Gods of the Field

Hey everybody. A lot going on. I’ve been pretty overwhelmed with commitments lately, and spending almost all my free time working out the details on the next Whose America episode. It really is almost done. I’ve re-written it 4-5 times, but I’ve finally got the narrative format down and it’s just a matter of doing the work. In the meantime, I took a couple days to begin a discussion I’ve been meaning to get to for a while. It was to be one essay, but alas, it looks like I’m gonna need at least one more installment to get around to my point.

Thank you again for your patience. The home stretch before I finish a history episode is always a time of tribulation. I become obsessive, cut myself off from the world, and bury myself in the project until it’s done. And that is what I will get back to doing now that this essay is complete.

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July 17, 1429 was to be a great day in France. Charles VII was to be crowned king at the Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin in the town of Reims. If you happened to catch any of the recent events surrounding the coronation of King Charles in Britain, you know that even today a royal transition is a highly ritualized affair, with sacred rites to be performed, spiritual laws to be obeyed, and ancient relics hauled out of their closets. On this occasion, the most important relic was the Holy Ampulla - an item which even then had been used to crown French kings for centuries. The Holy Ampulla was a glass vial, filled with sacred anointing oil and set about with rare gemstones. It wasn’t every day that new kings were crowned in France - it was quite possible that a person might see only one such transition in a long life - and each of the ritual offices bestowed great honor on the ones chosen to perform them. Among the most coveted duties was to be one of the four knights chosen to carry the Holy Ampulla from its resting place in the Abbey of St. Remy to the cathedral where the coronation was to take place. One of the men chosen for this task was a knight made famous for his exploits in the army of Joan of Arc. His name was Gilles de Rais.

Gilles de Rais was only about 24 years old when he was chosen. Already married to a wealthy heiress, de Rais was now a member of the king’s entourage, and, to ratify his place of honor among French nobility, had recently been declared Marshal of France - a title reserved for generals whose achievements raise them above their peers. The future, then, was looking bright for the famous knight Gilles de Rais - at least, at first glance.

See, Gilles de Rais had a problem. As wealthy as his wife’s family was, neither her riches nor the lands he was granted as a hero of France, were enough to cover de Rais’s extravagant lifestyle. His chateau was party central, as de Rais gave expensive feasts and threw elaborate balls. He fancied himself a playwright, and composed a theatrical show whose presentation he financed out of his own pocket. His spending was out of control, and his wife’s family as well as his own relatives watched aghast as he mortgaged their ancestral lands to finance his vanity. When they successfully petitioned the king to issue a decree preventing de Rais from selling or mortgaging any more of his inheritance, he did what any of us would do: he turned to witchcraft.

Seeking the devil’s help in restoring his fortune, de Rais gathered a group of occultists and began conducting magical rituals in the cellar of his chateau. After several years of practicing the dark arts, a Church investigation exposed de Rais’s coven, and they were hanged in 1440. The nature of the group’s ceremonies was so grotesque that today, despite copious confirming evidence, many people simply refuse to believe that such a thing was possible.

The author Nigel Cawthorne, in his book Witch Hunt: History of a Persecution, writes:

(Gilles de Rais’s) servant, Poitou, was sent out to procure children, usually boys between six and twelve. The children were tortured and sexually abused. Then they were killed, often at the point of orgasm. Once they were dead, their mutilated bodies would be sexually assaulted again, then ritually burnt. De Rais… confessed that (over the course of about eight years) he and his followers murdered over 800 children in the name of Satan.

De Rais’s servant was careful to kidnap the children of commoners, whose accusations against a Marshal of France would carry no weight, but, once he was in the dock, many witnesses who’d previously been silenced by fear came forward from the nearby towns and countryside. De Rais’s body count may have been significantly lower than 800. It is possible that, once some of his crimes were discovered, he was deemed responsible for every missing child in the surrounding area. Still, it seems likely that the number of his victims ran into the hundreds.

The discovery of De Rais’s crimes was followed by witch hunts and other persecutions in many parts of France, and, no doubt, many innocents with a suspicious interest in herb gardens were led off to their unfortunate deaths. In 1453, the inquisition sentenced several accused witches to prison or the executioner, and in 1456 they sentenced several more. In 1459, a full-scale witch hunt was organized in Arras. The hysteria led to a barrage of mutual accusations, and many others were caught up. One was a feeble-minded woman, who, under torture, confessed and named four other women as well as the painter Jehan la Vitte. To avoid naming anyone else under torture, la Vitte - whose nickname was Abbe-de-peu-de-sens, which means Father Little-Sense, implies he may have been feeble-minded himself - attempted to cut out his tongue before he was captured. He caused himself great injury but failed to remove his tongue, and anyway the inquisition was aware that he knew how to write, and his confession and accusations were extracted that way. France was, for decades in the 15th century, racked by periodic outbursts of witch hysteria. Since the prisoners usually confessed, the people only grew more certain of the threat lurking in the shadows. The inquisition ought to have gotten the message that people under torture will say whatever they think will make it stop, but, as an American who witnessed the enhanced interrogation of the Bush years, I’ll refrain from tsk tsk’ing them too harshly.

Accused witches confessed to conducting black masses, to having carnal relations with devils and succubi, to desecrating the host and trampling on the cross. While many, perhaps most, perhaps all of these people were innocent, the case of Gilles de Rais casts late-Medieval witch hunts in a slightly different light. If it happened once, it could happen again, and confessions ought not to be taken lightly when confirmed examples of witchcraft and devil worship lay close at hand.

The 16th and 17th centuries saw numerous witch epidemics throughout France. Dozens of people - men and women, noble and common - were burned or hanged after confessing to devil worship and deliberate ritual blasphemy. The witch hunts only came to an end when they got too close to the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV.

In 1673, two priests approached the Paris police commissioner Nicholas de la Reynie to inform him of a string of disturbing confessions they’d been receiving from many wealthy and prominent men and women, including several instances of spousal murder, often by poisoning. The priests refused to breach the sanctity of the confessional by naming names, but they encouraged de la Reynie to investigate what they had told him and see for himself if there was anything afoot.

The detective set to work, assuming at first that his target was likely a gang of criminals selling poisons to murderous aristocrats. Before long, he had zeroed in on a fortune teller named Marie Bosse. Detective de la Reynie sent a female confederate undercover to consult the fortune teller about the best way to be rid of her abusive husband. Bosse provided her with some arsenic to poison him, and was promptly arrested. A search of her home unearthed a trove of poisonous potions and powders. As she and her husband faced sentencing, they gave up a list of clients which included many members of the royal court.