), as Satan, with God’s permission, was thus setting before them a picture of the greed of money prevailing among certain of the princes. He was loath to see exorcism resorted to, “because the devil in his pride laughs at it”; all the more were they to pray for the girl and against the devil, and this, with the help of Christ, would finally spell her liberation; meanwhile, however, he expresses his readiness to make public all the facts of the case that could be proved. In his sermons he spoke of the occurrence to his hearers as a “warning.”[441]
Theodore Kirchhoff, who, in the “Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie,” mentions “Luther’s exorcisms of hysterical women folk,” not without bewailing his error, points out that it was in part his own fancied experience with the devil which led him to regard “similar phenomena in others as diabolical”; “his many nervous ailments,” he says, “strengthened his personal belief in the devil.” “Indeed, so far did he go in his efforts to drive out the devil that once he actually proposed that an idiot should be done to death.”[442] “Such a doctrine [on the devil’s action], backed by the authority of so great a man, took deep root.” It would be incorrect, writes Kirchhoff, to say, that Luther inaugurated a healthier view of “possession”; on the contrary his opinion is, “that, owing to Luther’s hard and fast theories, the right understanding and treatment of the insane was rendered more difficult than ever; for, if we consider the immense spread of his writings and what their influence became, it is but natural to infer that this also led to his peculiar view becoming popular.”[443] Needless to say, other circumstances also conspired to render difficult the treatment of the mentally disordered; long before Luther’s day they had been regarded by many as possessed, and as the physicians would not undertake to cure possessions, this condition was neglected by the healing art. In many instances, too, the relatives were against any cure being attempted by physicians.