I presuppose what is certain among Catholics: that energumens are often invaded and possessed or beset by demons, that is, demons enter into human bodies and at the same time receive some power of vexing or afflicting them. Both are required for someone to be an energumen. After Mengus and Polydorus, Peter Tyraeus has discussed this very learnedly.
It is established from Sacred Scripture that the apostles once had the power of handing human beings over to the demon, and that other holy people have sometimes received that power from God, formerly and today, using it only most prudently and with great charity and justice. This would not be difficult to prove, if it belonged to this place.
But someone could doubt whether demons possess those whom they possess by actually entering their bodies. For Blessed Hildegard writes in the book of her revelations that, concerning a certain energumen, she saw in a true vision that:
[margin: 1 Timothy 1; see Tyraeus, the cited work, final question]
By God’s permission she was beset and overshadowed by a certain blackness and smoke of diabolical globosity, which oppressed the whole sensitive power of that rational soul and did not allow it, when the intellect was raised up, to breathe. It covered and poured itself over her like the shadow of a human being or of another thing, or like smoke set opposite something. From this she lost right senses and actions, and often cried out and acted unbecomingly.
Hildegard continues:
And when I was thinking and wishing to know how the diabolical form, that is, substance, entered a human being, I saw and received an answer that the Devil does not enter a human being in his form, as he is, but shadows and covers him with the shadow and smoke of his blackness. For if his form were loosened, it would be scattered like straw by the wind. Therefore God does not permit him to enter a human being in his own form. But by pouring himself over the aforesaid things, he turns the person to madness and unbecoming acts; and through him, as through a window, he cries out and moves his members outwardly, while nevertheless he is not within them in his form, and the soul meanwhile is, as it were, put to sleep and ignorant of what the flesh of the body is doing.
So she writes in Theodoric the abbot’s Life of her, book 3, chapter 20. But this passage shows that the theologians’ statement is very true: often those who have grown accustomed to many revelations, even true ones, think they have by revelation what they have from reasoning and opinion. Many things indicate this.
First, at the beginning, only obsession is truly described, not possession. Second, this inquiry was not very necessary and was rather curious. Third, what she says is suspect: that God does not permit the Devil to possess bodies according to his essence, as he is accustomed to be in his own place. For the common distinction of theologians establishes this difference between the obsessed and the possessed: in the possessed, the demon is present as he was sometimes in idols. Inflations and many other things seen in possessed persons indicate this.
Fourth, there is no reason for it. The demon’s form or his spiritual substance is not so contrary to the body that, even against his will, it immediately destroys the body by the mere entrance. Fifth, the soul is not always put to sleep when the demon besets or possesses an energumen. This is evident because we often see such people remember all the things they have done. Finally, the saints and all theologians have always spoken and thought in such a way that they say the demon enters the body of the possessed person and goes out from it. He does not, indeed, enter it so as to inform it, or as a part to integrate the body, as they say, but only so as to use it as a place or as an organic instrument, as the bishop Abulensis explains at length on Exodus 7, question 16.
Therefore Caesarius spoke more correctly in book 5, chapter 15: demons are not united substantially to the soul, nor are they in the soul itself, but by application alone and oppression, by energy or operation, they are present to the soul, and in this way are united to the human being and, as it were, glide into him. He alleges Gennadius, book On Ecclesiastical Dogmas, chapter 82, as holding this. Yet Gennadius never denied that demons can be in the body as in a place and lurk in its cavities, and Caesarius expressly confirms this from Sacred Scripture. For a thing is not rightly said to go out unless it has been within. But the Savior orders demons to go out of a body, Matthew 8 and 9. Therefore they were within.
[margin: Abulensis on Exodus 7, question 16; Gennadius, On Ecclesiastical Dogmas, chapter 82; Matthew 8 and 9; Anastasius of Nicaea; Life of St. Hilarion]
It remains now to ask whether sorcerers can and usually do so devote others and, as it were, hand them over to a demon. From the confessions of many it is established that they think they do this. They confess that they have sent demons into the bodies of beasts or human beings; and the demons themselves, when they are exorcised, are accustomed to give as pretext that they were sent by this or that person. I shall pass over the more recent examples brought by Remigius and others, and write down only two recorded by people whose credibility cannot be rejected.
Anastasius of Nicaea writes of Simon Magus:
When many people tried to call him an impostor, he addressed them, and then, under the pretext of a banquet, sacrificed an ox. When he had received them at the banquet, he subjected them to various diseases and demons.
St. Jerome sets before us a demon cast out by Blessed Hilarion, whom a magician had sent into a virgin:
[margin: The discussion of Simon Magus is compared with Annals, tome 1, year 68]
When she had been brought by her parents, she was handed to the old man at the monastery, immediately howling and the demon confessing. “I have suffered force. I was brought unwillingly. How well I used to deceive people at Memphis in dreams. O crosses, O torments, how I suffer! You compel me to go out, and I am held bound under the threshold. I do not go out unless the youth who holds me dismisses me.” Then the old man said, “Great is your strength, you who are held by a thread and a little plate. Say why you dared to enter a girl of God.” “So that I might preserve her,” he said, “that virgin.” “You were preserving her, traitor to chastity? Why did you not rather enter the one who sent you?” “Why,” he answered, “should I enter him, who had my companion, the demon of love?”
See how the magician had truly sent in the demon. I think that many of the things which Anastasius narrates, from whom Glycas borrowed the same material, and especially the example now under discussion, could truly have been done by Simon Magus, with God permitting. Therefore I cannot agree with the most learned writer of the Annals, who judges those marvelous things about Simon handed down by Anastasius to have been only impostures shown to human beings through image and sight, when they had no truth in themselves. For in those things there are many which can and do usually happen, as we have shown rather copiously in the preceding book on demonic magic.
In the year 1581, in the Vivarais town of Annonay, there was a witch named Boyarona, who sent demons into several people by various means and in more than one way, by which they were most grievously tormented. Among these were her son and her daughter. She handed them over to be possessed, each by three demons, through nuts prepared for another person but, in childish fashion, nibbled by those who were carrying them. Another witch called La Gochonne did similar things, so that in those regions everything was full of energumens through votive harmful magic. Claude Charon, an eyewitness and a learned and prudent man, narrates it in On Antichrist Revealed.
Baptista Codronchus, the physician, admits that this is accustomed to happen in book 3, chapter 7, On Harmful Magical Diseases. But this sending in of evil spirits does not come from a faculty of compelling them, since no such faculty belongs to magicians over demons. Either demons go of their own accord to the one possessed by pact, pretending to obey, or inferior demons are driven to this by a superior demon wishing in this matter to gratify the sorcerer. In either case, however, God’s permission is required as the cause without which this could not be done.
[margin: Tyraeus, cited work, chapter 29; Johannes Caesarius, book 5, examples 11, 12, and 16; Remigius, Demonolatry, book 2, chapters 9-13]
God is accustomed to permit this only because of some grave sin of the possessed person, and not rarely because of the imprecations of angry parents. Johannes Caesarius supplies three examples of these. Ovid says of Medea, “She devotes those absent.” And by experience it is known today that very many strigae have made a pact with the demon that, against whatever beast or human being they utter curses, at once they begin to be tormented by disease, or are suddenly removed from the midst by another destruction. Remigius, book 2, chapters 9, 10, and the three following, teaches by very many examples that this devoting by them is generally not empty.
[margin: Canon-law and theological references on binding magic: chapter Si per sortiarias, 23, question 1; the whole title De frigidis et maleficiatis, around book 4, distinction 34; Thomas Aquinas, Prima pars, question 58, article 2; Enriquez, On Marriage, book 2, chapter 8; chapter Laudabile, De frigidis et maleficiatis; Enriquez’s related cross-references to chapter 8, number 2, and chapter 7, number 9]