Most diseases inflicted by harmful magic are prodigious; but the most prodigious of all, it seems to me, is when a sick person casts out through the mouth or the lower throat thorns, bones, pieces of wood, stones, fragments of glass, needles, knives, and other iron tools, balls of hair, cloths, bristles, lantern horns, and things of this kind, which it seems impossible could have been put into the body either by eating or in any other way.
Sprenger has one example of this concerning a woman of Saverne. There a certain midwife, gravely angry because she had not been called to the childbirth, came at night with two other witches to the woman who had given birth, and said that for revenge she wished to put certain things into her intestines, whose pain she would begin to feel only after half a year. She said this and touched the woman’s belly with her hand. At that touch the woman who had given birth seemed to herself to have her intestines drawn out, and certain things put into them which she then could not distinguish with her eyes.
[margin: Johannes Langius, epistle 38; Remigius, Demonolatry, book 3, chapter 4; Surius, tome 3, May 3, Life of St. Peter of Tarentaise, chapter 23]
Afterward, hardly six months having been completed, so dire a torture of the inward parts suddenly invaded her that, in Sprenger’s words, neither by day nor by night could she refrain from disturbing everyone with her cries. And because she was most devoted to the Virgin and Queen of mercy, fasting on bread and water every Saturday, she believed herself to have been freed by her intercessions. Hence one day, when pus was trying to bring nature’s work to completion, all that uncleanness broke out from her body. Calling her husband with her son, she said, “Are those things phantasms? Did I not say that after the space of half a year that matter would be known? Or who ever saw thorns, bones, and pieces of wood, all at once, which I had eaten?” For there were thorns of roses, the length of a palm, mixed with many other innumerable things.
Another example is related by Benivenius about a Florentine woman; a third by Johannes Langius about Ulrich Neuses, a rustic; a fourth about a girl of Leuwensteten in the German history printed about this matter in the year 1562. Nicholas Remigius adds three examples to these. I shall write down an eighth, altogether admirable, against which no trifles, calumnies, or decorations of the caviling Wierus will suffice, from the life of St. Peter of Tarentaise, written by Geoffrey:
There is said to be a town of St. Symphorian, a few miles distant from the city of Lyon, where a faithful man, a diligent receiver of religious faithful, by a great reputation both of way of life and of opinion, once drew the abbot to his house for hospitality, almost by force. He had a young daughter laboring under a pitiable affliction. For a certain evil magical woman, led by wickedness and the envy of the mother-in-law, had acted so that she would waste away in desperate sickness and could in no way bear either the presence or the sight of her husband.
The narration continues:
Her mother, persuaded by womanly affection to cast out Satan by Satan, summoned a certain famous sorceress. She came, explored, recognized the matter, and the little woman, bringing in an iron-bound box, offered a drink infected with herbs and words, grinding tree barks. She also bit the arm of the wretched woman with her own teeth. A marvelous thing, a new thing, and, unless I am mistaken, hitherto unheard: she indeed recovered from that sickness, but meanwhile, feeling as though needles were proceeding from her heart, she was tortured cruelly until, through the bite of the arm, over which no scar had formed, an occult force drew out the needles. The cruel remedy suited such an author. More than thirty needles in this manner had come out at intervals of time: some, as is commonly said, from a little case; some presenting holes suitable for receiving thread.
Then the abbot arrives:
The aforesaid abbot came to the house where these things were being done. The person is celebrated; this work of his, and other things not unworthy of admiration, are narrated, but the name must still be spared while he survives. To him the anxious father displayed his pitiable daughter, and not without tears explained the mournful tragedy. At the same hour credibility is given to the words, and the woman, feeling a needle, lamented with groans. It had already come to the hole, the accustomed blood had already gone before, part of it had already begun to come out. And one of the lay brothers, coming near, serving the same abbot, drew it out bloody, and it was preserved for many years as testimony.
The miracle then changes:
The abbot prayed, touched the place of the wound, and in the power of faith promised that no iron or steel would thereafter proceed from there. It was done; but the matter was changed, and the malice was not yet altogether extinguished. Small wooden stakes, such as people commonly call brocas, made from oak or ash wood, began to go out instead of iron needles, thicker than thorns and a little longer. Yet not all were of one length or thickness, just as the needles had not been. In this way, within a year and a few months, pieces of wood came out of the woman.
The conclusion is this:
At last the reverend bishop Peter came, to whom the fullness of the miracle was divinely reserved. The woman is brought before him as he celebrates the solemnities of Mass, just as he had ordered the evening before. At the same hour the seventeenth piece of wood came out of the woman’s body, which the chaplain drew out under the eyes of all. Therefore the bishop absolved the woman as she confessed, and, giving her the sacred Eucharist, ordered her to be secure thereafter from any further coming forth of whatever material. Thus, freed from all deceptions, she cleaved to her husband and bore sons. And, as is said, surviving even today, she proclaims the power which she happily deserved to experience in herself.
[margin: Medical citations on bodies producing or expelling objects: Galen, book 2, To Glaucon; Celsus, book 5, chapter 6; Aetius, book 16, chapter 10; Levinus Lemnius, book 3, On the Hidden Miracles of Nature, chapter 40; Alexander Benedictus, books 2 and 3; Ananias; Antonius Benivenius; Grillandus, On Sortilege, question 3; Cardano, On the Variety of Things, chapter 80; Alexander of Tralles, book 4, chapter 6; Benivenius, On the Hidden Causes of Diseases and Cures, chapters 24 and 80; Johannes Langius, epistle 38, and the German history of the girl of Leuwensteten]
The father is said to be Peter of Fraxineto, known and even honored among his fellow villagers, so that if the novelty of so great a thing has made anyone doubtful, perhaps it may be possible to prove what he has refused to believe. So far Geoffrey, abbot of Hautecombe. The Cistercian and Clairvaux abbots entrusted to him the business of writing this life, when Pope Lucius had commanded them to see that it be written faithfully. But, opponents will say, the writer was a monk. I believe he would deserve more faith than the most lying ministers and preachers of those opponents.
Caesalpinus says in On the Investigation of Demons, chapter 17:
This happened this year at Pisa, and I saw it while many looked on. A certain woman possessed by demons, often, sometimes during the adjuration and sometimes afterward, cast out bodies both of a size and a form altogether unsuitable to have been swallowed: very long iron nails, bones, stones, woolen balls, coals, and many other things. In the bedding, moreover, in that region on which the chest lay, especially where the heart rested, many little balls were found made of feathers, artfully shaped in diverse figures, most of them like roses with continuous rows of very fine feathers, now bound with thread, now with glue; other kinds were found in the pillow on which the head rested.
Why say more? In past years almost similar things happened to a woman of Douai and to a maidservant of Lille. We have enough examples. Let us consider the cause, which is sufficiently hidden and concealed.
First, I admit that certain things sometimes coalesce in human bodies from corrupt humors, such as tophi, little stones, hairs, little bones, shells, thorns, balls of hair, and such things. The demon could create these things in the ulcers themselves, or in suitable boundaries of the parts of the body, and ancient and recent physicians agree that this can happen naturally. Many know with me the son of a count who, almost nineteen years ago, at Luxembourg, was drawing fairly large little lizards out in his urine. Although many attributed this to the poison-working of his adulterous wife, whom he afterward ordered killed by an assassin, it could nevertheless happen naturally from corruption of humors and a defect of the kidneys. That woman was devoted to Calvin’s sect and was more familiar with the minister than was proper; therefore the suspicion of the crowd was not alien either to her morals or to her institute.
[margin: Binsfeld, On Malefici, question 7; Remigius, Demonolatry, book 2, chapter 4]
Second, I think that needles, knives, scissors, and metallic things of this kind, shaped artificially, cannot be generated naturally in the human body from any putrefaction, because natural heat does not seem able to produce metals there except over a space of very many years. Much less does it seem possible that such varied humors should come together by chance into a fixed analogy and artificial arrangement, unless we call back the madness of Democritus and Epicurus, which constructs all things from the chance concurrence of atoms. Nor have I yet read anyone who attributes this power to nature.
Third, I say that demons can work all these things in many ways through sorcerers. First, they can so deceive the senses that someone thinks these things are put into the body or cast out, when in reality the demon only causes true knives and the other artificial material which is vomited up, or even the very humors which are ejected, to appear as knives and the rest; or he condenses and colors the air in this way. This is very likely to happen when those things which seemed solid and dense are seen a little later to vanish.
Moreover, without fiction, things of this kind can be secretly put into the mouth by the demon, whence they are soon cast out. They can also be inserted and enclosed in other bodily parts. Wierus, a man without shame, denies this, although I do not see why he denies it. For trustworthy physicians and surgeons, some of whom he himself praises, testify that they have seen such things excreted from bodies or cut out, and that they handled them with their hands. To maintain that all these men, to a man, are deceived - what is that except to cast off all shame vigorously?
Of the modes of insertion which I find, only two please me. The first is the one Binsfeld did not omit: that the demon may sink a human being into deep sleep and remove the sense of pain; then skillfully cut the member, place the hard matter there, and finally with the same subtlety so close the wound that no scar or trace is left. Skilled surgeons sometimes do this.
Perhaps you will say: this can happen in fleshy parts, easily dilatable and quickly healed, examples of which Nicholas Remigius lists; but not in others in which that facility is not proper, for example in the intestines, the mouth of the stomach, the throat, the arteries, and such organs, which are very narrow and are not dilated except for their natural functions. Or, if they have been divided by cutting, they cannot be reunited.
I answer that this happens with more difficulty in these parts, but absolutely it can happen as in the others. For although medicines fit for closing and reuniting them are unknown to us, nevertheless they are most known to the demon. Besides, although they do not dilate of their own accord except for their natural effects, nevertheless, when some force is applied, they can be dilated and compressed beyond the usual order.
Ambroise Pare, an eyewitness and celebrated in the praise of surgery, brought forward two histories to give credibility to this matter. The first is about a student who had swallowed an ear of grain; when it had descended through the trachea into the lungs, nature expelled it whole, with the transverse lobes of the lungs unharmed, the muscles of the ribs also intact, and the membrane which girds them uninjured. The second is about a shepherd to whom robbers, forcing open his mouth, had given a half-foot-long knife with a horn handle of thumb thickness down his throat. He retained it in the body for six full months, and at last, when an abscess had formed in the groin, the surgeon extracted it from there. Plainly the knife had to come through all the narrowest passages from the throat to the groin. Remigius added a third narration about a fool among the Armoricans, who, after the point of a sword three fingers long had been driven through his mouth into his throat, voided it through the anus on the twelfth day. Was that knife not rolled through so many turns of the most delicate intestines, and through that which from the thing itself is called the small intestine? In these cases there was never any mention or suspicion of harmful magic. If nature and chance could do this, why could not that most skillful artist, striving for it by purpose, do the same?
[margin: Paracelsus, On Occult Philosophy; Baro Lichtenberg, On the Chief Articles of Magic; Ludovicus Milichius, On the Magical Demon; Nicholas Remigius, Demonolatry, book 1, chapter 3]
The other mode belongs to Sylvester Prierias. Certain more recent writers have followed him: that the demon possesses skill in dividing and breaking up the most solid things into the smallest parts, even into the form of powder, and in joining them again, applying, wherever there is need, natural active powers; and that he does this so swiftly and subtly that, because of the excessive speed of motion, the eyes of those looking cannot observe any of these things. Thus people think that they are put in and cast out whole. These two modes are probable.
I am greatly surprised that a certain third mode has pleased so many, since it is plainly improbable. They hold that the pores of the body are extended by the demon, and that through them these harder and larger things are inserted; then that the pores are closed again; and finally, when the opening is repeated, the things thrust in are expelled, when it seems good to the demon. Thus they say that the pores of a scabbard are penetrated by lightning without injury, that the steel blade is liquefied, and that in throwing a stone is hidden under water, yet when the hand has been withdrawn no path is seen by which the stone entered the water.
This opinion supposes, with Buridan, that the penetration of bodies is natural, though St. Thomas, Scotus, Durandus, and others who philosophize better maintain that this can be accomplished by God alone. Therefore they err first in this. If they say that bodies or bodily dimensions are not penetrated here, they are forced to invent an incredible dilation of pores, even in parts of the body that are not porous, though these pores are by nature so narrow that they cannot be stretched without notable injury.
[margin: Seneca, Natural Questions, book 3; Isidore, Etymologies]
Nor is there anything similar in those most dissimilar things which they bring as their reason. Lightning is something most subtle and thin, endowed with a natural force by which it consumes harder and resisting things, but passes through soft and yielding things without injury. But iron, wood, and stones are dense, hard things, and by no means apt to insinuate themselves into pores in this way. Water is a liquid body, moist, thin, flowing, giving place to any solid thing and capable even of boats; it can be condensed by the impulse of things thrown into it and, once they are removed, is apt by its own force immediately to come together and reunite. Just as it is condensed without the separation of its parts, so it is rarefied and extended without any new medicine of those parts. Children know how alien these things are from the members of the human body, and so do those who are not yet fully washed.
[margin: Mengus on the scourge of demons; Polydorus; Peter Tyraeus, discussion on demoniacs; 1 Corinthians 5]