“Suddenly, a figure with horns entered the room with loud footsteps. It was the Horned One. It was God.” This is how the American bestselling author Marion Bradley imagined the fateful meeting between Morgana and her half-brother Arthur. In this Celtic epic, she faithfully followed the theory of the British anthropologist Margaret Murray about the “Horned God”, who 95 years ago tried to draw a parallel between the ancient Stone Age and modern times. According to her, a “horned God” as opposed to the Great Goddess has existed in Europe, Ancient Asia, Egypt and India since ancient times. But it was only Christianity that made this horned god into a devil and the people who worshipped him into sorcerers and coppers. However, the simple claim that the Horned God is the same as the devil does not come out easily, because here again, as usual, the devil is in the details.
The world of belief and superstition is, of course, full of devils; Goethe’s Mephisto is the devil’s seducer, devils are sadistic monsters like the demons in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement fresco, and the same goes for serpentine dragon creatures, demons and similar creatures with or without horns, creatures with goat’s legs and tails, with claws and legs covered in hair. The Apocryphal Gospel of Bartholomew, dating from the 3rd century, details that the devil is 1600 watts long (one watt is about 77 centimetres, o.p.), that his wings measure 80 watts, and that an unbearable stench emanates from his nostrils.
But the devil can also be completely different, since the word lucifer means one who brings light. The very existence of the devil, then, is a source of confusion for those who are trying to find out where his roots actually lie.
At the start of their research, the scientists went underground, or more precisely, into the Trois-Freres cave in the south of France. A wall painting, about 15,000 years old, depicts a creature made up of a man and an animal with horns on its head. Is this a horned god, an animal lord, or simply a tribal shaman? In the remote alpine valley of Val Camonica in northern Italy, hundreds of drawings can be found on walls smoothed by glaciers, and even after 3 000 years, many figures with horns on their heads can still be seen. Perhaps these are Cernunnos, the animal gods of the Celts. The name of this god also means horned.
A 2000-year-old silver vessel found in a Danish swamp depicts a death cult. It shows a horned god holding a snake in one hand. Horns, snake and death. This brings us pretty close to the medieval and also the modern notion of the devil. But let us leave the swamps of Scandinavia and head for the sunny Mediterranean. Here, too, evil personified is lurking. The Greek god of shepherds, Pan, is anything but a cheerful, flute-playing creature, as he represents the sweet life and, through his actions, urges the society of his day to break the taboos of the day. But beware! If anyone disturbs his peace, he quickly transforms from a cheerful creature into an intimidating bully who drives the shepherds and their flocks to flight.
The Greek god of wine, Dionysus, or the Roman Bacchus were accompanied by naked and often drunken merrymakers, satyrs or Roman fauns. The ancient world saw these sexually particularly active demons as half-human and half-animal. They represented a fertile and unbridled nature, sometimes scaring people with murderous dreams and transforming themselves into incubuses or demons of the night.
All these phenomena originate in the Orient. “Ex oriente lux” – from the orient comes light? But what kind of light does lucifer bring to people? Perhaps the light of a man who wants to be like God? Or is it simply the realisation that light and shadow, light and darkness, good and bad are inseparable. In the Alpine world, Pehta is also known, a female phenomenon with a double face, beautiful on one side and representing the devil on the other. In her entourage is none other than the hoopoe himself.
Those who descended into the “tomba dell ‘Orco” in Tarquinia, Italy, had to abandon all hope of rescue. The same happened to the Etruscans who, 2 500 years ago, decorated this tomb with frescoes. It is teeming with demons, hideous figures that could later be found in Christian representations of hell. Tongs, hammers and ropes were the implements with which the Etruscan “devils” tortured the dead. The winged demon Tuhulcha with bluish skin holds a snake in his hand, the chief of the dead Harun also has wings and pointed ears and uses his hammer to drive the life out of people.
From these haunting scenes, it is only a hop across the Mediterranean to the Middle East, where we find Beelzebub, who is mentioned as the local Baal Zebub god of Ekron. His name translated means Lord of the Flies. An unusual name for a city god, probably derived from the word baal zebul (great prince). Baal – with various additions – was the chief god of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, often represented by horns and human sacrifices. Even today, in the Orient, doors and windows are often coloured turquoise or blue, as this colour is said to protect against the devil.
The devil in ancient mythology therefore did things that point to the origin of his Greek name diabolos, i.e. the one who makes a mess. Thus, it is possible to combine different ideas about him. As Satan, he was originally the accuser of men before the divine court, i.e. the negativist, the destroyer, “the great dragon, the ancient serpent”. In ancient Persian ideas, he was a spirit of destruction and therefore came to us from the Orient.
Although the ancient ideas of the Christian Satan were terrifying, destructive and hateful to humans, they lost some of their power in their journey from the ancient Eastern religions to Christian belief, and ended up being nothing more than “the poor devil”. Many legends tell of the encounter between humans and the devil, who must finally retreat in defeat. Our ancestors were often not frightened when they met him and always managed to outwit him, and if we read these stories, the devil has a pitying effect on us in the end.
Christian hell
A Christian hell is not something Jesus wants for His opponents. It was only Paul and later Luther who fanned the fear of the kingdom of the devil, where dead sinners are tortured. They suffer on burning trees, tied to them with their hair, limbs and tongues. A dragon with a hundred heads is just waiting to devour the souls of the dead.
Not far away, the devil torments girls who have committed fornication with glowing horns and broken chains. At first glance, it seems like a scene from a horror movie. But these pictures of horror are much older and come from Paul’s Apocalypse, which describes the apostle’s visit to hell. The archangel Gabriel himself shows him the fate that awaits those who do not obey God’s Word. The unbelieving and the unchurched will suffer in the abyss. Those who have sinned will have to suffer in the fire until the end. Paul also sees a bridge across which all souls must cross; the good go to paradise, the bad fall off the bridge into a river teeming with monsters. All that can be heard is a wailing and desperate howling. Here is eternal darkness and sadness.
These devotional scenes of horror, first written in Greek and later translated into Latin under the title Visio Pauli, have inspired poets, writers and artists for centuries. There are many paintings and sculptures from the Middle Ages that accurately depict dragons and the devil, torture preparations and fiery flames. These representations are supposed to have a pedagogical purpose – to make the faithful aware of what awaits them if they sin. This is, of course, a long time ago, and science has had a lot to say about it. We have long stopped believing everything we are preached and have relied more on ourselves than on higher powers. But it is hell that is resisting this new-age spirit. Hell is still alive.
Many Europeans believe in this place of eternal damnation. The Catholic Catechism says: “There is a hell that lasts forever. The souls of those who die in sin go immediately after death to the underworld, where the torments of hell and eternal fire await them. For those who have sinned but are not eternally damned, vice awaits.” In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI abolished the very pre-baptism to which unbaptised children were supposed to go. They can therefore go straight to paradise. The rest of humanity should repent for their sins in vice, if not hell. In fact, we cannot imagine heaven without hell.
Yet Christianity began without this place of horror. Jesus was born a Jew and raised a Jew. The fiery pots and torture preparations were foreign to him. According to the old Jewish belief, there was no separation of soul and body. Man was understood as an indivisible whole. When he died, he breathed out his breath, which was the breath of God. There was no afterlife. The kingdom of God, which the Messiah was to bring, was conceived of as a Jewish kingdom of righteousness without sin and without death.
Paul’s letters to the congregations, the oldest documents of the New Testament, are still written in this tradition. According to legend, Saul was transformed by a vision into Paul, from an orthodox Jew, always law-abiding, into a convinced Christian who feels called to spread the new faith. Like the first Christians, he was convinced that the “kingdom of God” would soon come, and that it would be accessible not only to Jews but to all who believed in it. The aim of the apostles was therefore to prepare themselves and the Gentiles they converted for the judgment of God.
He himself was a good example, living an ascetic life, abstaining from sexual relations, not shying away from exertion, visiting the faithful regularly and preaching. Yet he still feared God’s wrath. He was convinced that only faith in Christ, who took upon Himself all the sins of the world, could save people from it. Sinners will therefore be severely punished at the Last Judgment: “They will depart from the presence of God and from His power and glory, and will be punished with eternal destruction.” The idea of a Christian hell was thus born, but the details did not follow until later.
But the Last Judgement was not to be, so Christian communities had to prepare for a longer transition period. The evangelists left what they knew to the next generation in written messages – the Gospels. By this time, the conversion of the Gentiles initiated by Paul was well advanced, and by this time the moral ideas of foreign cultures and ideas of life beyond the grave had already become very mixed up with Judeo-Christian ideas.
Thus the Greek-Hellenistic philosopher Plato’s notion of the separation of the soul from the mortal body was used. The Christian hell thus eventually became a place of multicultural encounter. Here was the Greek Hades, in the most horrible part of which was the place of punishment Tartarus. There was also Scheol, the realm of the dead, where, according to late Jewish belief, darkness and hopelessness reigned, and there was Gehenna, the place of eternal fire. The word Gehenna was originally just a designation of a place. It was the name of a ravine near Jerusalem where garbage was dumped and human corpses were burned. In the later period of Jewish belief, it became a place of an otherworldly curse. Here, too, the devil took on a new form.
In the Old Testament, Satan was a faithful servant of God, commissioned by God to gather information about whether people were following God’s commandments. He was therefore doing nothing wrong. The Christian devil, by contrast, was evil personified and condemned to eternal damnation. In the Gospel of Matthew it says: “Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire, which is reserved for the devil and his angels.”
The more the conversion of the Gentiles progressed, the more demonic spirits and monsters were in the Christian hell. The ideas of such a hell do not come from the writings of the apostles, but were written down by unknown authors in the 4th century and are not part of the Bible today. The monsters the Apostles are said to have encountered have oriental origins; the river of fire comes from Greek mythology, the bridge from which sinners fall to eternal damnation has Iranian roots. And with every new detail, hell has become more horrible.
For the faithful, this was a heavy burden. Those who wanted to avoid eternal damnation not only had to be freed from original sin by baptism and live a God-fearing life, but also had to suppress all fleshly lusts. Even if he fulfilled all these requirements, he could hope for salvation only if he was fortunate enough to be among God’s elect. Fear of an unknown fate dominated people’s lives, and children were baptised when they were barely born, so that if they died early, they would be assured of a place in paradise. But could God’s grace also be bought?
Martin Luther was so outraged by the trading of indulgences that he published his 95 Theses in 1517. God’s grace cannot be bought with gifts and money. The ensuing theological quarrel led to his excommunication and the Reformation, which shook Christianity to its foundations. This was not what Luther wanted. He was no heretic, but a devout Augustinian monk who feared the wrath of God.
But he had no problems with hell. The existence of a place of eternal torment was a matter of course for him. He was not fooled by the details of translating the Greek Bible into German. For him, Hades, Tartarus, Gehenna and Scheol were simply hell. Hell is still relevant today and Pope Benedict XVI told the faithful on Vatican Radio two years after he became Pope: “Jesus came to tell us that he wants us all in paradise and that hell, which is so little talked about these days, exists and is eternal only for those who close their eyes to his love.”
Why do people like to deal with hell so much? In hell, they encounter things they don’t want to deal with: envy, jealousy, bloodthirstiness, destructiveness and the like. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was the first to discover that these darker sides of man are an integral part of his psyche. Freud not only abolished the separation between body and soul, but also relativised the opposition between good and bad. This laid the foundation stone for a new understanding of man.
But the Christian tradition of thinking has left traces in our minds. Generations of good Christians have been ashamed of their negative feelings, fantasies and sexual desires. Because these were considered to be the work of the devil, they were pushed under the carpet. The place where these things were at home was, of course, hell. Religions in all cultures are repositories of a psychic reality that is so unimaginable, horrible and disgusting that it cannot be experienced in the real world. It should therefore come as no surprise that hell is teeming with vengeful, shameful, sex-obsessed, bloodthirsty and sadistic devils who are nothing but a mirror of negative human feelings.
In Goethe’s Faust, Mephisto himself tells us at the end why he behaves like a great nihilist: “For everything that comes into being is worthy to perish.” We humans are inclined to take for certain what we see. And even Mephistopheles, the devil’s most successful agent, says: “What you do not touch is miles away from you.” So the devil knows us well.
The French philosopher Voltaire thought that “If there were no God, we should have invented him.” The same is true of Satan, who can be found not only in Christian but also in Muslim theology, in both the Bible and the Koran, in various forms from antiquity to the present day. He appears as the Antichrist, Diabolus, Shethan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Urian, Azazel or Beliar. Mephistopheles was just one of the personifications of the devil.
The devil always leaves a trail. “Evil always comes before good.” On the other hand, the Devil’s Bible, whose scientific name is Codex Gigas, is also the Devil’s legacy. For early stories about the workings of the devil, it is therefore right to start with this Bible. In the early 13th century, a monk tried to gather all the knowledge of the world in one book, and he wanted to write it in one night. But at midnight he realised that he would not be able to do it, so he called on Satan to help him, and Satan wrote the book to completion. To show the true authorship of the book, the monk drew a full-page picture of Satan with horns, claws and a forked tongue at the end.
Satan’s work, of course, required a suitable reward; the monk’s soul. According to tradition, a monk could get his soul back if he later prayed fervently to the Virgin Mary. The first accounts of a contract with the devil can be traced back to the 5th century. At that time, the cleric Theophilus was unable to achieve his career goal, so he asked Satan for help. He agreed to the contract, but when Theophilus reached his goal, he repented, asked Mary for help and succeeded in scalding Satan. It is interesting that even a sin as great as a contract with Satan can be renounced, with serious regret afterwards. Salvation is therefore possible, and this is why Satan has great difficulty later on when he wants to enforce the terms of the contract.
Divine comedy
In the meantime, let us see what is happening in the underworld, in the realm of eternal suffering. It doesn’t take long to get there, because the entrance to hell is in a dark forest, from where a narrow path leads deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth. So we are soon in the middle of the action. Hell is divided into eight circles, which get narrower and narrower, so that this place of damnation eventually narrows into a funnel, the tip of which touches the geographical centre of the earth. This crater was made by Satan when he was expelled from Paradise and fell to the centre of the earth.
Thus, in the first decade of the 14th century, the poet Dante Alighieri, in his work The Divine Comedy, described a journey to the land of lost souls, to hell. Like most educated men of the time, he believed that the centre of the earth was about 3250 miles (a mile is a thousand paces) from the surface. But such a distance can be covered quickly if one is in the spirit world. The journey took only 24 hours – at least Dante needed that long.
There is more than enough room for suffering souls and terrible things can be seen here. Although this idea of hell was only a poem, many of Dante’s contemporaries were convinced that the poet had actually visited this terrible place. The geographical location of the entrance to the underworld was never revealed by Dante. Some who read his poem swore by Jerusalem, others by Babylon, Cumae in Campania and, of course, Florence. He himself said only that he began his journey in 1300 on Good Friday.
Something else is important. The poet himself said that he was 35 years old at the time and that he was going through a difficult crisis in his life: “In the middle of the path of our life, in the black forest, I went into the depths, because I had missed the path of true desire.” But he himself does not know how he got into it. The forest frightened him and so did the way out of it. At last he saw a hill with a beam of light at the top, so he climbed it, hoping to find salvation there.
Suddenly, out of the darkness, a menacing panther leapt into his path. He ran and saw a lion, also blocking his way, and then a greedy wolf. He had no choice but to go back into the darkness of the forest. Suddenly, an unknown man stood in front of him and Dante asked for help. This man was the ghost of the Roman poet Vergil, who had the task of showing the way to those who had gone astray. Dante was chosen to visit hell and paradise from beyond to purify his soul. After Dante’s death, an account of this journey through hell, vice and paradise was published as The Divine Comedy.
It has always been the description of hell that has most interested readers. Goethe considered paradise to be explicitly boring, but that was his personal opinion. Only the “inferno” caught his attention. “I find hell disgusting,” he said.
The road to hell was rough and steep, and Dante followed his guide Virgil, who was the only person he could rely on. After a long wandering, they stood in front of a door, above which was engraved the inscription: “Here through goes the road to eternal pain, here through to perdition leads the way … O you who enter, leave all hope.”
And they entered a dark world from which there is no return. Pilgrims are rare here and can only hope to return from hell. Dante immediately heard the cries of despair, and they followed him afterwards. “Here everything sighs and cries out, cries echo in a starless place,” he reported. He was horrified, as he was not used to this.
Then the shadows of those who could never make up their minds in life passed by, and now inhabit the outer rim of hell. They were stung by annoying flies and wasps as punishment, but they could not defend themselves. In fact, this was the antechamber of hell, and here were also those angels who, in the struggle between God and Lucifer, could not make up their minds for either of them.
Here Dante saw the familiar and tired face of the recently deceased Pope Celestine V. He and Virgil continued their journey and came to the river Acheron, where the trembling souls of the dead, not yet knowing what punishment awaited them, waited for the ford-master Charon to ferry them to the other side of the river.
Finally, the two passengers stood in the first circle of hell. Here the people were happy and not doing badly. Dante met respected Roman citizens, Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato, as well as Muslim scholars and Hebrew patriarchs. There were no sinners here, all of them had only one fault; they had not been baptised because they lived in the pre-Christian era. Unbaptized children were also gathered in this place. And then the big surprise. In this first circle, called Limbus, Virgil also dwelt. All the souls gathered here seemed to be suffering. For they know that this is the best they can achieve.
They had already entered the next inner circle, where they first had to pass by Minos, the judge of hell, who asked everyone at the entrance, “What is the sin of this woman?” He was the one who decided in which circle of hell the soul should serve its sentence. Dante was given a pass and entered an area where only carnal sinners dwelt, exposed to the terrible stormy wind. He met an acquaintance, the beautiful and young Francesca de Polenta, who had been married for political reasons to a cruel husband from Rimini. In her loneliness and despair, she fell in love with his brother. The husband caught them and killed them both in a rage. Now she has to atone for her infidelity.
Dante was speechless. He did not understand why she, as a victim, had to suffer forever. It was not fair. But Francesca was not the only sympathetic soul he met on his journey. It soon became clear to him that the cosmic law did not allow for any exceptions. His journey became more and more painful and the punishment of sinners more and more severe.
In the third round, he encountered devourers and those who were immoderate. They had to persevere in the cold rain. Their only luxury was that they could turn around so that at least one side of them was dry for a short time.
The Fourth Circle was the home of the swallows, and it is full of priests, cardinals and popes. In the darkness, they were bumping into each other. They were dunked in the River Styx and dragged through the deep mud.
In the fifth round, there were those who had been angry all along, but now they were squatting in stinking mud. As time went on, the path down became steeper and steeper, and Dante often leaned on Vergil.
In the sixth round, they were stuck in front of the iron walls of Dis. Dante wanted to visit it, but despite a quarrel, neither of them was allowed in.
The two travellers endured many dangerous situations and Vergil had to be especially careful that Dante did not slip into the deep. Once they had to climb on the back of a recumbent dragon, another time the stench from the depths was so strong that they had to stay for a while and get used to it. In the meantime, they sat down on a coffin and as they started to talk, a soul came out of it. It was the soul of Pope Anastasius II, who wanted to talk to them. This was just one of the five Popes they met in hell.
Dante found that there are many interesting places in hell. He walked through a dried-up forest where the souls of suicidal men were torn from the branches. The heads of pimps protruded from a moat guarded by horned demons. But these sinful souls were not long on the surface of the water. The newcomers sat on their heads and plunged them under the water. Only the bubbles rising to the surface were proof that they were still there.
The sycophants sat in excrement and the corrupt officials in tar. Hypocrites wore heavy leather clothes and soothsayers ran their asses off so they could never see into the future. Thieves lingered in a cave full of snakes, and dishonest advisers cooked in the fire. Finally, there were the heretics, who invented new religions. They were constantly self-mutilating.
Time passed quickly in hell, and almost 24 hours have passed very quickly since Dante entered it. Now they have reached the ninth and final round. Here were the sinners, locked in the eternal ice. A cold wind, caused by the beating of the wings, blew through this terrible world. Three pairs of Lucifer’s wings were flapping. These wings were the only thing that moved in this motionless world.
The travellers had reached the bottom of hell and now they had to find a way out. Dante clung to Vergil, who was descending the hairy body of the devil. But suddenly – at the height of the devil’s hips – Vergil began to return. A miracle happened. They climbed down the hairy legs and suddenly down became up. They had crossed the centre of the earth and now all directions were reversed. They kept climbing along the legs until they spotted a stone crevice, stepped into it and found themselves in a tunnel leading to the outside world. They both found themselves in the vistas on the other side of the world. The path continued, they left hell and the road led them to paradise.
It is no coincidence that Dante set out on his journey in 1300. He was going through a crisis at the time. These were politically unpredictable times. In Europe, two factions were fighting for supremacy, one supporting the Pope, the other the Emperor. Dante initially supported the Pope, but in Florence the party split into two, he chose the wrong one and had to go into exile in 1301. It was in the ninth circle of hell that he found plenty of room for his political opponents. So he turned away from politics and chose the life of a philosophising poet. He never returned to Florence.
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Witches
Satan does not work alone, because he has given himself so much work that he cannot do it alone. His faithful helpers are witches. Who does not know the terrifying and cruel women who give one the shivers when one sees them flying on broomsticks, all with many warts on their faces and a raven or a black cat on their shoulders. Perhaps now is also the time to remember those against whom one of the most horrific crimes in human history was committed. They burned at the stake and to this day no one has rehabilitated them.
Belief in witchcraft and magic is as old as mankind and was deeply rooted in the imaginations of many pre-Christian peoples. Thus, the Germans knew the priestess goddess Freya, whom they worshipped and adored, calling her “hagzissa”. They considered her to be a being living on the border between the world of the gods and reality. She could mediate between the two worlds, heal the sick, cast spells, foretell the future, use medicinal plants and was accompanied by a black raven. From the Old High German word hagzissa evolved the word hecse, and then finally hexe or witch. Other cultures also know of similar figures who moved between two worlds and were part of popular belief throughout Europe until the Middle Ages.
At the time of Christianisation, the gods of the pagans were regarded as demons and belief in them as heresy. Thus, the former cults slowly disappeared due to persecution, and those that remained were persecuted by the Inquisition in the 13th century. The thirteenth century saw two major steps; the belief in the existence of the devil became part of Christian belief, and the Inquisition became the first successful institution to fight the devil and his handmaidens. Just as Satan could not exist without God, witches could not exist without Satan.
This was clear to every believer at the time. For Thomas Aquinas, witches were also an existing reality. But in the 6th century, heretics were merely driven out of Ravenna, and those who refused to leave were stoned. There were no major witch trials in the early Middle Ages. At this time, the Church still considered the existence of magical witches and wizards to be a delusional perception and an illusion. This changed when Pope Innocent VIII began persecuting witches.
It was clear very early on that the church was thinking of doing something about unbelievers. In 762, the Concilium Germanicum proclaimed: “Every bishop, with the help of the counts, should be a protector of the Church and should take care that the people do not take part in pagan customs; the offering of the dead, divination, the wearing of amulets and pagan sacrifices.”
Forty years later, Charlemagne decreed: “Anyone who is blinded by the devil and gives in to pagan beliefs, and any man or his wife who is a sorcerer, must be put to death.” How did such a radical turn come about? Times were bad then. The so-called Little Ice Age had begun, a period of cold climate that led to poor harvests, famines and disease, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The Church was forced to explain why a merciful God allowed such misery and quickly found the culprits; witches and wizards.
Although former pagan gods such as Odin, Frigg and Thor had served their time, the belief in witches was still firmly rooted in people’s consciousness. It was therefore appropriate to associate the priestesses of the old gods, who were already called demons anyway, with the handmaidens and mistresses of the devil himself. They were responsible for hailstorms, storms, floods, infertility and child mutilation. Witches were also responsible for miscarriages and premature births.
Witchcraft, i.e. the conjuring of women, was the service of the devil and an ecclesiastical transgression, since the witch had abandoned true faith in God. In the beginning, punishments in most countries were few and mild, witches had to fast, later they were branded with a branding iron and a seal was pressed on their chest and forehead, before they were brought before a regular court of law.
After Johannes Gutenbeg invented the printing press around 1450, revolutionising the production of books, the Witches’ Books became bestsellers. The Witches’ Hammer was published in 29 editions by the 17th century. In these books, one can also trace an incident in which a man lost his penis and asked a witch for help. She told him to climb a tree with a large bird’s nest full of penises and told him to choose his own. When he tried to take the biggest one, she said, “Not that one. It belongs to a priest.”
It was also a time of general hatred of women. They were despised by the church, stripped of their ability to work by the authorities, stripped of their property by their fathers and husbands, and made inferior by the sin of Eve. The world of women was supposed to be inherently gullible, wicked, and do-able, and easy to influence. They were also said to be prone to licentiousness because of their unsatisfied lust.
Itinerant preachers travelled the countryside, warning townspeople and peasants about the influence of witches and reminding them of the most important categories in every Christian’s life: salvation and eternal damnation, heaven and hell, good and bad. People related their hopes, fears and longings to all of these. The incomprehensible and unnatural that they encountered in their daily lives they denounced as devilry.
People started to be puzzled by the most ordinary things. When Adam Tanner, the famous Jesuit and professor of theology, died near Salzburg in 1632, a jar believed to contain the devil was found in his estate. A wizard! There was a general uproar, and the townspeople demanded that the buried man be dug up and burned. But there was only a large insect in the jar.
In the late Middle Ages, the sun was observed in Basel to be split into three parts, suggesting that the Earth would split into three. In Upper Italy, a cockerel that was said to have hatched an egg was beheaded as a sorcerer and burned with the egg. No one doubted that a woman had flown through the night air from Bergamo to Venice and ended up as a witch at the stake.
The witch hunts lasted from 1450 to 1792. How many victims it claimed is disputed. The victims were women, men and children, but more than three quarters of the victims were female. Although the accusations against the alleged witches were quite different, they did have something in common. Their main crime was a contract with the devil. According to the common belief of theologians, this meant a contract written in blood and sealed with a kiss under the devil’s tail. As soon as the contract was signed, the witch automatically had sexual intercourse with the devil. Typically, the dark lord was mostly invisible to the witch, even at the moment of intercourse.
Before the Inquisition, some of the accused even claimed that the devil had visited them in their marital bed, sleeping next to their husbands. The book The Witches’ Hammer also stated that sexual intercourse with the devil was painful, his penis of flesh and iron as long as an arm and covered with scales. The Inquisition’s questionnaire for the witch trials thus had specific questions written down. “What were the devil’s penis and his semen? Did you find sexual intercourse with the devil more satisfying than intercourse with your husband? In what way did the devil take your virginity? Did he do this to you several times in one night?”
As absurd as these questions seem to us today, they reveal the sexual fantasies of the Inquisitors. But it did not stop there. They searched the body for traces of sexual intercourse with the devil, and that was how the Inquisitors satisfied their sexual curiosity and sadism. So-called “witch marks” – whether they were just birthmarks on the body – were considered as evidence and sexual intercourse. If such a mark was found, a long-needle proof procedure was followed. According to the belief of the time, those parts of the body touched by the devil were insensitive to pain. The witch’s mark was therefore pierced with a needle, and if this was painless for the accused, other parts of the body, including the most intimate, were pierced with the needle.
During the most brutal periods of the witch hunts between 1550 and 1650, the process always had to end with a confession and denunciation of other witches. According to the Inquisition, the witches met at communal gatherings, where they flew in on broomsticks. Confessions were extracted by torture. The Church, which was in fact the instigator of such trials, preferred to leave it to the ordinary courts and to leave the enforcement of the judgments to the local authorities. In a way, it was washing its hands of the matter, and the municipalities found such trials very profitable. There are figures for the city of Bamberg which show that, at the beginning of the 17th century, half a million guilders flowed into the municipal coffers from these trials. People flocked to the places where witches were burnt in droves to get as close to the action as possible. It was a spectacle, a display of the power of the authorities, before which the people bowed down and enjoyed themselves.
Casting out the devil
Where is the devil today? Are the rising violence, war hysteria, social injustice, psychological pressures, refugee flows and other abuses the result of a reawakening of the devil? Even the Vatican warns that Satan is among us and not to be underestimated, and encourages its bishops to cast him out of our sinful bodies. Are we then possessed by the devil? What is behind this phenomenon which, according to the Church, poisons our souls?
It was a hot summer day in 2015. A helicopter, with a special passenger in it, slowly rose into the air. This passenger was a priest-exorcist of the devil who had been asked by the Vatican for his services. The helicopter circled over the port of Castellammare di Stabia, Naples, and the priest spread his hands and began to pray. He called on God to help him in his fight against the devil who was about to attack the place.
The faithful Catholics of the area had already called on the Church for help, as they had noticed an increase in church break-ins and grave desecrations in the town. Tomb crosses were being turned upside down, statues of the Virgin Mary were being vandalised and organised crime was rampant in the town. The arrival of a helicopter with a devil exorcist on board was spectacular, but not the only emergency measure taken by Catholic priests against the devil.
The Italian Church is particularly encouraging the fight against the “ruler of darkness”. Others are not doing enough, according to the International Association of Exorcists, which is worried about the growing number of “possessed” people. The Association of Exorcists has 400 members, half of them in Italy. But there are also countries where there are none. The Pope himself has admitted that more and more people with spiritual disorders are turning to him, and that if they do not have psychological causes, the exorcists should take the matter in hand.
The Pope’s words show how sensitive the Church is to demonic possession, and he calls for psychologists and doctors to be involved in giving advice. The Catechism’s website states that this should be done with great care and adherence to the rules laid down by the Church. The purpose of exorcism is to cast out a demon or to free someone from its influence by means of the priestly authority that Jesus has given to the church.
Gabriele Amorth (1925-2016), the recently deceased leader of the Italian exorcists, spoke of flying knives, self-immolations, levitations, stone rain and ghosts in bedrooms. All these phenomena are very similar to the ghosts and poltergeist phenomena that parapsychologists also deal with. All this was experienced by a German journalist who, a few years ago, personally witnessed the exorcising of the devil on a farm in Bavaria.
“The exorcist pressed the key and we entered the room. It smelled of burning. Everything in the room was burnt, only the window glass was intact. The window was open, it was unbearably hot in the room, and the only way to bear the heat was in the middle of the room. There was a bed. The wooden frame had sunk almost to the floor, the boards showed traces of fire in places, but the mattress was intact and there was a white sheet on top of it.
Strange things have been happening in this son’s room for two years. There were small flames everywhere, on the walls, ceiling and floor. Sparks were dancing on the edge of the window and on the glass. My son was lying on the bed, screaming desperately. There were small flames everywhere, not only harming him and the bed. The insurance company inspected the damage but could not find a logical cause. Not every night, but the flames appeared regularly out of nowhere, as the family had removed everything that could burn from the room except the bed. In the other rooms everything was normal. The situation only improved a little when the exorcist did his business here.”
Exorcists don’t like to talk about their work. This is because of the dramatic death of 23-year-old Anneliese Michel, who died in 1976 after exorcists had spent weeks exorcising the devil from her body. The student and her deeply religious parents turned to the church, convinced that she was possessed by the devil. Although doctors found that she had epilepsy, depression and paranoid psychosis, as well as brain damage, church agents concluded that she was possessed by the devil.
They tried to expel him 67 times, with the student acting mentally disturbed and self-harming. She died in July 1976 of starvation and pneumonia. The court later punished the two priests and the two parents for involuntary manslaughter. Even after this event, the Vatican insisted that the existence of demonic forces was not just a man’s fantasy, but a reality. However, many church leaders refused to have anything to do with exorcising the devil, much to the annoyance of Professor Paolo Morocutti, who in April 2016 taught a Basic Course on Exorcism at the Pontifical College Regina Apostolorum.
That is why only some archdioceses have official exorcists. In Switzerland, there are six in the German-speaking part of the country, and three in the Archdiocese of Chur alone. “More and more believers are also coming to us from abroad, because there they are very reticent about this issue.”
The evangelical church is much more critical of the casting out of Satan, and discourages such acts. But all churches are united in noting that more and more people are claiming to be possessed, which for some conservative Catholic circles is proof that the devil is to blame for a large part of the disasters that happen in the world.
One of the few exorcists to speak out about his work was the Italian Gabriele Amorth. “I have two kilos of metal that was spat out by the devil-possessed. Sometimes the metal came out of the rectum and there were also pieces of glass in it. If you were to examine the possessed with an X-ray machine, you wouldn’t find anything in their intestines.”
Amorth claimed that the presence of the devil could be identified by sudden temperature changes in the body, by windows and doors opening, telephones ringing but no one answering, televisions turning on and off, water taps opening and closing, pictures being taken from nails, water coming out of walls even though there were no water pipes, the possessed floating in the air, and wounds appearing on his body. He would be tossing back and forth, waving his arms around, gnashing his teeth and rolling his eyes, foam coming out of his mouth.
The Exorcist told that he once met a woman who acted like a witch who had lost control of her powers. When he told her what it was, she suddenly jumped on the table, stretched out her arms and tried to strangle him. He barely defended himself and cried out, “Satan, stop in the name of God!” Possessed, she backed away. He also once saw a person from whom he was casting the devil rise up into the air and hover thirty centimetres above the bed.
To the sceptics who regard such phenomena as disease, ecstasy, indoctrination or acting skill, Amorth responds with an example that happened to him while visiting a possessed woman. “I placed two glasses on the table, one filled with pure water, the other with blessed water. The woman first drank a glass of plain water and nothing happened. Then she drank another glass of blessed water and changed from a calm woman to a screaming woman. I started praying prayers to cast out the devil and within an hour she calmed down.”
According to his own data, Amorth exorcised the devil at least 70,000 times during his lifetime. He often argued with the Catholic Church and its guild: “Jesus cast out the devil as he went along. Now we do it only in secret.”
