Avicenna, Galen, and Hippocrates deny that any diseases can be inflicted on mortals through demons, for Caesalpinus attributes the same view to Hippocrates. Pomponazzi and Levinus Lemnius followed them. They do not deny this because they believe demons do not wish it, for they did not deny that demons are evil; nor because they judge the power of demons to be less than that of human beings or animals, which would be most absurd. Rather, they deny it because all diseases can arise from natural causes.
But this reasoning is not sound: diseases can arise from natural causes; therefore demons cannot be bringers or senders of diseases. Certainly Codronchus, Caesalpinus, Fernelius, Valesius, and other excellent physicians cited in the previous book think otherwise, as do St. Jerome on Matthew 4, St. Chrysostom, homily 54 on Matthew 17, St. Thomas, first part, question 115, article 5, and other theologians. Jurists too acknowledge the same, among whom Burchard does so in book 19 of the Decretals, chapter On Magical Matters. Peter Le Loyer, book 1 On Specters, last chapter, and Grillandus, often cited, prove it excellently. For me now, the firmer testimonies of Holy Scripture suffice; those who do not admit them must be held as pagans and atheists.
[margin: Job 2; Gospel passages including Matthew 9 and 17 and Luke 9; Julius Firmicus, Mathesis, book 3; Apuleius, Apology; Malleus, part 2, question 1, near the end]
The Devil struck Job with a most evil ulcer from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head. Sacred Scripture ascribes other diseases also to the demon as efficient cause. In one case, the Devil deprived someone of the use of ears and tongue and at the same time made him epileptic; St. Matthew calls him lunatic, not because he was not demon-possessed, but because he was both beset by a demon and, at the times of the full moon, gravely afflicted by the demon with the falling sickness, since then the brain, filled with humors, was more apt to be stirred up. Some people are indeed lunatics without being possessed by a demon, and Julius Firmicus spoke of lunatics in this sense. But our Evangelists were treating one who was at the same time an energumen.
Demons also delight in the disposition of epileptics, and therefore not rarely insinuate themselves into them. Through them, at the time when they collapsed, demons were accustomed to give responses. Apuleius, a great magician, is said to have been accused because, after witnesses had been removed, in a secret place, with a little altar, a lamp, and a few accomplices, he caused his slave Thallus, enchanted by a charm, to fall down, and then roused him when he was not aware of himself. This slave was suffering from the falling sickness. The Madauran abused him while he was ignorant of it, so that he might receive an answer from the demon. Apuleius treats this accusation in such a way that he seems to confess it; certainly he does not refute it.
If we hear more recent writers, Sprenger reports that a certain witch inflicted the epileptic disease on certain persons by means of eggs buried beneath bodies of the dead, especially those buried from their sect, then exhumed with certain ceremonies and given in drink or food.
[margin: Luke 8:27; Luke 13:11; First Kings 16:14-15 and 23]
In St. Luke, the Devil vexed one man with that mad affection which physicians call lycanthropy. Its chief sign is that such people cannot be kept at home, but rush out into deserted places and wander around tombs. He afflicted another with a convulsion of the spine. In that passage the demon is called a spirit of infirmity, because, as the text adds, “Satan had bound her.” For in Holy Scripture demons have their name from the effect: as a spirit of avarice is one that impels to avarice, and a spirit of fornication one that persuades toward uncleanness.
The demon also tormented Saul through black bile. The sacred history openly attributes this to the demon: an evil spirit agitated him, and it withdrew when David struck the harp. Today too, would that daily experience did not teach it. Many examples are available, but I will use only recent ones, which Sprenger reports as having been discovered by him in judgment. I willingly use the examples of Sprenger and Nider because, whatever heretics say, they were learned theologians and most practiced in the matters we are treating. Whatever things they handed down similar to these, our own age sees, and more recent writers confirm them all.
Then too, they lived almost a hundred years ago, when Luther’s heresy had not yet been born. There was therefore no cause for inventing many things contrary to it. Finally, we see that Germany was then most full of open and frequent infestation by demons, so that I understand that the demons were then preparing lodging for Luther and Zwingli, and that they went before them as certain advance scouts, just as now Calvinists and Anabaptists go before Antichrist and are his forerunners. But let us proceed. Forgive, reader, a parenthesis not long. Because of the strength of love I cannot so lay aside the memory of lost brothers that they do not now and then run both into my mind and into my pen.
Sprenger narrates the following:
[margin: Malleus, part 2, question 1, chapter 12]
A certain honorable person, married to one of the household of the archduke, deposed in the presence of a notary according to the form of law. When in the time of her virginity she was serving one of the citizens, it happened that his wife was languishing with a grave pain of the head. For her cure, when a certain woman had come and by her charms and a certain practice had undertaken to lessen the pain, I carefully observed her practice. I saw that, contrary to the nature of water, when water had been poured into a certain dish, the same water ascended into another pot, with other ceremonies which there is no need to recount. Considering that the pain of the head in my mistress was not being lessened by these things, I said to the witch with some indignation: “You do nothing but superstitious things, and this for your own profit.” Then the witch at once replied: “Whether I am superstitious or not, you will feel it on the third day.”
The event proved it:
On the third day in the morning, while I was sitting and holding a spindle, so great a pain suddenly invaded my body, first in the inward parts, that there was no part of the body in which I did not feel horrible piercings. Second, it seemed to me nothing other than that fiery coals were continually being poured over my head. Third, on the skin of the body, from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet, there was no space the size of a needle where there was not a pustule filled with matter. Thus I remained in these pains, howling and wishing only for death, until the fourth day.
She continues:
At last the husband of my mistress ordered me to enter a certain stable. While I was walking very slowly, with him going ahead, and when we were before the door of the stable, he said to me, “Behold, a piece of white cloth above the stable door.” I said, “I see it.” Then he said, “Remove it as far as you can, because perhaps you will have health.” Then I held the door with one arm as well as I could, and with the other I took hold of the piece. “Open it,” said the master, “and carefully consider what has been put inside.” When I unfolded the piece, I found many things enclosed in it, especially certain white grains, in the very manner in which the pustules were on my body; also seeds and legumes, whose like I could neither believe nor look at, together with bones of serpents and other animals. When I, astonished, asked the master what should be done, he ordered that all be thrown into the fire. I threw them in; and behold, not after the space of an hour or a quarter-hour, but in the very moment that those things were thrown into the fire, I recovered all my former health.
Sprenger adds:
A certain married and honorable woman came and, according to the form of law as above, deposed. “Behind my house,” she said, “I have a garden, and adjoining it is my neighbor’s garden. One day, when I saw that a passage was being made from the neighbor’s garden into my garden, not without damage, I stood at the door of the garden and complained and murmured to myself both about the passage and about the damage. Suddenly the neighbor came up and asked whether I suspected her. Terrified because of her evil reputation, I said nothing except these words: ‘Footsteps in the grasses show the damage.’ Then she, angry because perhaps I did not wish to involve myself with her in quarrelsome words according to her pleasure, went away with a mutter. The words which she uttered I heard but could not understand. After a few days, however, a huge sickness fell upon me, with pains of the belly and sharp twistings from the left side toward the right and back again, as though two swords were fixed in my breast. Thus, by day and night, I disturbed all the neighbors with my cries.”
As people flowed in from various places to console her, it happened that a potter, who had the aforesaid neighbor and witch as his mistress in an adulterous crime, came also in the same way as if for the sake of visiting. After compassionate and consoling words about her illness he went away. The next day, however, he returned hurriedly and, among other comforting words, added:
“I will make an experiment to see whether this sickness has happened to you by harmful magic. If it is found so, I will restore your health.”
Therefore he took molten lead and, while she lay in bed, poured the lead into a dish full of water placed above her body. When a certain image and figures of diverse things had appeared from the hardened lead, he said:
“Behold, this sickness has happened to you by harmful magic; and one part of the harmful magic is contained above the threshold of the door of the house. Let us go and, when those things have been removed, you will feel better.”
Her husband therefore went with him to take away the harmful magic. The potter raised the threshold and ordered the husband to put his hand into the hollow that appeared and draw out whatever he found. He did so. First he drew out a certain waxen image, the length of one palm, pierced through on all sides, having two needles opposite each other through the sides, just as the piercings she had suffered had passed from the left side to the right and back again. Then he drew out various pieces of small cloths containing very many things, grains, seeds, and bones. When these were thrown into the fire, she recovered, but not completely. For although the tortures and piercings ceased, and the appetite for eating returned entirely, she was not restored to her former health even to the present. When she asked why former health did not return, he answered, “There are also other instruments hidden elsewhere, which I cannot find.” When she asked how he had recognized the first instruments put away there, he answered, “I knew these things from the love by which a friend customarily reveals matters to a friend.”
[margin: Cornelius Gemma, Cosmocritics, book 2]
After these two examples Sprenger adds many other brief ones, born from the desire for vengeance: when little women are indignant that they are deserted by lovers who pass into marriage, they threaten revenge and soon carry it out.
But what Cornelius Gemma narrates surpasses all in wonder. After the end of book 2 of the Cosmocritics, he narrates at length the case of Catherine Gualter of Louvain, a girl of fifteen years, over whose cure he himself presided in the year 1571. After she had eaten a small morsel of food forced upon her by a heathen and coeval girl, she fell into entirely prodigious symptoms of disease. Gemma, a daily spectator of them, saw her discharge so many, such great, and such strange things that he himself would not have believed the eyes of others.
In the eighth month of the disease, with a great effort through the posterior, she ejected a living and perfect eel, as thick as a thumb and a foot and a half long. It had gills, eyes, and a whole tail as eels usually do. Three days before it broke out, a sound had been heard two or three times in the womb, not only by the girl herself but also by the bystanders, as of a sharp and thin sound produced from a reed. When she voided it, the girl clearly reported that she had first felt it draw itself out through the posterior with its head thrust forth, and then leap out with force. After the eel, which they had hung up dead and gutted in a high place safe from animals, it suddenly vanished.
Meanwhile the girl began to vomit an immense quantity of watery humor, not unlike human washing water and of an absurd taste. That vomiting lasted more than fourteen days, and each day she discharged more than twenty-four pounds, or three measures as they are commonly called. Besides this, she was in the meantime giving abundant urine twice or three times a day. There was no swelling of the belly, no outward inflation in the whole body. The girl herself was very sparing of drink and food, and scarcely drank one cup of wine, beer, or another liquid. The abundance of this watery discharge came to such a point that in the space of two weeks she could easily have filled two casks.
After this abundance of water, hairs began also to come out in heaps through vomiting of the belly, extremely numerous, the length of a finger, some longer and others shorter, of the sort that are plucked from dogs in spring. The quantity of hairs increased day by day, so that she could easily have filled several balls of a proper size with them. She ejected them all with great disgust and difficulty of vomiting.
After some days had intervened, other vomitings followed, which threw out large tufts of hairs with purulent material like sanies, sometimes similar to the dung of a dove or goose. In that filth were fragments of wood and beginnings of thin membranes. But the pieces of wood were so lively in appearance that they seemed like portions of obsolete trunks, broken and unevenly cut up, of the breadth of a fingernail, some of greater thickness, spongy within and covered outwardly with an older black bark.
A little later another vomit began, black as coal. You would have said it was true ink, or cuttlefish juice, or rather real coals crushed very small and mixed together, coming forth each day to the amount of two or three pounds, very often with hairs so abundant that they could not be enclosed in a walnut, all white, long, and rather hard. When these things had continued for three days, she once ejected two pounds of pure blood as though from a cut vein, mixed with nothing of another kind.
After the vomiting of blood, a black humor followed again, as if colored with ground antimony, altogether liquid, almost five or six pounds each day. This portent continued for a whole week with a constant law and space of hours. It ceased for some time when divine and human remedies had been applied. Meanwhile she was still discharging hairs, but fewer, gradually darker, and shorter day by day. Whereas at first they were yellowish-red, they slowly became livid, black, and finally very black, and were returned by vomiting as though cut into very tiny pieces. Sometimes with these there was also poisonous humor, and sometimes a thick humor very like mud.
Around the middle of September she vomited larger pieces of membrane, as though parts of the stomach. These had the appearance of a thicker, fleshy, tough tunic, stubborn when broken; and in them, as if in the membrane of a fetus, there appeared also channels of veins furrowed in a branching propagation, sometimes of the length of half a palm. Immediately after these came others much thinner, but wholly black, showing only the traces of veins, not unlike the allantoid membrane. Lastly there came tunics of a third kind, wholly without vessels, the thinnest of all, so that they retained the place of the amnion.
But there was in these another reasoning of substance and figure far different from that in the wrappers of lamb fetuses. For with this thinness there was a marvelous solidity and a pattern of figures greater than any miracle. The fragments varied, but three rare ones among the rest exceeded the breadth of two palms. They were interwoven with deep furrows without inscriptions. Cutting across one another mutually from top to base, they formed lattice-work in the shape of a rhombus. Gemma says he has nothing to which he could better compare it than the slough of a viper, although he has seen nothing so far to which it could rightly be compared.
This especially was to be wondered at in the matter: along the lengthwise course there appeared, as it were, a rather deep channel, engraved with transverse and rare fibers, just as in the rough artery of the lung. That region was altogether hollow and circular. At one end of one membrane it became gradually narrower, representing the trace of a snake’s head with a mastoid apophysis or nipple-like process. At the end of another it gradually widened and displayed something swelling and uneven, not unlike a forked tip. All the parts fitted to one another expressed clearly enough the whole length and thickness of the eel. Gemma thinks that the little nipple-like tubercle was a way of respiration, perhaps through which it was nourished by the solids and liquids necessary for its nutrition.
After she ejected these membranes, almost innumerable stones followed, which she belched up in the evening and at a fixed period of hours with great storms and faintings of soul. Their form was of the kind that is commonly found among ruins of old buildings. The stones were solid, angular, unequal both in appearance and in size, which sometimes approached the quantity of a walnut, not without manifest danger of suffocation. They sometimes seemed covered with lime and joined in various ways, so that they could not be distinguished from those pulled down from walls. Once, in Gemma’s presence, she ejected an angular stone scarcely to be lubricated with the size of a double chestnut. She threw out that rock with a great effort of breath; and he saw her clearly vomiting, and heard the sound of the falling thing into the basin, to the great horror both of his soul and of the crowd poured around on every side.
Immediately she also secreted a large piece of wood, the length and thickness of a thumb, but with less difficulty. This was rather porous, notable for straight fibers, and a certain more notable seam, as it were, ran through the middle of the whole length. Meanwhile, however, hairs also continued through intervals, but in smaller number, fewer in order, and blacker.
Another thing was added which went beyond all belief. She returned a triangular bone, solid outwardly, hollow and spongy within, such that it was plainly evident to be a fragment of the leg of an ox; and the girl’s parent said that she had seen such a thing the day before among her cooked meats. Without delay, on the following day, bony joints, ankle bones, ranks of fingers, a kneecap, and things of various appearance and size came forth. Sometimes, however, hairs and stones were mixed in, and last of all pieces of glass and bronze.
After narrating these things, Gemma rightly judges that, by God’s permission, the demon was the minister of these marvels, though he used natural causes, and even preserved order as far as he could. I wish Gemma had thought the same in the same work about another woman who, in the bloom of life, was tortured for nine continuous years by unspeakable pains of the intestines. First she passed rudiments of a thicker tunic; then immense pieces of a tree, many of them the thickness of a thumb and a little longer; and likewise almost everything belonging to the appearance of a tree: leaves not unlike laurel leaves, roots, barks, and even things which presented the appearance of kernels enclosed in some down, but not clothed with any shell. I would prefer to refer this to prodigious effects of demons rather than to natural observations of diseases.
To the same effects produced by God’s permission I would refer the bodily torments of Blessed Angela of Foligno, which she describes in these words:
[margin: Life of Blessed Angela, chapter 19; Dubravius, History, book 2; Mattioli, preface to Dioscorides]
The torments of the body are innumerable, stirred up in many ways by many demons. For I scarcely believe that the infirmities and sufferings of my body could be written. There does not remain in me any member which does not suffer horribly. I am never without continuous pain and sickness. I am weak and frail, full of pain, so that I must continually lie down. There is not in me a member which is not struck, twisted, and punished by demons. I am always sick, always swollen, and full of pains in all my members, so that I can move myself only with great pain. I am weary of lying down, and I cannot even eat sufficiently.
From this you learn that this holy widow was set forth to the female sex as an example of patience, just as Job was set forth to the male sex.
I have already taught about perpetual alienation of the mind when I discussed philters. The mind of Stradio too was alienated for a time by a drink from a maiden poisoner, as Dubravius records in book 2 of his history. Mattioli, in the preface to Dioscorides, narrates an example not unpleasant to hear about mountebanks, undoubtedly magicians of Bohemia:
They mix into wine the powder of a certain root, by whose taste the throat is convulsed. The man on whom they wish to play a trick they order, as if for the sake of tasting, to put his finger dipped in that wine into his mouth. Then, immediately, the unwilling man presses his finger, wet with wine and put into his mouth, with his teeth, not without pain and crying. Meanwhile the mountebank, as if consoling the sufferer with blandishments, anoints the temples and pulse arteries with another medicine. Then he throws a coin on the ground and urges him to pick it up. There the man, bent forward, first cannot pick it up; soon, by the force of the ointment, made mad, he falls down and at once swims in the manner of one who fears being drowned in water, and cries out, saying at the same time that he is overwhelmed by waves. Therefore the mountebank raises him. The man, as though about to avenge the injury, first seems to rebuke the sorcerer with sidelong and fierce gaze, then to attack him; at last he pursues the fleeing mountebank until finally, when the poison of that medicine has been wiped off, he receives his soul again and is restored to his mind. When he returns to himself, he is seen, like someone who has escaped shipwreck, to wring out his hair and garments as if wet, to stretch and dry his arms, and to blow his nose.
[margin: Lucian, Philopseudes; Hippocrates, On the Sacred Disease; Levinus Lemnius, On the Hidden Miracles of Nature, book 2, chapter 1]
I do not understand how the power of ointment alone can do this, without the work of a demon intervening.
We can prove that the gentiles formerly thought the same from the diseases which they ascribed to their gods, that is, to demons. I have already handed down examples concerning those called “Ceres-struck” or “Demeter-seized,” concerning the lymphatic, the panic-stricken, and similar people. Therefore those who were fanatic and spoke in various languages during illness they called demon-possessed, or people beset by Hecate or by heroes. Therefore Levinus Lemnius at last gives up his hand and admits that demons are accidental causes of diseases of this kind. If by an accidental cause he means an external cause, yet efficient, then he agrees with us.
It remains to explain in what manner the demon inflicts diseases. Franciscus Valesius taught this accurately: the demon is an external cause, because he comes from outside to inhabit the body and bring diseases upon it. If diseases depend on matter, he moves internal causes. Thus he excites melancholic diseases. First he stirs up the black bile which was in the body, and drives sooty vapors into the brain and the cells of the internal senses. Then he increases the black bile by applying burning causes, or by holding back that humor so that it is not purged. He brings on epilepsy, paralysis, and similar injuries by carrying a thicker juice, by blocking a ventricle of the brain or obstructing the roots of the nerves. He is the cause of blindness or deafness by heaping harmful excrements toward the ears or eyes.
[margin: Franciscus Valesius, Sacred Philosophy, chapter 28]
Often also, in order to induce hatred, love, and other disturbances of soul, he moves images so that they may cling more firmly in the imagination. To excite bodily affections, he selects a spirituous substance from the blood itself, separating and purging it from the thickness of matter. Then he uses those spirits as the proximate instrument of the soul for acting most effectively and most swiftly. I say that from the most poisonous things he draws out a certain quasi-quintessence, as alchemists do from gems and gold, and with it infects the vital spirits themselves; and in this way he imbues the person with a harmful magical disease.
Caesalpinus prudently noticed this in the book On the Investigation of Demons, chapter 16. When the demon does this, human art with difficulty can, or usually does, apply sufficiently celebrated and effective remedies. For the more subtle and thin this matter is, the sharper and more effective it is toward death. It usually anticipates every delay.
Nor is there any obstacle to his sometimes bringing these very harms by himself, without such matter or an internal acting cause, if he impedes or injures the senses, holds back or withdraws the animal spirits, and in a thousand other ways which he knows. But diseases which do not depend on internal causes, but only on an external impediment, injury, or harmful breath, he very often works by himself. This is the case when the instruments of harmful magic, anointings, signs, things buried, or similar things have no natural force for the poison-working itself, but serve only as signs at which, by pact, the demon acts. The same Antonius Caesalpinus taught this in the cited work, chapter 17.
[margin: Caesalpinus, On the Investigation of Demons, chapters 16, 17, and 8; Remigius, Demonolatry, book 2, chapter 4; Solinus, Polyhistor]
Then also he can make some force upon a human being by external things, as Caesalpinus teaches in chapter 8. For example, when an angry witch caused a cooked apple to be glued to the hand of another person so that it brought a very bitter torment and could not by any art be dissolved or unglued, as you may read in Nicholas Remigius, book 2 of Demonolatry, chapter 4. Why should we not believe it, since we also read that the Corsican stone Catochites is endowed with such a force that it glues separated bodies together and holds fast the hands placed on it? See Solinus in Polyhistor. I shall treat in book 6 how harmful magical diseases are to be distinguished from others.
[margin: Sprenger, Malleus, part 2, question 1, chapter 3]