Читать книгу Art of the Devil - Arturo Graf - Страница 4

Enguerrand Quarton, The Coronation of Mary (detail), 1454. Oil on panel, 183 × 220 cm. Musée Pierre de Luxembourg, Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, France.

Only with the utmost difficulty, if at all, do men succeed in forming a concept of an incorporeal substance, essentially different from that which meets their senses. For them, the incorporeal is usually an attenuation, a rarefaction, of the corporeal, a state of minimum density, comparable though inferior to that of air or flame. To all uncivilised men, and to the great majority of those who call themselves civilised, the soul is a breath, or a light vapour, and it can be seen under the appearance of a shadow. The gods of all the mythologies are, to a lesser or a greater degree, corporeal; those of Greek mythology feed on ambrosia and nectar, and in case they meddle (as they are sometimes wont to do) in the brawls of mortals, they run the risk of catching a sound drubbing. It ought not to seem strange, then, that the pneumatological doctrines of both Jews and Christians generally assign bodies to angels and to demons.

Doctors and Fathers of the Church are almost unanimous in holding that demons are provided with bodies, already possessed by them when they lived in the condition of angels but become denser and heavier after their fall. The density of these bodies of theirs, always far lighter than the bodies of men, has not been similarly estimated by all investigators; in the second century Tatianus declared that it was like that of air or fire, and a body formed of air was attributed to the demons by Isidorus of Seville (560–636) at the beginning of the seventh century. Others, like Saint Basil the Great (330–379), were inclined to assign to them an even more rarefied body. But it is easy to understand how, in a matter of this sort, there could not possibly be one single opinion that must be universally accepted; and how Dante, without offending the conscience of any one, could give his Lucifer, down amid the frost and ice of Cocytus, a solid, compact body, to which he and Virgil cling, as to a rock.[21]

Having bodies, the demons must also have certain natural needs, as have all living, corporeal beings; foremost among all these being that of repairing their organism, whose structure is being constantly worn away by the exercise of life. The devils must require to be fed; and in fact, Origen (185–253), Tertullian (150–230), Athenagoras (about 176), Minucius Felix (second century), Firmicus Maternus (about 347), Saint John Chrysostom (347–407) and many others, say that the devils greedily absorb the vapour and smoke of the victims sacrificed by the pagans – a somewhat unsubstantial food, to be sure, but one not unsuited to their constitution. Some Jewish Rabbis, in a little more generous spirit, endeavouring to introduce a somewhat greater variety into the diabolic diet, said that the devils subsist on the odour of fire and the vapour of water, but that they are also very fond of blood when they can get it; and a German proverb adds that when the Devil is famished he eats flies.

The common people frequently speak of old devils and young devils; and many are the proverbs which, in various languages, give evidence of this popular belief. We know that the Devil, grown old, became a hermit;[22] and it would seem reasonable that he too should grow old, since all organic beings do likewise; but Isidorus of Seville, who has already been quoted, declares that the demons do not grow old, nor can we well make any different assertion until diabolic anatomy and physiology have been more thoroughly studied. If they do not grow old, neither ought they to die; and those Rabbis are guilty of a great falsehood who declare that they too die, like men – not all of them, it is true, but yet the great majority. It seems that they could fall ill, however; at any rate the witches, during the days of the Inquisition, sometimes went so far as to say in their depositions – after having suffered two or three turns of the cord – that the Devil did fall ill from time to time, and that it was then their task to nurse and cure him.

Some Fathers and Doctors, like Saint Gregory the Great (Pope 590–604), – not to mention others – would have it that the devils were altogether incorporeal; but this belief was, as I have shown, far from being the generally accredited one. However, one was at liberty to accept one belief or the other, and Saint Thomas (1225–1274), after citing the conflicting opinions on the subject, concludes by saying that it matters but little to faith whether the demons have bodies or not. But if it matters little to faith, it matters much to fancy, and people were not slow in giving the devils as solid a body as possible.

And how was this body formed? Let it suffice here to treat only of the bodies that the devils possess naturally, not of those which they can assume at their pleasure and of which I shall speak later.

Fra Angelico, The Last Judgment (detail), 1432–1435. Tempera and gold on wood. Museo di San Marco, Florence, Italy.

In general, and as a rule, the bodies of the demons had a human form. This ought not to excite our wonder, since man, who has made the gods in his own image, has also made in his own image both angels and devils. However, when we speak of a human form, we must not conceive of a form in all respects like our own. In consequence of his sin and of his fall, Satan (“The creature who fair semblance once possessed,” as Dante Alghieri calls him[23]) and with Satan the other rebels, not only beheld their bodies grow denser and coarser, but they also saw changed into ignominious deformity the sovereign beauty wherewith God had first clothed them. The form of the devils is, then, a human form, but disfigured and monstrous, wherein the beastly mingles with the human and not seldom exceeds it; and if, on the basis of this form, we were to assign to the demons (with the consent of the naturalists) a place in the zoological classification, we must needs class the greater portion of them in an appropriate family of anthropoids.

An excessive ugliness, sometimes fearful and awe-inspiring, sometimes ignoble and ridiculous, was, then, the most prominent and apparent among what I may call the physical characteristics of the Devil; nor was this without reason, for even if it be not true that the beautiful is, as Plato was held to teach, the splendour of the good, it is, on the other hand, very true that men are drawn by some kind of instinct, whose origins we will not seek to discover, to associate beauty with goodness and wickedness with ugliness. To give to Satan an excessive degree of ugliness was considered a work of merit, which in itself benefited the soul and in which was found a legitimate outlet for hatred of an enemy never sufficiently feared. Authors of legends, painters, sculptors, expended the best of their inventive talent in depicting Satan; and so well, or to speak more correctly, so ill did they depict him that Satan himself must have resented their efforts – though it is not likely that he sets any great store by his own beauty. There is a well-known story, told by many writers of the Middle Ages, about a painter who, having painted a certain devil uglier than fairness demanded, was by that same demon hurled down headlong from the scaffolding where he was working. Luckily for the painter, a Madonna, whom he had represented as very beautiful, thrust forth her arm from the picture and caught and upheld him in mid-air.

However, it was not necessary to invent anything in this connection. Many persons had seen the Devil with their own eyes and were able to say how he was formed; in the vertiginous fantasies of the visionaries, at every slightest shock he would take shape from the shreds and fragments of images, just as from particles of multicoloured glass are formed the capricious figures of the kaleidoscope.

The Manichaeans, a famous heretical sect that arose about the middle of the third century, attributed to the prince of demons a form which was not only human but gigantic, and they said that men were made in his image. Saint Anthony (251–356), who was destined to behold him under so many other aspects, once saw him in the form of an enormous giant, entirely black, and with his head touching the clouds; but on another occasion, as a little child, likewise black, and naked. Black appears as the native colour of the demons from the very earliest centuries of Christianity, and the reasons for assigning it to them are self-explanatory, so obvious are they, and natural. More than one anchorite of the Thebaid beheld the demon in the form of an Ethiopian – which once more goes to show how the demon conforms himself to the times and places amid which he moves, or has been made to move; but countless other saints of later times continued to see him in this guise, not the least of whom was Saint Thomas Aquinas. Neither is this gigantic stature without a reason, since in all mythologies the giants are usually wicked. In that of Greece, the Titans are the enemies of Zeus, and for this reason Dante places them in Hell. Dante likewise makes his Lucifer of gigantic size;[24] and in the French epopees of the Middle Ages the giants are quite often devils, or sons of devils. In the Vision of Tundal, composed about the middle of the twelfth century, the prince of the demons, who is roasting eternally on a gridiron, is not only of gigantic dimensions but, like Briareus, he has a hundred arms; and like Briareus, with a hundred hands and a hundred feet, he was seen in the fourteenth century by Saint Birgitta (1303–1373). On the other hand, the Devil is occasionally represented as a dwarf, probably through the influence of Germanic myths that need not be discussed in this place.

Matthias Grünewald, St. Antony, Isenheim Altarpiece (detail), c. 1512–1515. Oil on wood. Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France.

Taddeo di Bartolo, Hell (detail), between 1393 and 1413. Fresco. Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta, San Gimignano, Italy.

Giotto di Bondone, The Last Judgment (detail), 1302–1305. Fresco. Capella degli Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua, Italy.

Dante’s Lucifer has three faces, but Dante was not the first to give him these. The Trinity was sometimes represented in the Middle Ages in the guise of a man with three countenances; and since the divine trinity suggested by way of contrast the idea of a diabolic trinity, and since, furthermore, in the spirit of evil there are supposed to be three faculties or attributes opposite and contradictory to those allotted to the three divine persons, it was but natural that in representing the prince of the demons artists would turn to the image of the Triune God in order to form a well fitted counterpart. This Lucifer with the three faces, a sort of antithesis or reverse of the Trinity, appears in works of sculpture, in paintings on glass, in manuscript miniatures, his head now girt with a crown, now surrounded by horns, holding in his hands sometimes a sceptre, sometimes a sword, or even a pair of swords. How ancient this image is, it is hard to tell; but certainly it is anterior to Dante, who brought it into his poem, and to Giotto (1276–1337), who, before Dante, introduced it into his famous fresco; it is found already in the eleventh century; and allusion to a three-headed Beelzebub is made in the Gospel of Nicodemus, which, in the form it now presents, is not later than the sixth century.[25]

Giovanni da Modena, The Punishments of the Damned in Hell,1410. Fresco. Basilica di San Petronio, Capella Bolognini, Bologna, Italy.

Anonymous, Madonna del Soccorso (detail), c. 1470. Chiesa dei Sancto Spirito, Florence, Italy.

The more the fear of Satan increases in men’s minds and spreads through the world, the more horrible and fantastic becomes his ugliness; but it is easy to understand how differences in occasion, belief and temperament would tend to give him one shape rather than another. The simplest form in which he has been clothed is that of a tall, lank man, of sooty or livid complexion, extraordinarily emaciated, with fiery and protuberant eyes, breathing ghostly horror from all his gloomy person. Thus is he described more than once, in the thirteenth century, by Caesarius von Heisterbach, a Cistercian monk, whose name will reappear frequently in these pages; and thus is he introduced by Theodor Hoffmann (1776–1822) in his weird tale entitled “The Devil’s Elixir”. Another form, represented time and again in art, is that of a blackened and disfigured angel, with great bat-like wings, an emaciated and hairy body, two or more horns on his head, hook-nosed, with long pointed ears, swine’s tusks, and hands and feet armed with claws. Such is the appearance of the demon who, in the Dantean Hell, flings into the viscid pitch-bath of the barrators one of the Ancients of Santa Zita:

This form does not preclude a certain elegance; but because of this very fact it must needs find many willing distorters. The horns often became ox-horns; the ears, asses’ ears; the tip of the tail was embellished with serpents’ jaws; hideous visages, like the carved heads of fountain-spouts, covered the joints and grinned from the breast, the belly and the buttocks; the virile member coiled and twisted in weird fashion, recalling certain bizarre creations of ancient art; the legs were changed into goats’ legs, reminiscent of the pagan satyr, or one of them was changed to the leg of a horse; the feet were sometimes the talons of a bird of prey or the webbed claws of the goose.

But with all this, the last word in monstrosity had not yet been reached. One strange belief maintained that the bodies of devils had only a front and were hollow within, like those old tree-trunks that by slow decay have been emptied of all ligneous substance. Saint Fursey (died about 650) once saw a pack of devils with long necks and heads like brazen cauldrons. Certain other devils, seen by Saint Guthlac (673–714), had huge heads, long necks, thin swarthy countenances, squalid beards, bushy ears, lowering brows, savage eyes, teeth like horses’, singed locks, wide mouths, bulging breasts, scraggy arms, knock-knees, bow legs, unwieldy heels and splayed feet. Furthermore, they had loud, hoarse voices, and from their mouths they vomited flames – though this act of vomiting flame from the mouth is not an especially striking feature, since, as a rule, they used to spout living flames from every orifice of the body. To Saint Birgitta there once appeared a devil having a head like a pair of bellows furnished with a long pipe, his arms like serpents, his feet like grappling irons.

But who could ever describe this new Chimaera under all its aspects? The belief that each individual demon must have a peculiar form of his own, befitting his peculiar character, his rank and the nature of his infernal office, tended to multiply these strange fancies and increase their confusion. We have seen brute members joined in the bodies of demons with members of human shape; not seldom the brute predominates over the human, and in such a case we find, for instance, a beast with the head of a man, like Dante’s Geryon;[27] sometimes the brute excludes the human altogether, and then we meet a diabolic beast, which also may be composite, made up of portions taken from this creature and from that, a monster that does violence to nature, a living symbol of falsehood and confusion.

Anonymous, The Krampus, Demon Companion of St. Nicholas,19th century. Imprint on a cake pan. Private collection.

All through the Middle Ages, the Devil, as we have seen, is represented as being exceedingly ugly; and to this rule – a moral rather than an aesthetic one – it is very hard to discover exceptions. Nevertheless, some rare exceptions can be found. A Latin Bible of the ninth or tenth century, preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, contains among other pictures a miniature representing Satan and Job. Satan is here depicted in a fashion that cannot be called ugly. Of the former angel, there are still preserved the wings and – stranger still – the nimbus that encircles his head, but the feet are armed with claws, and in his left hand he holds a vessel filled with fire, wherewith he seems to intend to symbolise his own nature. A devil, whom the poet calls handsome, but who nevertheless has a large mouth and a hooked nose, is described in a French epopee of the twelfth century, La Bataille Aliscans. Federigo Frezzi, bishop of Foligno and author of the Quadriregio (died in 1416), finds in Hell, contrary to his expectation, a Satan of great beauty:

But this is merely a deceptive appearance, and the poet, looking through the diamond shield of his guide, Minerva, beholds the prince of the demons as he really is – of most savage aspect, entirely black, with fiery eyes, his head surrounded, not with a crown but with dragons, all the hairs on his head and trunk changed into serpents, his arms furnished with claws, the rest of his body and his tail like those of a monstrous scorpion. Satan begins to reacquire something of his beauty with the arrival, or rather with the unfolding, of the Renaissance; and it is easy to understand how an age enamoured of beauty, an age that devoted to the cult of beauty all the best of its own elements, could not suffer, even in Satan, too base and horrible a deformity. In the “Last Judgment” of Michelangelo, the figures of the demons do not differ greatly from those of the damned, and they are impressive rather through their awfulness than their horribleness. Milton’s demons keep in their fall no small portion of their former beauty and their former majesty; but those of Tasso have strange and horrible forms and even reproduce all the monsters of antiquity. The figure of the cavalier, in velvet doublet and silken mantle, his cap adorned with a long cock’s feather and with sword at his side, is a product of modern imagination.

Paolo Uccello, St. George and the Dragon, c. 1470. Oil on canvas, 55.6 × 74.2 cm. The National Gallery, London, United Kingdom.

The demons, though they had their own proper forms, could also at their pleasure assume other forms; but so great is the variety, so extensive the development, of both one kind and the other, that it is not always possible to distinguish between them. In general, it may be said that there is no shape which the Devil may not assume on occasion, a faculty which renders him most worthy of the name sometimes bestowed on him of the “Infernal Proteus”. Milton was well aware of this faculty. Speaking of the fallen angels, he says:

Let us try, for a moment, to recover our bearings in the midst of this infernal masquerade. The devils, ugly by nature, could by artifice acquire an appearance that was beautiful and seductive; they could also acquire a deformity that was different from their own. According to their plans and needs, they assumed sometimes one aspect, sometimes the other.

That the devils, especially in ancient times, should appear to Christians under the guise of one or another of the pagan divinities, will seem strange to no one. Saint Martin, the famous bishop of Tours, was made to see them disguised as Jupiter, Mercury, Venus and Minerva. But Saint Martin lived in the fourth century, at a time when paganism, if not flourishing, was yet alive; and for that reason his visions are easily accounted for. Not so easily, however, do we account for the fact that devils in the form of Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Bacchus and Hebe, were still seen by Saint Rainaldo, bishop of Nocera, in the thirteenth century. In this second case, we are forced to recognise the effects of certain readings of classic authors, and the symptoms of the near approach of the Renaissance. The same reasons that led the demons to masquerade as pagan divinities could also lead them to clothe themselves in the likeness of illustrious men of old. In the tenth century, there appeared one night to a grammarian of Ravenna, Vilgardo by name, certain devils in the guise of Virgil, Horace and Juvenal; and thanking him for the diligence with which he was devoting himself to their writings, they promised to make him after his death a sharer in their own glory.

Very often the devils, who generally possessed one human form, would assume another – also human, but better adapted to their need. Countless histories of saintly men tell us of demons appearing in the form of attractive women, while numberless histories of female saints tell us of demons hiding themselves under the semblance of handsome and saucy youths. I shall return to the subject of these perilous apparitions when I come to speak of the Devil as tempter. Not seldom did the devils conceive the idea of presenting themselves before the man or woman they wished to annoy, under the guise of friends, kindred, or persons otherwise well-known and familiar; whence there might result, and ofttimes there did result, great damage and scandal. The venerable Mary of Maille discovered the Devil beneath the garb of a hermit, reputed by all a holy man. To the blessed Gherardesca of Pisa, and to other holy women, the Devil appeared in the guise of their husbands; in the form of a gallant he issued one day from the bedchamber of Saint Kunegund (1002–1024). On another occasion, he was guilty of even grosser conduct. He assumed the appearance of Saint Silvanus, bishop of Nazareth, discovered his passion to a young girl, and suffered himself to be found beneath her bed. Standing one day at a window, Thomas Cantipratensis, a Dominican of the thirteenth century, beheld the Devil in the form of a priest, who was exhibiting himself in a most indecent attitude. The monk shouted, and in a trice the demon vanished. This same Thomas tells how, in the year 1258, there was seen near Cologne a great mob of devils in the guise of White Friars, running and dancing across the meadows.

Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death and the Devil, c. 1513. Engraving, 24.4 × 18.7 cm. Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, Germany.

Vittore Carpaccio, St. George and the Dragon, 1516. Oil on canvas, 180 × 226 cm. San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, Italy.

Quite often, the devils let themselves be seen in the forms of various animals. As for the dragon, I am uncertain whether that was the natural form of some devils or one assumed incidentally. As a dragon, it is true, Satan appears in the Apocalypse; and many are the saints to whom diabolic dragons showed themselves. In the eighth century, John of Damascus (700–754) described the demons as dragons flying through the air. Sometimes the dragon seems to be a creature intermediate between demon and beast. But countless were the other animal forms that the demons were wont to don in order to torment, to frighten, or to annoy the righteous souls of the faithful. Saint Anthony, afar in the desert, was made to see them in the forms of roaring, howling beasts of prey, of serpents and scorpions; and more than a thousand years later, Saint Colette still saw them transformed into foxes, serpents, toads, snails, flies and ants. In the thirteenth century, Saint Giles recognised the demon under the shell of an enormous tortoise. In the form of a lion, the demon killed a child, who was restored to life by Saint Eleutherius (456–532), bishop of Tournai; to many persons he showed himself in the form of a raven. In the legend of Saint Vedast (sixth century) it is related that the demons were once seen obscuring the sunlight under the form of a cloud of bats. As a dog, the Devil became the companion of Pope Silvester II (Pope 999–1003), suspected of practicing magic arts; as a dog he appeared to Faust, and as a dog he was seen guarding treasures hidden underground; as a huge he-goat, he showed himself at the revels of the witches; as a cat, he rubbed his back in their kitchens; as a fly, he buzzed persistently about the heads of honest folk. In short, there is no savage creature, no hideous or disgusting one, under whose semblance the demons have not some time hidden themselves.

All this diabolic zoology should occasion us no surprise. Not only was it natural that the demons, in order to gain their particular ends, should take on whatever animal forms best suited them; but between the animals themselves – some of them, at least – and the demons, there was a certain affinity, there was sometimes an actual identity of nature. Aside from the fact that in Christian symbolism some creatures, such as the serpent, the lion or the ape, represent the Devil; aside from the fact that the demons themselves are very often called beasts; it is also true that certain animals are rightly transformed into demons, or confused with the demons. In an ancient formula for exorcism, God is asked to preserve the fruits of the earth from caterpillars, mice, moles, serpents and other unclean spirits. On the other hand, I remember having seen in an ancient “Bestiary”, or zoological treatise of the Middle Ages, the Devil catalogued along with the other beasts. I have already called attention to the fact that the dragon formed a sort of connecting link between demon and beast; the same can also be said of the basilisk. The toad, which very often appears in company with the witches, turns out, in certain tales, to be far more demon than beast. To prove this, I need only to cite the following frightful story, related by Caesarius von Heisterbach. A child finds a toad in the field and kills it. The dead toad pursues its slayer, giving him no rest either day or night; when it has been killed again and again, it still continues to pursue him, and does not desist even after it has been burned and reduced to ashes. The poor persecuted child, finding no other means of freeing himself, lets himself be bitten by his enemy, and then escapes death by quickly cutting away with a knife the flesh which the venomous jaws have penetrated. Its vengeful fury appeased, the terrible toad was seen no more.

Saint Patrick (396–469), Saint Geffroy (died in 1115), Saint Bernard (1091–1153) and several other saints, excommunicated flies and other noxious insects, or even reptiles, and rid houses, cities and provinces of their presence. The trials of animals, conducted in the Middle Ages and even in the height of the Renaissance, are famous in the annals of superstition; the beasts were arraigned, as were the devils. In 1474 the magistrates of Basel tried and condemned to the flames a diabolic cock which had ventured to lay an egg. If animals transform themselves into demons, it was but just that the demons should transform themselves into animals.

Nor were they satisfied with transforming themselves into animals only; nay, they even turned themselves into inanimate objects. Saint Gregory the Great relates the pitiful case of a nun who, thinking that she was eating a leaf of lettuce, ate the Devil and retained him in her body for a season. A disciple of Saint Hilary, abbot of Galeata, once beheld the Devil in the shape of a tempting cluster of grapes. To others, according to circumstances and conditions, the Devil caused himself to appear in the semblance of a goblet of wine, a gold-piece, a purse full of money, a tree-trunk, a rolling cask and even a cow’s tail. It is not without reason, therefore, that the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch, and several others among the most famous painters of devils, often animated with diabolic life trees, stones, fabrics, pieces of furniture and kitchen utensils.

But not even here do these diabolic masqueradings reach their limit; and if those that I have related give proof of no small degree of natural versatility and no slight power of imagination, there are yet others which reveal the greatest audacity and a truly diabolical impudence. More than once did Satan venture to assume the venerable features of some famous saint, still living, or already dead, and raised to the honours of the altar. Ofttimes, too, he would reveal himself in the semblance of an angel, resplendent with light and glory. Capping the climax of his audacity, he appeared to some in the likeness of the Virgin Mary, of Christ, crucified, or risen from the dead, of God the Father himself; and, in company with his satellites, he sometimes succeeded in staging the entire Court of Heaven.

The demons were able, by condensing the air about them, or by fashioning at need some other element, to form for themselves the kind of body that best suited them; but they could also introduce themselves into a body already formed, and employ it exactly as if it were their own. I do not intend to speak here of diabolic possession – of which I will treat in its proper place – , a power which the demons exercised by entering bodies that were still alive; but I am speaking of their invasion of dead bodies, which through their agency gave the appearance of life. Dante makes Friar Alberigo de’ Manfredi[29] say that the betrayers of their fatherland, undergoing punishment in Ptolemaea, suffer such a fate that, while their souls are languishing in the lowest depths of Hell, their bodies, directed by demons, remain for a certain season in the world, still, in appearance, alive. This has been regarded as an ingenious invention of Dante himself, but such is not the case. Caesarius relates the melancholy history of a dead clerk whose body was animated and sustained by a devil. This counterfeit clerk used to sing with so sweet a voice that all who heard him were entranced; but one fine day a certain holy man, after listening a while to his singing, said without hesitation: “This is not the voice of a man; ‘tis the voice of a doubly damned devil!” And having performed his efficacious exorcisms, he compelled the devil to come out; and when the devil was out, the corpse dropped to the ground. Thomas Cantipratensis tells how the demon entered the body of a dead man that had been deposited inside a church and endeavoured with his chicaneries to terrify a holy virgin who was praying there; but the holy virgin, perceiving the trick, gave the dead man a sound rap on the head and made him lie quiet. The story of a devil who, in order to tempt a poor recluse, appropriated the body of a dead woman, is told by Giacomo da Voragine (died in 1298) in his Legenda Aurea. But this idea is quite ancient. Concerning a devil who, entering the corpse of a felon, used to carry travellers across a river in the hope of drowning them, we read in The Life of Saint Gildwin; concerning another, who kept alive the body of a wicked man, we read in The Life of Saint Odran. The theologians admitted the truth of what was related in these legends; only, in their wisdom, they affirmed that devils could not invade the corpses of persons of good repute and approved by the Church. The belief, with or without this restriction, is not as harmless as it might appear at first. Closely connected with it are various others concerning the evil that can be wrought by dead bodies; also various horrible practices intended to prevent these bodies from doing harm. If a person believed to be dead made the slightest movement, this was at once thought to be an illusion of the Devil, and burial was given in all haste to the dead who wished to be alive. This belief persisted well into the Renaissance, and even in the eighteenth century it had not entirely disappeared.

Raffaello Sanzio, also known as Raphael, St. Margaret, 1518. Oil on poplar wood, 192 × 122 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.

Carlo Crivelli, Madonna and Child, c. 1480. Tempera and gold on wood, 37.8 × 25.4 cm (painted surface: 36.5 × 23.5 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.

The Devil could, at will, assume honourable and pleasing forms, but none the less he did not cease to be a devil; though rendered invisible, his devilishness did not cease to emanate from his whole person, as an evil influence. Even when he concealed himself under the shape of a beautiful girl, or that of an angel, of the Virgin Mary, or of Christ himself, by his approach he perturbed and dismayed human nature, inspired unaccountable aversions, or left behind him profound apprehensions and terrors. This pernicious influence could be greatly strengthened if he also let himself be seen under his own, or any other, monstrous aspect.

The good Caesarius cites various instances to show how great danger is involved in a sight of the Devil. Two youths fell ill after seeing the Devil in the form of a woman; several, after seeing him, died. Thomas Cantipratensis says that the sight of the Devil will strike one with dumbness. Dante, in the presence of Lucifer, became “frozen and faint”; he does not die, and he is not alive. Nor should this surprise us, when we remember that to the White Lady and other spectres was often given the power of slaying with a look or a mere glance.

Numberless were the shapes under which the Devil could hide himself, and numberless the tricks which, by using these shapes, he could play on others; but there were some who, like Saint Martin, knew how to rout him out, even when hidden under the most unusual and most deceptive forms. When discovered, the disguised demon would either incontinently vanish or reassume his ordinary aspect.

Such was the physical nature of the Devil; of his moral nature I will not speak now, for we shall see that nature expounded in the following chapters. I will only say, in passing, that – contrary to the opinion of Thomas Aquinas, who charged him with no other sin than pride and envy – , popular belief attributed to the Devil all of the seven deadly sins.

Anonymous, Mission Table, also known as a “taolennou”: The State of Sin, 19th century. Oil on canvas, 76 × 63 cm. Évêché, Quimper, France.

Anonymous, Hell and the Seven Deadly Sins, published by La Bonne Presse, end of 19th century. Private collection, Paris, France.