ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
August 18
Urbain Grandier and The Devils Restored!
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This
October, nearly four centuries after the events it depicts, audiences will
finally get to see Ken Russell's The
Devils exactly as he intended it. Warner Bros.' new specialty label
Clockwork has completed a full 4K restoration of the director's uncensored cut,
premiered at Cannes this year, screening at TIFF, and heading to North American
theaters October 16th before a UK release two weeks later, fully uncut for the
first time since its notorious 1971 debut. The film has spent over fifty years
as one of cinema's most legendary casualties of censorship, banned outright in
several countries and butchered by studio cuts everywhere else. Its subject
deserves that same restoration of attention: on August 18th, 1634, a French
parish priest named Urbain Grandier was convicted of sorcery, condemned to be
tortured and burned alive, on evidence that has been recognized as fraudulent
for roughly as long as it's been famous.
The
real Loudun case is, if anything, a stranger and more damning story than the
one Ken Russell put on screen…
The True Story Before the Film
Urbain Grandier
was, by every account, a genuinely gifted man, and that talent made him enemies
fast. Educated for over a decade at the Jesuit College of Bordeaux, he was
appointed curé of Loudun at just twenty-seven, accumulating influential patrons
and, according to his critics, an equally impressive list of seduced
parishioners. Loudun itself was a town sharply divided between Catholics and
Huguenots, and Grandier's charisma and eloquence eclipsed his fellow priests
badly enough that professional jealousy became, by most modern historians'
assessment, the actual engine behind everything that followed.
The
case against him gained real political teeth when a libelous pamphlet attacking
Cardinal Richelieu, France's most powerful man, was falsely attributed to
Grandier. A Capuchin friar who'd already assured Richelieu of Grandier's
authorship of that libel was the same man who brought him the second, far more
useful story: that the Ursuline nuns of Loudun's convent had become demonically
possessed, and that Grandier was responsible. Richelieu seized the opening. He
wrote directly to the local counselor of state demanding a strict
investigation, making his desired outcome unmistakable from the outset.
The “possessions” themselves had been escalating for months under exactly the wrong kind of supervision. Father Mignon, one of Grandier's clerical rivals, took charge as exorcist and, rather than working to calm the afflicted nuns, actively encouraged their fits, convulsions, and blasphemous outbursts. What began as a private convent crisis turned into public theater, with staged exorcisms drawing crowds of curious spectators from across the region, the nuns barking, screaming, and contorting for an increasingly captivated audience.
The
evidence assembled against Grandier reads, even by the standards of
seventeenth-century witch trials, as remarkably threadbare. Investigators
produced a supposed pact between Grandier and the Devil, written in reversed
Latin and ostensibly signed in Grandier's own blood, conveniently discovered
and just as conveniently matched to his handwriting by his accusers. During
formal questioning, twelve nuns, compelled by the court to identify themselves,
gave twelve different demonic names in place of their own, their testimony as
possessing spirits treated as legitimate evidence against the man they'd been
coached to blame. One popular account of the trial even frames Grandier as
having been “convicted on the evidence of Astaroth,” a chief demon supposedly speaking
through one of the nuns, a genuinely accurate description of how the
proceedings were theatrically staged, even if the real engine underneath it was
Richelieu's political vendetta rather than an actual demonic confession.
Grandier
was tried for nearly two years before the final verdict came down on August
18th, 1634: guilty of magic, maleficence, and causing the demonic possession of
the Ursuline nuns. His sentence was brutal even by the era's standards, his
legs crushed under torture meant to force him to name accomplices he insisted
did not exist, before he was burned alive in the public square. Contemporary
polemicists recognized the injustice even as it happened; Grandier's calm,
eloquent final speech of innocence reportedly moved spectators to tears,
forcing the judges to clear the courtroom. The possessions, notably, did not
stop after his execution.
Aldous
Huxley's 1952 nonfiction account The Devils of Loudun
turned the case into a modern touchstone, explicitly framing it as a study in
how state power, ideological conformity, and mass hysteria can combine to
destroy an individual, with Huxley drawing pointed comparisons to
twentieth-century totalitarianism. Ken Russell's 1971 film adaptation pushed
that indictment into deliberately provocative, sexually explicit territory, garnering
an X rating and its decades of suppression the same way its subject earned his
conviction: by making authority profoundly uncomfortable. That the definitive, uncensored version of Russell's film is only now
becoming widely available, nearly four hundred years after
Grandier's death and over fifty after the film's original release, feels like
its own strange coda to a case that was always, fundamentally, about who
controls the story and who gets silenced for telling an inconvenient one.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
“DAILY OCCULT REVIEW”
Modern Occultist is proud
to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the
newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the case now
finally getting its full cinematic due, we're recommending the scholarly
account behind both the book and the film.
The Possession at Loudun
By
Michel de Certeau, translated by Michael B. Smith | University of Chicago Press
Michel
de Certeau, the renowned Jesuit historian, brings genuine primary-source rigor
to a case usually filtered through Huxley's polemic or Russell's provocation. The
Possession at Loudun interweaves substantial excerpts from the actual
seventeenth-century trial documents, exorcism records, and contemporary
accounts with de Certeau's own careful commentary, treating the case less as a
morality tale and more as a genuine window into a society in the midst of
religious and political upheaval. Where popular retellings tend to flatten
Grandier into either pure victim or ambiguous rogue, de Certeau is interested
in the full texture of the crisis: what the possessions reveal about
seventeenth-century French anxieties, and how the machinery of church and state
combined to produce a conviction that even contemporaries recognized as unjust.
This
is a work of serious scholarship rather than narrative nonfiction, and readers
wanting something closer to Huxley's more novelistic approach should read his
book alongside it rather than instead of it. But for readers who want to go
past the legend, the pact written in blood, the demon's testimony, the burning
at the stake, and see the actual documented mechanics of how Loudun's tragedy
was constructed, de Certeau's book remains the definitive scholarly account.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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