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At the end of time you will turn into an
incubus. For proof you have only to turn to a treatise by
the seventeenth-century Franciscan monk Ludovico Maria Sinistrari,
De Daemonialitate. In his view an incubus is a blend
of human and spiritual being, heavier than angels but lighter
than earthbound humans. He makes it clear that, although in
the mean time this halfway status is only possible for an
incubus, 'whose body has the lightness and luminosity of human
redemption', our dead bodies will acquire in the last days
the same consistency. In fact this transformation is already
happening. There may be only a few snatches of evidence for
this kind of blend between human and spirit, among which would
be the brief text about giants being the product of woman
and angels in Genesis 6:4, but demonologists like Sinistrari
never let sparsity of evidence inhibit their research. Augustine,
after all, had proposed that Psalm 85 makes clear that the
blessed souls will have bodies like angels. A Renaissance
scientist of the spiritual need only be more precise and fill
out the picture. Nero, Alexander, Aeneas, even Luther, also
came from human-demon intercourse, as Francesco Maria Guazzo's
Compendium maleficarum (1608) showed. And now Sinistrari's
research (not published till 1875, following its discovery
in London) reveals that those Genesis giants did not disappear
from the earth at the time of the flood, as most commentators
assume. Rather the flood made the quality of the air change,
so now those hybrid and aereal creatures have become invisible
and small, like fairies; but they are still with us, and the
sign of our eventual redemption.
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In his new book, Armando Maggi tries to understand
the strange world of Renaissance demonology without making
fun or dwelling on its absurdity. But he has a lot of competition.
The field, especially its witchcraft branch, has been heavily
studied over the past fifty years, and there have been many
attempts to get inside this bizarre world-view to explain
why this farrago of various apparent nonsenses was believed
by so many for so long. Some explanations take a psychological
turn: a woman's fears of childbirth are the source of the
incubus fantasies, as in the Polanski film of Rosemary's
Baby; or perhaps it is male fears of being usurped in
the marriage bed and so not fathering their own children (Miranda:
Sir, are not you my father? Prospero: Thy mother was a piece
of virtue, and/ She said thou wast my daughter.) Others show
how the kissing of Satan's arse, like Luther's vision of the
devil in the privy, suggests the link with anality memorably
argued by Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death (1959).
And many emphasize the suppressed eroticism, as in R.E.L.
Masters's book Eros and Evil (1962), which included
a transcript of Sinistrari. Some treatises do indeed read
like licensed pornography: explicit sexual activity is described
at length, conventionally including some ritual orgy like
the one so coolly filmed in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
The Malleus Maleficarum itself (1486), the Dominican
text that inspired so much of the witch-hunt craze, claims
that 'Witches have often been seen in fields and woods, lying
on their backs, naked up to the navel. And it appears from
the disposition of their sexual organs, and from the agitation
of the legs, that they have been copulating with Incubus demons
which are invisible to the onlookers.' Many accounts describe
the activities of the so-called sabbats - dancing in a ring,
raising of petticoats, copulations in groups ('the brother
does not spare the sister, nor the father the daughter, nor
the son the mother', according to Henri Boguet's 1610 Discours
des sorciers).
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Carlo Ginzburg took a very different line
in his brilliant study of an extraordinary shamanistic cult
in northern Italy, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian
Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1983).
His follow-up and more ambitious book, Ecstasies: Deciphering
the Witches' Sabbath (1991) was less convincing and fell
prey to the same outmoded attitudes as Margaret Murray's Frazerian
theory about the pre-Christian horned god in The Witch-cult
in Western Europe (1921). Anthropologists have compared
early modern practices with those of other more exotic societies
of the kind that used to be called 'primitive', and in which
medical knowledge is inadequate for explaining illness. Indeed
animism -- belief in a world of invisible spirits -- was part
of the human heritage, it seems, before even we left Africa,
and Renaissance demonology may be simply its most sophisticated
reflex: see J.R. and W.H. McNeill, The Human Web (2004).
But not the last: the recent spates of belief in Satanic Ritual
Abuse, whether in Kenya or in California, has been widely
studied, and in the most recent book, Evil Incarnate
(2006), David Frankfurter finds several clusters of images
that make patterns common to all such outbreaks going back
at least to the treatment of Christians in ancient Rome. The
truly unpleasant aspects of demonology, especially its anti-Semitism,
were reviewed by Norman Cohn in Europe's Inner Demons
(1975, 2nd edn., 1993), a reconstruction of the development
of the European witch stereotype. Others have adopted sociological
approaches and argued for the daily resentments of small communities
as the main motivations for accusations of witchcraft. Robin
Briggs, the Oxford historian, took this line in his Witches
and Neighbours (1996), about early modern Europe, as did
James Sharpe in The Bewitching of Anne Gunter (1999),
a study of a case of fake possession. Sharpe's Instruments
of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 1550-1750 (1996),
had already extended the socio-economic analyses of Alan McFarlane
for English history (different in important ways from Continental
Europe: above all, local malevolence but no belief in a large-scale
Satanic cult). And Christina Larner's essays in Witchcraft
and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief (1984), following
her earlier Enemies of God: the Witch-hunt in Scotland
(1981), widened the field for social historians and laid out
the causes for the specific timing of witch-hunts. The witch-hunts
coincided, she argued, with important changes in the judicial
systems, with the rapid spread of printing and with the period
of the new-born and Godly nation state. And finally, early
modern witchcraft has also been a favourite field of study
for feminist efforts to rescue the (her)story of women from
patriarchal historians. Diane Purkiss in The Witch in History:
Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (1996)
both explores and questions this approach.
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Armando Maggi takes quite a different tack.
He wants to revive a lost world of the imagination. His aim
is not to psychoanalyze but to sympathize, and his strategy
is to enter into the spirit (so to speak) of this strange
world. In the Company of Demons treats all demonological
texts as acts of language, using techniques common among literary
critics. One treatise, for example, by a nephew of the famous
Pico della Mirandella, is a tissue of classical allusions
and quotations, intended to demonstrate that the gods of the
ancient world have become demons (a common view among the
Fathers of the Church). In Pico's view, Florentine humanists
(like his uncle), in their hospitality to those ancient gods,
are the real demonic enemies, and Pico stages the struggle
with them as an imagined dialogue between two opposing intellectuals.
But Maggi's linguistic analysis goes much further. In the
course of their conversation, the two intellectual friends
come upon a witch being dragged to her trial. The text reproduces
her sorrowful confession about the terrifying rituals in which
she meets her incubus Ludovicus, has sex with him and murders
various children. It gradually becomes clear that to 'burn'
a witch, in this treatise at least, means to unravel the mythic
references hiding there. A witch is 'a patchwork of narrative
particles'. And a 'devil has a syncretistic presence in that
his visibility is in fact a cultural palimpsest (a cluster
of disparate cultural references).'
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Thus, the demonologists themselves understood
the activity of witches as primarily linguistic. Devils come
to us as visible quotations from classical texts, 'as if Greek
and Roman culture were a demonic book of Revelations'. Strozzi
Cicogna's popular and original treatise to that effect was
incorporated into the first section of Robert Burton's Anatomy
of Melancholy (1624). And in general demons try to create
linguistic chaos by undoing or altering prayers or invocations,
even countering the exorcisms themselves by changing the wording.
If creation by the Word is a metaphor for divine activity,
then destruction by perversions of language is the way the
devils work: incomprehensible words like 'firabis ficaliri
Elypolis starras poly…buccabor vel barton … ' should be avoided
in any exorcism (though Maggi cites one which mistakenly quotes
just these words), because of their destructive potential.
Close and careful speaking is the way to salvation.
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Maggi's earlier book from 2001, Satan's
Rhetoric, investigated how the devil constructs his own
idiom. This linguistic approach is widespread in our time:
Stuart Clark, for example, began his gigantic book Thinking
With Demons, a study with an enormous reach and including
the classic French demonology of Jean Bodin (1580), by proposing
that 'to make any kind of sense of the witchcraft beliefs
of the past we need to begin with language'. Maggi followed
up the implications of that idea and brought to light an enormous
amount of material from his Italian sources.
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In the Company of Demons takes this
linguistic approach a stage further, and argues that all spirits'
bodies are made of similes. 'Through a metaphor a poet tries
to convey a certain message', and demons, angels, spirits
do the same, using bodies made of air to make a statement
and communicate with us. Maggi reads these Renaissance treatises
as efforts to interpret those linguistic signs that spirits
utter. How can a metaphor couple with human flesh? Maggi is
not afraid to ask that question, and though, not unexpectedly,
he never manages to answer it, he explores a variety of possibilities
opened by these bizarre texts.
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Of course much else that was physically mutilating
as well as linguistically deformed was going on in these exorcisms,
and Maggi is well aware of that. Indeed such is the interest
of the topic that he is often drawn beyond his linguistic
or rhetorical approach to discuss the deeds that witches are
supposed to perform. And he links these deeds back to his
basic linguistic hypothesis by imagining the exorcism as a
theatrical performance. In an earlier book, which he makes
use of here, Maggi had studied one of the most prominent Italian
mystics, Maria Maddalena, from just this point of view: her
constant efforts to make the Word incarnate in her own oral
discourse, and the melancholy that results when this expression
is denied or obfuscated. In this and other ways, though he
has no particular linguistic theory of his own to present,
Maggi has opened a whole field for investigation.
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And yet, as in that overlapping of mystic
and witch, this book is a muddle. Spirits, angels, demons,
devils are often run together and treated as parallel or similar
entities; any distinction between good and bad magic, good
and bad language, collapses. But the distinction as to where
the spirits come from is often important, both in the treatises
and in Maggi's argument. As an example, take the story Jerome
tells about St Anthony's visiting Paul the hermit and meeting
a satyr on the way. Two different ways of reading the story
are presented, one by Giovan Franceso Pico in which the story
serves as a way to refute his uncle's humanism by showing
that all figures from classical mythology and legend are really
demonic; the other in which Sinistrari, whose treatise De
Demonialitate Maggi is the first to expound at any length,
focuses on the dialogue between hermit and satyr. Realizing
that the hermit is terrified by his appearance, the satyr,
who is actually an incubus, offers the holy man some fruit,
saying 'I am mortal'. This means, in Sinistrari's analysis,
that 'I am like you, you have nothing to fear'. He has been
sent to Anthony as an ambassador, having learned of the Incarnation,
to ask him to pray for his people's salvation. He and his
kind are trapped in an in-between world, exiled and fearful.
Whereas Pico denounces this satyr as a kind of strix or
witch, and defines humanity by contrast with this realm of
demonic beings, Sinistrari makes him the sign of our joint
salvation. An incubus is one step up the scale of being, and
has the kind of body we will have if we attain salvation.
Obviously the distinction between good and evil magic mattered
to these spiritual scientists.
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In another story a young man complains that
he is hounded by a demon he cannot shake off no matter what
he does. The demon appears in a variety of forms, including
a valet, a butler and a teacher, even a nobleman on horseback.
To Maggi, the demon is clearly in love. The young man complains
to a friar about these visitations, and the friar confirms
the various sightings, though unaware that the apparition
is a demon. We never hear whether the young man succeeds in
liberating himself from this lovesick demon, but Girolamo
Menghi, a Franciscan and the author of the treatise in which
the story is told, is of two minds. On the one hand this is
clearly a perverse relationship like those the ancients tell
us about. We must be eternally vigilant to protect ourselves
from this kind of demonic attack. On the other, we detect
no evil in the spirit's behaviour and the story is ultimately
about the love the demon has for the young man. What are we
to make of this? What counts for Maggi is the evidence of
friendly demonic interest in humanity.
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These two stories together define both the
strength and the problem of this book. It is based on thorough
and scholarly research into demonology, and what Renaissance
philosophers thought of as the danger that the demons represent
to human beings in these, the last days of humanity (as Menghi
and many others believed). Yet Maggi is clearly more than
sympathetic to these demonic discourses, and to the spirits
who deliver them. They are, as he reiterates several times,
'concerned and compassionate' toward humanity. That, as even
Machiavelli thought, is why they speak to us. Apparently evil,
these demons are also the sign of our salvation, and it is
hard to be consistent in the face of that kind of contradiction.
For example Pompeo della Barba, who wrote a Neoplatonic treatise
on love, also published (1558) a work on the magico-scientific
secrets of nature. It discusses deceased lovers who cannot
help returning to the places that witnessed their love, and
taking on bodies to repeat the experience. However sympathetic
we may be to them, we have to be firm, says della Barba, and
he mentions the Cretan practice of piercing a corpse's heart
with a stick to stop his returning with a visible but fictional
body to quench his still burning desire. In this variant of
a vampire remedy we must be willing to 'break the lover's
heart' to avoid his becoming the daimon of his own
fixation.
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Maggi tries to see all these extraordinarily
diverse treatises as manifestations of the same early modern
ideology. And he gives the impression at times that, though
he insists they are 'nonexistent beings', he wants us to listen
to these familiar spirits who are all somehow so eager for
our salvation. He is not interested in history for its own
sake, he says; that is mere archeology. He may be contemptuous
of the cult of angels so common in America today, yet, in
several unguarded moments, he wonders where today are the
spirits who used to visit us to express their compassion and
concern. He may be just ventriloquizing what the texts say,
and yet, at the end of this scholarly and often fascinating
book, he nonetheless writes that in these spirits lies our
redemption. One has the uneasy feeling that Professor Maggi
has spent too long in the company of demons.
