A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [208]
Apocalypse was in the air. The Duc d’Anjou in 1376, in the course of authorizing an annual corpse for dissection by the medical faculty of Montpellier, took notice that the population was so reduced, owing to epidemics and wars, that “it may be diminished to ever greater extent and the world brought to nothing.” Under the influence of malign and capricious events, overwrought minds turned to magic and the supernatural. The Inquisitor of France, on inquiring of the Pope in 1374 if he should take cognizance of sorcerers, was authorized by Gregory XI to pursue them vigorously. Since early in the century the papacy had been taking an increasingly punitive view of recourse to the supernatural, especially during the hyperactive reign of John XXII. In a series of Bulls in the 1320s, Pope John had equated sorcerers with heretics and authorized their punishment as such, since they had made a “pact with Hell,” forsaking God and seeking the aid of the Devil. He ordered their books of magic lore to be sought out and burned. Despite his alarm, prosecuted cases were few until the second half of the century, when sorcery and its links to demonology took on new life and were met by new efforts at repression. In 1366 the Council of Chartres ordered anathema to be pronounced against sorcerers every Sunday in every parish church.
Demonology and the black arts were the opposite of heresy, not more pious than the Church but impious, seeking communion with the Devil, not God. Adepts in their rites worshiped Lucifer arrayed as the King of Heaven and believed that he and the other fallen angels would recapture Heaven while the Archangel Michael and his fellows would take their places in Hell. A pact with the Devil offered pleasure without penitence, enjoyment of sexuality, riches, and earthly ambitions. If the price was eternal hellfire, that was what many could expect anyway at the Day of Judgment. Though old and indigenous, demonology was never more than an aberration, but insofar as it offered an alternative answer, it was seen by the Church as dangerous.
The problem was to distinguish between diabolic and lawful magic powers. Respectable sorcerers claimed that their images of wax or lead acquired potency through being baptized and exorcised, that their mysteries were consecrated by celebration of the mass, that God was invoked to compel the obedience of demons—indeed, that God flowed from their arts, as proved by the fulfillment of wishes. Theologians disallowed such pretensions. Even if it was only to recover a straying lover or cure a peasant’s sick cow, sorcerers were offering aid outside the approved channel of prayer, priests, and saints. As the times darkened, all magic and witchcraft came to be taken as an implied contract with Satan.
Women turned to sorcery for the same reasons they turned to mysticism. In Paris in 1390 a woman whose lover had jilted her was tried for taking revenge by employing the magical powers of another woman to render him impotent. Both were burned at the stake. In the following year two more women were condemned on charges of maleficiam or doing evil. Since confessions in trials for sorcery were extracted by torture, they tended to reflect the accusations of diabolic power drawn up by the prosecutors, and since the accused were likely to be cranks or fanatics or otherwise disturbed, they did not hesitate to claim the powers imputed to them. They admitted to consorting with demons and to pacts with the Devil for lust or revenge, to diabolic rites and flights through the night to copulate with the Devil in the shape of a monstrous black cat or goat with flaming eyes or a gigantic man with black skin, a huge phallus, and eyes like burning coals. The Devil was a Gothic satyr with horns and cloven hoofs, fierce teeth and claws, a sulfurous smell and sometimes ass’s ears. The lore developed as much from the minds of the prosecutors as from the hallucinations of the accused, and together they laid the ground