The Serpent, The Pigs, and The Demons: Possessed Biblical Animals in Early Modern Europe

DEL OLMO ISMAEL

Animals and Witches. Animal Turn in Witchcraft Research?

Akademie der Diözese Rottenburg Stuttgart

Lugar: Stuttgart; Año: 2021;

This chapter studies demonically possessed biblical animals in early modern Europe. I will highlight the way in which demonology provided arguments against unbelief in the XVI and XVII centuries. In short, I will argue that animals were summoned in order to talk about spirits. This adds a twist to a basic notion of ?animal studies?: this trend often argues that the cultural construction of animals is an essential part of our own definition as humans. I would add that in early modern Europe, animals were also used to understand the world of the spirit. In fact, the materiality of animals was deployed as proof of the existence of immortal souls and evil spirits. Two biblical episodes include possessed animals: the serpent in Genesis 3: 1-5, and the herd of swine in the Gospels of Matthew 8: 28-34, Luke 8: 26-39, and Mark 5: 1-20. The serpent and the pigs were invoked during the early modern period in debates concerning heterodox understandings of spirit and matter. Three set of ideas were regarded as akin to unbelief or atheism: The notion that the devil is a non-existent entity, and that we may understand him as thoughts or movements of the brain; the notion of the materiality (and thus the mortality) of the soul; and, finally, the notion that demonic possession was not possible, and that their purported symptoms corresponded in fact to a natural disease. The chapter will trace the ways in which possessed biblical animals were used in these debates as part of the arguments against heterodoxy