Note 94 — Chapter II

A correspondent of the London “Times” describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:

“About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with ‘a hatred of holy things,’ the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor—I mean the priest—came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, ‘had an aversion to holy things,’ or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was ‘a holy thing,’ she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, ‘Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.’ The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the ‘possessed with the devils,’ with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day’s proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. ‘You know,’ said the priest, ‘that so great is this girl’s aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.’ Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: ‘In the name of God, of the saints, of the blessed Host, of every holy sacrament of our Church, I adjure thee, Rusbel, come out of her.’ (N. B. ‘Rusbel’ is the name of a devil, the devil having 257 names in Catalonia.) Thus adjured, the girl threw herself—in an agony of convulsion, till her distorted face, foam-bespattered lips and writhing limbs grew well-nigh stiff—at full length upon the floor, and, in language semi-obscene, semi-violent, screamed out, ‘I don’t choose to come out, you thieves, scamps, robbers.’ At last, from the quivering lips of the girl, came the words, ‘I will;’ but the devil added, with traditional perversity, ‘I will cast the 100 out, but by the mouth of the girl.’ The priest objected. The exit, he said, of 100 devils out of the small Spanish mouth of the woman would ‘leave her suffocated.’ Then the maddened girl said she must undress herself for the devils to escape. This petition the holy father refused. ‘Then I will come out through the right foot, but first’—the girl had on a hempen sandal, she was obviously of the poorest class—‘you must take off her sandal.’ The sandal was untied; the foot gave a convulsive plunge; the devil and his myrmidons (so the cura said, looking round triumphantly) had gone to their own place. And, assured of this, the wretched dupe of a girl lay quite still. The bishop was not cognizant of this freak of the clergy, and the moment it came to the ears of the civil authorities, the sharpest means were taken to prevent a repetition of the scandal.”