The'physical prophet'and the powers of the imagination. Part I

40 Pages·2016·0.58 MB·English

by  Koen Vermeir

The ’physical prophet’ and the powers of the
imagination. Part I
Koen Vermeir
To cite this version:
Koen Vermeir. The ’physical prophet’ and the powers of the imagination. Part I: a case-study on
prophecy, vapours and the imagination (1685 -1710). Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Elsevier, 2004, 35
(4), pp.561-591. <10.1016/j.shpsc.2004.09.001>. <halshs-00641619>
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Vermeir, Koen. 2004. “The ‘physical prophet’ and the powers of the imagination. Part I: a case-
study on prophecy, vapours and the imagination (1685 -1710).” Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical
Sciences 35 (4) (December): 561-591. doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2004.09.001.

The ‘Physical Prophet’ and the Powers of the Imagination
Part I
A case-study on prophecy, vapours and the imagination
(1685-1710)

Abstract

I argue that the imagination was a crucial concept for the understanding of marvellous
phenomena, divination and magic in general. Exploring a debate on prophecy at the turn of
the seventeenth century, I show that four explanatory categories (God, demons, nature and
fraud) were consistently evoked and I elucidate the role of the imagination in each of them. I
introduce the term ‘floating concept’ to conceptualise the different understandings of the
imagination and animal spirits in different discourses. I underpin my argument with a broader
and less known discussion of the imagination. I argue that theories of the imagination, and
particularly of the powers of the imagination, acquired negative associations and became
linked with illicit magic in the Renaissance. Furthermore, I show that the relation between
both animal spirits and imagination, and the power of the latter over external bodies, points to
the importance of a ‘history of vapours’ and this suggests an adjustment to Hutchison’s
argument on occult qualities in mechanical philosophy. The accompanying paper (Vermeir,
2005) gives more evidence of these claims and elaborates on the relation between the natural
and the moral.

Keywords: Prophecy; Divination; Imagination; Pneuma; Physiology; Magic; Occult;
Vapours; Animal spirits; Preternatural; Floating concept; Keith Hutchison.
1
The wonder is not that older systems of divination
should have lasted so long, but that we should now
feel it possible to do without them.
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971)
Introduction

On the third of February 1688, Isabeau Vincent, a fifteen year old Huguenot shepherdess
of the Dauphiné, started to talk aloud about ‘wonderful and godly things’ while asleep. She
called for repentance and prophesied with a loud voice, meanwhile experiencing bodily
agitations and convulsions. A few weeks later, she started to preach in a trance by daylight
too. As in biblical times, prophecy was extremely contagious. Within a few months, hundreds
of children traversed the countryside of the Dauphiné, the Cévennes and the Languedoc,
chanting and prophesying in ecstasy and transmitting this ‘gift’. An eyewitness wrote: ‘They
all have the most beautiful physiognomy in the world; the girls resemble the angels in their
beauty and tenderness when they are possessed by the charming and heavenly madness
[mal].’1 This was not the only event that enthralled the inhabitants of the South of France. In
the same year, a dowser discovered that he could trace criminals with his special ‘gift’.2 In a
spectacular case four years later, he followed the trail of a murderer for several days, caught
him and brought him to court. These events catalysed two important controversies at the end
of the seventeenth century, which were similar in nature and which will form the basis of the
two parts of this article.
Prophecy and dowsing are instances of divination, which is an important type of magic and
means ‘discovering the hidden’.3 Divination traditionally included a wide range of practices,

1 ‘Toutes ces personnes ont la meilleure physionomie du monde, les filles ressemblent à des anges en beauté et
en douceur quand le mal charmant et céleste les prend.’ Cited in Crété (1992), p. 56.
2 What this ‘gift’ meant for contemporaries depended on the different interpretations, but in the case-studies I
consider, it was associated with the bodily complexions of the diviners.
3 Notwithstanding the numerous recent attempts at defining magic, I think that the general category of magic is
impossible to ‘define’. Del Rio (1599-1600), I.2, defines magic as ‘an art or skill which, by the use of natural
(i.e. not supernatural [or divine]) power, accomplishes extraordinary and unusual things, the manner in which
these are done being such as to overwhelm people’s emotions and their capacity to comprehend.’ If we try to
combine this with Della Porta’s notion of ‘natural magic’ in a paradoxical synthesis, we may grasp something of
the meaning of ‘magic’, and the tensions inherent in the concept. See also ibid., IV for ‘divination’.
2
such as prognostications from dreams, weather-forecasting and searching for hidden treasures.
Our two cases drew on these older traditions but were also informed by their contemporary
contexts. Different interest groups seized on these spectacular events to explain them and to
bolster their world view. According to the recent secondary literature,4 these events should be
classified as preternatural. I will argue, however, that this is not the best concept for
understanding what was at stake. Contemporaries used categories which had informed similar
debates about unusual events for centuries. Godly miracles, the cunning of the devil, hidden
natural principles and human deceit were the explanatory principles that were persistently
evoked. Giving due importance to these positions in a close analysis of two specific events
will allow us to integrate the different perspectives which divide the current historiography
across the history of wonder, demonology and medicine.5
I will do this by focussing on the role of the imagination in our case-studies. Walker
assigned in his famous study Spiritual and Demonic Magic (1958) a central place to astrology
and the imagination, which were in his view involved in every magical practice. This claim
seems exaggerated and the occult properties of natural magic (such as the power of the
magnet) were independent of man’s imagination and the heavens. The current secondary
literature on magic, however, seems to underestimate the role of the imagination, and I will
argue that its role was crucial in many debates. To support this argument, I will intersperse
my analysis of the case-studies with notions of the history of the imagination, which is in
many ways still unwritten. This will also give me the chance to add an adjustment to Keith
Hutchison’s seminal argument,6 which analyses the transition of occult qualities from
scholasticism to the mechanical philosophy, by pointing out the importance of an (also yet
unwritten) ‘history of vapours’.
The early modern concept of the imagination was very different from ours. It generally had
not the exalted connotations of art, freedom and creativity that it acquired in Romanticism. It
connected, however, different discourses and had the characteristics of what I will term a
‘floating concept’. It was the highest material faculty of man, yet subservient to immaterial
reason and intellect. The imagination was perceived to be the bond between body, soul and
the outer world and was furthermore the pre-eminent social faculty as the source of our
feelings of empathy. Interwoven with this was a (now little known) unorthodox tradition of

4 E.g. Daston and Park (2001); Clark (1997).
5 Daston and Park, Clark, and Brockliss and Jones all wrote excellent works, yet from very different perspectives
which tend to obscure their interplay.
6 Hutchison (1982).
3
the powers of the imagination, which claimed that the imagination could work physically on
external bodies, and I will argue that it became associated with atheism and illicit magic. It is
often assumed that this tradition had ended by the end of the seventeenth century,7 but I will
show that it informed the debates in a crucial, if sometimes concealed, way.
The end of the seventeenth century, Keith Thomas claimed, coincided with the ‘decline of
magic’,8 and our case-studies will shed light on the possible interpretations of this process. It
is increasingly becoming clear that this decline was in part a rhetorical change and Hutchison
assessed Thomas’ thesis by arguing that, despite the rhetoric against magic, occult qualities
became incorporated into natural philosophy.9 As we can deduce from the history of the
powers of the imagination, the negative reputation of illicit magic gradually expanded over
magic as a whole,10 and a strong rhetoric was employed to separate some branches from the
‘rotten trunk’. The ‘decline’ and ‘secularisation’ of magic is thus partly illusory and Schaffer,
for instance, drew attention to the attempts to incorporate the spiritual in experimental
practice.11 In Part II of this article, I will focus on the attempts of the mechanical philosophy
to include moral issues stemming from magic, and the place of moral qualities in nature and
natural philosophy. This too has been neglected in the historiography of science, but it was a
central concern for the participants of the debates I have analysed.

Children’s prophecies

The last decade of the seventeenth-century was a tumultuous time in the south of France. It
was traditionally a stronghold of the Protestants, but they lived dispersed and their power and
zeal had somewhat eroded during the century. Religion was not a priority anymore and the
Huguenots were more absorbed in local interests. The Crown capitalised on this and gradually
abolished their liberties and institutions. In the 1680s force and harassment became more
explicit: royal troops were quartered in Protestant homes and were encouraged to terrorize
their hosts; their churches and schools were closed, and they were ‘advised’ to convert to

7 E.g. Daston and Park (2001), p. 339; Cocking (1991); Kearny (1988).
8 Thomas (1973).
9 See Hutchison (1982) and (1983); see also Henry (1986); and Schaffer (1983).
10 Contemporaries’ conceptual tools for classifying phenomena were ‘too strong’, and with this I mean that it
was possible to classify (almost) every phenomenon in every of the four categories (divine, demonic, natural or
fraud), as we will see in our case-studies. Illicit magic could thus potentially always usurp the whole of magic.
11 Schaffer (1987); and later works such as Fouke (1997).
4
Catholicism. Even before the formal revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 (fig. 1), the
majority of Huguenots had already been converted. Some clandestine circles still existed,
however, and ‘the faithful’ believed that these harassments were the final ordeals which
preceded the apocalypse and their ‘liberation’. These millenarian ideas were fuelled by the
prophecies of Pierre Jurieu, an exiled Huguenot, whose letters circulated widely,12 and they
believed that the first signs of their rightfulness, that their creed was the ‘true faith’, were
already apparent. Many people heard the sound of psalms and trumpets coming from the sky,
and they assembled at night to hear the angelic voices.13
For them, the anticipated divine intervention came with Isabeau Vincent’s prophecies. Her
words affected the conscience of the new converts and gave the suppressed a voice. The
preachers and prophets who came in her wake were mostly children, women and idiots, but
they gave the Protestants of the region, peasants or pauperized artisans, a renewed identity.
After singing psalms, the prophets fell to the ground and cried in ecstasy: ‘I see the Heavens
opened. O, how lovely the angels are.’ Another was beating her breast because the Holy Spirit
was tormenting her, and a third claimed that the Spirit was at the end of her finger. They felt
that the angels were all around them.14 Crowds gathered around the diviners and it became a
‘sacred theatre’15 with a social, dramatic and religious meaning. The authorities were aware
of the threat: they imprisoned Isabeau and broke up the assemblies. In February 1689, the
gathered crowd resisted the royal troops, convinced as they were of their invulnerability. One
prophet even asserted that they were protected by a multitude of invisible angels ‘white as
snow and tiny as a finger’.16 Yet the troops opened fire and killed some three hundred people.
After this disaster, the movement went underground, to revive again after a decade. This led
to the rebellion of the Camisards, which lasted for more than ten years, involving thousands of

12 Jurieu, L’accomplissement des Propheties, ou la delivrance prochaine de l’eglise (1686). See also the telling
subtitle: ‘Ouvrage dans lequel il est prouvé, que le Papisme est l’Empire Antichrêtien, que cet Empire n’est pas
élogné de sa ruine ; que la persecution presente peut finir dans trois ans & demi. Aprés quoi commencera la
destruction de l’Antechrist, laquelle s’achevera dans le commencement du Siecle prochain : Et enfin le regne de
Jesus-Christ viendra sur la terre.’
13 See e.g. the polemical descriptions in Jurieu (1988), deuxième année, lettre VII, 49.
14 Garrett (1987), p. 27.
15 Cf. Misson (1707), translated as The Cry; see also Garrett, (1987), I. I cannot expand on this interesting notion
here.
16 Ibid., p. 28.
5
people fighting against royal troops. It was an impossible war, which ended in decimation and
exile.17
These prophecies and the newly found faith of the Huguenots took the Catholics by
surprise, and they tried to explain it. The interpretations available, which followed the
conventional categories in explaining wonders and drew on a long history of prophecy,18
were summarised by a contemporary: ‘Some people have treated this Event, as an Intrigue
and Cheat; others as a Delusion, that weak Minds are easily capable of, in Matters of
Religion; some have ascribed it, to a Possession by the Devil, others again to some bodily
Distemper, which though natural, might have Symptoms alike surprizing.’19 Fraud, demonic
possession and a natural illness of mind or body were perceived by many to be the three
possible explanations of these wondrous phenomena. A fourth, divine intervention, was the
preferred account of the prophets and their followers.20 Crucial for deciding between these
explanatory models were the bodily states of the prophets, who seemed to perform unnatural
and almost impossible acts, such as preaching while asleep and strangely contorting their
limbs. Traditional theology placed importance on the content and circumstances of the
prophecies in distinguishing between divine, demonic and natural divination;21 the medical
critique, however, which focussed on the bodily symptoms, gradually became more
important, also in theology. In England the medicalisation of the ‘enthusiasts’ was
championed by Burton, Casaubon and More.22 In France, on the other hand, the Catholic
Church had incorporated visions, prophecies and apparitions within Counter-Reformation
spirituality. The idea of a continuing divine intervention in the natural order was supported by

17 For the episode, see Garrett (1978); de La Gorce (1950); Crete (1992); Joutard (1976) and (1977).
18 On prophecy, see Walsham (1999); Nicolli (1990); Smoller (1994); Burns (2002). The debates considered of
course drew on older controversies, such as the one on the weapon-salve (see Part II), and informed later ones
such as Mesmerism and the case of the convulsionaries of Saint-Médard.
19 Excerpt of Beman’s History of the Edict of Nantes in Lacy (1707), p. 4.
20 God, demons, human deceit and nature were the four causes involved. Natural causes could be distinguished
into illnesses of body and mind (material versus spiritual). Those categories, however, were not always strictly
separable and interacted in complex ways (e.g. psychosomatic phenomena; demons profited from human
wickedness and deceit or from a mental illness).
21 Del Rio (1599-1600), IV.
22 As a reaction to the atheist threat posed by radicals, they still subscribed to the possibility of demonic
intervention however.
6
the ecclesiastical elite and they published, for instance, the mystical experiences of a nun.23
The occurrence of hostile prophets on their own soil, preaching against Catholic rituals and
spirituality, therefore prompted shock and consternation.
The first reactions were diverse and disordered. Priests tried to exorcise Isabeau by means
of holy water and her body was examined for signs of the devil,24 yet without any apparent
result. Even in prison she and the other children kept preaching and singing. They were
examined by physicians, but these were mocked by the prophet’s followers who claimed that
the physicians were not able to find any disease. Flottard, a sympathizing witness, wrote
sarcastically: ‘The learned and famous College of Physicians at Montpellier judged otherwise
of this matter [than the priests]. (...) As these Physicians were much more used to the Study of
Nature, than to look into Things supernatural, they would neither affix the Name of Prophet,
nor of Demoniack, to the inspired children; nor could they find sufficient ground to ascribe to
them any bodily Distemper, as the cause of their Agitations and Discourses.’ According to
him, it was also impossible to see them as impostors, conspirators or idiots and the case left
the physicians baffled. None of the explanatory models available for the physicians seemed to
fit the case. Flottard concluded: ‘those Doctors thinking it necessary to make Report and
Judgement of the Case, as it became them for their own reputation; a Brand therefore must be
fixed upon the Inspired, and no better one could be found than that of FANATICK, for in all
Ages as well as ours, the Prophet was accounted Fool, and the Inspired a Madman.’25

23 Du Bois (1628); and many references in books published at the middle of the century. See Heyd (1995), pp.
74-75.
24 Jurieu (1988, first published 1689), Troisième année, lettre III, 21: ‘Elle prononce fort juste ce qu’elle dit de
Latin & fort intelligiblement. Ses mouvements ne font points violents, elle ne s’agite point, elle sort les bras du
lit & en fait quelques gestes fort bien reglés. Sa voix est claire & intelligible, mais sans éclat, elle remüe les
levres, mais peu & sans aucune apparance de convulsion: des Medecins l’ont examinée dans cet état & non rien
reconnu qui sente aucune maladie ni affection corporelle. (...) Elle a été transportée de lieu en lieu, tantôt à Cret,
tantôt dans l’hopital de Grenoble tantôt dans un couvent, de filles qui est prés de Grenoble. Et par tout elle a
continué de tomber en extase & de parler dans ses extases. On la rasée, on luy a ôté tout ce qu’elle avoit d’habits
& de linges, pretendant qu’elle pouvoit avoir un charme caché quelque part : quelques Prêtres l’ont même
exorcisée avec de l’eau benite, comme si elle eut été possedée. Mais rien n’u a fait, elle est toûjours la meme.’
On the importance of the body in miracles, see Camporesi (1988); and Schaffer (1996).
25 ‘Testimony of Flottard’ (1706-7) in Lacy (1707), pp. 74-78. Another strategy was to discredit the prophets by
accusing them of sexual excesses and impertinencies. A movement of youngsters of mixed sexes which
expressed themselves in extravagant behaviour and communicated the ‘gift’ by touching or kissing were
particularly prone to these accusations.
7
De Brueys (1640-1723), a new convert himself who stayed loyal to his new Catholic faith,
judged otherwise in the first well-orchestrated theoretical challenge to the movement. He
argued that fraud was involved and his Histoire du fanatisme de notre tems (1692) was an
elaborate conspiracy theory. According to him, the Protestant countries were worried because
of the Catholic dominance and the many recent new converts. Therefore they waged war with
France at its borders, used secret agents to make trouble inside the country,26 and opened a
school in the Dauphiné to teach ‘the art to foretell’.27 To kindle a political revolution, De
Brueys thought, the Protestants needed miracles, and since heaven is not favourable towards
them, they had to create these miracles themselves.28 (Fig. 2) This interpretation was
enhanced by the political context and by some of the prophecies, which were explicitly
political in nature,29 and De Brueys’ book became the standard account of the revolution of
the Camisards.
The physiology of prophecy was crucial in the arguments of both the prophet’s advocates,
such as Jurieu and Flottard, and their Catholic opponents. The former referred to biblical and
historical accounts of similar bodily behaviour by canonised prophets. They claimed,
furthermore, that this extraordinary behaviour could not be intentional, which ruled out the
possibility of fraud. For the latter, it was an indication of fraud, demonic involvement or
psychic illness. The latter two accusations could reinforce each other, because melancholic
disposition and weakness of reason was often claimed to be a preparation for demonic
intervention. Both were ascribed to a strong imagination, which stimulated strange fancies
and clouded reason. The physiology of prophecy was dependent on a physiology of the
imagination, and because the imagination plays a crucial role in the interpretation of

26 Jurieu’s role was crucial here. He had predicted that Willem of Orange would become king of England and
that a new and better age for the Protestants was nearby. Some, however, claim that Willem got the idea to
invade England from Jurieu. For a response in France, see e.g. the comments of Papin, an Anglican converted to
Catholicism, in Journal des Sçavans (JdS) 26/01/1693: ‘La tolérance des Protestants & l’autorité de l’Eglise, ou
réponse au libelle de M. Jurieu.’
27 ‘Il leur chargea la memoire de plusieurs passages des Psaumes & de l’Apocalypse, leur apprit à faire des
grimaces & des postures extravagantes, à battre des mains sur leur teste, à se jetter à la renverse, (...) & pour faire
des imprecations contre l’Eglise Catholique, & contre les Prêtres.’ JdS 21/06/1692.
28 De Brueys (1709), p. xxv.
29 The hopes of the Huguenots were directed to William, the new king of England. A female prophet, for
example, saw him in a vision, coming to France through the sky together with one hundred thousand soldiers.
Someone else predicted battles in Switzerland, that deliverance was coming and that they would be able to take
protestant communion at Easter. Garrett (1987), p. 26.
8
prophecies and divinations, I now have to give a more detailed description of its nature and
functions. I will show that the physiology of the imagination was important in people’s
understanding of the four categories invoked to explain divination.

Spirits and the imagination

Every period has its fashionable concepts which seem to be able to solve all problems. One
might call such concepts ‘boundary concepts’ after Star and Griesemer’s boundary objects,
which are objects functioning in different discourses and connecting diverse groups of people.
I prefer, however, to speak of ‘floating concepts’ because (contrary to boundary objects) they
are only vaguely defined and have almost no meaning in themselves.30 They are often not
debated for their own sake, but their function is to make meaningful discourse on other
phenomena possible. In the late seventeenth century, the animal spirits and the imagination
were such ‘floating concepts’. Both formed the mysterious connection between soul and
body, but it was widely acknowledged that nobody could demonstrate anything more definite.
Le Brun, an oratorian theologian, defined the animal spirits in a small glossary as a ‘fluid of a
subtle nature’31 and Nicholson, physician and apostate French Prophet, wrote about ‘this
Juice, whatsoever it be.’32 Despite (or better, because of) this vagueness, these spirits
functioned in the most diverse contexts, from medical to fictional literature,33 and were
invoked to solve all kinds of problems. Imagination and animal spirits were intimately
connected. Sir Kenelm Digby, famous for his treatise on the weapon-salve, wrote that these
‘intern spirits’ served as ‘centinells, to bring their discoveries to their General, viz. to the

30 Star and Griesemer, (1989). Without necessarily taking all their theoretical bias, they make the interesting
point that some objects make communication between very different contexts possible, without necessarily
presupposing a consensus about these objects. According to them, these objects are ‘robust enough’ to make this
possible and to keep their identity. I argue that some concepts lack a (robust) identity, but by their constant use in
different contexts they make meaningful talk in these contexts possible; they ‘create’ meaning. ‘Magnetism’ is
an example for the eighteenth century, ‘postmodernism’ would be a good contemporary example.
31 Le Brun (1702), p. 46. (cf. infra)
32 Nicholson, A Brief Treatise of the Anatomy of Humane Bodies (1709); cited in Schwartz (1978), p. 32. Bohn,
an anatomist from Leipzig, considered in his Circulus (1710) the nature of animal spirits to be similar to light
(after Willis), or air (after Mayow), but decided in favour of a similarity with fluids. Things were even more
complex since animal spirits became confused with the other kinds of spirits during the seventeenth century (see
the argument in Putscher (1974)).
33 E.g. Van Sant (1993); see Frasca-Spada (2003) for more references.
9