The Encyclopedia Of Demons And Demonology

Jeanne des Anges 127
Beelzebub, the principal demon possessing Jeanne des Anges (©
RICHARD COOK)
At the hearings, the nuns screamed and screeched
at Grandier, claiming his specter roamed the convent at
night seducing them. The prosecution produced “pacts”
that appeared mysteriously in the nuns’ cells or were
allegedly vomited up by them. One pact was a piece of
paper stained with three drops of BLOOD and containing
eight orange seeds. Another was a bundle of five straws
and another was a package containing worms, cinders,
and hair and nail clippings. On June 17, while possessed
by LEVIATHAN, Jeanne vomited up a pact containing—according
to her possessing demons—a piece of the heart
of a child who had been sacrificed in 1631 at a witches’
sabbat near Orléans, the ashes of a eucharist, and some of
Grandier’s blood and semen.
Countering these shocking spectacles was the nuns’ obvious
lack of command of previously unlearned foreign languages,
a test of demoniacs. Jeanne displayed little knowledge
of Latin and made poor attempts to speak it. Some of
the other possessed nuns did not even try to understand
or speak Latin, Hebrew, or Greek. Often, the nuns resorted
to howling and contorting to avoid answering questions.
Other times, they claimed that the pacts they had with
Grandier forbade them to speak in certain languages.
The nuns also failed the test for clairvoyance. And
they claimed that Grandier’s magical books were kept in
the home of one of his mistresses—but none were found
there.
After the death of Grandier, the nuns fell into states
of remorse and guilt, but they were subjected to continuing
exorcisms before crowds. They performed as if they
were circus animals. In December 1634, four new Jesuit
exorcists arrived, including Father JEAN-JOSEPH SURIN, to
whom Jeanne took an immediate dislike. Whenever approached
by him, she went into fits, howled, stuck out her
tongue, and ran away. She laughed and mocked him, and
her jokes seemed to energize one of the demons, BALAAM,
who urged her to continue and thus undermine the progress
made by Surin. The priest wrote:
I saw that this spirit was wholly opposed to the seriousness
with which one ought to take the things of God,
and that it fostered in her a certain glee which destroys
the compunction of heart indispensable to a perfect conversation
with God. I saw that in a single hour of this
kind of jocularity was enough to ruin everything I had
built up in the course of many days, and I induced in her
a strong desire to rid herself of this enemy.
Jeanne diverted attention with a false pregnancy. She
claimed ISACAARON began tempting her anew; she said
“he performed an operation upon my body, the strangest
and most furious that could be imagined; thereafter he
persuaded me that I was great with child, in such sort
that I firmly believed the fact and exhibited all signs.”
Jeanne’s belly became greatly distended and she
stopped menstruating. She vomited frequently and secreted
milk from her breasts. She was in a state of extreme
agitation nearly constantly and only experienced relief
when Isacaaron visited her nightly and sexually assaulted
her. Refusals resulted in beatings.
Jeanne considered trying to abort herself with herbs
and drugs but abandoned the idea. She considered cutting
the baby out of her womb with a knife but could not carry
out the deed. Isacaaron once offered her a magic plaster
that would terminate the pregnancy, but she refused it.
A physician pronounced her pregnancy to be genuine,
but Isacaaron, speaking at an exorcism, claimed it
was all deception created by the demons in Jeanne. She
threw up a large quantity of blood and the pregnancy
symptoms vanished. For Jeanne and Surin, a miracle had
taken place.
Surin persisted in trying to rid Jeanne of devils, if not
by exorcisms alone, then by spiritual instruction that
would elevate her soul. He offered to take on her demons
himself and soon became obsessed, and then possessed.
Jeanne continued to revile and resist Surin and then
suddenly had a turnabout. She decided she wanted to
become a saint; in fact, she wanted to imitate St. Teresa
of Avila. She increased her prayer time and took on severe
austerities: a hair shirt, a bed of boards, wormwood
poured onto her food, and a belt spiked with nails. She