The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals
by E. P. Evans · English · Gutenberg #43286 · 589,373 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals
Author: E. P. Evans
Release date: July 23, 2013 [eBook #43286]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43286
Credits: Produced by Chris Curnow and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRIMINAL PROSECUTION AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT OF ANIMALS ***
Produced by Chris Curnow and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive.)
THE CRIMINAL PROSECUTION AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT OF ANIMALS
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
ANIMAL SYMBOLISM IN ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHITECTURE. Fully illustrated. In one
Vol. Crown 8vo. Price 9_s._
EVOLUTIONAL ETHICS AND ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY. In one Vol. Crown 8vo. Price
9_s._
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
[Illustration: Execution of a Sow.]
THE CRIMINAL PROSECUTION AND
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT OF ANIMALS
BY E. P. EVANS
AUTHOR OF
“ANIMAL SYMBOLISM IN ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHITECTURE,”
“EVOLUTIONAL ETHICS AND ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY,” ETC., ETC.
[Illustration]
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
MCMVI
_Copyright 1906 by William Heinemann_
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Sources--Amira’s distinction between retributive and
preventive processes--Addosio’s incorrect designation of the
latter as civil suits--Inconsistent attitude of the Church
in excommunicating animals--Causal relation of crime to
demoniacal possession--Squatter sovereignty of devils--
_Aura corrumpens_--Diabolical infestation and lack of
ventilation--“Bewitched kine”--Greek furies and Christian
demons--Homicidal bees, laying cocks and crowing hens--
Theory of the personification of animals--Beasts in
Frankish, Welsh, and old German laws--Animal prosecutions
and witchcraft--The Mosaic code in Christian courts--Pagan
deities as demons--Born malefactors among beasts--The theory
of punishment in modern criminology _p._ 1
CHAPTER I
BUGS AND BEASTS BEFORE THE LAW
Criminal prosecution of rats--Chassenée appointed to defend
them--Report of the trial--Chassenée employed as counsel in
other cases of this kind--His dissertation on the subject--
Nature of his argument--Authorities and precedents--The
withering of the fig-tree at Bethany justified and explained
by Dr. Trench--Eels and blood-suckers in Lake Leman cursed
by the Bishop of Lausanne with the approval of Heidelberg
theologians--White bread turned black, and swallows, fish,
and flies destroyed by anathema--St. Pirminius expels
reptiles--Vermifugal efficacy of St. Magnus’ crosier--Papal
execratories--Animals regarded by the law as lay persons,
and not entitled to benefit of clergy--Methods of
procedure--Jurisdiction of the courts--Records of judicial
proceedings against insects--Important trial of weevils at
St. Jean-de-Maurienne extending over more than eight
months--Untenableness of Ménebréa’s theory--Summary of the
pleadings--Futile attempts at compromise--Final decision
doubtful--St. Eldrad and the snakes--Views of Thomas
Aquinas--Distinction between excommunication and anathema--
“Sweet beasts and stenchy beasts”--Animals as incarnations
of devils--Their diabolical character assumed in papal
formula for blessing water to kill vermin--Amusing treatise
by Père Bougeant on this subject--All animals animated by
devils, and all pagans and unbaptized persons possessed with
them--Demons the real causes of diseases--Father Lohbauer’s
prescription in such cases--Formula of exorcism issued by
Leo XIII.--Recent instances of demoniacal possession--
Hoppe’s psychological explanation of them--Charcot on
faith-cures--Why not the duty of the Catholic Church to
inculcate kindness to animals--Zoölatry a form of
demonolatry--Gnats especially dangerous devils--
Bodelschwingh’s discovery of the _bacillus infernalis_--
Gaspard Bailly’s disquisition with specimens of plaints,
pleas, etc.--Ayrault protests against such proceedings--
Hemmerlein’s treatise on exorcisms--Criminal prosecution of
field-mice--Vermin excommunicated by the Bishop of
Lausanne--Protocol of judicial proceedings against
caterpillars--Conjurers of cabbage-worms--Swallows
proscribed by a Protestant parson--Custom of writing letters
of advice to rats--Writs of ejectment served on them--
Rhyming rats in Ireland--Ancient usage mentioned by
Kassianos Bassos--Capital punishment of larger quadrupeds--
Berriat-Saint-Prix’s Reports and Researches--List of
culprits--Beasts burned and buried alive and put to the
rack--Swine executed for infanticide--Bailly’s bill of
expenses--An ox decapitated for its demerits--Punishment of
buggery--Cohabitation of a Christian with a Jewess declared
to be sodomy--Trial of a sow and six sucklings for murder--
Bull sent to the gallows for killing a lad--A horse
condemned to death for homicide--A cock burned at the stake
for the unnatural crime of laying an egg--Lapeyronie’s
investigation of the subject--Racine’s satire on such
prosecutions in _Les Plaideurs_; _Lex talionis_--Tit for tat
the law of the primitive man and the savage--The application
of this iron rule in Hebrew legislation--Flesh of a culprit
pig not to be eaten--Athenian laws for punishing inanimate
objects--Recent execution of idols in China--Russian bell
sentenced to perpetual exile in Siberia for abetting
insurrection--Pillory for dogs in Vienna--Treatment
prescribed for mad dogs in the Avesta--Cruelty of laws, of
talion and decrees of corruption of blood--Examples in
ancient and modern legislation--Cicero approves of such
penalties for political offences--Survival of this
conception of justice in theology--Constitutio Criminalis
Carolina--Lombroso opposed to trial by jury as a relic of
barbarism--Corruption of Swiss cantonal courts--Deodand in
English law--Applications of it in Maryland and in
Scotland--Blackstone’s theory of it untenable--Penalties
inflicted for suicide--Ancient legislation on this
subject--Legalization of suicide--Abolition of deodands in
England _p._ 18
CHAPTER II
MEDIÆVAL AND MODERN PENOLOGY
Recent change in the spirit of criminal jurisprudence--
Mediæval tribunals cut with the executioner’s sword the
intricate knots which the modern criminalist essays to
untie--Phlebotomy a panacea in medicine and law--Restless
ghosts of criminals who died unpunished--Execution of
vampires and were-wolves--Case of a were-wolf who devoured
little children “even on Friday”--Pope Stephen VI. brings
the corpse of his predecessor to trial--Mediæval and modern
conceptions of culpability--Problems of psycho-pathological
jurisprudence--Degrees of mental vitiation--Italians
pioneers in the scientific study of criminality--Effects of
these speculations upon legislation--Barbarity of mediæval
penal justice--Gradual abolition of judicial torture--Cruel
sentence pronounced by Carlo Borromeo--“Blue Laws” a great
advance on contemporary English penal codes--Moral and penal
responsibility--Atavism and criminality--Physical
abnormities--Capacity and symmetry of the skull--
Circumvolutions of the brain--Tattooing not a peculiarity of
criminals, but simply an indication of low æsthetic sense--
Theories of the origin and nature of crime--Intelligence not
always to be measured by the size of the encephalon--
Remarkable exceptions in Gambetta, Bichat, Bischoff and Ugo
Foscolo--Advanced criminalists justly dissatisfied with the
penal codes of to-day--Measures proposed by Lombroso and his
school--Their conclusions not sustained by facts--Crime
through hypnotic suggestion--Difficulty of defining
insanity--Coleridge’s definition too inclusive--
Predestination and evolution--Criminality among the lower
animals--Punishment preventive or retributive--
Schopenhauer’s doctrine of responsibility for character--
Remarkable trial of a Swiss toxicomaniac, Marie
Jeanneret--“Method in Madness” not uncommon--Social safety
the supreme law--Application of this principle to
“Cranks”--Spirit of imitation peculiarly strong in such
classes--Contagiousness of crime--Criminology now in a
period of transition _p._ 193
APPENDIX
A. De Actis Scindicorum Communitatis Sancti Julliani
agentium contra Animalia Bruta ad formam muscarum volantia
coloris viridis communi voce appellata Verpillions seu
Amblevins _p._ 259
B. Traite des Monitoires avec un Plaidoyer contre les
Insectes par Spectable Gaspard Bailly _p._ 287
C. Allegation, Replication, and Judgment in the process
against field-mice at Stelvio in 1519 _p._ 307
D. Admonition, Denunciation, and Citation of the Inger by
the Priest Bernhard Schmid in the name and by the authority
of the Bishop of Lausanne in 1478 _p._ 309
E. Decree of Augustus, Duke of Saxony and Elector,
commending the action of Parson Greysser in putting the
sparrows under ban, issued at Dresden in 1559 _p._ 311
F. Chronological List of Excommunications and Prosecutions
of Animals from the ninth to the nineteenth century _p._ 313
G. Receipt, dated January 9, 1386, in which the hangman of
Falaise acknowledges to have been paid by the Viscount of
Falaise ten sous and ten deniers tournois for the execution
of an infanticidal sow, and also ten sous tournois for a new
glove _p._ 335
H. Receipt, dated September 24, 1394, in which Jehan Micton
acknowledges that he received the sum of fifty sous tournois
from Thomas de Juvigney, Viscount of Mortaing, for having
hanged a pig, which had killed and murdered a child in the
parish of Roumaygne _p._ 336
I. Attestation of Symon de Baudemont, Lieutenant of the
Bailiff of Nantes and Meullant, made by order of the said
bailiff and the king’s proctor, on March 15, 1403, and
certifying to the expenses incurred in executing a sow that
had devoured a small child _p._ 338
J. Receipt, dated October 16, 1408, and signed by Toustain
Pincheon, jailer of the royal prisons in the town of Pont de
Larche, acknowledging the payment of nineteen sous and six
deniers tournois for food furnished to sundry men and to one
pig kept in the said prisons on charge of crime _p._ 340
K. Letters Patent, by which Philip the Bold, Duke of
Burgundy, on September 12, 1379, granted the petition of the
Friar Humbert de Poutiers, Prior of the town of
Saint-Marcel-lez-Jussey, and pardoned two herds of swine,
which had been condemned to suffer the extreme penalty of
the law as accomplices in an infanticide committed by three
sows _p._ 342
L. Sentence pronounced by the Mayor of Loens de Chartres on
the 12th of September, 1606, condemning Guillaume Guyart to
be hanged and burned together with a bitch _p._ 344
M. Sentence pronounced by the Judge of Savigny in January,
1457, condemning to death an infanticidal sow. Also the
sentence of confiscation pronounced nearly a month later on
the six pigs of the said sow for complicity in her crime _p._ 346
N. Sentence pronounced, April 18, 1499, in a criminal
prosecution instituted before the Bailiff of the Abbey of
Josaphat, in the Commune of Sèves, near Chartres, against a
pig condemned to be hanged for having killed an infant. In
this case the owners of the pig were fined eighteen francs
for negligence, because the child was their fosterling _p._ 352
O. Sentence pronounced, June 14, 1494, by the Grand Mayor of
the church and monastery of St. Martin de Laon, condemning a
pig to be hanged and strangled for infanticide committed on
the fee-farm of Clermont-lez-Montcornet _p._ 354
P. Sentence pronounced, March 27, 1567, by the Royal Notary
and Proctor of the Bailiwick and Bench of the Court of
Judicatory of Senlis, condemning a sow with a black snout to
be hanged for her cruelty and ferocity in murdering a girl
of four months, and forbidding the inhabitants of the said
seignioralty to let such beasts run at large on penalty of
an arbitrary fine _p._ 356
Q. Sentence of death pronounced upon a bull, May 16, 1499,
by the Bailiff of the Abbey of Beaupré, for furiously
killing Lucas Dupont, a young man of fourteen or fifteen
years of age _p._ 358
R. Scene from Racine’s comedy _Les Plaideurs_, in which a
dog is tried and condemned to the galleys for stealing a
capon _p._ 360
S. Record of the decision of the Law Faculty of the
University of Leipsic condemning a cow to death for having
killed a woman at Machern near Leipsic, July 20, 1621 _p._ 361
BIBLIOGRAPHY _p._ 362
INDEX _p._ 373
THE CRIMINAL PROSECUTION AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT OF ANIMALS
INTRODUCTION
The present volume is the result of the revision and expansion of two
essays entitled “Bugs and Beasts before the Law,” and “Modern and Mediæval
Punishment,” which appeared in _The Atlantic Monthly_, in August and
September 1884. Since that date the author has collected a vast amount of
additional material on the subject, which has also been discussed by other
writers in several publications, the most noteworthy of which are
Professor Karl von Amira’s _Thierstrafen und Thierprocesse_ (Innsbruck,
1891), Carlo d’Addosio’s _Bestie Delinquenti_ (Napoli, 1892), and G.
Tobler’s _Thierprocesse in der Schweiz_ (Bern, 1893), but in none of these
works, except the first-mentioned, are there any important statements of
facts or citations of cases in addition to those adduced in the essays
already mentioned, for which the writer was indebted chiefly to the
extensive and exceedingly valuable researches of Berriat-Saint-Prix and M.
L. Ménebréa, and the _Consilium Primum_ of Bartholomew Chassenée, cited in
the appended bibliography. Professor Von Amira is a very distinguished and
remarkably keen-sighted jurisprudent and treats the matter exclusively
from a jurisprudential point of view, his main object being to discover
some general principle on which to explain these strange phenomena, and
thus to assign to them their proper place and true significance in the
historical evolution of the idea of justice and the methods of attaining
it by legal procedure.
Von Amira draws a sharp line of technical distinction between Thierstrafen
and Thierprocesse; the former were capital punishments inflicted by
secular tribunals upon pigs, cows, horses, and other domestic animals as a
penalty for homicide; the latter were judicial proceedings instituted by
ecclesiastical courts against rats, mice, locusts, weevils, and other
vermin in order to prevent them from devouring the crops, and to expel
them from orchards, vineyards, and cultivated fields by means of exorcism
and excommunication. Animals, which were in the service of man, could be
arrested, tried, convicted and executed, like any other members of his
household; it was, therefore, not necessary to summon them to appear in
court at a specified time to answer for their conduct, and thus make
them, in the strict sense of the term, a party to the prosecution, for
the sheriff had already taken them in charge and consigned them to the
custody of the jailer. Insects and rodents, on the other hand, which were
not subject to human control and could not be seized and imprisoned by the
civil authorities, demanded the intervention of the Church and the
exercise of its supernatural functions for the purpose of compelling them
to desist from their devastations and to retire from all places devoted to
the production of human sustenance. The only feasible method of staying
the ravages of these swarms of noxious creatures was to resort to
“metaphysical aid” and to expel or exterminate them by sacerdotal
conjuring and cursing. The fact that it was customary to catch several
specimens of the culprits and bring them before the seat of justice, and
there solemnly put them to death while the anathema was being pronounced,
proves that this summary manner of dealing would have been applied to the
whole of them, had it been possible to do so. Indeed, the attempt was
sometimes made to get rid of them by setting a price on their heads, as
was the case with the plague of locusts at Rome in 880, when a reward was
offered for their extermination, but all efforts in this direction proving
futile, on account of the rapidity with which they propagated, recourse
was had to exorcisms and be-sprinklings with holy water.
D’Addosio speaks of the actions brought against domestic animals for
homicide as penal prosecutions, and those instituted against insects and
vermin for injury done to the fruits of the field as civil suits
(_processi civili_); but the latter designation is not correct in any
proper sense of the term, since these actions were not suits to recover
for damages to property, but had solely a preventive or prohibitive
character. The judicial process was preliminary to the utterance of the
malediction and essential to its efficacy. Before fulminating an
excommunication the whole machinery of justice was put in motion in order
to establish the guilt of the accused, who were then warned, admonished,
and threatened, and, in cases of obduracy, smitten with the _anathema
maranatha_ and devoted to utter destruction. As with all bans, charms,
exorcisms, incantations, and other magical hocus-pocus, the omission of
any formality would vitiate the whole procedure, and, by breaking the
spell, deprive the imprecation or interdiction of its occult virtue.
Ecclesiastical thunder would thus be robbed of its fatal bolt and reduced
to mere empty noise, the harmless explosion of a blank cartridge.
The Church was not wholly consistent in its explanations of these
phenomena. In general the swarms of devouring insects and other noxious
vermin are assumed to have been sent at the instigation of Satan
(_instigante sathana, per maleficium diabolicum_), and are denounced and
deprecated as snares of the devil and his satellites (_diaboli et
ministrorum insidias_); again they are treated as creatures of God and
agents of the Almighty for the punishment of sinful man; from this latter
point of view every effort to exterminate them by natural means would be
regarded as a sort of sacrilege, an impious attempt to war upon the
Supreme Being and to withstand His designs. In either case, whether they
were the emissaries of a wicked demon or of a wrathful Deity, the only
proper and permissible way of relief was through the offices of the
Church, whose bishops and other clergy were empowered to perform the
adjurations and maledictions or to prescribe the penances and
propitiations necessary to produce this result. If the insects were
instruments of the devil, they might be driven into the sea or banished to
some arid region, where they would all miserably perish; if, on the other
hand, they were recognized as the ministers of God, divinely delegated to
scourge mankind for the promotion of piety, it would be suitable, after
they had fulfilled their mission, to cause them to withdraw from the
cultivated fields and to assign them a spot, where they might live in
comfort without injury to the inhabitants. The records contain instances
of both kinds of treatment.
It was also as a protection against evil spirits that the penalty of death
was inflicted upon domestic animals. A homicidal pig or bull was not
necessarily assumed to be the incarnation of a demon, although it was
maintained by eminent authorities, as we have shown in the present work,
that all beasts and birds, as well as creeping things, were devils in
disguise; but the homicide, if it were permitted to go unpunished, was
supposed to furnish occasion for the intervention of devils, who were
thereby enabled to take possession of both persons and places. This belief
was prevalent in the Middle Ages, and is still taught by the Catholic
Church. In a little volume entitled _Die Verwaltung des Exorcistats nach
Massgabe der römischen Benediktionale_, of which a revised and enlarged
edition was published at Stuttgart in 1893 for the use of priests as a
manual of instruction in performing exorcisms, it is expressly stated by
the reverend author, Dr. Theobald Bischofberger, that a spot, where a
murder or other heinous crime has been committed, if the said crime
remains undetected or unexpiated, is sure to be infested by demons, and
that the inmates of a house or other building erected upon such a site
will be peculiarly liable to diabolical possession, however innocent they
may be personally. Indeed, the more pure and pious they are, the greater
will be the efforts of the demons to enter into and annoy them. Not only
human beings, but also all cattle after their kind, and even the fowls of
the barnyard are subject to infernal vexations of this sort. The
infestation thus produced may continue for centuries, and, although the
property may pass by purchase or inheritance into other hands and be held
successively by any number of rightful owners, the demons remain in
possession unaffected by legal conveyances. If each proprietor imagines he
has an exclusive title to the estate, he reckons without the host of
devils, who exercise there the right of squatter sovereignty and can be
expelled only by sacerdotal authority. Dr. Bischofberger goes so far as to
affirm that it behoves the purchaser of a piece of land to make sure that
it is unencumbered by devils as well as by debts, otherwise he may have to
suffer more from a demoniac lien than from a dead pledge or any other form
of obligation in law. Information concerning the latter can be obtained at
the registry of deeds, but it is far more difficult to ascertain whether
the infernal powers have any claims upon it, since this knowledge can be
derived only inferentially and indirectly from inquiries into the
character of the proprietors for many generations and must always rest
upon presumptive evidence rather than positive proof. Our author does not
hesitate to assert that houses which have been the abodes of pious people
from time immemorial ought to have a higher market value than the
habitations of notoriously wicked families. It is thus shown that
“godliness is profitable” not only “unto all things,” but also, as
mediæval writers were wont to say, unto some things besides, which the
apostle Paul in his admonitions to his “son Timothy” never dreamed of. We
are also told that the _aura corrumpens_ resulting from diabolical
infestation imparts to the dwelling a peculiar taint, which it often
retains for a long time after the demons have been cast out, so that
sensitive persons cannot enter such a domicile without getting nervously
excited, slightly dizzy and all in a tremble. The carnal mind, which is at
enmity with all supernatural explanations of natural phenomena, would seek
the source of such sensations in an _aura corrumpens_ arising from the
lack of proper ventilation, and find relief by simply opening the windows
instead of calling in a priest with aspergills, and censers, and
_benedictiones locorum_.
We have a striking illustration of this truth in the frequent cases of
“bewitched kine.” European peasants often confine their cattle in stalls
so small and low that the beasts have not sufficient air to breathe. The
result is that a short time after the stalls are closed for the night the
cattle get excited and begin to fret and fume and stamp, and are found in
the morning weak and exhausted and covered with sweat. The peasant
attributes these phenomena to witchcraft, and calls in an exorcist, who
proceeds to expel the evil spirits. Before performing the ceremony of
conjuration, he opens the doors and windows and the admission of fresh
air makes it quite easy to cast out the demons. A German veterinarian, who
reports several instances of this kind, tried in vain to convince the
peasants that the trouble was due, not to sorcery, but to the absence of
proper sanatory conditions, and finally, in despair of accomplishing his
purpose in any other way, told them that if the windows were left open so
that the witches could go in and out freely, the demons would not enter
into the cattle. This advice was followed and the malign influence ceased.
The ancient Greeks held that a murder, whether committed by a man, a
beast, or an inanimate object, unless properly expiated, would arouse the
furies and bring pestilence upon the land; the mediæval Church taught the
same doctrine, and only substituted the demons of Christian theology for
the furies of classical mythology. As early as 864, the Council of Worms
decreed that bees, which had caused the death of a human being by stinging
him, should be forthwith suffocated in the hive before they could make any
more honey, otherwise the entire contents of the hive would become
demoniacally tainted and thus rendered unfit for use as food; it was
declared to be unclean, and this declaration of impurity implied a
liability to diabolical possession on the part of those who, like Achan,
“transgressed in the thing accursed.” It was the same horror of aiding
and abetting demons and enabling them to extend their power over mankind
that caused a cock, which was suspected of having laid the so-called
“basilisk-egg,” or a hen, addicted to the ominous habit of crowing, to be
summarily put to death, since it was only by such expiation that the evil
could be averted.
A Swiss jurist, Eduard Osenbrüggen (_Studien zur deutschen und
schweizerischen Rechtsgeschichte._ Schaffhausen, 1868, p. 139-149),
endeavours to explain these judicial proceedings on the theory of the
personification of animals. As only a human being can commit crime and
thus render himself liable to punishment, he concludes that it is only by
an act of personification that the brute can be placed in the same
category as man and become subject to the same penalties. In support of
this view he refers to the fact that in ancient and mediæval times
domestic animals were regarded as members of the household and entitled to
the same legal protection as human vassals. In the Frankish capitularies
all beasts of burden or so-called juments were included in the king’s ban
and enjoyed the peace guaranteed by royal authority: _Ut jumenta pacem
habent similiter per bannum regis_. The weregild extended to them as it
did to women and serfs under cover of the man as master of the house and
lord of the manor. The beste covert, to use the old legal phraseology, was
thus invested with human rights and inferentially endowed with human
responsibilities. According to old Welsh law atonement was made for
killing a cat or dog belonging to another person by suspending the animal
by the tail so that its nozzle touched the ground, and then pouring wheat
over it until its body was entirely covered. Old Germanic law also
recognized the competency of these animals as witnesses in certain cases,
as, for example, when burglary had been committed by night, in the absence
of human testimony, the householder was permitted to appear before the
court and make complaint, carrying on his arm a dog, cat or cock, and
holding in his hand three straws taken from the roof as symbols of the
house. Symbolism and personification, as applied to animals and inanimate
objects, unquestionably played an important part in primitive legislation,
but this principle does not account for the excommunication and
anathematization of noxious vermin or for the criminal prosecution and
capital punishment of homicidal beasts, nor does it throw the faintest
light upon the origin and purpose of such proceedings. Osenbrüggen’s
statement that the cock condemned to be burned at Bâle was personified as
a heretic (Ketzer) and therefore sentenced to the stake, is a far-fetched
and wholly fanciful explanation. As we have already seen, the unfortunate
fowl, suspected of laying an egg in violation of its nature, was feared as
an abnormal, inauspicious, and therefore diabolic creature; the fatal
cockatrice, which was supposed to issue from this egg when hatched, and
the use which might be made of its contents for promoting intercourse with
evil spirits, caused such a cock to be dreaded as a dangerous purveyor to
His Satanic Majesty, but no member of the Kohlenberg Court ever thought of
consigning Chanticleer to the flames as the peer of Wycliffe or of Huss in
heresy.
The judicial prosecution of animals, resulting in their excommunication by
the Church or their execution by the hangman, had its origin in the common
superstition of the age, which has left such a tragical record of itself
in the incredibly absurd and atrocious annals of witchcraft. The same
ancient code that condemned a homicidal ox to be stoned, declared that a
witch should not be suffered to live, and although the Jewish lawgiver may
have regarded the former enactment chiefly as a police regulation designed
to protect persons against unruly cattle, it was, like the decree of death
against witches, genetically connected with the Hebrew cult and had
therefore an essentially religious character. It was these two paragraphs
of the Mosaic law that Christian tribunals in the Middle Ages were wont to
adduce as their authority for prosecuting and punishing both classes of
delinquents, although in the application of them they were undoubtedly
incited by motives and influenced by fears wholly foreign to the mind of
the Levitical legislator. The extension of Christianity beyond the
boundaries of Judaism and the conversion of Gentile nations led to its
gradual but radical transformation. The propagation of the new and
aggressive faith among the Greeks and Romans, and especially among the
Indo-Germanic tribes of Northern Europe, necessarily deposed, degraded and
demonized the ancestral deities of the proselytes, who were taught
henceforth to abjure the gods of their fathers and to denounce them as
devils. Thus missionary zeal and success, while saving human souls from
endless perdition, served also to enlarge the realm of the Prince of
Darkness and to increase the number of his subjects and satellites. The
new convert saw them with his mind’s eye skulking about in obscure places,
haunting forest dells and mountain streams by day, approaching human
habitations by night and waiting for opportunities to lure him back to the
old worship or to take vengeance upon him for his recreancy. Every
untoward event furnished an occasion for their intervention, which could
be averted or repelled only by the benedictions, exorcisms or anathemas of
the Church. The ecclesiastical authorities were therefore directly
interested in encouraging this superstitious belief as one of the chief
sources of their power, and it was for this reason that diabolical
agencies were assumed to be at work in every maleficent force of nature
and to be incarnate in every noxious creature. That this doctrine is
still held and this policy still pursued by the bishops and other clergy
of the Roman Catholic Church, no one familiar with the literature of the
subject can deny.
Besides the manuals and rituals already cited, consult, for example, _Die
deutschen Bischöfe und der Aberglaube_: Eine Denkschrift von Dr. Fr.
Heinrich Reusch, Professor of Theology in the University of Bonn, who
vigorously protests against the countenance given by the bishops to the
crassest superstitions. For specimens of the literature condemned by the
German professor, but approved by the prelates and the pope, see such
periodicals as _Monat-Rosen zu Ehren der Unbefleckten Gottes-Mutter Maria
and Der Sendbote des göttlichen Herzens Jesu_, published by Jesuits at
Innsbruck in the Tyrol.
It is a curious fact that the most recent and most radical theories of
juridical punishment, based upon anthropological, sociological and
psychiatrical investigations, would seem to obscure and even to obliterate
the line of distinction between man and beast, so far as their capacity
for committing crime and their moral responsibility for their misdeeds are
concerned. According to Lombroso there are _i delinquenti nati fra gli
animali_, beasts which are born criminals and wilfully and wantonly injure
others of their kind, violating with perversity and premeditation the laws
of the society in which they live. Thus the modern criminologist
recognizes the existence of the kind of malefactor characterized by
Jocodus Damhouder, a Belgian jurist of the sixteenth century, as _bestia
laedens ex interna malitia_; but although he might admit that the beast
perpetrated the deed with malice aforethought and with the clear
consciousness of wrong-doing, he would never think of bringing such a
creature to trial or of applying to it the principle of retributive
justice. This example illustrates the radical change which the theory of
punishment has undergone in recent times and the far-reaching influence
which it is beginning to exert upon penal legislation. In the second part
of the present work the writer calls attention to this important
revolution in the province of criminology, discussing as concisely as
possible its essential features and indicating its general scope and
practical tendencies, so far as they have been determined. It must be
remembered, however, that, although the savage spirit of revenge, that
eagerly demands blood for blood without the slightest consideration of the
anatomical, physiological or psychological conditions upon which the
commission of the specific act depends, has ceased to be the controlling
factor in the enactment and execution of penal codes, the new system of
jurisprudence, based upon more enlightened conceptions of human
responsibility, is still in an inchoate state and very far from having
worked out a satisfactory solution of the intricate problem of the origin
and nature of crime and its proper penalty.
In 1386, an infanticidal sow was executed in the old Norman city of
Falaise, and the scene was represented in fresco on the west wall of the
Church of the Holy Trinity in that city. This curious painting no longer
exists, and, so far as can be ascertained, has never been engraved. It has
been frequently and quite fully described by different writers, and the
frontispiece of the present volume is not a reproduction of the original
picture, but a reconstruction of it according to these descriptions. It is
taken from Arthur Mangin’s _L’Homme et la Bête_ (Paris, 1872), of which
all the illustrations are more or less fancy sketches. A full account of
the trial and execution is given in the present volume.
The iconographic edition of Jocodus Damhouder’s _Praxis Rerum Criminalium_
(Antverpiæ, 1562) contains at the beginning of each section an engraving
representing the perpetration of the crimes about to be discussed. That at
the head of the chapter entitled “De Damno Pecuario” is a lively picture
of the injuries done by animals and rendering them liable to criminal
process; it is reproduced facing page 161 of the present work.
The most important documents, from which our knowledge of these judicial
proceedings is derived, are given in the Appendix, together with a
complete list of prosecutions and excommunications during the past ten
centuries, so far as we have been able to discover any record of them.
The bibliography, although making no claim to be exhaustive, comprises the
principal works on the subject. Articles and essays, which are merely a
rehash of other publications, it has not been deemed necessary to mention.
Such, for example, are “Criminalprocesse gegen Thiere,” in _Miscellen aus
der neuesten ausländischen Literatur_ (Jena, 1830, LXV. pp. 152-55),
Jörgensen’s _Nogle Frugter af mit Otium_ (Kopenhagen, 1834, pp. 216-23);
Cretella’s “Gli Animali sotto Processo,” in _Fanfulla della Domenica_
(Florence, 1891, No. 65), all three based upon the archival researches of
Berriat-Saint-Prix and Ménabréa, and Soldan’s “La Personification des
Animaux in Helvetia,” in _Monatsschrift der Studentenverbindung Helvetia_
(VII. pp. 4-17), which is a mere restatement of Osenbrüggen’s theory.
In conclusion the author desires to express his sincere thanks to Dr.
Laubmann, Director of the Munich Hof- und Staatsbibliothek, as well as to
the other custodians of that library, for their uniform kindness and
courtesy in placing at his disposal the printed and manuscript treasures
committed to their keeping.
CHAPTER I
BUGS AND BEASTS BEFORE THE LAW
It is said that Bartholomew Chassenée,[1] a distinguished French jurist of
the sixteenth century (born at Issy-l’Evêque in 1480), made his reputation
at the bar as counsel for some rats, which had been put on trial before
the ecclesiastical court of Autun on the charge of having feloniously
eaten up and wantonly destroyed the barley-crop of that province. On
complaint formally presented by the magistracy, the official or bishop’s
vicar, who exercised jurisdiction in such cases, cited the culprits to
appear on a certain day and appointed Chassenée to defend them.
In view of the bad repute and notorious guilt of his clients, Chassenée
was forced to employ all sorts of legal shifts and chicane, dilatory pleas
and other technical objections, hoping thereby to find some loophole in
the meshes of the law through which the accused might escape, or at least
to defer and mitigate the sentence of the judge. He urged, in the first
place, that inasmuch as the defendants were dispersed over a large tract
of country and dwelt in numerous villages, a single summons was
insufficient to notify them all; he succeeded, therefore, in obtaining a
second citation, to be published from the pulpits of all the parishes
inhabited by the said rats. At the expiration of the considerable time
which elapsed before this order could be carried into effect and the
proclamation be duly made, he excused the default or non-appearance of his
clients on the ground of the length and difficulty of the journey and the
serious perils which attended it, owing to the unwearied vigilance of
their mortal enemies, the cats, who watched all their movements, and, with
fell intent, lay in wait for them at every corner and passage. On this
point Chassenée addressed the court at some length, in order to show that
if a person be cited to appear at a place, to which he cannot come with
safety, he may exercise the right of appeal and refuse to obey the writ,
even though such appeal be expressly precluded in the summons. The point
was argued as seriously as though it were a question of family feud
between Capulet and Montague in Verona or Colonna and Orsini in Rome.
At a later period of his life Chassenée was reminded of the legal
principle thus laid down and urged to apply it in favour of clients more
worthy of its protection than a horde of vagrant rodents. In 1540 he was
president of the judicial assembly known as the Parliament of Provence on
a memorable occasion when the iniquitous measure for the extirpation of
heresy by exterminating the Waldenses in the villages of Cabrières and
Merindol was under discussion. One of the members of the tribunal, a
gentleman from Arles, Renaud d’Alleins, ventured to suggest to the
presiding officer that it would be extremely unjust to condemn these
unfortunate heretics without granting them a hearing and permitting an
advocate to speak in their defence, so that they might be surrounded by
all the safeguards of justice, adding that the eminent jurist had formerly
insisted upon this right before the court of Autun and maintained that
even animals should not be adjudged and sentenced without having a proper
person appointed to plead their cause. Chassenée thereupon obtained a
decree from the king commanding that the accused Waldenses should be
heard; but his death, which occurred very soon afterwards, changed the
state of affairs and prevented whatever good effects might have been
produced by this simple act of justice. [Cf. Desnoyers: _Recherches_, etc.
(_vide_ Bibliography), p. 18.]
In the report of the trial published in the _Thémis Jurisconsulte_ for
1820 (Tome I. pp. 194 sqq.) by Berriat Saint-Prix, on the authority of the
celebrated Jacques Auguste De Thou, President of the Parliament of Paris,
the sentence pronounced by the official is not recorded. But whatever the
judicial decision may have been, the ingenuity and acumen with which
Chassenée conducted the defence, the legal learning which he brought to
bear upon the case, and the eloquence of his plea enlisted the public
interest and established his fame as a criminal lawyer and forensic
orator.
Chassenée is said to have been employed in several cases of this kind, but
no records of them seem to have been preserved, although it is possible
that they may lie buried in the dusty archives of some obscure provincial
town in France, once the seat of an ecclesiastical tribunal. The whole
subject, however, has been treated by him exhaustively in a book entitled
_Consilium primum, quod tractatus jure dici potest, propter multiplicem et
reconditam doctrinam, ubi luculenter et accurate tractatur quaestio illa:
De excommunicatione animalium insectorum_. This treatise, which is the
first of sixty-nine consilia, embodying opinions on various legal
questions touching the holding and transmission of property, entail,
loans, contracts, dowries, wills, and kindred topics, and which holds a
peculiar place in the history of jurisprudence, was originally published
in 1531, and reprinted in 1581, and again in 1588. The edition referred to
in the present work is the first reprint of 1581, a copy of which is in
the Royal Court and State Library of Munich.
This curious dissertation originated, as it appears, in an application of
the inhabitants of Beaune to the ecclesiastical tribunal of Autun for a
decree of excommunication against certain noxious insects called huberes
or hurebers, probably a kind of locust or harvest-fly. The request was
granted, and the pernicious creatures were duly accursed. Chassenée now
raises the query whether such a thing may be rightfully and lawfully done
(_sed an recte et de jure fieri possit_), and how it should be effected.
“The principal question,” he says, “is whether one can by injunction cause
such insects to withdraw from a place in which they are doing damage, or
to abstain from doing damage there, under penalty of anathema and
perpetual malediction. And although in times past there has never been any
doubt on this point, yet I have thought that the subject should be
thoroughly examined anew, lest I should seem to fall into the vice
censured by Cicero (_De Off._ I. 6), of regarding things which we do not
know as if they were well understood by us, and therefore rashly giving
them our assent.” He divides his treatise into five parts, or rather
discusses the subject under five heads: “First, lest I may seem to
discourse to the populace, how are these our animals called in the Latin
language; secondly, whether these our animals can be summoned; thirdly,
whether they can be summoned by procurators, and, if they are cited to
appear personally, whether they can appear by proxy, _i.e._ through
procurators appointed by the judge who summons them; fourthly, what
judge, whether layman or ecclesiastic, is competent to try them, and how
he is to proceed against them and to pass and execute sentence upon them;
fifthly, what constitutes an anathema and how does it differ from an
excommunication.” Chassenée’s method of investigation is not that of the
philosophic thinker, who marshals facts under general laws and traces them
to rational causes, but combines that of the lawyer, who quotes precedents
and examines witnesses, with that of the theologian, who balances
authorities and serves us with texts instead of arguments. He scrupulously
avoids all psychological speculation or metaphysical reasoning, and simply
aims to show that animals have been tried, convicted, and sentenced by
civil and ecclesiastical courts, and that the competence of these
tribunals has been generally recognized.
The documentary evidence adduced is drawn from a great variety of sources:
the scriptures of the Old and New Testament, pagan poets and philosophers,
patristic theologians and homilists, mediæval hagiologists, Virgil, Ovid,
Pliny, Cicero, Cato, Aristotle, Seneca, Silius Italicus, Boethius, Gregory
the Great, Pico della Mirandola, the laws of Moses, the prophecies of
Daniel, and the Institutes of Justinian are alike laid under contribution
and quoted as of equal authority. All is fish that comes to his net out
of his erudition, be it salmon or sea-urchin. If twelve witnesses can be
produced in favour of a statement, and only two against it, his reason
bows to the will of the majority, and accepts the proposition as proved.
It must be added, however, to his credit, that he proceeds in this matter
with strict impartiality and perfect rectitude, takes whatever evidence is
at hand, and never tries to pack the witness-box.
His knowledge of obscure and now utterly forgotten authors, secular and
ecclesiastic, is immense. Like so many scholars of his day he was
prodigiously learned, without being remarkable for clearness or
originality of thought. Indeed, the vastness of his erudition seems rather
to have hampered than helped the vigorous growth of his intellectual
faculties. He often indulges in logical subtilties so shallow in their
speciousness, that they ought not to deceive the veriest smatterer in
dialectics; and the reader is constantly tempted to answer his laboured
argumentations, as Tristram Shandy’s Uncle Toby did the lucubrations of
Corporal Trim, by “whistling half-a-dozen bars of Lillibullero.” The
examples he adduces afford striking illustrations of the gross credulity
to which the strongly conservative, precedent-mongering mind of the
jurisconsult is apt to fall an easy prey. The habit of seeking knowledge
and guidance exclusively in the records and traditions of the past, in the
so-called “wisdom of ages,” renders him peculiarly liable to regard every
act and utterance of antiquity as necessarily wise and authoritative.
In proof of the power of anathemas, Chassenée refers to the cursing of the
serpent in the Garden of Eden, causing it to go upon its belly for all
time; David’s malediction of the mountains of Gilboa, so that they had
neither rain nor dew; God’s curse upon the city of Jericho, making its
strong walls fall before the blasts of trumpets; and in the New Testament
the withered fig-tree of Bethany. The words of Jesus, “Every tree that
bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire,” he
interprets, not merely as the best means of getting rid of a cumberer of
the orchard, but as a condemnation and punishment of the tree for its
delinquencies, and adds: “If, therefore, it is permitted to destroy an
irrational thing, because it does not produce fruit, much more is it
permitted to curse it, since the greater penalty includes the less” (_cum
si liceat quid est plus, debet licere quid est minus_).
An English professor of divinity, Richard Chevenix Trench, justifies the
withering of the fruitless fig-tree on the same ground or, at least, by a
similar process of reasoning: “It was punished, not for being without
fruit, but for proclaiming by the voice of those leaves that it had such;
not for being barren, but for being false.” According to this exegesis, it
was the telling of a wilful lie that “drew on it the curse.” The guilty
fig is thus endowed with a moral character and made clearly conscious of
the crime for which it suffered the penalty of death: “Almost as soon as
the word of the Lord was spoken, a shuddering fear may have run through
all the leaves of the tree, which was thus stricken at the heart.” As
regards the culpability and punishableness of the object, the modern
divine and the mediæval jurist occupy the same standpoint; only the
latter, with a stricter judicial sense, insists that there shall be no
infliction of punishment until the malefactor has been convicted by due
process of law, and that he shall enjoy all the safeguards which legal
forms and technicalities have thrown around him and under whose covert
even the vilest criminal has the right to take refuge. The Anglican
hermeneutist, on the contrary, would justify the curse and admit the
validity of the anathema, although it was only the angry expression of an
unreasonable impatience disappointed in not finding fruit at the wrong
season, “for the time of figs was not yet.”
A curious and characteristic specimen of the absurd and illogical
inferences, which Chassenée is constantly deducing from his texts, is the
use he makes of the passage in Virgil’s first Georgic, in which the poet
remarks that “no religion has forbidden us to draw off water-courses for
irrigating purposes, to enclose crops with fences, or to lay snares for
birds,” all these things being essential to successful husbandry. But from
the right to snare birds, our jurisprudent infers the right to
excommunicate them, since “no snares are stronger than the meshes of an
anathema.” Far-fetched deductions and wretched twaddle of this sort fill
many pages of the famous lawyer’s dissertation.
Coming down to more recent times, Chassenée mentions several instances of
the effectiveness of anathemas, accepting as convincing testimony the
ecstacies of saints and the extravagant statements of hagiologists without
the slightest expression of doubt as to the truth of these legends. Thus
he relates how a priest anathematized an orchard, because its fruits
tempted the children of his parish and kept them away from mass. The
orchard remained barren until, at the solicitation of the Duchess of
Burgundy, the ban was removed. In like manner the Bishop of Lausanne freed
Lake Leman from eels, which had become so numerous as seriously to
interfere with boating and bathing; on another occasion in the year 1451
the same ecclesiastic expelled from the waters of this lake an immense
number of enormous blood-suckers, which threatened to destroy all the
large fish and were especially fatal to salmon, the favourite article of
food on fast-days. This method of procedure was both cheap and effective
and, as Felix Malleolus informs us in his _Tractatus de Exorcismis_ (I),
received the approbation of all the learned doctors of the University of
Heidelberg: _omnes studii Heydelbergensis Doctores hujusmodi ritus
videntes et legentes consenserunt_. By the same agency an abbot changed
the sweet white bread of a Count of Toulouse, who abetted and protected
heresy, into black, mouldy bread, so that he, who would fain feed souls
with corrupt spiritual food, was forced to satisfy his bodily hunger with
coarse and unsavoury provender. No sooner was the excommunication removed
than the bread resumed its original purity and colour. Egbert, Bishop of
Trier, anathematized the swallows, which disturbed the devotions of the
faithful by their chirping and chattering, and sacrilegiously defiled his
head and vestments with their droppings, when he was officiating at the
altar. He forbade them to enter the sacred edifice on pain of death; and
it is still a popular superstition at Trier, that if a swallow flies into
the cathedral, it immediately falls to the ground and gives up the ghost.
Another holy man, known as John the Lamb, cursed the fishes, which had
incurred his anger, with results equally fatal to the finny tribe. It is
also related of the honey-tongued St. Bernard, that he excommunicated a
countless swarm of flies, which annoyed the worshippers and officiating
priests in the abbey church of Foigny, and lo, on the morrow they were,
like Sennacherib’s host, “all dead corpses.” William, Abbot of St.
Theodore in Rheims, who records this miraculous event, states that as soon
as the execration was uttered, the flies fell to the floor in such
quantities that they had to be thrown out with shovels (_palis
ejicientes_). This incident, he adds, was so well known that the cursing
of the flies of Foigny became proverbial and formed the subject of a
parable. [_Vita S. Bernardi_, auctore Wilhelmo abbate S. Thod. Rhem. I.
11.] According to the usual account, the malediction was not so drastic in
its operation and did not cause the flies to disappear until the next day.
The rationalist, whose chill and blighting breath is ever nipping the
tender buds of faith, would doubtless suggest that a sharp and sudden
frost may have added to the force and efficacy of the excommunication. The
saint resorted to this severe and summary measure, says the monkish
chronicler, because the case was urgent and “no other remedy was at hand.”
Perhaps this lack of other means of relief may refer to the absence of
“deacons with fly-flaps,” who, according to a contemporary writer, were
appointed “to drive away the flies when the Pope celebrateth.”
The island Reichenau in Lake Constance, which derives its name from its
fertility and is especially famous for the products of its vineyards and
its orchards, was once so infested by venomous reptiles as to be
uninhabitable by human beings. Early in the eighth century, as the legend
goes, it was visited by St. Pirminius, and no sooner had he set foot upon
it than these creatures all crawled and wriggled into the water, so that
the surface of the lake was covered for three days and three nights with
serpents, scorpions and hideous worms. Peculiar vermifugal efficacy was
ascribed to the crosier of St. Magnus, the apostle of Algau, which was
preserved in the cloister of St. Mang at Füssen in Bavaria, and from 1685
to 1770 was repeatedly borne in solemn procession to Lucerne, Zug, Schwyz
and other portions of Switzerland for the expulsion and extermination of
rats, mice, cockchafers and other insects. Sometimes formulas of
malediction were procured directly from the pope, which, like saints’
curses, could be applied without legal formalities. Thus in 1660 the
inhabitants of Lucerne paid four pistoles and one Roman thaler for a
document of this kind; on Nov. 15, 1731, the municipal council of Thonou
in Savoy resolved to join with other parishes of that province to obtain
from Rome an excommunication against insects, the expenses for which are
to be assessed _pro rata_;[2] in 1740 the commune of Piuro purchased from
His Holiness a similar anathema; in the same year the common council of
Chiavenna discussed the propriety of applying to Rome for an execratory
against beetles and bears; and in December 1752 it was proposed by the
same body to take like summary measures in order to get rid of a pest of
rodents. In 1729, 1730 and 1749 the municipal council of Lucerne ordered
processions to be made on St. Magnus’ Day from the Church of St. Francis
to Peter’s Chapel for the purpose of expelling weevils. This custom was
observed annually from 1749 to 1798. The pompous ceremony has been
superseded in Protestant countries by an officially appointed day of
fasting and prayer.
In his “First Counsel” Chassenée not only treats of methods of procedure,
and gives forms of plaints to be drawn up and tendered to the tribunal by
the injured party, as well as useful hints to the pettifogger in the
exercise of his tortuous and tricky profession, but he also discusses many
legal principles touching the jurisdiction of courts, the functions of
judges, and other characteristic questions of civil, criminal, and
canonical law. Animals, he says, should be tried by ecclesiastical
tribunals, except in cases where the penalty involves the shedding of
blood. An ecclesiastical judge is not competent _in causa sanguinis_, and
can impose only canonical punishments, although he may have jurisdiction
in temporal matters and punish crimes not involving a capital sentence.
[_Nam judex ecclesiasticus in causa sanguinis non est competens judex,
licet habeat jurisdictionem in temporalibus et possit crimina poenam
sanguinis non existentia_ (_exigentia_ is obviously the correct reading)
_castigare_. Cons. prim. IV. § 5.] For this reason the Church never
condemned heretics to death, but, having decided that they should die,
gave them over to the secular power for formal condemnation, usually under
the hollow and hypocritical pretence of recommending them to mercy. In the
prosecution of animals the summons was commonly published from the parish
pulpit and the whole judicial process bore a distinctively ecclesiastical
character. In most cases the presiding judge or official was the vicar of
the parish acting as the deputy of the bishop of the diocese. Occasionally
the curate officiated in this capacity. Sometimes the trial was conducted
before a civil magistrate under the authority of the Church, or the matter
was submitted to the adjudication of a conjurer, who, however, appointed
two proctors to plead respectively for the plaintiff and the defendant and
who rendered his verdict in due legal form. Indeed, the word “conjurer”
seems to have been used as a popular designation of the person, whether
priest or layman, who exercised judicatory functions in such trials,
probably because, as a rule, the sentence could be executed only by
conjuration or the invocation of supernatural aid.
Another point, which strikes us very comically, but which had to be
decided before the trial could proceed, was whether the accused were to be
regarded as clergy or laity. Chassenée thinks that there is no necessity
of testing each individual case, but that animals should be looked upon as
lay persons. This, he declares, should be the general presumption; but if
any one wishes to affirm that they have _ordinem clericatus_ and are
entitled to benefit of clergy, the burden of proof rests upon him and he
is bound to show it (_deberet estud probare_). Probably our jurist would
have made an exception in favour of the beetle, which entomologists call
_clerus_; it is certain, at any rate, that if a bug bearing this name had
been brought to trial, the learning and acuteness displayed in arguing the
point in dispute would have been astounding. We laugh at the subtilties
and quiddities of mediæval theologians, who seriously discussed such silly
questions as the digestibility of the consecrated elements in the
eucharist; but the importance attached to these trivialities was not so
much the peculiarity of a single profession as the mental habit of the
age, the result of scholastic training and scholastic methods of
investigation, which tainted law no less than divinity. Nevertheless the
ancillary relations of all other sciences and disciplines to theology
render the latter chiefly responsible for this fatal tendency.
Chassenée also makes a distinction between punitive and preventive
purposes in the prosecution of animals, between inflicting penalties upon
them for crimes committed and taking precautionary measures to keep them
from doing damage. By this means he seeks to evade the objection, that
animals are incapable of committing crimes, because they are not endowed
with rational faculties. He then proceeds to show that “things not
allowable in respect to crimes already committed are allowable in respect
to crimes about to be committed in order to prevent them.” Thus a layman
may not arrest an ecclesiastic for a delict fully consummated, but may
seize and detain him in order to hinder the consummation of a delict. In
such cases, an inferior may coerce and correct a superior; even an
irrational creature may put restraint upon a human being and hold him back
from wrong-doing. In illustration of this legal point he cites an example
from Holy Writ, where “Balaam, the prophet and servant of the Most High,
was rebuked by a she-ass.”
Chassenée endeavours to clinch his argument as usual by quoting biblical
texts and adducing incidents from legendary literature. The province of
zoö-psychology, which would have furnished him with better material for
the elucidation of his subject, he leaves untouched, simply because it was
unknown to him. If crime consists in the commission of deeds hurtful to
other sentient beings, knowing such actions to be wrong, then the lower
animals are certainly guilty of criminal offences. It is a
well-established fact, that birds, beasts and insects, living together in
communities, have certain laws, which are designed to promote the general
welfare of the herd, the flock or the swarm, and the violation of which by
individual members they punish corporally or capitally as the case may
require. It is likewise undeniable, that domestic animals often commit
crimes against man and betray a consciousness of the nature of their acts
by showing fear of detection or by trying to conceal what they have done.
Man, too, recognizes their moral responsibility by inflicting chastisement
upon them, and sometimes feels justified in putting incorrigible
offenders, a vicious bull, a thievish cat or a sheep-killing dog,
summarily to death. Of course this kind of punishment is chiefly
preventive, nevertheless it is provoked by acts already perpetrated and is
not wholly free from the element of retributive justice. Such a
proceeding, however, is arbitrary and autocratic, and if systematically
applied to human beings would be denounced as intolerable tyranny.
Chassenée insists that under no circumstances is a penalty to be imposed
except by judicial decision--_nam poena nunquam imponitur, nisi lex
expresse dicat_--and in support of this principle refers to the apostle
Paul, who declares that “sin is not imputed when there is no law.” He
appears to think that any technical error would vitiate the whole
procedure and reduce the ban of the Church to mere _brutum fulmen_. If he
lays so great stress upon the observance of legal forms, which in the
criminal prosecution of brute beasts strike us as the caricature and farce
of justice, it is because he deems them essential to the effectiveness of
an excommunication. The slightest mispronunciation of a word, an incorrect
accentuation or false intonation in uttering a spell suffices to dissolve
the charm and nullify the occult workings of the magic. The lack of a
single link breaks the connection and destroys the binding force of the
chain; everything must be “well-thought, well-said and well-done,” not
ethically, but ritually, as prescribed in the old Avestan formula: _humata
hûkhta huvarshta_. All the mutterings and posturings, which accompany the
performance of a Brahmanical sacrifice, or a Catholic mass, or any other
kind of incantation have their significance, and none of them can be
omitted without marring the perfection of the ceremonial and impairing its
power. An anathema of animals pronounced in accordance with the sentence
passed upon them by a tribunal, belongs to the same category of
conjurations and is rendered nugatory by any formal defect or judicial
irregularity.
Sometimes the obnoxious vermin were generously forewarned. Thus the
grand-vicars of Jean Rohin, Cardinal Bishop of Autun, having been informed
that slugs were devastating several estates in different parts of his
diocese, on the 17th of August, 1487, ordered public processions to be
made for three days in every parish, and enjoined upon the said slugs to
quit the territory within this period under penalty of being accursed. On
the 8th of September, 1488, a similar order was issued at Beaujeu. The
curates were charged to make processions during the offices, and the slugs
were warned three times to cease from vexing the people by corroding and
consuming the herbs of the fields and the vines, and to depart; “and if
they do not heed this our command, we excommunicate them and smite them
with our anathema.” In 1516, the official of Troyes pronounced sentence on
certain insects (_adversus brucos seu eurucas vel alia non dissimilia
animalia, Gallicè urebecs_, probably a species of _curculio_), which laid
waste the vines, and threatened them with anathema, unless they should
disappear within six days. Here it is expressly stated that a counsellor
was assigned to the accused, and a prosecutor heard in behalf of the
aggrieved inhabitants. As a means of rendering the anathema more
effective, the people are also urged to be prompt and honest in the
payment of tithes. Chassenée, too, endorses this view, and in proof of its
correctness refers to Malachi, where God promises to rebuke the devourer
for man’s sake, provided all the tithes are brought into the storehouse.
The archives of the old episcopal city of St. Jean-de-Maurienne contain
the original records of legal proceedings instituted against some
insects, which had ravaged the vineyards of St. Julien, a hamlet situated
on the route over Mt. Cenis and famous for the excellence of its vintage.
The defendants in this case were a species of greenish weevil (charançon)
known to entomologists as _rychites auratus_, and called by different
names, amblevin, bèche, verpillion, in different provinces of France.
Complaint was first made by the wine-growers of St. Julien in 1545 before
François Bonnivard, doctor of laws. The procurator Pierre Falcon and the
advocate Claude Morel defended the insects, and Pierre Ducol appeared for
the plaintiffs. After the presentation and discussion of the case by both
parties, the official, instead of passing sentence, issued a proclamation,
dated the 8th of May, 1546, recommending public prayers and beginning with
the following characteristic preamble: “Inasmuch as God, the supreme
author of all that exists, hath ordained that the earth should bring forth
fruits and herbs (_animas vegetativas_), not solely for the sustenance of
rational human beings, but likewise for the preservation and support of
insects, which fly about on the surface of the soil, therefore it would be
unbecoming to proceed with rashness and precipitance against the animals
now actually accused and indicted; on the contrary, it would be more
fitting for us to have recourse to the mercy of heaven and to implore
pardon for our sins.” Then follow instructions as to the manner in which
the public prayers are to be conducted in order to propitiate the divine
wrath. The people are admonished to turn to the Lord with pure and
undivided hearts (_ex toto et puro corde_), to repent of their sins with
unfeigned contrition, and to resolve to live henceforth justly and
charitably, and above all to pay tithes. High mass is to be celebrated on
three consecutive days, namely on May 20th, 21st, and 22nd, and the host
to be borne in solemn procession with songs and supplications round the
vineyards. The first mass is to be said in honour of the Holy Spirit, the
second in honour of the Blessed Virgin, and the third in honour of the
tutelar saint of the parish. At least two persons of each household are
required to take part in these religious exercises. A _procès-verbal_,
signed by the curate Romanet, attests that this programme was fully
carried out and that the insects soon afterwards disappeared.
About thirty years later, however, the scourge was renewed and the
destructive insects were actually brought to trial. The proceedings are
recorded on twenty-nine folia and entitled: _De actis scindicorum
communitatis Sancti Julliani agentium contra animalia bruta ad formam
muscarum volantia coloris viridis communi voce appellata verpillions seu
amblevins_. The documents, which are still preserved in the archives of
St. Julien, were communicated by M. Victor Dalbane, secretary of the
commune, to M. Léon Ménebréa, who printed them in the appendix to his
volume: _De l’origine de la forme et de l’esprit des jugements rendus au
moyen-âge contre les animaux_. Chambery, 1846. This treatise appeared
originally in the twelfth tome of the _Mémoires de la Société Royale
Académique de Savoie_.
It may be proper to add that Ménebréa’s theory of “the spirit, in which
these judgments against animals were given,” is wholly untenable. He
maintains that “these procedures formed originally only a kind of symbol
intended to revive the sentiment of justice among the masses of the
people, who knew of no right except might and of no law except that of
intimidation and violence. In the Middle Ages, when disorder reigned
supreme, when the weak remained without support and without redress
against the strong, and property was exposed to all sorts of attacks and
all forms of ravage and rapine, there was something indescribably
beautiful in the thought of assimilating the insect of the field to the
masterpiece of creation and putting them on an equality before the law. If
man should be taught to respect the home of the worm, how much more ought
he to regard that of his fellow-man and learn to rule in equity.”
This explanation is very fine in sentiment, but expresses a modern, and
not a mediæval way of thinking. The penal prosecution of animals, which
prevailed during the Middle Ages, was by no means peculiar to that period,
but has been frequently practised by primitive peoples and savage tribes;
neither was it designed to inculcate any such moral lesson as is here
suggested, nor did it produce any such desirable result. So far from
originating in a delicate and sensitive sense of justice, it was, as will
be more fully shown hereafter, the outcome of an extremely crude, obtuse,
and barbaric sense of justice. It was the product of a social state, in
which dense ignorance was governed by brute force, and is not to be
considered as a reaction and protest against club-law, which it really
tended to foster by making a travesty of the administration of justice and
thus turning it into ridicule. It was also in the interest of
ecclesiastical dignities to keep up this parody and perversion of a sacred
and fundamental institute of civil society, since it strengthened their
influence and extended their authority by subjecting even the caterpillar
and the canker-worm to their dominion and control.
But to return to the records of the trial. On the 13th of April, 1587, the
case was laid before “his most reverend lordship, the prince-bishop of
Maurienne, or the reverend lord his vicar-general and official” by the
syndics and procurators, François Amenet and Petremand Bertrand, who, in
the name of the inhabitants of St. Julien, presented the following
statement and petition: “Formerly by virtue of divine services and
earnest supplications the scourge and inordinate fury of the aforesaid
animals did cease; now they have resumed their depredations and are doing
incalculable injury. If the sins of men are the cause of this evil, it
behoveth the representatives of Christ on earth to prescribe such measures
as may be appropriate to appease the divine wrath. Wherefore we the
afore-mentioned syndics, François Amenet and Petremand Bertrand, do appear
anew (_ex integro_) and beseech the official, first, to appoint another
procurator and advocate for the insects in place of the deceased Pierre
Falcon and Claude Morel, and secondly, to visit the grounds and observe
the damage, and then to proceed with the excommunication.”
In compliance with this request, the distinguished Antoine Filliol was
appointed procurator for the insects, with a moderate fee (_salario
moderato_), and Pierre Rembaud their advocate. The parties appeared before
the official on the 30th day of May and the case was adjourned to the 6th
of June, when the advocate, Pierre Rembaud, presented his answer to the
declaration of the plaintiffs, showing that their action is not
maintainable and that they should be nonsuited. After approving of the
course pursued by his predecessor in office, he affirms that his clients
have kept within their right and not rendered themselves liable to
excommunication, since, as we read in the sacred book of Genesis, the
lower animals were created before man, and God said to them: Let the earth
bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing,
and beast of the earth after his kind; and he blessed them saying, Be
fruitful and multiply and fill the waters of the seas, and let fowl
multiply in the earth. Now the Creator would not have given this command,
had he not intended that these creatures should have suitable and
sufficient means of support; indeed, he has expressly stated that to every
thing that creepeth upon the earth every green herb has been given for
meat. It is therefore evident that the accused, in taking up their abode
in the vines of the plaintiffs, are only exercising a legitimate right
conferred upon them at the time of their creation. Furthermore, it is
absurd and unreasonable to invoke the power of civil and canonical law
against brute beasts, which are subject only to natural law and the
impulses of instinct. The argument urged by the counsel for the
plaintiffs, that the lower animals are made subject to man, he dismisses
as neither true in fact nor pertinent to the present case. He suggests
that the complainants, instead of instituting judicial proceedings, would
do better to entreat the mercy of heaven and to imitate the Ninevites,
who, when they heard the warning voice of the prophet Jonah, proclaimed a
fast and put on sackcloth. In conclusion, he demands that the petition of
the plaintiffs be dismissed, the monitorium revoked and annulled, and all
further proceedings stayed, to which end the gracious office of the judge
is humbly implored (_humiliter implorato benigno officio judicis_).
The case was adjourned to the 12th and finally to the 19th of June, when
Petremand Bertrand, the prosecuting attorney, presented a lengthy
replication, of which the defendants’ advocate demanded a copy with due
time for deliberation. This request led to a further adjournment till the
26th of June, but as this day turned out to be a _dies feriatus_ or
holiday, no business could be transacted until the 27th, when the advocate
of the commune, François Fay (who seems to have taken the place of Amenet,
if he be not the same person), in reply to the defendants’ plea, argued
that, although the animals were created before man, they were intended to
be subordinate to him and subservient to his use, and that this was,
indeed, the reason of their prior creation. They have no _raison d’être_
except as they minister to man, who was made to have dominion over them,
inasmuch as all things have been put under his feet, as the Psalmist
asserts and the apostle Paul reiterates. On this point, he concludes, our
opponent has added nothing refutatory of the views, which have been held
from time immemorial by our ancestors; we need only refer to the opinions
formerly expressed by the honourable Hippolyte Ducol as satisfactory. The
advocate for the defence merely remarked that he had not yet received the
document ordered on the 19th of June, and the further consideration of the
case was postponed till the 4th of July. Antoine Filliol then made a
rejoinder to the plaintiffs’ replication, denying that the subordination
of the lower animals to man involves the right of excommunicating them,
and insisting upon his former position, which the opposing counsel had not
even attempted to disprove, namely, that the lower animals are subject
solely to natural law, “a law originating in the eternal reason and
resting upon a basis as immutable as that of the divine law of revelation,
since they are derived from the same source, namely, the will and power of
God.” It is evident, he adds, that the action brought by the plaintiffs is
not maintainable and that judgment should be given accordingly.
On the 18th of July, the same parties appear before the official of St.
Jean-de-Maurienne. The procurator of the insects demands that the case be
closed and the plaintiffs debarred from drawing up any additional
statements or creating any further delay by the introduction of irrelevant
matter, and requests that a decision be rendered on the documents and
declarations already adduced. The prosecuting attorney, whose policy seems
to have been to keep the suit pending as long as possible, applies for a
new term (_alium terminum_), which was granted.
Meanwhile, in view of the law’s long delay, other measures were taken for
the speedier adjustment of the affair by compromise. On the 29th of June,
1587, a public meeting was called at noon immediately after mass on the
great square of St. Julien, known as Parloir d’Amont, to which all hinds
and habitants (_manants et habitants_) were summoned by the ringing of the
church bell to consider the propriety and necessity of providing for the
said animals a place outside of the vineyards of St. Julien, where they
might obtain sufficient sustenance without devouring and devastating the
vines of the said commune. This meeting appears to have been held by the
advice of the plaintiffs’ advocate, François Fay, and at the suggestion of
the official. A piece of ground in the vicinity was selected and set apart
as a sort of insect enclosure, the inhabitants of St. Julien, however,
reserving for themselves the right to pass through the said tract of land,
“without prejudice to the pasture of the said animals,” and to make use of
the springs of water contained therein, which are also to be at the
service of the said animals; they reserve furthermore the right of working
the mines of ochre and other mineral colours found there, without doing
detriment to the means of subsistence of said animals, and finally the
right of taking refuge in this spot in time of war or in case of like
distress. The place chosen is called La Grand Feisse and described with
the exactness of a topographical survey, not only as to its location and
dimensions, but also as to the character of its foliage and herbage. The
assembled people vote to make this appropriation of land and agree to draw
up a conveyance of it “in good form and of perpetual validity,” provided
the procurator and advocate of the insects may, on visitation and
inspection of the ground, express themselves satisfied with such an
arrangement; in witness whereof the protocol is signed “L. Prunier,
curial,” and stamped with the seal of the commune.
But this attempt of the inhabitants to conciliate the insects and to
settle their differences by mutual concessions did not put an end to the
litigation. On the 24th of July, an “Extract from the Register of the
Curiality of St. Julien,” containing the proceedings of the public
meeting, was submitted to the court by Petremand Bertrand, procurator of
the plaintiffs, who called attention to the very generous offer made by
the commune and prayed the official to order the grant to be accepted on
the conditions specified, and to cause the defendants to vacate the
vineyards and to forbid them to return to the same on pain of
excommunication. Antoine Filliol, procurator of the insects, requested a
copy of the _procès-verbal_ and time for deliberation. The court complied
with this request and adjourned the case till “the first juridical day
after the harvest vacation,” which fell on the 11th of August, and again
by common consent till the 20th of the same month.
At this time, Charles Emanuel I., Duke of Savoy, was preparing to invade
the Marquisate of Saluzzo, and the confusion caused by the expedition of
troops over Mt. Cenis interfered with the progress of the trial, which was
postponed till the 27th of August, and again, since the passage of armed
men was still going on (_actento transitu armigerorum_), till the 3rd of
September, when Antoine Filliol declared that he could not accept for his
clients the offer made by the plaintiffs, because the place was sterile
and neither sufficiently nor suitably supplied with food for the support
of the said animals; he demanded, therefore, that the proposal be rejected
and the action dismissed with costs to the complainants (_petit agentes
repelli cum expensis_). The “egregious Petremand Bertrand,” in behalf of
the plaintiffs, denies the correctness of this statement and avers that
the spot selected and set apart as an abode for the insects is admirably
adapted to this purpose, being full of trees and shrubs of divers kinds,
as stated in the conveyance prepared by his clients, all of which he is
ready to verify. He insists, therefore, upon an adjudication in his
favour. The official took the papers of both parties and reserved his
decision, appointing experts, who should in the meantime examine the
place, which the plaintiffs had proffered as an asylum for the insects,
and submit a written report upon the fitness of the same.
The final decision of the case, after such careful deliberation and so
long delay, is rendered doubtful by the unfortunate circumstance that the
last page of the records has been destroyed by rats or bugs of some sort.
Perhaps the prosecuted weevils, not being satisfied with the results of
the trial, sent a sharp-toothed delegation into the archives to obliterate
and annul the judgment of the court. At least nothing should be thought
incredible or impossible in the conduct of creatures, which were deemed
worthy of being summoned before ecclesiastical tribunals and which
succeeded as criminals in claiming the attention and calling forth the
legal learning and acumen of the greatest jurists of their day.
In the margin of the last page are some interesting items of expenses
incurred: “_pro visitatione III flor._,” by which we are to understand
three florins to the experts, who were appointed to visit the place
assigned to the insects; then “_solverunt scindici Sancti Julliani incluso
processu Animalium sigillo ordinationum et pro copia que competat in
processu dictorum Animalium omnibus inclusis XVI flor._,” which may be
summed up as sixteen florins for clerical work including seals; finally,
“_item pro sportulis domini vicarii III flor._,” three florins to the
vicar, who acted as the bishop’s official and did not receive a regular
fee, but was not permitted to go away empty-handed. The date, which
follows, Dec. 20, 1587, may be assumed to indicate the time at which the
trial came to an end, after a pendency of more than eight months. (_Vide_
Appendix A.)
In the legal proceedings just described, two points are presented with
great clearness and seem to be accepted as incontestable: first, the right
of the insects to adequate means of subsistence suited to their nature.
This right was recognized by both parties; even the prosecution did not
deny it, but only maintained that they must not trespass cultivated fields
and destroy the fruits of man’s labour. The complainants were perfectly
willing to assign to the weevils an uncultivated tract of ground, where
they could feed upon such natural products of the soil as were not due to
human toil and tillage. Secondly, no one appears to have doubted for a
moment that the Church could, by virtue of its anathema, compel these
creatures to stop their ravages and cause them to go from one place to
another. Indeed, a firm faith in the existence of this power was the pivot
on which the whole procedure turned, and without it, the trial would have
been a dismal farce in the eyes of all who took part in it.
It is related in the chronicles of an ancient abbey (_Le Père Rochex:
Gloire de l’Abbaye et Vallée de la Novalaise_), that St. Eldrad commanded
the snakes, which infested the environs of a priory in the valley of
Briançon, to depart, and, taking a staff in his hand, conducted them to a
desert place and shut them up in a cave, where they all miserably
perished. Perhaps the serpent, which suffered Satan to take possession of
its seductive form and thus played such a fatal part in effecting the fall
of man and in introducing sin into the world, may have been regarded as
completely out of the pale and protection of law, and as having no rights
which an ecclesiastical excommunicator or a wonder-working saint would be
bound to respect. As a rule, however, such an arbitrary abuse of
miraculous power to the injury or destruction of God’s creatures was
considered illegal and unjustifiable, although irascible anchorites and
other holy men under strong provocation often gave way to it. Mediæval
jurists frowned upon summary measures of this sort, just as modern lawyers
condemn the practice of lynch-law as mobbish and essentially seditious,
and only to be excused as a sudden outburst of public indignation at some
exceptionally brutal outrage.
Properly speaking, animals cannot be excommunicated, but only
anathematized; just as women, according to old English law, having no
legal status of their own and not being bound in frankpledge as members of
the decennary or tithable community, could not be outlawed, but only
“waived” or abandoned. This form of ban, while differing theoretically
from actual outlawry, was practically the same in its effects upon the
individual subjected to it. Excommunication is, as the etymology of the
word implies, the exclusion from the communion of the Church and from
whatever spiritual or temporal advantages may accrue to a person from this
relation. It is one of the consequences of an anathema, but is limited in
its operation to members of the ecclesiastical body, to which the lower
animals do not belong. This was the generally accepted view, and is the
opinion maintained by Gaspard Bailly, advocate and councillor of the
Sovereign Senate of Savoy, in his _Traité des Monitoires, avec un
Plaidoyer contre les Insects_, printed at Lyons in 1668, but it has not
always been held by writers on this subject, some of whom do not recognize
this distinction between anathema and excommunication on the authority of
many passages of Holy Writ, affirming that, as the whole creation was
corrupted by the fall, so the atonement extends to all living creatures,
which are represented as longing for the day of their redemption and
regeneration.
One of the strong points made by the counsel for the defence in
prosecutions of this kind was that these insects were sent to punish man
for his sins, and should therefore be regarded as agents and emissaries of
the Almighty, and that to attempt to destroy them or to drive them away
would be to fight against God (_s’en prendre à Dieu_). Under such
circumstances, the proper thing to do would be, not to seek legal redress
and to treat the noxious creatures as criminals, but to repent and humbly
to entreat an angry Deity to remove the scourge. This is still the
standpoint of Christian orthodoxy, Protestant as well as Catholic, and the
argument applies with equal force to the impious and atheistic
substitution of Paris green and the chlorate of lime for prayer and
fasting as exterminators of potato-bugs. The modern, like the mediæval
horticulturist may ward off devouring vermin from his garden by the use of
ashes, but he strews them on his plants instead of sprinkling them on his
own head, and thus indicates to what extent scientific have superseded
theological methods in the practical affairs of life.
Thomas Aquinas, the “angelic doctor,” in his _Summa Theologiæ_ raises the
query, whether it is permissible to curse irrational creatures (_utrum
liceat irrationabiles creaturas adjurare_). He states, in the first place,
that curses and blessings can be pronounced only upon such things as are
susceptible of receiving evil or good impressions from them, or in other
words, upon sentient and rational beings, or upon irrational creatures and
insentient things in their relation to rational beings, so that the latter
are the objects ultimately aimed at and favourably or unfavourably
affected. Thus God cursed the earth, because it is essential to a man’s
subsistence; Jesus cursed the barren fig-tree symbolizing the Jews, who
made a great show of leafage in the form of rites and ceremonies, but bore
no fruits of righteousness; Job cursed the day on which he was born,
because he took from his mother’s womb the taint of original sin; David
cursed the rocks and mountains of Gilboa, because they were stained with
the blood of “the beauty of Israel”; in like manner the Lord sends locusts
and blight and mildew to destroy the harvests, because these are
intimately connected with the happiness of mankind, whose sins he wishes
to punish.
It is laid down as a legal maxim by mediæval jurisprudents that no animal
devoid of understanding can commit a fault (_nec enim potest animal
injuriam fecisse quod sensu caret_). This doctrine is endorsed by the
great theologian and scholastic Thomas of Aquino. If we regard the lower
animals, he says, as creatures coming from the hand of God and employed by
him as agents for the execution of his judgments, then to curse them would
be blasphemous; if, on the other hand, we curse them _secundem se_, i.e.
merely as brute beasts, then the malediction is odious and vain and
therefore unlawful (_est odiosum et vanum et per consequens illicitum_).
There is, however, another ground, on which the right of excommunication
or anathematization may be asserted and fully vindicated, namely, that the
lower animals are satellites of Satan “instigated by the powers of hell
and therefore proper to be cursed,” as the Doctor angelicus puts it.
Chassenée refers to this opinion in the treatise already cited (I. § 75),
and adds “the anathema then is not to be pronounced against the animals as
such, but should be hurled inferentially (_per modum conclusionis_) at the
devil, who makes use of irrational creatures to our detriment.” This
notion seems to have been generally accepted in the Middle Ages, and the
fact that evil spirits are often mentioned in the Bible metaphorically or
symbolically as animals and assumed to be incarnate in the adder, the asp,
the basilisk, the dragon, the lion, the leviathan, the serpent, the
scorpion, etc., was considered confirmatory of this view.
But not all animals were regarded as diabolical incarnations; on the
contrary, many were revered as embodiments and emblems of divine
perfections. In a work entitled _Le Liure du Roy Modus et de la Reyne
Racio_ (The Book of King Mode and Queen Reason), which, as the colophon
records, was “printed at Chambery by Anthony Neyret in the year of grace
one thousand four hundred and eighty-six on the thirtieth day of October,”
King Mode discourses on falconry and venery in general. Queen Reason
brings forward, in reply to these rather conventional commonplaces,
“several fine moralities,” and dilates on the natural and mystic qualities
of animals, which she divides into two classes, sweet beasts (_bestes
doulces_) and stenchy beasts (_bestes puantes_). Foremost among the sweet
beasts stands that which Milton characterizes as
“Goodliest of all the forest, hart and hind.”
According to the Psalmist, the hart panting after the water-brooks
represents the soul thirsting for the living God and is the type of
religious ardour and aspiration. It plays an important part in the legends
of saints, acts as their guide, shows them where holy relics are
concealed, and causes St. Eustace and St. Hubert to abandon the chase and
to lead lives of pious devotion by appearing to them with a luminous cross
between its antlers. The ten branches of its horns symbolize the ten
commandments of the Old Testament and signify in the Roman ritual the ten
fingers of the outstretched hand of the priest as he works the perpetual
miracle of transubstantiation of the eucharist.
Chief of the stenchy beasts is the pig. In paganism, which to the
Christians was merely devil-worship, the boar was an object of peculiar
adoration; for this reason the farrow of the sow is supposed to number
seven shotes, corresponding to the seven deadly sins. To the same class of
offensive beasts belong the wolf, typical of bad spiritual shepherds, and
the fox, which is described as follows: “Reynard is a beast of small size,
with red hair, a long bushy tail and an evil physiognomy, for his visage
is thin and sharp, his eyes deep-set and piercing, his ears small,
straight and pointed; moreover he is deceitful and tricky above all other
beasts and exceedingly malicious.” “We are all,” adds Queen Reason in a
moralizing strain, “more or less of the brotherhood of Saint Fausset,
whose influence is now-a-days quite extended.” Among birds the raven is
pre-eminently a malodorous creature and imp of Satan, whereas the dove is
a sweet beast and the chosen vessel for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit,
the form in which the third person of the Trinity became incarnate.
This division of beasts corresponds in principle to that which is given in
the Avesta, and according to which all animals are regarded as belonging
either to the good creation of Ahuramazda or to the evil creation of
Angrô-mainyush. The world is the scene of perpetual conflict between these
hostile forces summed up in the religion and ethics of Zarathushtra as the
trinity of the good thought, the good word, and the good deed (_humata_,
_hûkhta_, _huvarshta_), which are to be fostered in opposition to the evil
thought, the evil word, and the evil deed (_dushmata_, _duzhûkhta_,
_duzhvarshta_), which are to be constantly combated and finally
suppressed. Every man is called upon by the Iranian prophet to choose
between these contraries; and not only the present and future state of his
own soul, the complexion of his individual character, but also the welfare
of the whole world, the ultimate destiny of the universe, depend, to no
inconsiderable extent, upon his choice. His thoughts, words, and deeds do
not cease with the immediate effect which they are intended to produce,
but, like force in the physical world, are persistent and indestructible.
As the very slightest impulse given to an atom of matter communicates
itself to every other atom, and thus disturbs the equilibrium of the
globe--the footfall of a child shaking the earth to its centre--so the
influence of every human life, however small, contributes to the general
increase and ascendency of either good or evil, and helps to determine
which of these principles shall ultimately triumph. In the universal
strife of these “mighty opposites,” the vicious are the allies of the
devil; while the virtuous are not merely engaged in working out their own
salvation, but have also the ennobling consciousness of being
fellow-combatants with the Deity, who needs and appreciates their services
in overcoming the adversary. This sense of solidarity with the Best and
the Highest imparts additional elevation and peculiar dignity to human
aims and actions, and lends to devotion a warmth of sympathy and fervour
of enthusiasm springing from personal attachment and loyalty, which it is
difficult for the Religion of Humanity to inspire. The fact, too, that
evil exists in the world, not by the will and design of the Good Being,
but in spite of him, and that all his powers are put forth to eradicate
it, while detracting from his omnipotence, frees him from all moral
obliquity and exalts his character for benevolence, thus rendering him far
more worthy of love and worship and a much better model for human
imitation than that “dreadful idealization of wickedness” which is called
God in the Calvinistic creed. The idea that the humblest person may, by
the purity and rectitude of his life, not only strengthen himself in
virtue, but also increase the actual aggregate of goodness in the universe
and even endue the Deity with greater power and aggressive energy in
subduing and extirpating evil, is surely a sublime thought and a source of
lofty inspiration and encouragement in well-doing, although it has been
degraded by Parsi Dasturs--as all grand conceptions and ideals are apt to
be under priestly influences--into a ridiculous and childish hatred of
snakes, scorpions, frogs, lizards, water-rats, and other animals supposed
to have been produced by Angrô-mainyush.
Plato held a similar theory of creation, regarding it not as the
manifestation of pure benevolence endowed with almighty power, but rather
as the expression of perfect goodness working at disadvantage in an
intractable material, which by its inherent stubbornness prevented the
full embodiment and realization of the original purpose and desire of the
Creator or Cosmourgos, who was therefore obliged to content himself with
what was, under the circumstances, the only possible, but by no means the
best imaginable, world. The Manicheans attributed the same unsatisfactory
result to the activity of an evil principle, which thwarted the complete
actualization of the designs of the Deity. So conspicuous, indeed, is the
defectiveness of nature as a means of promoting the highest conceivable
human happiness, so marked and manifold are the causes of suffering in all
spheres of sentient existence, and so often do the elements seem to
conspire for the destruction of mankind, raging relentlessly like a wild
beast
“Red in tooth and claw
With ravin,”
that every cosmogony has been compelled to assume the persistent
intervention of some malignant spirit or perverse agency as the only
rational explanation of such a condition of things. The orthodox
Christianity of to-day gives over the earth entirely to the sovereignty of
Satan, the successful usurper of Eden, and instead of bidding the
righteous to look forward to the final re-enthronement and absolute
supremacy of truth and goodness in this world as the
“One far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves,”
consoles them with the vague promise of compensation in a future state of
being. Even this remote prospect of redemption is confined to a select
few; not only is the earth destined to be burned with fire on account of
its utter corruption, but the great majority of its inhabitants are doomed
to eternal torments in the abode of evil spirits.
Scientific research also leads to the same conclusions in respect to the
incompleteness of Nature’s handiwork, which it is the function of art and
culture to amend and improve. Everywhere the correcting hand and
contriving brain of man are needed to eliminate the worthless and noxious
productions, in which Nature is so fatally prolific, and to foster and
develop those that are useful and salutary, thus beautifying and ennobling
all forms of vegetable and animal life. By a like process man himself has
attained his present pre-eminence. Through long ages of strife and
struggle he has emerged from brutishness and barbarism, and rising by a
slow, spiral ascent, scarcely perceptible for generations, has been able
gradually to
“Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.”
The more man increases in wisdom and intellectual capacity, the more
efficient he becomes as a co-worker with the good principle. At the same
time, every advance which he makes in civilization brings with it some new
evil for him to overcome; or, as the Parsi would express it
mythologically, every conquest achieved by Ahuramazda and his allies
stimulates Angrômainyush and his satellites to renewed exertions, who
convert the most useful discoveries, like dynamite, into instruments of
diabolical devastation. The opening of the Far West in the United States
to agriculture and commerce, and the completion of the Pacific Railroad,
not only served to multiply and diffuse the gifts of the beneficent and
bountiful spirit (_speñtô mainyush_), but also facilitated the propagation
and spread of the plagues of the grasshopper and the Colorado beetle. The
power of destruction insidiously concealed in the minutest insect organism
often exceeds that of the tornado and the earthquake, and baffles the most
persistent efforts of human ingenuity to resist it. The genius and energy
of Pasteur were devoted for years to the task of detecting and destroying
a microscopic parasite, which threatened to ruin for ever the silk
industry of France; and the Phylloxera and Doryphora still continue to
ravage with comparative impunity the vineyards of Europe and the
potato-fields of America, defying at once all the appliances of science
for their extermination and all the attempts of casuistic theology to
reconcile such scourges with a perfectly benevolent and omnipotent Creator
and Ruler of the Universe. It is the observation of phenomena like these
that confirms the modern Parsi in the faith of his fathers, and reveals to
him, in the operations of nature and the conflicts of life, unquestionable
evidences of a contest between warring elements personified as Hormazd
and Ahriman, the ultimate issue of which is to be the complete triumph of
the former and the consequent purification and redemption of the world
from the curse of evil. The Parsi, however, recognizes no Saviour, and
repudiates as absurd and immoral any scheme of atonement whereby the
burden of sin can be shifted from the shoulders of the guilty to those of
an innocent, vicarious victim. Every person must be redeemed by his own
good thoughts, words, and deeds, as creation must be redeemed by the good
thoughts, words, and deeds of the race. After death, the character of each
individual thus formed appears to him, either in the form of a beautiful
and brilliant maiden, who leads him over the Chinvad (or gatherer’s)
bridge, into the realms of everlasting light, or in the form of a foul
harlot, who thrusts him down into regions of eternal gloom.
But to return from this digression; it is not only in the Venidad that
certain classes of animals are declared to be creations of the archfiend,
and therefore embodiments of devils; additional proofs of this doctrine
were derived by mediæval writers from biblical and classical sources. A
favourite example was the metamorphosis of Nebuchadnezzar, who, when given
over to Satan, dwelt with the beasts of the field and ate grass as oxen,
while his hair grew like eagles’ feathers and his nails like birds’
claws. Still more numerous and striking instances of this kind were drawn
from pagan mythology, which, being of diabolical origin, would naturally
be prolific of such phenomena. Thus, besides centaurs and satyrs, “dire
chimeras” and other “delicate monsters,” there were hybrids like the
semi-dragon Cecrops and transformations by which Io became a heifer,
Dædalion a sparrow-hawk, Corone a crow, Actæon a stag, Lyncus a lynx, Mæra
a dog, Calisto a she-bear, Antigone a stork, Arachne a spider, Iphigenia a
roe, Talus a partridge, Itys a pheasant, Tereus Ascalaphus and Nyctimene
owls, Philomela a nightingale, Progne a swallow, Cadmus and his spouse
Harmonia snakes, Decertis a fish, Galanthis a weasel, and the warriors of
Diomedes birds, while the companions of Ulysses were changed by Circe, the
prototype of the modern witch, into swine. All these metamorphoses are
adduced as the results of Satanic agencies and proofs of the tendency of
evil spirits to manifest themselves in bestial forms.
Towards the end of the ninth century the region about Rome was visited by
a dire plague of locusts. A reward was offered for their extermination and
the peasants gathered and destroyed them by millions; but all efforts were
in vain, since they propagated faster than it was possible to kill them.
Finally Pope Stephen VI. prepared great quantities of holy water and had
the whole country sprinkled with it, whereupon the locusts immediately
disappeared. The formula used in consecrating the water and devoting it to
this purpose implies the diabolical character of the vermin against which
it was directed: “I adjure thee, creature water, I adjure thee by the
living God, by Him, who at the beginning separated thee from the dry land,
by the true God, who caused thee to fertilize the garden of Eden and
parted thee into four heads, by Him, who at the marriage of Cana changed
thee into wine, I adjure thee that thou mayst not suffer any imp or
phantom to abide in thy substance, that thou mayst be indued with
exorcising power and become a source of salvation, so that when thou art
sprinkled on the fruits of the field, on vines, on trees, on human
habitations in the city or in the country, on stables, or on flocks, or if
any one may touch or taste thee, thou shalt become a remedy and a relief
from the wiles of Satan, that through thee plagues and pestilence may be
driven away, that through contact with thee weevils and caterpillars,
locusts and moles may be dispersed and the maliciousness of all visible
and invisible powers hostile to man may be brought to nought.” In the
prayers which follow, the water is entreated to “preserve the fruits of
the earth from insects, mice, moles, serpents and other foul spirits.”
This subject was treated in a lively and entertaining manner by a Jesuit
priest, Père Bougeant, in a book entitled _Amusement Philosophique sur le
Langage des Bestes_, which was written in the form of a letter addressed
to a lady and published at Paris in 1739. In the first place, the author
refers to the intelligence shown by animals and refutes the Cartesian
theory that they are mere machines or animated automata. This tenet, we
may add, was not original with Descartes, but was set forth at length by a
Spanish physician, Gomez Pereira, in a bulky Latin volume bearing the
queer dedicatory title: “_Antoniana Margarita opus nempe physicis, medicis
ac theologis non minus utile quam necessarium_,” and printed in 1554,
nearly a century before the publication of Descartes’ _Meditationes de
prima philosophia and Principia philosophiae_, which began a new epoch in
the history of philosophy.
If animals are nothing but ingenious pieces of mechanism, argues the
Jesuit father, then the feelings of a man towards his dog would not differ
from those which he entertains towards his watch, and they would both
inspire him with the same kind of affection. But such is not the case.
Even the strictest Cartesian would never think of petting his chronometer
as he pets his poodle, or would expect the former to respond to his
caresses as the latter does. Practically he subverts his own metaphysical
system by the distinction which he makes between them, treating one as a
machine and the other as a sentient being, endowed with mental powers and
passions corresponding, in some degree, to those which he himself
possesses. We infer from our own individual consciousness that other
persons, who act as we do, are free and intelligent agents, as we claim to
be. The same reasoning applies to the lower animals, whose manifestations
of joy, sorrow, hope, fear, desire, love, hatred and other emotions, akin
to those passing in our own minds, prove that there is within them a
spiritual principle, which does not differ essentially from the human
soul.
But this conclusion, he adds, is contrary to the teachings of the
Christian religion, since it involves the immortality of animal souls and
necessitates some provision for their reward or punishment in a future
life. If they are capable of merits and demerits and can incur praise and
blame, then they are worthy of retribution hereafter and there must be a
heaven and a hell prepared for them, so that the pre-eminence of a man
over a beast as an object of God’s mercy or wrath is lost. “Beasts, in
that case, would be a species of man or men a species of beast, both of
which propositions are incompatible with the teachings of religion.” The
only means of reconciling these views, endowing animals with intellectual
sense and immortal souls without running counter to Christian dogmas, is
to assume that they are incarnations of evil spirits.
Origen held that the scheme of redemption embraced also Satan and his
satellites, who would be ultimately converted and restored to their
primitive estate. Several patristic theologians endorsed this notion, but
the Church rejected it as heretical. The devils are, therefore, from the
standpoint of Catholic orthodoxy, irrevocably damned and the blood of
Christ has made no atonement for them. But, although their fate is sealed
their torments have not yet begun. If a man dies in his sins, his soul, as
soon as it departs from his body, receives its sentence and goes straight
to hell. The highest ecclesiastical authorities have decided that this is
not true of devils, who, although condemned to everlasting fire, do not
enter upon their punishment until after the judgment-day. This view is
supported by many passages and incidents of Holy Writ. Thus Christ
declares that, when the Son of man shall come in his glory, he shall say
unto them on his left hand, “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting
fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Here it is not stated that
the devils are already burning, but that the fire has been “prepared” for
them, a form of expression which leads us to infer that they were not yet
in it. Again the devils, which Christ drove out of the two “exceeding
fierce” demoniacs, protested against such interference, saying, “Art thou
come hither to torment us before the time?” This question has no
significance, unless we suppose that they had a right to inhabit such
living beings as had been assigned to them, until the time of their
torment should come on the last day. Père Bougeant is furthermore of the
opinion that, when these devils were sent miraculously and therefore
abnormally into the swine, they came into conflict with the devils already
in possession of the pigs, and thus caused the whole herd to run violently
down a steep place into the sea. Even a hog, he thinks, could not stand it
to harbour more than one devil at a time, and would be driven to suicide
by having an intrinsic and superfluous demon conjured into it. A still
more explicit and decisive declaration on this point is found in the
Epistle of Jude and the Second Epistle of Peter, where it is stated that
the angels which kept not their first estate the Lord hath reserved in
everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.
These words are to be understood figuratively as referring to the
irrevocableness of their doom and the durance vile to which they are
meanwhile subjected. That they are held in some sort of temporary custody
and are not actually undergoing, but still awaiting the punishment, which
divine justice has imposed upon them, the sacred scriptures and the
teachings of the Church leave no manner of doubt.
Now the question arises as to what these legions of devils are doing in
the meantime. Some of them are engaged in “going to and fro in the earth
and walking up and down in it,” in order to spy out and take advantage of
human infirmities. God himself makes use of them to test the fealty of men
and their power of holding fast to their integrity under severe
temptations, just as the Creator made fossils and concealed them in the
different strata of the earth, in order to see whether Christian faith in
the truth of revelation would be strong enough to resist the seductions of
“science falsely so called.” Other devils enter into living human bodies
and give themselves up to evil enchantments as wizards and witches; others
still reanimate corpses or assume the form and features of the dead and
wander about as ghosts and hobgoblins. Not only were pagans regarded by
the Christian Church as devil-worshippers and exorcised before being
baptized, but it is also a logical deduction from the doctrine of original
sin, that a devil takes possession of every child as soon as it is born
and remains there until expelled by an ecclesiastical functionary, who
combines the office of priest with that of conjurer and is especially
appointed for this purpose. Hence arose the necessity of abrenunciation,
as it was called, which preceded baptism in the Catholic Church and which
Luther and the Anglican reformers retained. Before the candidate was
christened he was exorcised and adjured personally, if an adult, or
through a sponsor, if an infant, to “forsake the devil and all his works.”
These words, which still hold a place in the ritual, but are now repeated
in a perfunctory manner by persons, who have no conception of the magic
potency formerly ascribed to them, are a survival of the old formula of
exorcism. In the seventeenth century there was a keen competition between
the Roman Catholic and the Lutheran clergy in casting out devils, the
former claiming that to them alone had been transmitted the exorcising
power conferred by Christ upon his apostles. The Protestant churches
finally gave up the hocus-pocus and during the eighteenth century it fell
into general discredit and disuse among them, although some of the
stiffest and most conservative Lutherans never really abandoned it in
principle and have recently endeavoured to revive it in practice.
The Catholic Church, on the contrary, still holds that men, women and
cattle may be possessed by devils and prescribes the means of their
expulsion. In a work entitled _Rituale ecclesiasticum ad usum clericorum
S. Fransisci_ by Pater Franz Xaver Lohbauer (Munich, 1851), there is a
chapter on the mode of helping those who are afflicted by demons (_Modus
juvandi afflictos a daemone_). The author maintains that nearly all
so-called nervous diseases, hysteria, epilepsy, insanity, and milder forms
of mental alienation, are either the direct result of diabolical agencies
or attended and greatly aggravated by them. A sound mind in a sound body
may make a man devil-proof, but Satan is quick to take advantage of his
infirmities in order to get possession of his person. The adversary is
constantly lying in wait watching for and trying to produce physical
derangements as breaches in the wall, through which he may rush in and
capture the citadel of the soul. In all cases of this sort the priest is
to be called in with the physician, and the medicines are to be blessed
and sprinkled with holy water before being administered. Exorcisms and
conjurations are not only to be spoken over the patient, but also to be
written on slips of consecrated paper and applied, like a plaster, to the
parts especially affected. The physician should keep himself supplied with
these written exorcisms, to be used when it is impossible for a priest to
be present. As with patent medicines, the public is warned against
counterfeits, and no exorcism is genuine unless it is stamped with the
seal and bears the signature of the bishop of the diocese. According to
Father Lohbauer, the demon is the efficient cause of the malady, and there
can be no cure until the evil one is cast out. This is the office of the
priest; the physician then heals the physical disorder, repairing the
damage done to the body, and, as it were, stopping the gaps with his drugs
so as to prevent the demon from getting in again. Thus science and
religion are reconciled and work together harmoniously for the healing of
mankind.
The Catholic Church has a general form of _Benedictio a daemone
vexatorum_, for the relief of those vexed by demons; and Pope Leo XIII.,
who was justly esteemed as a man of more than ordinary intelligence and
more thoroughly imbued with the modern spirit than any of his
predecessors, composed and issued, November 19, 1890, a formula of
_Exorcismus in Satanam et Angelos Apostatas_ worthy of a place in any
mediæval collection of conjurations. His Holiness never failed to repeat
this exorcism in his daily prayers, and commended it to the bishops and
other clergy as a potent means of warding off the assaults of Satan and of
casting out devils. In 1849 the Bishop of Passau published a _Manuale
Benedictionum_, and as late as 1893 Dr. Theobald Bischofberger described
and defended the practice of the papal see, in this respect, in a brochure
printed in Stuttgart and entitled _Die Verwaltung des Exorcistats nach
Massgabe der römischen Benediktionale_.
That these formulas are still deemed highly efficacious is evident from
the many recent cases in which they have been employed. Thus in 1842 a
devil named Ro-ro-ro-ro took possession of “a maiden of angelic beauty” in
Luxemburg and was cast out by Bishop Laurentius. This demon claimed to be
one of the archangels expelled from heaven, and appears to have rivalled
Parson Stöcker and Rector Ahlwardt in Anti-semitic animosity; when the
name of Jesus was mentioned, he cried out derisively: “O, that Jew! Didn’t
he have to drink gall?” When commanded to depart, he begged that he might
go into some Jew. The bishop, however, refused to give him leave and bade
him “go to hell,” which he forthwith did, “moaning as he went, in
melancholy tones, that seemed to issue from the bowels of the earth,
‘Burning, burning, everlastingly burning in hell!’ The voice was so sad,”
adds the bishop, “that we should have wept for sheer compassion, had we
not known that it was the devil.”
Again, a lay brother connected with an educational institute in Rome
became diabolically possessed on January 3, 1887, and was exorcised by
Father Jordan. In this instance the leading spirit was Lucifer himself,
attended by a host of satellites, of whom Lignifex, Latibor, Monitor,
Ritu, Sefilie, Shulium, Haijunikel, Exaltor, and Reromfex were the most
important. It took about an hour and a half to cast out these demons the
first time, but they renewed their assaults on February 10th, 11th, and
17th, and were not completely discomfited and driven back into the
infernal regions until February 23rd, and then only by using the water of
Lourdes, which, as Father Jordan states, acted upon them like poison,
causing them to writhe to and fro. Lucifer was especially rude and saucy
in his remarks. Thus, for example, when Father Jordan said, “Every knee in
heaven and on the earth shall bow to the name of Jesus,” the fallen “Son
of the Morning” retorted, “Not Luci, not Luci--never!”
It would be easy to multiply authentic reports of things of this sort that
have happened within the memory of the present generation, such as the
exorcism of a woman of twenty-seven at Laas in the Tyrol in the spring of
1892, and the expulsion of an evil spirit from a boy ten years of age at
Wemding in Bavaria by a capuchin, Father Aurelian, July 13th and 14th,
1891, with the sanction of the bishops of Augsburg and Eichstätt. In the
latter case we have a circumstantial account of the affair by the exorcist
himself, who, in conclusion, uses the following strong language:
“Whosoever denies demoniacal possession in our days confesses thereby that
he has gone astray from the teaching of the Catholic Church; but he will
believe in it when he himself is in the possession of the devil in hell.
As for myself I have the authority of two bishops.” In a pamphlet on this
subject printed at Munich in 1892, and entitled _Die Teufelsaustreibung in
Wemding_, the author, Richard Treufels, takes the same view, declaring
that diabolical possession “is an incontestable fact, confirmed by the
traditions of all nations of ancient and modern times, by the unequivocal
testimony of the Old and New Testaments, and by the teaching and practice
of the Catholic Church.” Christ, he says, gave his disciples power and
authority over all devils to cast them out, and the same power is
divinely conferred upon every priest by his consecration, although it is
never to be exercised without the permission of his bishop.
Doubtless modern science by investigating the laws and forces of nature is
gradually diminishing the realm of superstition; but there are vast
low-lying plains of humanity that have not yet felt its enlightening and
elevating influence. It has been estimated that nine-tenths of the rural
population of Europe and ninety-nine hundredths of the peasantry, living
in the vicinity of a cloister and darkened by its shadow, believe in the
reality of diabolical possession and attribute most maladies of men and
murrain in cattle to the direct agency of Satan, putting their faith in
the “metaphysical aid” of the conjurer rather than in medical advice and
veterinary skill.
Unfortunately this belief is not confined to Catholics and boors, but is
held by Protestants, who are considered persons of education and superior
culture. Dr. Lyman Abbott asserted in a sermon preached in Plymouth
Church, that “what we call the impulses of our lower nature are the
whispered suggestions of fiend-like natures, watching for our fall and
exultant if they can accomplish it.” But while affirming that “evil
spirits exercise an influence over mankind,” and that cranks like Guiteau,
the assassin of President Garfield, are diabolically possessed, the
reverend divine would hardly risk his reputation for sanity by attempting
to exorcise the supposed demon. The Catholic priest holds the same view,
but has the courage of his convictions and goes solemnly to work with
bell, book and candle to effect the expulsion of the indwelling fiend.
The fact that such methods of healing are sometimes successful is adduced
as conclusive proof of their miraculous character; but this inference is
wholly incorrect. Professor Dr. Hoppe, in an essay on _Der Teufels- und
Geisterglaube und die psychologische Erklärung des Besessenseins_
(_Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie_, Bd. LV. p. 290), gives a
psychological explanation of these puzzling phenomena. “The priest,” he
says, “exerts a salutary influence upon the brain through the respect and
dignity which he inspires, just as Christ in his day wrought upon those
who were sick and possessed with devils.” Indeed, it is expressly stated
by the evangelist that Jesus did not attempt to do wonderful works among
people who did not believe. According to this theory the exorcism effects
a cure by its powerful action on the imagination, just as there are
frequent ailments, for which a wise physician administers bread pills and
a weak solution of powdered sugar as the safest and best medicaments.
Professor Hoppe, therefore, approves of “priestly conjurations for the
expulsion of devils as a psychical means of healing,” and thinks that the
more ceremoniously the rite can be performed in the presence of grave and
venerable witnesses, the more effective it will be. This opinion is
endorsed by a Catholic priest, Friedrich Jaskowski, in a pamphlet entitled
_Der Trierer Rock und seine Patienten vom Jahre 1891_ (Saarbrücken: Carl
Schmidtke, 1894). The author belongs to the diocese of Trier and is
therefore under the jurisdiction of the bishop, Dr. Felix Korum, whose
statements concerning the miracles wrought and the evidences of divine
mercy manifested during the exhibition of the “holy coat” in 1891 he
courageously reviews and conclusively refutes. The bishop had printed what
he called “documentary proofs,” consisting of certificates issued by
obscure curates and country doctors, that certain persons suffering
chiefly from diseases of the nervous system had been healed, and sought to
discover in these cures the working of divine agencies. Jaskowski shows
that in several instances the persons said to have found relief died
shortly afterwards, and maintains that where cures actually occurred they
“were not due to a miracle or any direct interference of God with the
established order of things, but happened in a purely natural manner.” He
quotes the late Professor Charcot, Dr. Forel, and other neuropathologists
to establish the fact that hetero-suggestion emanating from a physician or
priest, or auto-suggestion originating in the person’s own mind, may
often be the most effective remedy for neurotic disorders of every kind.
In auto-suggestion the patient is possessed with the fixed idea that the
doing of a certain thing, which may be in itself absolutely indifferent,
will afford relief. As an example of this faith-cure Jaskowski refers to
the woman who was diseased with an issue of blood, and approaching Jesus
said within herself: “If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.”
This is precisely the position taken by Jesus himself, who turned to the
woman and said: “Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee
whole.” Jaskowski also quotes the declaration of the evangelist referred
to above, that in a certain place the people’s lack of faith prevented
Jesus from doing many wondrous works, and does not deny that on this
principle, which is now recognized by the most eminent physicians, some
few of the hundreds of pilgrims may have been restored to health by
touching the holy coat of Trier; and there is no doubt that the popular
belief in Bishop Korum’s assertion that it is the same garment which Jesus
wore and the woman touched, would greatly increase its healing efficacy
through the force of auto-suggestion (see my article on “Recent
Recrudescence of Superstition” in Appleton’s _Popular Science Monthly_ for
Oct. 1895, pp. 762-66).
The Bishop of Bamberg in Bavaria has been stigmatized as a hypocrite
because he sends the infirm of his flock on a pilgrimage to Lourdes or
Laas or some other holy shrine, while he prefers for himself the profane
waters of Karlsbad or Kissingen. But in so doing he is not guilty of any
inconsistency, since a journey to sacred places and contact with sacred
relics would not act upon him with the same force as upon the ignorant and
superstitious masses of his diocese. His conduct only evinces his
disbelief in the supernatural character of the remedies he prescribes. The
distinguished French physician, Professor Charcot, as already mentioned,
recognized the curative power of faith under certain circumstances, and
occasionally found it eminently successful in hysterical and other purely
nervous affections. In some cases he did not hesitate to prescribe a
pilgrimage to the shrine of any saint for whom the patient may have had a
peculiar reverence; but in no instance in his experience did faith or
exorcism or hagiolatry heal an organic disease, set a dislocated joint or
restore an amputated limb. What Falstaff says of honour is equally true of
faith, it “hath no skill in surgery.”
But to return from this digression, Père Bougeant’s theory of the
diabolical possession of pagans and unbaptized persons would provide for
comparatively few devils, and the gradual diffusion of Christianity would
constantly diminish the supply of human beings available as their proper
habitations. The ultimate conversion of the whole world and the custom of
baptizing infants as soon as they are born would, therefore, produce
serious domiciliary destitution and distress among the evil spirits and
set immense numbers of them hopelessly adrift as vagabonds, and thus
create an extremely undesirable diabolical proletariat. This difficulty is
avoided by assuming that the vast majority of devils are incarnate in the
billions of beasts of all kinds, which dwell upon the earth or fly in the
air or fill the waters of the rivers and the seas. This hypothesis, he
adds, “enables me to ascribe to the lower animals thought, knowledge,
feeling, and a spiritual principle or soul without running counter to the
truths of religion. Indeed, so far from being astonished at their
manifestations of intelligence, foresight, memory and reason, I am rather
surprised that they do not display these qualities in a higher degree,
since their soul is probably far more perfect than ours. Their defects
are, as I have discovered, owing to the fact that in brute as in us, the
mind works through material organs, and inasmuch as these organs are
grosser and less perfect in the lower animals than in man, it follows that
their exhibitions of intelligence, their thoughts and all their mental
operations must be less perfect; and, if these proud spirits are conscious
of their condition, how humiliating it must be for them to see themselves
thus embruted! Whether they are conscious of it or not, this deep
degradation is the first act of God’s vengeance executed on his foes. It
is a foretaste of hell.”
Only by such an assumption, as our author proceeds to show, is it possible
to justify the ways of man to the lower animals and to reconcile his cruel
treatment of them with the goodness of an all-wise and all-powerful maker
and ruler of the universe. For this reason, he goes on to explain, the
Christian Church has never deemed it a duty to take the lower animals
under its protection or to inculcate ordinary natural kindness towards
them. Hence in countries, like Italy and Spain, where the influence of
Catholicism has been supreme for centuries, not only are wild birds and
beasts of chase relentlessly slaughtered and exterminated, but even useful
domestic animals, asses, sumpter-mules and pack-horses, are subjected to a
supererogation of suffering at the hands of ruthless man. As the pious
Parsi conscientiously comes up to the help of Ahuramazda against the
malevolent Angrô-mainyush by killing as many as possible of the creatures
which the latter has made, so the good Catholic becomes an efficient
co-worker with God by maltreating brutes and thus aiding the Almighty in
punishing the devils, of which they are the visible and bruisable forms.
Whatever pain is inflicted is felt, not by the physical organism, but by
the animated spirit. It is the embodied demon that really suffers, howling
in the beaten dog and squealing in the butchered pig.
There are doubtless many persons of tender susceptibilities, who cannot
bear to think that the animals, whose daily companionship we enjoy, the
parrot we feed with sugar, the pretty pug we caress and the noble horse,
which ministers to our comfort and convenience, are nothing but devils
predestined to everlasting torture. But these purely sentimental
considerations are of no weight in the scale of reason. “What matters it,”
replies the Jesuit Father, “whether it is a devil or another kind of
creature that is in our service or contributes to our amusement? For my
part, this idea pleases rather than repels me; and I recognize with
gratitude the beneficence of the Creator in having provided me with so
many little devils for my use and entertainment. If it be said that these
poor creatures, which we have learned to love and so fondly cherish, are
fore-ordained to eternal torments, I can only adore the decrees of God,
but do not hold myself responsible for the terrible sentence; I leave the
execution of the dread decision to the sovereign judge and continue to
live with my little devils, as I live pleasantly with a multitude of
persons, of whom, according to the teachings of our holy religion, the
great majority will be damned.” The crafty disciple of Loyola, elusive of
disagreeable deductions, is content to accept the poodle in its phenomenal
form and to make the most of it, without troubling himself about “des
Pudels Kern.”
This doctrine, he thinks, is amply illustrated and confirmed by an appeal
to the consentient opinion of mankind or the argument from universal
belief, which has been so often and so effectively urged in proof of the
existence of God. If the maxim _universitas non delinquit_ has the same
validity in the province of philosophy as in that of law, then we are
justified in assuming that the whole human race cannot go wrong even in
purely metaphysical speculation and that unanimity in error is a
psychological impossibility. The criterion of truth, _quod semper, quod
ubique, quod ab omnibus_, by which the Roman hierarchy is willing to have
its claims to ecclesiastical catholicity and doctrinal orthodoxy tested,
is confined to Christendom in its application and does not consider the
views of persons outside of the body of believers. In the question under
discussion the argument is not subject to such limitations, but gathers
testimony from all races and religions, showing that there is not a
civilized nation or savage tribe on the face of the earth, which does not
regard or has not regarded the lower animals as embodiments of evil
spirits and sought to propitiate them. That “the devil is an ass” is a
truth so palpable that it has passed into a proverb. Baal-zebub means
fly-god; and the Christian Satan betrays his presence by the cloven foot
of the goat or the solid hoof of the horse. In folk-lore, which is the
_débris_ of exploded mythologies adrift on the stream of popular
tradition, cats, dogs, otters, apes, ravens, blackcocks, capercailzies,
rabbits, hedgehogs, wolves, were-wolves, foxes, polecats, swine, serpents,
toads, and countless varieties of insects, reptiles and vermin figure as
incarnations and instruments of the devil; and Mephistopheles reveals
himself to Faust as
“Der Herr der Ratten und der Mäuse,
Der Fliegen, Frösche, Wanzen, Läuse.”
“The Lord of rats and of the mice,
Of flies and frogs, bed-bugs and lice.”
The worship of animals originates in the belief that they are embodiments
of devils, so that zoölatry, which holds such a prominent place in
primitive religions, is only a specific form of demonolatry. The objection
that a flea or a fly, a mite or a mosquito is too small a creature to
furnish fit lodgment for a demon, Father Bougeant dismisses with an
indulgent smile and disparaging shrug as implying a gross misconception of
the nature and properties of spirit, which is without extension or
dimension and therefore capable of animating the most diminutive particle
of organized matter. Large and little are purely relative terms. God, he
says, could have made man as small as the tiniest puceron without any
decrease of his spiritual powers. “It is, therefore, no more difficult to
believe that a devil may be incorporated in the delicate body of a gnat
than in the huge bulk of an elephant.” The size of the physical
habitation, in which spirits take up their temporary abode, is a thing of
no consequence. In fact, devils in the forms of gnats and tiny insects
were thought to be especially dangerous, since one might swallow them
unawares and thus become diabolically possessed. The demon, liberated by
the death and dissolution of the insect, was supposed to make a tenement
of the unfortunate person’s stomach, producing gripes and playing
ventriloquous tricks. Thus it is recorded in the _Dies Caniculuares_ of
Majolus (Meyer: _Der Aberglaube des Mittelalters_, p. 296-7) that a young
maiden in the Erzgebirge near Joachimsthal, in 1559, swallowed a fly,
while drinking beer. The evil spirit, incarnate in the fly, took
possession of the maiden and began to speak out of her, thus attracting
crowds of people, who put questions to the devil and tried to drive him
out by prayers, in which the unhappy girl sometimes joined, greatly to her
discomfort, since the devil waxed exceeding wroth and unruly and caused
her much suffering, whenever she uttered the name of Christ. Finally the
parish priest had her brought into the church, where he succeeded with
considerable difficulty in exorcising her. The stubborn demon resisted for
two years all efforts to cast him out; he even tried to compromise with
the girl, promising to be content with a finger nail or a single hair of
her head, but she declined all overtures, and he was at last expelled by
means of a potent conjuration, which lasted from midnight till midday.
As the human soul is released by death, so the extinction of life in any
animal sets its devil free, who, instead of entering upon a spiritual
state of existence, goes into the egg or embryo of another animal and
resumes his penal bondage to the flesh. “Thus a devil, after having been a
cat or a goat, may pass, not by choice, but by constraint, into the embryo
of a bird, a fish or a butterfly. Happy are those who make a lucky hit and
become household pets, instead of beasts of burden or of slaughter. The
lottery of destiny bars them the right of voluntary choosing.” The
doctrine of transmigration, continues our author, “which Pythagoras taught
of yore and some Indian sages hold to-day, is untenable in its application
to men and contrary to religion, but it fits admirably into the system
already set forth concerning the nature of beasts, and shocks neither our
faith nor our reason.” Furthermore, it explains why “all species of
animals produce many more eggs or embryos than are necessary to propagate
their kind and to provide for a normal increase.” Of the millions of
germs, of which “great creating nature” is so prolific, comparatively few
ever develop into living creatures; only those which are vivified by a
devil are evolved into complete organisms; the others perish. This seeming
superfluity and waste can be most easily reconciled with the careful
economy and wise frugality of nature by viewing it as a manifestation of
the bountiful and beneficent providence of God in preventing “any lack of
occupation or abode on the part of the devils,” which are being constantly
disembodied and re-embodied. “This accounts for the prodigious clouds of
locusts and countless hosts of caterpillars, which suddenly desolate our
fields and gardens. The cause of these astonishing multiplications has
been sought in cold, heat, rain and wind, but the real reason is that, at
the time of their appearance, extraordinary quantities of animals have
died or their embryos been destroyed, so that the devils that animated
them were compelled to avail themselves at once of whatever species they
found most ready to receive them, which would naturally be the
superabundant eggs of insects.” The more profoundly this subject is
investigated, he concludes, and the more light our observations and
researches throw upon it from all sides, the more probable does the
hypothesis here suggested in explanation of the puzzling phenomena of
animal life and intelligence appear.
Father Bougeant calls his lucubration “a new system of philosophy”; but
this is not strictly true. He has only given a fuller and more facetious
exposition of a doctrine taught by many of the greatest lights of the
Catholic Church, among others by Thomas Aquinas, whose authority as a
thinker Pope Leo XIII. distinctly recognized and earnestly sought to
restore to its former prestige. Bougeant’s ingenious dissertation has a
vein of irony or at least a strain of jocundity in it, approaching at
times so perilously near the fatal brink of persiflage, that one cannot
help surmising an intention to render the whole thing ridiculous in a
witty and underhand way eminently compatible with Jesuitical habits of
mind; but whether serious or satirical, his treatise is an excellent
example and illustration of the kind of dialectic hair-splitting and
syllogistic rubbish, which passed for reasoning in the early and middle
ages of the Christian era, and which the greatest scholars and acutest
intellects of those days fondly indulged in and seem to have been fully
satisfied with. Here, too, we come upon the metaphysical and theological
groundwork, upon which was reared by a strictly logical process a vast
superstructure of ecclesiastical excommunication and criminal prosecution
against bugs and beasts. He protests with never-tiring and needless
iteration his absolute devotion to the precepts of religion; indeed, like
the lady in the play, he “protests too much, methinks.” In all humbleness
and submission he bows to the authority of the Church, and would not touch
the ark of the covenant even with the tip of his finger, but his easy
acquiescence has an air of perfunctoriness, and in his assenting lips
there lurks a secret, semi-sarcastic leer, which casts suspicion on his
words and looks like poking fun at the principles he professes and turning
them into raillery.
Indeed, such covert derision would have been a suitable way of ridiculing
the gross popular superstition of his time, which saw a diabolical
incarnation in every unfamiliar form of animal life. During the latter
half of the sixteenth century a Swiss naturalist named Thurneysser, who
held the position of physician in ordinary to the Elector Johann Georg von
Brandenburg, kept some scorpions bottled in olive oil, which were feared
by the common people as terrible devils endowed with magic power
(_fürchterliche Zauberteufel_). Thurneysser presented also to Basel, his
native city, a large elk, which had been given to him by Prince Radziwil;
but the good Baselers looked upon the strange animal as a most dangerous
demon, and a pious old woman finally rid the town of the dreaded beast by
feeding it with an apple stuck full of broken needles.
A distinguished Spanish theologian of the sixteenth century, Martin
Azpilcueta, commonly known as Dr. Navarre, refers, in his work on
excommunication, to a case in which anathemas were fulminated against
certain large sea-creatures called terones, which infested the waters of
Sorrento and destroyed the nets of the fishermen. He speaks of them as
“fish or cacodemons” (_pisces seu cacodemones_), and maintains that they
are subject to anathematization, not as fish, but only as devils. In his
Five Counsels and other tractates on this subject (Opera, Lyons, 1589;
reprinted at Venice, 1601-2, and at Cologne, 1616) he often takes issue
with Chassenée on minor points, but the French jurist and the Spanish
divine agree on the main question.
In this connection it may be a matter of interest to add, that a German
neuropathologist of our own day, Herr von Bodelschwingh, ascribes epilepsy
to what he calls “demonic infection” due to the presence of the _bacillus
infernalis_ in the blood of those who are subject to this disease. The
microbe, to which the jocose scientist has been pleased to give this name,
differs from all other bacilli hitherto discovered in having two horns and
a tail, although the most powerful lenses have not yet revealed any traces
of a cloven foot. An additional indication of its infernal qualities is
the fact that it liquefies the gelatine, with which it comes in contact,
and turns it black, emitting at the same time a pestilential stench.
Doubtless this discovery will be hailed by theologians as a striking
confirmation of divine revelation by modern science, proving that our
forefathers were right in attributing the falling-sickness to diabolical
agencies. We know now that it was a legion of _bacilli infernales_ which
went out of the tomb-haunting man into the Gadarene swine and drove them
tumultuously over a precipice into the sea. In fact, who can tell what
microbes really are! Père Bougeant would certainly have regarded them as
nothing less than microscopic devils.
The Savoyan jurist, Gaspard Bailly, in the second part of the disquisition
entitled _Traité des Monitoires_, already mentioned, treats “Of the
Excellence of Monitories” and discusses the main points touching the
criminal prosecution and punishment of insects. He begins by saying that
“one should not contemn monitories (a general term for anathemas, bans and
excommunications), seeing that they are matters of great importance,
inasmuch as they bear with them the deadliest sword, wielded by our holy
mother, the Church, to wit, the power of excommunication, which cutteth
the dry wood and the green, sparing neither the quick nor the dead, and
smiting not only rational beings, but turning its edge also against
irrational creatures; since it hath been shown at sundry times and in
divers places, that worms and insects, which were devouring the fruits of
the earth, have been excommunicated and, in obedience to the commands of
the Church, have withdrawn from the cultivated fields to the places
prescribed by the bishop who had been appointed to adjudge and to adjure
them.”
M. Bailly then cites numerous instances of this kind, in which a writer on
logic would find ample illustrations of the fallacy known as _post hoc,
ergo propter hoc_. Thus in the latter half of the fifteenth century,
during the reign of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, a plague of
locusts threatened the province of Mantua in Northern Italy with famine,
but were dispersed by excommunication. He quotes some florid lines from
the poet Altiat descriptive of these devastating swarms, which “came,
after so many other woes, under the leadership of Eurus (_i.e._ brought by
the east wind), more destructive than the hordes of Attila or the camps of
Corsicans, devouring the hay, the millet and the corn, and leaving only
vain wishes, where the hopes of August stood.” Again in 1541, a cloud of
locusts fell upon Lombardy, and by destroying the crops, caused many
persons to perish with hunger. These insects “were as long as a man’s
finger, with large heads and bellies filled with vileness; and when dead
they infected the air and gave forth a stench, which even carrion kites
and carnivorous beasts could not endure.” Another instance is given, in
which swarms of four-winged insects came from Tartary, identified in the
popular mind with Tartarus, obscuring the sun in their flight and covering
the plains of Poland a cubit deep. In the year 1338, on St. Bartholomew’s
Day, these creatures began to devastate the region round Botzen in the
Tyrol, consuming the crops and laying eggs and leaving a numerous progeny,
which seemed destined to continue the work of destruction indefinitely. A
prosecution was therefore instituted against them before the
ecclesiastical court at Kaltern, a large market-town about ten miles south
of Botzen, then as now famous for its wines, and the parish priest
instructed to proceed against them with the sentence of excommunication in
accordance with the verdict of the tribunal. This he did by the solemn
ceremony of “inch of candle,” and anathematized them “in the name of the
Blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” Owing to the sins of the
people and their remissness in the matter of tithes the devouring insects
resisted for a time the power of the Church, but finally disappeared.
Under the reign of Lotharius II., early in the twelfth century, enormous
quantities of locusts, “having six wings with two teeth harder than flint”
and “darkening the sky and whitening the air like a snowstorm,” laid waste
the most fertile provinces of France. Many of them perished in the rivers
and the sea, and being washed ashore sent forth a putrescent smell and
produced a fearful pestilence. Precisely the same phenomenon, with like
disastrous results, is described by St. Augustine in the last book of _De
Civitate Dei_ as having occurred in Africa and caused the death of 800,000
persons.
In the majority of cases adduced there is no evidence that the Church
intervened at all with its fulminations, and, even when the anathema was
pronounced, the insects appear to have departed of their own free-will
after having eaten up every green thing and reduced the inhabitants to
the verge of starvation; and yet M. Bailly, supposed to be a man of
judicial mind, disciplined by study, accustomed to reason and to know what
sound reasoning is, goes on giving accounts of such scourges, as though
they proved in some mysterious way the effectiveness of ecclesiastical
excommunications and formed a cumulative argument in support of such
claims.
The most important portion of M. Bailly’s work is that in which he shows
how actions of this kind should be brought and conducted, with specimens
of plaints, pleas, replications, rejoinders, and decisions. First in order
comes the petition of the inhabitants seeking redress (_requeste des
habitans_), which is followed in regular succession by the declaration or
plea of the inhabitants (_plaidoyer des habitans_), the defensive
allegation or plea for the insects (_plaidoyer pour les insectes_), the
replication of the inhabitants (_réplique des habitans_), the rejoinder of
the defendant (_réplique du defendeur_), the conclusions of the bishop’s
proctor (_conclusions du procureur episcopal_), and the sentence of the
ecclesiastical judge (_sentence du juge d’église_), which is solemnly
pronounced in Latin. The pleadings on both sides are delivered in French
and richly interlarded with classical allusions and Latin quotations,
being even more heavily weighted with the spoils of erudition than the set
speech of a member of the British Parliament.
The following abridgment of the plea, in which the prosecuting attorney
sets forth the cause of complaint, is a fair specimen of the forensic
eloquence displayed on such occasions:
“Gentlemen, these poor people on their knees and with tearful eyes, appeal
to your sense of justice, as the inhabitants of the islands Majorica and
Minorica formerly sent an embassy to Augustus Cæsar, praying him for a
cohort of soldiers to exterminate the rabbits, which were burrowing in
their fields and consuming their crops. In the power of excommunication
you have a weapon more effective than any wielded by that emperor to save
these poor suppliants from impending famine produced by the ravages of
little beasts, which spare neither the corn nor the vines, ravages like
those of the boar that laid waste the environs of Calydon, as related by
Homer in the first book of the _Iliad_, or those of the foxes sent by
Themis to Thebes, which destroyed the fruits of the earth and the cattle
and assailed even the husbandmen themselves. You know how great are the
evils which famine brings with it, and you have too much kindness and
compassion to permit my clients to be involved in such distress, thus
constraining them to perpetrate cruel and unlawful deeds; _nec enim
rationem patitur, nec ulla aequitate mitigatur, nec prece ulla flectitur
esuriens populus_: for a starving people is not amenable to reason, nor
tempered by equity, nor moved by any prayer. Witness the mothers, of whom
it is recorded in the Fourth Book of the Kings, that they ate their own
children, the one saying to the other: ‘Give thy son that we may eat him
to-day, and we will eat my son tomorrow.’” The advocate then discourses at
length of the horrors of hunger and its disastrous effects upon the
individual and the community, lugging in what Milton calls a “horse-load
of citations” from Arianus Marcellinus, Ovid and other Latin prosaists and
poets, introduces an utterly irrelevant allusion to Joshua and the crafty
Gibeonites, and concludes as follows: “The full reports received as the
result of an examination of the fields, made at your command, suffice for
your information concerning the damage done by these animals. It remains,
therefore, after complying with the usual forms, only to adjudicate upon
the case in accordance with the facts stated in the Petition of the
Plaintiffs, which is right and reasonable, and, to this effect, to enjoin
these animals from continuing their devastations, ordering them to quit
the aforesaid fields and to withdraw to the place assigned them,
pronouncing the necessary anathemas and execrations prescribed by our Holy
Mother, the Church, for which your petitioners do ever pray.”
It is doubtful whether any speaking for Buncombe in the halls of Congress
or any spouting of an ignorant bumpkin in the moot-court of an American
law-school ever produced such a rhetorical hotchpotch of “matter and
impertinency mixed” as the earnest plea, of which the above is a brief
abstract.
Rather more to the point, but equally overburdened with legal lore and
literary pedantry, is the rejoinder of the counsel for the insects:
“Gentlemen, inasmuch as you have chosen me to defend these little beasts
(_bestioles_), I shall, an it please you, endeavour to right them and to
show that the manner of proceeding against them is invalid and void. I
confess that I am greatly astonished at the treatment they have been
subjected to and at the charges brought against them, as though they had
committed some crime. Thus information has been procured touching the
damage said to have been done by them; they have been summoned to appear
before this court to answer for their conduct, and, since they are
notoriously dumb, the judge, wishing that they should not suffer wrong on
account of this defect, has appointed an advocate to speak in their behalf
and to set forth in conformity with right and justice the reasons, which
they themselves are unable to allege.
“Since you have permitted me to appear in defence of these poor animals, I
will state, in the first place, that the summons served on them is null
and void, having been issued against beasts, which cannot and ought not to
be cited before this judgment seat, inasmuch as such a procedure implies
that the parties summoned are endowed with reason and volition and are
therefore capable of committing crime. That this is not the case with
these creatures is clear from the paragraph _Si quadrupes_, etc., in the
first book of the Pandects, where we find these words: _Nec enim potest
animal injuriam fecisse, quod sensu caret_.
“The second ground, on which I base the defence of my clients, is that no
one can be judicially summoned without cause, and whoever has had such a
summons served renders himself liable to the penalty prescribed by the
statute _De poen. tem. litig._ As regards these animals there is no _causa
justa litigandi_; they are not bound in any manner, _non tenentur ex
contractu_, being incompetent to make contracts or to enter into any
compact or covenant whatsoever, _neque ex quasi contractu_, _neque ex
stipulatione_, _neque ex pacto_, and still less _ex delicto seu quasi_,
can there be any question of a delict or any semblance thereof, since, as
has just been shown, the rational faculties essential to the capability of
committing criminal actions are wanting.
“Furthermore, it is illicit to do that which is nugatory and of non-effect
(_qui ne porte coup_); in this respect justice is like nature, which, as
the philosopher affirms, does nothing _mal à propos_ or in vain: _Deus
enim et Natura nihil operantur frustra_. Now I leave it to you to decide
whether anything could be more futile than to summon these irrational
creatures, which can neither speak for themselves, nor appoint proxies to
defend their cause; still less are they able to present memorials stating
grounds of their justification. If then, as I have shown, the summons,
which is the basis of all judicial action, is null and void, the
proceedings dependent upon it will not be able to stand: _cum enim
principalis causa non consistat, neque ea quae consequuntur locum
habent_.”
The counsel for the defence rests his argument, of which the extract just
given may suffice as a sample, upon the irrationality and consequent
irresponsibility of his clients. For this reason he maintains that the
judge cannot appoint a procurator to represent them, and cites legal
authorities to show that the incompetency of the principal implies the
incompetency of the proxy, in conformity with the maxim: _quod directe
fieri prohibetur, per indirectum concedi non debet_. In like manner the
invalidity of the summons bars any charge of contempt of court and
condemnation for contumacy. Furthermore, the very nature of
excommunication is such that it cannot be pronounced against them, since
it is defined as _extra ecclesiam positio, vel è qualibet communione, vel
quolibet legitimo actu separatio_. But these animals cannot be expelled
from the Church, because they are not members of it and do not fall under
its jurisdiction, as the apostle Paul says: “Ye judge them that are
within and not them also that are without.” _Excommunicatio afficit
animam, non corpus, nisi per quandam consequentiam, cujus medicina est._
The animal soul, not being immortal, cannot be affected by such sentence,
which involves the loss of eternal salvation (_quae vergit in dispendium
aeternae salutis_).
A still more important consideration is that these insects are only
exercising an innate right conferred upon them at their creation, when God
expressly gave them “every green herb for meat,” a right which cannot be
curtailed or abrogated, simply because it may be offensive to man. In
support of this view he quotes passages from Cicero’s treatise _De
Officiis_, the Epistle of Jude and the works of Thomas Aquinas. Finally,
he maintains that his clients are agents of the Almighty sent to punish us
for our sins, and to hurl anathemas against them would be to fight against
God (_s’en prendre à Dieu_), who has said: “I will send wild beasts among
you, which shall destroy you and your cattle and make you few in number.”
That all flesh has corrupted its way upon the earth, he thinks is as true
now as before the deluge, and cites about a dozen lines from the
_Metamorphoses_ of Ovid in confirmation of this fact. In conclusion he
demands the acquittal of the defendants and their exemption from all
further prosecution.
The prosecuting attorney in his replication answers these objections in
regular order, showing, in the first place, that, while the law may not
punish an irrational creature for a crime already committed, it may
intervene, as in the case of an insane person, to prevent the commission
of a crime by putting the madman in a strait-jacket or throwing him into
prison. He elucidates this principle by a rather far-fetched illustration
from the legal enactments concerning betrothal and breach of promise of
marriage. “It follows then inferentially that the aforesaid animals can be
properly summoned to appear and that the summons is valid, inasmuch as
this is done in order to prevent them from causing damage henceforth
(_d’ores en avant_) and only incidentally to punish them for injuries
already inflicted.”
“To affirm that such animals cannot be anathematized and excommunicated is
to doubt the authority conferred by God upon his dear spouse, the Church,
whom he has made the sovereign of the whole world, having, in the words of
the Psalmist, put all things under her feet, all sheep and oxen, the
beasts of the field, the fowl of the air, the fish of the sea and
whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas. Guided by the Holy
Spirit she does nothing unwisely; and if there is anything in which she
should show forth her power it is in protecting and preserving the most
perfect work of her heavenly husband, to wit, man, who was made in the
divine image and likeness.” The orator then dilates on the grandeur and
glory of man and interlards his harangue with quotations from sacred and
profane writers, Moses, Paul, Pliny, Ovid, Silius Italicus and Pico di
Mirandola, and declares that nothing could be more absurd than to deprive
such a being of the fruits of the earth for the sake of “vile and paltry
vermin.” In reply to the statement of Thomas Aquinas, quoted by the
counsel for the defence, that it is futile to curse animals as such, the
plaintiffs’ advocate says that they are not viewed merely as animals, but
as creatures doing harm to man by eating and wasting the products of the
soil designed for human sustenance; in other words he ascribes to them a
certain diabolical character. “But why dwell upon this point, since
besides the instances recorded in Holy Writ, in which God curses inanimate
things and irrational creatures, we have an infinite number of examples of
holy men, who have excommunicated noxious animals. It will suffice to
mention one familiar to us all and constantly before our eyes in the town
of Aix, where St. Hugon, Bishop of Grenoble, excommunicated the serpents,
which infested the warm baths and killed many of the inhabitants by biting
them. Now it is well known, that if the serpents in that place or in the
immediate vicinity bite any one, the bite is no longer fatal. The venom of
the reptile was stayed and annulled by virtue of the excommunication, so
that no hurt ensues from the bite, although the bite of the same kind of
serpent outside of the region affected by the ban, is followed by death.”
That serpents and other poisonous reptiles could be deprived of their
venom by enchantment and thus rendered harmless is in accord with the
teachings of the Bible. Thus we read in Ecclesiastes (x. 11): “Surely the
serpent will bite without enchantment,” _i.e._ unless it be enchanted and
its bite disenvenomed. A curious superstition concerning the adder is
referred to in the Psalms (lviii. 4, 5), where the wicked are said to be
“like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear; which will not hearken to the
voice of charmers, charming never so wisely.” The Lord is also represented
by Jeremiah (viii. 17) as threatening to “send serpents, cockatrices,
among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you.” It does
not seem to have occurred to the prosecutor that the defendants might be
locusts, which would not be excommunicated.
The objection that God has sent these insects as a scourge, and that to
anathematize them would be to fight against him, is met by saying that to
have recourse to the offices of the Church is an act of religion, which
does not resist, but humbly recognizes the divine will and makes use of
the means appointed for averting the divine wrath and securing the divine
favour.
After the advocates had finished their pleadings, the case was summed up
by the episcopal procurator substantially as follows:
“The arguments offered by the counsel for the defence against the
proceedings instituted by the inhabitants as complainants are worthy of
careful consideration and deserve to be examined soberly and maturely,
because the bolt of excommunication should not be hurled recklessly and at
random (_à la volée_), being a weapon of such peculiar energy and activity
that, if it fails to strike the object against which it is hurled, it
returns to smite him, who hurled it.” [This notion that an anathema is a
dangerous missile to him who hurls it unlawfully or for an unjust purpose,
retroacting like an Australian boomerang, survives in the homely proverb:
“Curses, like chickens, come home to roost.”] The bishop’s proctor reviews
the speeches of the lawyers, but seems to have his brains somewhat muddled
by them. “It is truly a deep sea,” he says, “in which it is impossible to
touch bottom. We cannot tell why God has sent these animals to devour the
fruits of the earth; this is for us a sealed book (_lettres closes_).” He
suggests it may be “because the people turn a deaf ear to the poor begging
at their doors,” and goes off into a long eulogy on the beauty of charity,
with an anthology of extracts from various writers in praise of
alms-giving, among which is one from Eusebius descriptive of hell as a
cold region, where the wailing and gnashing of teeth are attributed to
the torments of eternal frost instead of everlasting fire (_liberaberis ab
illo frigore, in quo erit fletus et stridor dentium_). Again, the plague
of insects may be due to irreverence shown in the churches, which, he
declares, have been changed from the house of God into houses of
assignation. On this point he quotes from Tertullian, Augustine, and Numa
Pompilius, and concludes by recommending that sentence of excommunication
be pronounced upon the insects, and that the prayers and penances,
customary in such cases, be imposed upon the inhabitants.
After this discourse, which reads more like a homily from the pulpit than
a plea at the bar and in the mouth of the bishop’s proctor is simply an
_oratio pro domo_, the official gave judgment in favour of the plaintiffs.
The sentence, which was pronounced in Latin befitting the dignity and
solemnity of the occasion, condemned the defendants to vacate the premises
within six days on pain of anathema.
The official begins by stating the case as that of “The People _versus_
Locusts,” declaring that the guilt of the accused has been clearly proved
“by the testimony of worthy witnesses and, as it were, by public rumour,”
and inasmuch as the people have humbled themselves before God and
supplicated the Church to succour them in their distress, it is not
fitting to refuse them help and solace. “Walking in the footsteps of the
fathers, sitting on the judgment-seat, having the fear of God before our
eyes and confiding in his mercy, relying on the counsel of experts, we
pronounce and publish our sentence as follows:
“In the name and by virtue of God, the omnipotent, Father, Son and Holy
Spirit, and of Mary, the most blessed Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, and
by the authority of the holy apostles Peter and Paul, as well as by that
which has made us a functionary in this case, we admonish by these
presents the aforesaid locusts and grasshoppers and other animals by
whatsoever name they may be called, under pain of malediction and anathema
to depart from the vineyards and fields of this district within six days
from the publication of this sentence and to do no further damage there or
elsewhere.” If, on the expiration of this period, the animals have refused
to obey this injunction, then they are to be anathematized and accursed,
and the inhabitants of all classes are to beseech “Almighty God, the
dispenser of all good gifts and the dispeller of all evils,” to deliver
them from so great a calamity, not forgetting to join with devout
supplications the performance of all good works and especially “the
payment of tithes without fraud according to the approved custom of the
parish, and to abstain from blasphemies and such other sins as are of a
public and particularly offensive character.” (_Vide_ Appendix B.)
It is doubtful whether one could find in the ponderous tomes of scholastic
divinity anything surpassing in comical _non sequiturs_ and sheer nonsense
the forensic eloquence of eminent lawyers as transmitted to us in the
records of legal proceedings of this kind. Although the counsel for the
defendants, as we have seen, ventured to question the propriety and
validity of such prosecutions, his scepticism does not seem to have been
taken seriously, but was evidently smiled at as the trick of a pettifogger
bound to use every artifice to clear his clients. In the writings of
mediæval jurisprudents the right and fitness of inflicting judicial
punishment upon animals appear to have been generally admitted. Thus Guy
Pape, in his _Decisions of the Parliament of Grenoble_ (Qu. 238), raises
the query, whether a brute beast, if it commit a crime, as pigs sometimes
do in devouring children, ought to suffer death, and answers the question
unhesitatingly in the affirmative: “_si animal brutum delinquat, sicut
quandoque faciunt porci qui comedunt pueros, an debeat mori? Dico quod
sic._” Jean Duret, in his elaborate Treatise on Pains and Penalties
(_Traicté des Peines et des Amendes_, p. 250; cf. _Thémis Jurisconsulte_,
VIII. p. 57), takes the same view, declaring that “if beasts not only
wound, but kill and eat any person, as experience has shown to happen
frequently in cases of little children being eaten by pigs, they should
pay the forfeit of their lives and be condemned to be hanged and
strangled, in order to efface the memory of the enormity of the deed.” The
distinguished Belgian jurist, Jodocus Damhouder, discusses this question
in his _Rerum Criminalium Praxis_ (cap. CXLII.), and holds that the beast
is punishable, if it commits the crime through natural malice, and not
through the instigation of others, but that the owner can redeem it by
paying for the damage done; nevertheless he is not permitted to keep
ferocious or malicious beasts and let them run at large, so as to be a
constant peril to the community. Occasionally a more enlightened jurist
had the common-sense and courage to protest against such perversions and
travesties of justice. Thus Pierre Ayrault, _lieutenant-criminel au siége
présidial d’Angers_, published at Angers, in 1591, a small quarto
entitled: _Des Procez faicts au Cadaver, aux Cendres, à la Mémoire, aux
Bestes brutes, aux Choses inanimées et aux Contumax_, in which he argued
that corpses, the ashes and the memory of the dead, brute beasts and
inanimate things are not legal persons (_legales homines_) and therefore
do not come within the jurisdiction of a court. Curiously enough a case
somewhat analogous to those discussed by Pierre Ayrault was adjudicated
upon only a few years ago. A Frenchman bequeathed his property to his own
corpse, in behalf of which his entire estate was to be administered, the
income to be expended for the preservation of his mortal remains and the
adornment of the magnificent mausoleum in which they were sepulchred. His
heirs-at-law contested the will, which was declared null and void by the
court on the ground that “a subject deprived of individuality or of civil
personality” could not inherit. The same principle would apply to the
infliction of penalties upon such subjects. The only kind of legacy that
will cause a man’s memory to be cherished is the form of bequest which
makes the public weal his legatee. The Chinese still hold to the barbarous
custom of bringing corpses to trial and passing sentence upon them. On the
6th of August, 1888, the cadaver of a salt-smuggler, who was wounded in
the capture and died in prison, was brought before the criminal court in
Shanghai and condemned to be beheaded. This sentence was carried out by
the proper officers on the place of execution outside of the west gate of
the city.
Felix Hemmerlein, better known as Malleolus, a distinguished doctor of
canon law and proto-martyr of religious reform in Switzerland, states in
his _Tractatus de Exorcismis_, that in the fourteenth century the peasants
of the Electorate of Mayence brought a complaint against some Spanish
flies, which were accordingly cited to appear at a specified time and
answer for their conduct; but “in consideration of their small size and
the fact that they had not yet reached their majority,” the judge
appointed for them a curator, who “defended them with great dignity”; and,
although he was unable to prevent the banishment of his wards, he obtained
for them the use of a piece of land, to which they were permitted
peaceably to retire. How they were induced to go into this insect
reservation and to remain there we are not informed. The Church, as
already stated, claimed to possess the power of effecting the desired
migration by means of her ban. If the insects disappeared, she received
full credit for accomplishing it; if not, the failure was due to the sins
of the people; in either case the prestige of the Church was preserved and
her authority left unimpaired.
In 1519, the commune of Stelvio, in Western Tyrol, instituted criminal
proceedings against the moles or field-mice,[3] which damaged the crops
“by burrowing and throwing up the earth, so that neither grass nor green
thing could grow.” But “in order that the said mice may be able to show
cause for their conduct by pleading their exigencies and distress,” a
procurator, Hans Grinebner by name, was charged with their defence, “to
the end that they may have nothing to complain of in these proceedings.”
Schwarz Mining was the prosecuting attorney, and a long list of witnesses
is given, who testified that the serious injury done by these creatures
rendered it quite impossible for tenants to pay their rents. The counsel
for the defendants urged in favour of his clients the many benefits which
they conferred upon the community, and especially upon the agricultural
class by destroying noxious insects and larvæ and by stirring up and
enriching the soil, and concluded by expressing the hope that, if they
should be sentenced to depart, some other suitable place of abode might be
assigned to them. He demanded, furthermore, that they should be provided
with a safe conduct securing them against harm or annoyance from dog, cat
or other foe. The judge recognized the reasonableness of the latter
request, in its application to the weaker and more defenceless of the
culprits, and mitigated the sentence of perpetual banishment by ordering
that “a free safe-conduct and an additional respite of fourteen days be
granted to all those which are with young and to such as are yet in their
infancy; but on the expiration of this reprieve each and every must be
gone, irrespective of age or previous condition of pregnancy.” (_Vide_
Appendix C.)
An old Swiss chronicler named Schilling gives a full account of the
prosecution and anathematization of a species of vermin called inger,
which seems to have been a coleopterous insect of the genus Brychus and
very destructive to the crops. The case occurred in 1478 and the trial was
conducted before the Bishop of Lausanne by the authority and under the
jurisdiction of Berne. The first document recorded is a long and earnest
declaration and admonition delivered from the pulpit by a Bernese
parish-priest, Bernhard Schmid, who begins by stating that his “dearly
beloved” are doubtless aware of the serious injury done by the inger and
of the suffering which they have caused. The Leutpriester, as he is
termed, gives a brief history of the matter and of the measures taken to
procure relief. The mayor and common council of Berne were besought in
their wisdom to devise some means of staying the plague, and after much
earnest deliberation they held counsel with the Bishop of Lausanne, who
“with fatherly feeling took to heart so great affliction and harm” and by
an episcopal mandate enjoined the inger from committing further
depredations. After exhorting the people to entreat God by “a common
prayer from house to house” to remove the scourge, he proceeds to warn and
threaten the vermin in the following manner: “Thou irrational and
imperfect creature, the inger, called imperfect because there was none of
thy species in Noah’s ark at the time of the great bane and ruin of the
deluge, thou art now come in numerous bands and hast done immense damage
in the ground and above the ground to the perceptible diminution of food
for men and animals; and to the end that such things may cease, my
gracious Lord and Bishop of Lausanne has commanded me in his name to
admonish you to withdraw and to abstain; therefore by his command and in
his name and also by virtue of the high and holy trinity and through the
merits of the Redeemer of mankind, our Saviour Jesus Christ, and in virtue
of and obedience to the Holy Church, I do command and admonish you, each
and all, to depart within the next six days from all places where you have
secretly or openly done or might still do damage, also to depart from all
fields, meadows, gardens, pastures, trees, herbs, and spots, where things
nutritious to men and to beasts spring up and grow, and to betake
yourselves to the spots and places, where you and your bands shall not be
able to do any harm secretly or openly to the fruits and aliments
nourishing to men and beasts. In case, however, you do not heed this
admonition or obey this command, and think you have some reason for not
complying with them, I admonish, notify and summon you in virtue of and
obedience to the Holy Church to appear on the sixth day after this
execution at precisely one o’clock after midday at Wifflisburg, there to
justify yourselves or to answer for your conduct through your advocate
before His Grace the Bishop of Lausanne or his vicar and deputy. Thereupon
my Lord of Lausanne or his deputy will proceed against you according to
the rules of justice with curses and other exorcisms, as is proper in such
cases in accordance with legal form and established practice.” The priest
then exhorts his “dear children” devoutly to beg and to pray on their
knees with Paternosters and Ave Marias to the praise and honour of the
high and holy trinity, and to invoke and crave the divine mercy and help
in order that the inger may be driven away. (_Vide_ Appendix D.)
There is no further record of proceedings at this time, and it is highly
probable that the detection of some technical error rendered it necessary
to postpone the case, since this pettifogger’s trick was almost always
resorted to and proved generally successful in procuring an adjournment.
At any rate either this or a precisely similar trial occurred in the
following year. Early in May 1479, the mayor and common council of Berne
sent copies of the monitorium and citation issued by the Bishop of
Lausanne to their representative for distribution among the priests of the
afflicted parishes, in order that it might be promulgated from their
respective pulpits and thus brought to the knowledge of the delinquents.
About a week later, on May 15, the same authorities sent also a letter to
the Bishop of Lausanne asking for new instructions in the matter, as they
were not certain how they should proceed, urging that immediate steps
should be taken, as the further delay would be “utterly intolerable.” This
impatience would seem to imply that the anathema had been hanging fire for
some time and that the prosecution was identical with that of the
preceding year.
The appointed term having elapsed and the inger still persisting in their
obduracy, the mayor and common council of Berne issued the following
document conferring plenipotentiary power of attorney on Thüring Fricker
to prosecute the case: “We, the mayor, council and commune of the city of
Berne, to all those of the bishopric of Lausanne, who see, read, or hear
this letter. We make known that after mature deliberation we have
appointed, chosen and deputed and by virtue of the present letter do
appoint, choose and depute the excellent Thüring Fricker, doctor of the
liberal arts and of laws, our now chancellor, to be our legal delegate and
agent and that of our commune, as well as of all the lands and places of
the bishopric of Lausanne, which are directly or indirectly subject and
appurtenant to us and of which a complete list is herein contained. And
indeed he has assumed this general and special attorneyship, whereof the
one shall not be prejudicial to the other, in the case which we have
undertaken and prosecute and have determined to prosecute before the court
of the right reverend in Christ Benedict de Montferrand, Bishop of
Lausanne, Count and our most worthy Superior, against the noxious host of
the inger (_brucorum_), which creeping secretly in the earth devastate the
fields, meadows and all kinds of grain, whereby with grievous wrong they
do detriment to the ever-living God, to whom the tithes belong, and to
men, who are nourished therewith and owe obedience to him. In this cause
he shall act in our stead, and in the name of all of us collectively and
severally shall plead, demur, reply, prove by witnesses, hear judgment or
judgments, appoint other defenders and in general and specially do each
and every thing which the importance of the cause may demand and which we
ourselves in case of our presence would be able to do. We solemnly promise
in good faith that all and the whole of what may be transacted, performed,
provided, pledged, and ordained in this cause by our aforesaid attorney or
by the proxy appointed by him shall be firmly and gratefully observed by
us, with the express renunciation of each and every thing that might
either by right or actually, in any wise, either wholly or partially
impair, weaken or assail our ordainment, conclusion and determination,
also over against any reservation of right, which permits a general
renunciation, even if no special reservation has preceded, with the
exclusion of every fraud and every deceit. In corroboration and
confirmation of the aforesaid we ratify this letter with the warranty of
our seal. Given on the twenty-second of May 1479.”
The trial began a couple of days later and was conducted with less “of the
law’s delay” than usual, inasmuch as it ended on the twenty-ninth day of
the same month. The defender of the insects was a certain Jean Perrodet of
Freiburg, who according to all accounts was a very inefficient advocate
and does not appear to have contested the case with the ability and energy
which the interests of his clients required. The sentence of the court
with the appended anathema of the bishop was as follows: “Ye accursed
uncleanness of the inger, which shall not be called animals nor mentioned
as such, ye have been heretofore by virtue of the appeal and admonition of
our Lord of Lausanne enjoined to withdraw from all fields, grounds and
estates of the bishopric of Lausanne, or within the next six days to
appear at Lausanne, through your proctor, to set forth and to hear the
cause of your procedure, and to act with just judgment either for or
against you, pursuant to the said citation. Thereupon our gracious Lords
of Berne solicited by their mandate such a day in court at Lausanne, and
there before the tribunal renewed their plaint in their name and in that
of all the provinces of the said bishopric, and your reply thereto through
your proctor has been fully heard, and the legal terms have been justly
observed by both parties, and a lawful decision pronounced word for word
in this wise:
“We, Benedict of Montferrand, Bishop of Lausanne, etc., having heard the
entreaty of the high and mighty lords of Berne against the inger and the
ineffectual and rejectable answer of the latter, and having thereupon
fortified ourselves with the Holy Cross, and having before our eyes the
fear of God, from whom alone all just judgments proceed, and being advised
in this cause by a council of men learned in the law, do therefore
acknowledge and avow in this our writing that the appeal against the
detestable vermin and inger, which are harmful to herbs, vines, meadows,
grain and other fruits, is valid, and that they be exorcised in the person
of Jean Perrodet, their defender. In conformity therewith we charge and
burden them with our curse, and command them to be obedient and
anathematize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,
that they turn away from all fields, grounds, enclosures, seeds, fruits
and produce, and depart. By virtue of the same sentence I declare and
affirm that you are banned and exorcised, and through the power of
Almighty God shall be called accursed and shall daily decrease
whithersoever you may go, to the end that of you nothing shall remain save
for the use and profit of man. _Adiungendo aliquid in devotionem populi._”
The phrase _das si beswärt werden in die person Johannis Perrodeti irs
beschirmers_ does not imply that the vermin or the devils, of which they
were supposed to be incarnations, were to be conjured into him, but refer
to him merely as their proctor and legal representative. The results of
the prosecution, which had been awaited with intense and anxious interest
by the people, were received with great joy, and the Bernese government
ordered a full report of the proceedings to be made. The ecclesiastical
anathema, however, proved to be _brutum fulmen_; nothing more came of it,
says Schilling, “owing to our sins.” Another chronicler adds that God
permitted the inger to remain as a plague and a punishment until the
people repented of their wickedness and gave evidence of their love and
gratitude to Him, namely, by giving to the Church tithes of what the
insects had not destroyed.
The Swiss priest in his malediction declares that the inger were not in
Noah’s ark and even denies that they are animals properly speaking,
stigmatizing them as living corruption, products of spontaneous generation
perhaps, or more probably creations of the devil. This position was
assumed in order to escape the gross impropriety and glaring incongruity
of having the Church of God curse the creatures which God had made and
pronounced very good, and afterwards took pains to preserve from
destruction by the deluge. This difficulty, always a serious one, was, as
we have seen, one of the chief points urged by the counsel for the defence
in favour of his clients.
Malleolus gives the following formula for banning serpents and expelling
them from human habitations, inculcating incidentally the iniquity of
perjury and judicial injustice: “By virtue of this ban and conjuration I
command you to depart from this house and cause it to be as hateful and
intolerable to you, as the man, who knowingly bears false witness or
pronounces an unjust sentence, is to God.” Sometimes the exorcism was in
the form of a prayer, as, for example, in that used for the purgation and
disinfection of springs and water-courses: “O Lord Jesus, thou who didst
bless the river Jordan and wast baptized in it and hast purified and
cleansed it to the end that it might be a healing element for the
redemption from sin, bless, sanctify and purify this water, so that there
may be left in it nothing noxious, nothing pestiferous or contagious,
nothing pernicious, but that everything in it may be pure and immaculate,
in order that we may use whatever is created in it for our welfare and to
thy glory, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.”
In a Latin protocol of legal proceedings in Crollolanza’s _Storia del
Contado di Chiavenna_ it is recorded that on June 26, 1659, Capt. J. B.
Pestalozzi came, in behalf of the communes of Chiavenna, Mese, Gordona,
Prada and Samolico, before the commissioner Hartmann Planta and brought
complaint against certain caterpillars on account of the devastations
committed by them, demanding that these hurtful creatures should be
summoned by the proper sheriff to appear in court on June 28 at a
specified hour in order to have a curator and defender appointed, who
should answer for them to the plaintiffs. A second document, dated June
28, 1659, and signed by the notary Battista Visconti, certifies that the
said summons had been duly issued and five copies of the same been posted
each on a tree in the five forests in the territory of the aforesaid five
communes. A third document of the same date required the advocate of the
accused, Cesare de Peverello, to appear before the court on the following
Tuesday, July 1, in behalf of his recusant clients, who were charged with
trespassing upon the fields, gardens and orchards and doing great damage
therein, instead of remaining in their habitat, the forest. The
prosecutors required that they should seek their food in wild and wooded
places and cease from ravaging cultivated grounds. A fourth document
contains an account of the trial; the pleadings of the respective parties,
so far as they are preserved, do not differ essentially from those already
quoted. In the fifth and final document the court recognizes the right of
the caterpillars to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, provided
the exercise of this right “does not destroy or impair the happiness of
man, to whom all lower animals are subject.” Accordingly a definite place
of abode is to be assigned to them and various places are proposed. The
protocol is incomplete, so that we are left in ignorance of the ultimate
decision. The whole is written in execrable Latin quite worthy of the
subject.
More than half-a-century later the Franciscan friars of the cloister of
St. Anthony in the province of Piedade no Maranhão, Brazil, were greatly
annoyed by termites, which devoured their food, destroyed their furniture,
and even threatened to undermine the walls of the monastery. Application
was made to the bishop for an act of interdiction and excommunication, and
the accused were summoned to appear before an ecclesiastical tribunal to
give account of their conduct. The lawyer appointed to defend them urged
the usual plea about their being God’s creatures and therefore entitled to
sustenance, and made a good point in the form of an _argumentum ad
monachum_ by praising the industry of his clients, the white ants, and
declaring them to be in this respect far superior to their prosecutors,
the Gray Friars. He also maintained that the termites were not guilty of
criminal aggression, but were justified in appropriating the fruits of the
fields by the right derived from priority of possession, inasmuch as they
had occupied the land long before the monks came and encroached upon their
domain. The trial lasted for some time and called forth remarkable
displays of legal learning and forensic eloquence, with numerous citations
of sacred and profane authorities on both sides, and ended in a
compromise, by the terms of which the plaintiffs were obliged to provide a
suitable reservation for the defendants, who were commanded to go thither
and to remain henceforth within the prescribed limits. In the chronicles
of the cloister it is recorded, under date of Jan. 1713, that no sooner
was the order of the prelatic judge promulgated by being read officially
before the hills of the termites than they all came out and marched in
columns to the place assigned. The monkish annalist regards this prompt
obedience as conclusive proof that the Almighty endorsed the decision of
the court. [Cited by Emile Angel on the authority of Manoel Bernardes’
_Nova Floresta, ou Sylva de varios apophthegmas e ditos sentencios
espirituaes e moraes_, etc. Vol. V., Lisboá, 1747.]
About the middle of the sixteenth century the inhabitants of several
villages in Aargau were greatly annoyed by swarms of gadflies and
petitioned the Bishop of Constance for relief. In the episcopal rescript,
written and signed by the vidame Georg Winterstetter, the people are
enjoined to abstain from dancing on Sundays and feast days, from all forms
of libidinousness, gambling with cards or dice and other frivolities.
These injunctions are followed by prayer and the usual formulas of
conjuration and exorcism. The original document was written in Latin and
preserved in the archives of Baden in Switzerland, but is now lost. In
1566 the Landamman of Unterwalden, Johannes Wirz, took a German
translation of it home with him to be used in case of need against the
“vergifteten Würmer,” and deposited it in the archives of Obwalden, where
it still remains. It was published in 1898 by Dr. Merz.
In Protestant communities, the priest as exorcist has been superseded, to
a considerable extent, by the professional conjurer, who in some portions
of Europe is still employed to save crops from devouring insects and
similar plagues. A curious instance of this kind is recorded in Görres’
_Historisch-Politische Blätter_ for 1845 (Heft VII. p. 516). A Protestant
gentleman in Westphalia, whose garden was devastated by worms, after
having tried divers vermicidal remedies in vain, resolved to have recourse
to a conjurer. The wizard came and walked about among the vegetables,
touching them with a wand and muttering enchantments. Some workmen, who
were repairing the roof of a stable near by, made fun of this hocus-pocus
and began to throw bits of lime at the conjurer. He requested them to
desist, and finally said: “If you don’t leave me in peace, I shall send
all the worms up on the roof.” This threat only excited the hilarity of
the scoffers, who continued to ridicule and disturb him in his
incantations. Thereupon he went to the nearest hedge, cut a number of
twigs, each about a finger in length, and placed them against the wall of
the stable. Soon the vermin began to abandon the plants and, crawling in
countless numbers over the twigs and up the wall, took complete possession
of the roof. In less than an hour the men were obliged to stop working and
stood in the court below covered with confusion and cabbage-worms.
The writer, who relates this strange incident, fully believes that it
actually occurred, and ascribes it to “the force of human faith and the
magnetic power of a firm will over nature.” This, too, is the theory held
by Paracelsus, who maintained that the effectiveness of a curse lay in the
energy of the will, by which the wish, so to speak, concretes into a deed,
just as anger directs the arm and actualizes itself in a blow. By “fervent
desire” merely, without any physical effort or aggressive act, he deemed
it possible to wound a man’s body or to pierce it through as with a sword.
He also held that brutes are more easily exorcised or accursed than men,
“for the spirit of man resists more than that of the brute.” Similar
notions were entertained nearly a century later by Jacob Boehme, who
defines magic as “doing in the spirit of the will,” an idea which finds
more recent and more scientific expression in Schopenhauer’s doctrine of
“the objectivation of the will.” Indeed, Schopenhauer’s postulate of the
will as the sole energy and actuality in the universe is only the
philosophic statement of an assumption, upon which magicians and
medicine-men, enchanters, exorcists and anathematizers have acted more or
less in all ages. We have a striking illustration of the workings of some
such mysterious, quasi-hyperphysical force in hypnotism, the reality of
which it is no longer possible to deny, however wonderful and
incomprehensible its manifestations may appear.
It is natural that a religion of individual initiative and personal
responsibility, like Protestantism, should put less confidence in theurgic
machinery and formularies of ex-cathedral execration than a religion like
Catholicism, in which man’s spiritual concerns are entrusted to a
hierarchical corporation to be managed according to traditional and
infallible methods. This tendency crops out in a decree published at
Dresden, in 1559, by “Augustus Duke and Elector,” wherein he commends the
“Christian zeal of the worthy and pious parson, Daniel Greysser,” for
having “put under ban the sparrows, on account of their unceasing and
extremely vexatious chatterings and scandalous unchastity during the
sermon, to the hindrance of God’s word and of Christian devotion.” But the
Saxon parson, unlike the Bishop of Trier, did not expect that his ban
would cause the offending birds to avoid the church or to fall dead on
entering it. He relied less on the directly coercive or withering action
of the curse than on the human agencies, which he might thereby set at
work for the accomplishment of his purpose. By his proscription he put the
culprits out of the pale of public sympathy and protection and gave them
over as a prey to the spoiler, who was persuaded that he was doing a pious
work by exterminating them. It was solemnly enjoined upon the hunter and
the fowler to lie in wait for the anathematized sparrows with guns and
with snares (_durch mancherlei visirliche und listige Wege_); and the
Elector issued his decree in order to enforce this duty on all good
Christians. (See Appendix E.)
A faded and somewhat droll survival of ecclesiastical excommunication and
exorcism is the custom, still prevailing in European countries and some
portions of the United States, of serving a writ of ejectment on rats or
simply sending them a friendly letter of advice in order to induce them to
quit any house, in which their presence is deemed undesirable. Lest the
rats should overlook and thus fail to read the epistle, it is rubbed with
grease, so as to attract their attention, rolled up and thrust into their
holes. Mr. William Wells Newell, in a paper on “Conjuring Rats,” printed
in _The Journal of American Folk-Lore_ (Jan.-March, 1892), gives a
specimen of such a letter, dated, “Maine, Oct. 31, 1888,” and addressed in
business style to “Messrs. Rats and Co.” The writer begins by expressing
his deep interest in the welfare of said rats as well as his fears lest
they should find their winter quarters in No. 1, Seaview Street,
uncomfortable and poorly supplied with suitable food, since it is only a
summer residence and is also about to undergo repairs. He then suggests
that they migrate to No. 6, Incubator Street, where they “can live snug
and happy” in a splendid cellar well stored with vegetables of all kinds
and can pass easily through a shed leading to a barn containing much
grain. He concludes by stating that he will do them no harm if they heed
his advice, otherwise he shall be forced to use “Rough on Rats.” This
threat of resorting to rat poison in case of the refusal to accept his
kind counsel is all that remains of the once formidable anathema of the
Church.
In Scotland, when these domestic rodents became too troublesome, people of
the lower classes are wont to post the following notice on the walls of
their houses:
“Ratton and mouse,
Lea’ the puir woman’s house,
Gang awa’ owre by to ’e mill,
And there ane and a’ ye’ll get your fill.”
In order to make the conjuration effective some particular abode must be
assigned to them; it is not sufficient to bid them begone, but they are to
be told to go to a definite place. The fact that they are usually sent
across a river or brook may indicate a lingering tradition of their
demoniacal character, since, according to a widespread popular
superstition, a water-course is a barrier to hobgoblins and evil spirits:
“A running stream they dare na cross.”
In this case the rats, as imps of Satan, having reached their destination,
would find it impossible to return.
It was in Ireland, the native realm of bulls and like incongruities, that
conjuring or “rhyming” rats seems to have been most common, if we may
judge from the manner in which it is alluded to by the Elizabethan poets.
Thus in _As you Like It_ Rosalind says in reference to Orlando’s verses:
“I was never so be-rhymed since Pythagoras’ time, that I was an Irish rat,
which I can hardly remember.” Randolph declares:
“My poets
Shall with a satire, steep’d in gall and vinegar,
Rhime ’em to death, as they do rats in Ireland.”
Ben Jonson is still more specific:
“Rhime ’em to death, as they do Irish rats,
In drumming tunes.”
From this reference to the mode of conjuring it appears that the repeating
of the rhymes was accompanied with the beating of a drum, as is still the
usage in France. From the very earliest times a peculiar magical potency
has been ascribed to words woven into rhythmic form. The fascination which
metrical expression, even as a mere jingle and jargon, still retains for
the youth of the individual was yet far more strongly felt in the youth of
the race. The simple song was intoned as a spell and the rude chant
mumbled as a charm.
In France the conjuration of field-mice bears a more distinctly religious
stamp. On the first Sunday in Lent, the so-called Feast of the Torches
(_la Fête des Brandons ou des Bures_), the peasants wander in all
directions through the fields and orchards with lighted torches of twisted
straw, uttering the following incantation, which not only threatens to
burn the whiskers of obdurate mice, but also hints at the wine-bibbing
propensities of the curate:
“Sortez, sortez d’ici, mulots!
Ou je vais vous bruler les crocs!
Quittez, quittez ces blés!
Allez, vous trouverez
Dans la cave du curé
Plus à boire qu’à manger.”
The form of imprecation varies in different provinces, but usually
includes some threat of breaking the bones or burning the beards of the
refractory rodents, in case they refuse to quit the close, as in the
following summons:
“Taupes et mulots,
Sors de mon clos,
Ou je te casse les os;
Barbassione! Si tu viens dans non clos,
Je te brûle la barbe jusqu’aux os.”
The utterance of these words is emphasized by loud and discordant noises
of cat-calls, tin horns, and similar instruments of “Callithumpian” music.
Gregory, who was Bishop of Tours in the latter half of the sixth century,
states in his _History of the Franks_ (VIII. 35) that bronze talismans
representing dormice and serpents were used in Paris to protect the city
against the ravages
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/43286