Thursday, November 5, 2020

Leigh Eric Schmidt on 17th and 18th-century Attempts to Explain the Witch of Endor and the Ghost of Samuel

 

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)

 

 



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