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| From Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus; Or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions, 2 vols. (London: J. Collins, 1681), vol. 1, frontispiece. |
Vocal Artifice: An Enlightenment
Theory of the Origins of Religion
From late antiquity through
the early decades of the eighteenth century ventriloquism was deeply embedded
in Christian discourses about demon possession, necromancy, and pagan idolatry.
The term itself, in its Latin derivation, meant literally “one who speaks from
the belly,” and it long held a place among many other specialized markers for
different types of divination, prophecy, and conjuring. As Reginald Scot
explained in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), “Pythonists” or
“Ventriloqui” speak in a “hallowe” voice, much different from their
usual one, and are “such as take upon them to give oracles” or “to tell where
things lost are become.” In demonological discussions, such nomenclature was
used to refer to those who were overcome by “a familiar spirit,” who spoke
during trances or fits in an apparently diabolical voice, or who claimed
soothsaying powers.
Much of the formative
discussion of ventriloquy in the Christian tradition focused on the story of
the Witch of Endor recounted in 1 Samuel 28, in which King Saul disguises
himself and visits a sorceress in hopes of summoning up the ghost of Samuel and
discerning the future of his battle against the Philistines. With the help of
the necromancer, Saul hears the prophet Samuel speak from beyond the grave—an apparent
success for the soothsayer that made for considerable anxious commentary in the
patristic literature and long afterward: Why would God allow necromancy, a
practice repeatedly abominated, to be use for divine purposes? Was this whole scene
not accomplished through the power of the devil? Was this apparitional voice of
Samuel real and prophetic, or only a diabolical illusion created by the enchantress
to trick a weakened Saul? The story bundled many crucial theological issues
together, but among the most intriguing to centuries of interpreters was the
question about the source of the ventriloquized voice—namely, who was speaking
and by what means or powers.
In the early modern versions
of this debate about Samuel’s ghost, interlocutors swung, as in the larger
controversies over witchcraft, between those who saw the power of the demonic
and the supernatural on display and those who supported increasingly
materialistic or skeptical explanations. Reginald Scot’s work, a leading
harbinger of dissent from long-standing demonic readings, shifted the blame,
comparing the woman’s powers to that constant Protestant bugbear of Catholic “magic”:
“Let us confesse that Samuell was not raised . . . and see whether this
illusion may not be contrived by the art and cunning of the woman, without anie
of these supernaturall devices: for I could cite a hundred papisticall and
counsening practises, as difficult as this, and as cleanlie handled.” Amid his
detailed explanations, Scot speculated that the diviner was a cunning
ventriloquist who “abused Saule” and her “counterfeit hollow voice.” In
the opposite camp, Joseph Glanvill, who, as a member of the Royal Society, was
committed to establishing an empirical base for the defense of Christian
supernaturalism, argued that it was “a real Apparition” and thought that
the ventriloquial explanation was nonsense: “It cannot certainly in any reason
be thought, that the Woman could by a natural knack, speak such as Discourse as
is related from Samuel, much less that she could from her Belly imitate
his Voice, so as to deceive one that knew him as Saul did.” For Glanvill—as
with the Mathers, Henry More, and George Sinclair—the contention that
necromancers, witches, and demoniacs were mostly frauds and mere sophistry. Diabolical
as well as prophetic utterances were part of a biblical world of spirits,
apparitions, and wonders that Glanvill and his various allies stood ready to
defend against the incipient challenges of skeptical critics.
The scriptural debate
over the Witch of Endor and the sources of Samuel’s voice had its lived
counterpart in the “sacred theatre” of possession that haunted seventeenth-century
Protestants and Catholics alike . . . Skeptics were inevitably contemptuous of
all such trickeries of the voice, all the supposed fraud of demoniacs and
soothsayers. In A perfect Discovery of Witches (1661), Thomas Ady
described ventriloquism as a commonplace scam used by impostors to make people “beleeve
that they are possessed by the Devil, speaking within them, and tormenting
them, and so do by that pretence move the people to charity.” In Leviathan (1651),
Thomas Hobbes, arguing for the prevalence of religious impostures, was
predictably scathing about vocal artifice, describing ventriloquism as a means
by which enchanters were “able to make very many men believe” that their own
voice “is a voice from Heaven.” If the construct still required further
sharpening, already it was being whetted for use against pious fraud. As
another British exposer of demonic displays explained in 1718 [Francis
Hutchinson, An Historical Essay Concerning Withcraft], “Some
Counterfeits can speak out of their Bellies with a little or no Motion of their
Lips. They can change their Voices, that they shall not be like their own. They
can make, that what they shall say be heard, as if it was from a different Part
of the Room, or as if it came from their own Fundament.” “Such persons are call’d,”
he said, “Engastriloques, or Ventriloquists.” (Leigh Eric
Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment [Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000], 138, 140-41)
