In the Middle Ages, no one doubted that demons are able to penetrate a person, which makes him possessed. Nowadays, everyday life is so far from mysticism that obsession seems to be a figment of the fantasy of Hollywood scriptwriters.
However, if you think about some of the actions of people, then it should be recognized that either a person is by nature not quite reasonable, or an evil spirit still exists and does not allow us to live in peace. For example, unmotivated violent crimes raise a lot of questions.
After committing them, some criminals say: "The devil beguiled." Although from a legal point of view, such an explanation does not alleviate the guilt, but suddenly, in fact, the person was not aware of his actions? Because it was ruled by the demon that possessed him.
Overpowered by demons
In medieval Europe, there were many possessed. Moreover, for some reason the demons were not satisfied with the bodily shells of bandits and murderers, they strove to penetrate, for example, nuns.
For example, the nun Jeanne Ferry, who lived in Mons (Belgium) in the 16th century, admitted that she was possessed by eight demons. She claimed that at the age of 14 she was raped by the devil, after which she began to be haunted by visions of hell. Demons began to penetrate the girl, causing her convulsions.
Another nun, who lived at the same time in Vienne (France), claimed that 12 606 (!) Demons who had previously been in a glass jug in the form of a lump of flies had moved into her.
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There have been different versions of where demons come from and how they choose the target of their persecution. The Ursuline women from the monastery in Provence unanimously declared that the demons were sent to them by the parish priest from Marseille Louis' Gofridi. So, one of the ursulines, Magdalene de la Palu, said that Gofridi had sent a whole legion of demons against her.
The accusations that the nuns leveled against the priest from Marseilles now look absurd. For example, they stated that Gofridi during the post pretended not to eat meat. In fact, he gorged on the meat of the babies he strangled. To the accusations of these atrocities, the Magdalene added her personal claim, stating that the priest had seduced her.
Louis swore by all the saints that the Ursulines were slandering him, and hoped that Inquisitor Michaelis, charged with the investigation, would find out. However, the inquisitor decided that the nuns were indeed possessed by demons.
After that, Gofridi was tortured, during which he not only confessed to all the sins of which the ursulines were accused, but also painted them with additional details. Specifically, Gofridi said:
- I also confess that, wishing to go to the Sabbath, I stood at the open window through which Lucifer appeared to me, and instantly transferred to the gathering, where I remained for two, three, and sometimes four hours.
The priest also added that he infected about a thousand women with poisonous breath, which Lucifer taught him. After such revelations, one could no longer count on Gofridi's indulgence. On April 30, 1611, he was burned at Aix.
According to researchers, Gofridi did not suffer innocently. It seems that he really seduced Magdalene when he was her spiritual mentor. But who really suffered without guilt was the young priest Grandier, who arrived from Bordeaux to the provincial Louden, where a small monastery of Ursulines from noble families was located. One gets the impression that the handsome and witty Grandier slept with half of the female population of Louden.
But the ursuline was bypassed by its attention. They began a whole campaign against him in 1631. The abbess and the nuns began to convulse and mutter in diabolical dialect. They lay down on the floor, crawled on their stomachs, stuck out their tongue, which turned completely black, let out screams, meowed, barked and raved.
And the reason for their unusual behavior was declared to be the demons that Grandier had sent against them. The women broke the comedy for almost six months and finally got so tired that they confessed in the church that it was only a game of the devil and that Grandier was innocent. However, it was too late. On August 18, 1634, by the verdict of the court, the priest was burned at the stake.
The pledge of the innocent had dramatic consequences not only for poor Grandier, but also for the Ursulines themselves. Obsession, like a contagious disease, engulfed the entire monastery. Even after the execution of Grandier, the ursulines for no apparent reason began to convulse and rage. Soon an epidemic of obsession spread to all of Luden. Attacks of either madness or demonism began to persecute the most respectable ladies and maidens. And not a single exorcist could cope with them.
Many guises
Although most of the world's religions do not doubt that obsession exists, two key questions remain unclear in this phenomenon. First of all, how do demons penetrate the human body? Even in The Hammer of the Witches, a detailed instruction for inquisitors, the authors were unable to answer this question. The process of obsession is most clearly presented in the American mystical series "Supernatural".
There, a jet of black smoke flies into a person's mouth, and he instantly turns into a slave of evil forces. It is not without grounds that the French nun mentioned that the demons entered her by means of flies is not without reason. They say that in the form of this insect Beelzebub loved to appear to people, whose name translates as "lord of the flies."
Sometimes an apple was called a conductor of evil spirits, since this fruit was considered a symbol of the Fall, sometimes a pig. Mikhail Lermontov used one gospel parable about demons, who, having left a man, moved into a herd of pigs and forced him to throw himself off a cliff, in his story "Fatalist". In it, the main character Pechorin predicts an imminent death for Vulich, and on the same night learns that the lieutenant was hacked to death by a drunken Cossack, who had previously chased a pig and cut it in two.
Although the Fatalist does not mention this, it seems that it was the demon who possessed a drunken Cossack that pushed him to kill. And then the goals of evil spirits become clear. It is unclear why the demons mock a man: make him make faces and convulse. But if we assume that these are only side effects of obsession, and the main goal is to push a person to commit a crime, then the motives of many high-profile murders become understandable.
Supernatural instigators
Classically fits into the theory of obsession with the temporary clouding of the mind of the French king Charles VI. On August 5, 1392, during a military campaign, he calmly rode on horseback, when suddenly the monarch was unbalanced by the clang of a spear that fell from the hands of a sleeping page and hit the infantryman's helmet. The king suddenly drew his sword from its scabbard and with a cry: "Forward, forward on the traitors!" - pierced the page, then killed the bastard de Paulie-nac and wounded three more of his retinue.
Then Charles VI chased his own brother, who rushed from him into the forest. It is not known how many more the mad monarch would have laid if the castellan Guillaume Martel had not thrown himself on the croup of the royal horse and grabbed Charles VI from behind. The king was thrown to the ground, after which he fell into oblivion and woke up only two days later, quite normal.
Mulat Dimitrio Tsafendas, who worked as a courier in the South African parliament, it seemed that a worm had settled in his stomach, which ordered him to kill the head of government. Unable to resist him. Tsafendas went to the State Assembly building on September 6, 1966, and there he stabbed the Prime Minister of South Africa, Hendrik Verwoerd, who was considered the "architect of the apartheid regime."
Although the authors of the "Hammer of the Witches" claimed that demons inhabit the head of people, it is possible that in South Africa they chose another part of the body as their refuge. Someone is easier to control through the brain, someone through the stomach …
The most notorious Russian murder in a state of obsession can be called the massacre on April 18, 1993, perpetrated by former internationalist warrior Nikolai Averin over three monks in Optina Pustyn. It is possible that a certain demon actually settled in his head, demanding bloodshed from Nicholas. During interrogations, Averin said that a voice in his head made him drink, smoke and swear dirty, and somehow ordered him to kill a neighbor in the hostel and throw himself out of the window himself. Nikolai resisted that time. But later he succumbed to the influence of the voice from his head, carved a cleaver in a car workshop, on which he engraved the number of the beast - 666, watched and killed the monks.
And the loudest world murder was the shooting of the famous musician John Lennon by his fan Mark Chapman in December 1980.-Sentenced to life imprisonment, Chapman gave an interview in 1991, in which he blamed all the blame for the crime on demons:
- From the age of ten I was saturated with the righteousness of John Lennon, I accepted him with all my heart … But suddenly I found in my head "little people". I spoke to them every day, asked them what to do. And it was they, the "little people", who convinced me to kill the famous musician John Lennon. They were terrified. They were shocked. They were part of my conscience, and when I acted against my conscience, there was nothing left in me to control me. I was left alone. And then I tore off my clothes, put on the Beatles records and pray to Satan. I screamed and screamed into the tape recorder: “John Lennon must die! John Lennon is a deceiver!"
Chapman (right) and John Lennon
Maybe Chapman, by accusing the demons of incitement, was trying to justify himself in front of the whole world. And perhaps he really was obsessed with them.
Oleg LOGINOV