The Encyclopedia Of Demons And Demonology

34 Bruner
a psychosomatic pregnancy, and, as in Laon, ravings by
Beelzebub against the heresy of the Huguenots.
Realizing the celebrity potential of her possession,
Brossier and her family traveled the Loire valley, stopping
in various towns for exorcisms and drawing large audiences.
The physician Michel Marescot, who examined
Brossier in 1599, unkindly described her tours as “fifteen
months spent in carrying of her too [sic] and fro, like an
Ape or a Beare, to Angers, Saulmur, Clery, Orleans and
Paris.”
In Orléans, Brossier obtained a certificate of genuine
possession from the local priest. Not everyone was
fooled, however, as administrators in Clery and Orléans
posted documents forbidding any priest to exorcise “that
fictitious spirit.” At Angers, Bishop Charles Miron tested
Brossier on her reactions to holy water and sacred Latin
texts, and she failed both examinations: She did not react
to real holy water but to ordinary water, and the Latin,
which caused more convulsions, was merely a line from
Virgil’s Aeneid. Bishop Miron ordered Brossier and her
family to return to Romorantin and stop playing tricks.
Instead, in early March 1599, Brossier and her father
went to Paris. Just a few days prior, the Paris parliament
had passed the Edict of Nantes, giving official tolerance to
both Catholic and Huguenot beliefs. The Brossiers sought
refuge in the Capuchin monastery of Ste. Genevieve,
where the monks began to exorcise Brossier immediately
and broadcast Beelzebub’s anti-Huguenot diatribes. The
exorcisms attracted huge crowds, and by the end of March,
public feeling was so high that Henri De Gondy, bishop of
Paris, intervened to verify Brossier’s possessed state. Both
theologians and physicians examined Brossier, including
Marescot, and all agreed on March 30 that Brossier was
not possessed but merely ill; her symptoms were mainly
counterfeit.
On March 31, two of the doctors reexamined Brossier
and found an insensitive spot between her thumb and index
finger. Believing it to be a DEVIL’S MARK, they asked
for a postponement of the earlier report and began to exorcise
Brossier on April 1. The Capuchins called in another
group of doctors on April 2, and on April 3 they
proclaimed her genuinely possessed. But their efforts
were too late.
Fearing a breakdown of the edict, King Henri IV
ordered a halt to the public exorcisms. Brossier was
imprisoned for 40 days, and her copy of the Miracle
of Laon was confiscated. Her convulsions gradually
ceased. On May 24, Parliament ordered Brossier and her
father to return to Romorantin, where the local judge
was to check on her every two weeks. All was quiet until
December, when Alexandre de la Rochefoucauld, the
prior of St. Martin-de-Randan in Auvergne and a believer
in Brossier’s possession, kidnapped her and took
her to Avignon and finally to Rome to see the pope, all
the while encouraging her anti-Huguenot performances.
They arrived just in time for the Papal Jubilee of 1600,
where Brossier contorted and was exorcized for the edification
of the tourists.
Upon the advice of Henri IV and other clerics, the
French cardinal d’Ossat stopped the Prior’s exhibitions,
although Brossier continued to perform. According to
an account by Palma Cayet in 1605, Brossier was still
staging possession fits in Milan as of 1604 and acting
as Beelzebub’s mouthpiece. That is the last record of her
escapades.
FURTHER READING:
Ferber, Sarah. Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern
France. London: Routledge, 2004.
Walker, D. P. Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in
France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth
Centuries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1981.
Bruner (Burner), Theobald and Joseph (19th century)
French case considered a classic example of demonic
POSSESSION and EXORCISM. Two brothers, Theobald and
Joseph Bruner of Illfurt (Illfurth), Alsace, exhibited all
the accepted signs of diabolic interference—contortions,
blasphemies, levitation, speaking in unknown languages,
revulsion toward holy objects, and clairvoyance—while
the DEVIL was successfully driven out through organized
rituals.
Theobald (Thiebaut), born in 1855, and Joseph, born
in 1857, first began displaying unusual and frightening
behavior in September 1865. Confined mostly to their
beds for the next two years, the boys would entwine
their legs, sometimes every two or three hours, in knots
so tight that no human pressure could unentangle them.
They would stand on their heads for hours, bend completely
backward; become rigid; and undergo attacks of
vomiting, expelling great quantities of yellow foam, seaweed,
and foul-smelling feathers.
The boys levitated as well, rising upward while remaining
seated or in bed. Sometimes their mother, seated
on the bed while it rose off the floor, would be thrown
into the corner. Their room was unbearably hot, although
no stove was lit; only by sprinkling holy water on the bed
did the room’s temperature return to normal. Furniture
flew about the room, the drapes would fall down by themselves,
and the windows would burst open. The entire
house shook, as if from an earthquake.
More disturbing were the boys’ increasing fascination
with the Devil and hatred of holy objects. They would
draw devilish faces on the walls by their bed and talk
to them. Rosaries or sacred relics placed on or under
their bed would send the boys into hysterical fits, hiding
under the covers and screaming blasphemies. The
blessed host was particularly loathsome, and pictures of
the Virgin Mary, or even the mention of her name, drove
the boys crazy. According to the records kept by the local
priest, Father Karl (Charles) Brey, if a “clergyman or
pious Catholic visited the house, the possessed children