The concept of demonic possession has a long history and is present in cultures around the world. There was a time when people lived in fear of demons, when it was a very real threat that tracked shadows and waited to leap over the reckless, and such cases of possession continued until modern times and the age of reason.
While demonic possession is pretty scary, what about when there are multiple victims who have succumbed to these supernatural forces? This is the case of one of the most famous mass possession cases ever recorded, when in the 17th century darkness fell on a convent of quiet nuns in a sleepy town in France, becoming a spectacle of supernatural terror this day.
For this historical tale, we go back to the year 1632, in the town of Loudun, in France, where was the modest Ursuline convent, originally built in 1626. The convent was rather new at the time, and was led by the eccentric, the prioress Jeanne des Anges, powerful and well connected, who kept her lifestyle humble and silent, that is to say until she and certain other nuns began to receive frightening nocturnal visits by the living appearance of a man from the web. During these visions, the man would have seemed almost angelic, but would have spit out dirt and profanity, ordering the nuns to do the most unthinkable obscene sexual acts. It was scary enough for the nuns, but things escalated when they started showing symptoms of demonic possession, such as convulsions, contortions, verbal outbursts, and open sexuality.
The culprit, according to Anges, was a local priest by the name of Father Urbain Grandier, who had been appointed parish priest of St-Pierre-du-Marché in Loudun in 1617, and who was also fairly known for his decidedly anti-priest character. behaviour. The rich and handsome Grandier had the reputation of being an incorrigible man and had already been accused of having fathered a child with Philippa Trincant, the daughter of the king’s lawyer in Loudun. He had also been convicted of immorality in 1530, only his high level political relations preventing him from being imprisoned and allowing him to maintain his post. There were also rumors that he tried black magic and worshiping demons, and Angels accused him of having made a pact with the devil.
In the meantime, possession at the convent has intensified, the nuns allegedly speaking in languages they did not know, possessing arcane knowledge, levitating, moving objects with their mind, displaying superhuman strength and knowing the secrets the darker the deeper the people, to the point where a procession of priests was brought in to investigate. A total of 27 nuns from the convent showed these symptoms of demonic possession, and it didn’t take long to convince themselves that they had a problem on their hands. A chronicle of the case, The Devils of Loudun from Des Niau would say of these demonic episodes and subsequent exorcisms:
They went from a state of calm to the most terrible convulsions, and without the slightest increase in pulsations. They hit their chest and the back of their head as if they had had their neck broken and with inconceivable speed; they would twist their arms at the shoulder, elbow and wrist joints two or three times in a row; lying on their stomachs, they joined the palms of their hands to the soles of their feet; their faces became such that the commissioners had to bow. It was even more frightening not to be able to watch them; their eyes remained open without blinking; their tongues suddenly came out of their mouths, horribly swollen, black, hard and covered with pimples, and yet, in this state, they spoke distinctly; they threw themselves back until their heads touched their feet,
They uttered: screams so horrible and loud that nothing like this has ever been heard before; they used expressions so indecent that they shamed the most debauched men, while their acts, both by exposing themselves and by inviting the obscene people to act, would have surprised the prisoners at the brothel the lower in the country; they uttered curses against the three divine persons of the Trinity, oaths and blasphemous expressions so execrable, so incredible, that they could not have suggested themselves to the human spirit.
The devil sometimes made them fall asleep suddenly: they fell to the ground and became so heavy that the strongest man found it difficult to move even his head. Françoise Filestreau with her mouth closed, you could hear different voices in her body speaking at the same time, quarreling and discussing who was to make her speak.
One, the Mother Superior, stretched her legs to such an extraordinary degree that, from one foot to the other, the distance was 7 feet, although she was herself but 4 feet high. In another exorcism, the Mother Superior was suspended in the air, touching only the ground with her elbow. The Mother Superior from the beginning was removed from her feet and hung in the air at a height of 24 inches. A report was drawn up and sent to the Sorbonne, signed by a large number of witnesses, ecclesiastics and doctors, and the related judgment of the bishop of Poitiers who was also a witness. Doctors at the Sorbonne agreed with the bishop and said that hellish possession was proven.
This is quite intense and it has been claimed that these possessed nuns sexually assaulted and relentlessly offered priests in the most obscene manner. According to the Mother Superior, the two main culprits were the demons Asmodeus and Zabulon, as well as Isacarron, the devil of debauchery, although there was a whole horde of other demons who helped them. The exorcisms became more and more public as the phenomena progressed, with the Capuchin exorcists Father Tranquille, Franciscan Father Lactance and Jesuit father Jean-Joseph Surin performing exorcisms with up to 7,000 amazed spectators. All this seemed to have little effect, which made Father Grandier more and more reproached. This led to his arrest and the torture that followed to try to make him confess.
My Lord and Master, Lucifer, I recognize you as my God and promise to serve you all my life. I renounce all other God, Jesus Christ and all the other saints; the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church, its sacraments, with all the prayers that can be said for me; and I promise to do all I can. I renounce the holy oil and the water of baptism, as well as all the merits of Jesus Christ and his saints; and if I cannot serve and worship you, and pay homage to you three times a day, I will give up my life as you should.
Grandier was subjected to the most horrible torture methods of the time, with both legs painfully broken during the process, but he defied all efforts and did not confess. At Grandier’s trial, things would get even more bizarre, when some of the allegedly possessed nuns were speaking for the father’s defense, and Angels herself would claim that she had been subjected to all of this by Grandier’s enemies. She went so far as to make a public merger, whipping herself, putting a noose around her neck and threatening to hang herself if Grandier was not freed from his charges. Doctors who examined Grandier before his torture also claimed that they themselves had not seen any marks of the devil, and it was suspected that the “pact with the devil” was in fact the writing of Anges, a plot to frame it. Additionally, there was evidence in favor of Grandier that some priests discovered that the nuns had failed the tests to see if they could really speak foreign languages or present superhuman force or other supernatural powers, and that a physical examination of them had shown no signs of possession. There were even nuns who would have burst into tears during the exorcisms and admitting that they had been trained on what to do.
All of this had little effect, as the court saw it only as evidence that the devil was manipulating them to save himself, and indeed, it was ultimately ordered that anyone speaking for the defense of Grandier be arrested as traitors. Only witnesses against Grandier were allowed to speak, and many of those who allegedly defended him feared for their lives and fled France. Even Grandier’s refusal not to confess under serious torture that would have broken someone else was not taken as proof of his innocence, and a typical attitude towards this challenge was given by a witness who testified :
I am not surprised by his impenitence, nor by his refusal to admit himself guilty of magic, both under torture and during his execution, because we know that magicians promise the devil never to confess this crime, and he in return hardens the heart, so that they go to their death stupid and completely insensitive to their misfortunes.
In other words, it was not exactly a fair trial, and it is perhaps not surprising that Grandier was convicted of “magic, evil spell and causing demonic possession” on August 18, 1634 , and condemned to be burned at the stake. , despite his insistence that the latter was innocent. He was apparently not even allowed to have a final word before his execution as promised, gagged, and was unable to speak before the flames consumed him. This execution would itself be a rather strange spectacle, as described by a witness:
The executioner then advanced, as always, to strangle him; but the flames suddenly burst out with such violence that the rope caught fire, and he fell alive among the burning bundles. Just before that, a strange event happened. In the midst of this mass of people, despite the noise of so many voices and the efforts of archers who were shaking their halberds in the air to scare them, a flight of pigeons [note: une espèce de colombe] flew all around the stake. Supporters of Grandier [les Huguenauts et les Réformateurs], impudent until the end, declared that these innocent birds came, in the absence of men, as witnesses to his innocence; others thought very differently, and said that it was a troop of demons who came, as sometimes happens to the death of great magicians, to attend that of Grandier, whose scandalous impenitence certainly deserved to be honored with this way. His friends, however, called this hardness of constancy of heart, and had his ashes picked up as if they were relics.
Surprisingly, this would not even be the end of it all. The exorcisms continued, still the same public performances as ever, with many nuns still displaying possessed behavior, much to the delight of the crowds, and this was mainly seen as a big fraudulent show. However, a priest by the name of Father Jean-Joseph Surin claimed that the real demons had jumped into his body. He was so convinced that he was now the host of these demons that his mental and physical health deteriorated rapidly, to the point that he could barely do the most basic things on his own, such as eating, dressing or even read or write. Through it all, he claimed that he was constantly plagued by nightmares in which demons taunted and terrorized him, finding peace only in his last years before his death in 1665.
Others who had been implicated in the exorcisms were also allegedly hunted down and attacked by demons in the years following Grandier’s death. How this torment came to them includes madness, sickness and death, as well as visions of Grandier’s mind taunting them from beyond the grave. In Des Niau’s account, it is written at length on these incidents:
Father Lactance, the worthy monk who had helped the possessed in their suffering, was himself attacked … Suddenly, while driving on a perfectly flat road, the car turned over with the wheels in the air without that no one is injured. . The next day … the car returned again in the same way in the middle of the rue du Faubourg de Fenet, which is perfectly smooth … This holy monk then experienced the most annoyance from the demons, who sometimes deprived him of sight, and to moments of memory; they provoked violent fits of nausea in him, tarnished his intelligence and worried him in many ways. Finally, after being tested by so many evils, God called him to Himself.
Five years later, Father Tranquille died of the same illness… They threw him to the ground, they cursed and swore with his mouth, they pushed him to stick out his tongue and whistle like a snake, they filled his spirit of darkness seemed to crush his heart, and overwhelmed him with a thousand other torments.
Civil Lieutenant Louis Chauvet was seized with such fear that his mind gave way and he never recovered. Sieur Mannouri, the surgeon who had sounded the marks that the devil had printed on the magician priest, suffering from extraordinary disorders, was of course, according to friends of Grandier, victim of remorse. Here are the details of the death of this surgeon …
One night, when he came back around ten o’clock after visiting a patient, walking with a friend and accompanied by a man carrying a lantern, he suddenly cried out, like a man waking up from a dream: “Ah! there is Grandier! What do you want? ’At the same time he was shaking. The two men took him home, while he continued to speak to Grandier whom he thought was in front of him. He was put to bed filled with the same illusion and trembling in all the limbs. He only lived for a few days, during which his condition never changed. He died believing that the magician was still in front of him and making efforts to keep him at bay
What should we do with all of this? Loudun’s possessions have become an often discussed historical oddity, with several possible answers. Of course, there is the idea that this is an authentic case of possession, with the paranormal phenomena surrounding the nuns witnessing many priests and other witnesses, as well as the curse and demonic activity that seemed to persist even after Grandier’s death. Another idea is that it was just a case of mass hysteria, and that Grandier was just the unlucky guy who got caught in the middle of it all, his rather notorious reputation didn’t help. at all. The most popular notion, however, is that it was all a set-up and that Grandier was surrounded by his enemies, of whom he had a lot, to judge for witchcraft and remove from the picture, all orchestrated from behind the scenes .
Jean Grandier
Although Grandier had more than a few enemies and opponents, the main culprit is generally considered to be a Cardinal Richelieu, who absolutely hated Grandier and wanted him to be removed from office, but it could have been anyone. in a position of power that wanted him gone. The theory is that it happened as the Mother Superior said, and that they were approached to falsify goods and point the finger at Grandier, after which Mignot was sent by these conspiratorial forces to further cement the illusion that something paranormal was happening. Indeed, most accounts of supernatural activity were relayed by Mignot, with many other priests testifying that the arguments in favor of demonic possession were far from convincing. Then there were the conflicting accounts of the “marks of the devil” and the fact that the “devil’s pact” was written by Angels, as well as the fact that the testimony of witnesses for Grandier’s defense had been closed. It stinks of an organization, and there seems to be a distinct possibility that Loudun’s possessions have been orchestrated by nefarious parties.
What has happened all these years in Loudun? What was tracking this convent of nuns? Are these demonic forces from beyond, or simply the political and religious machinations of men stabbing themselves in the back? Is there anything supernatural to see here or is it all a complex framing of an innocent man using the fear of witchcraft and Satan of the time against him? Whatever the case, the case of the Loudun nuns is a curious look at another age, a tale of witchcraft, demons, magic and intrigue, and it’s a historical oddity that is about as strange as possible.
Source and credits: MYSTERIOUSUNIVERSE
