The Cudgel of Demons
Fustis Daemonum · Girolamo Menghi, 1584
Girolamo Menghi was a Franciscan friar known in his own time as “the father of the exorcists’ art.” Fustis Daemonum, first published in 1584 as a companion to his earlier Flagellum Daemonum, is not a work of theory alone: it is a working manual, a sequence of prayers, adjurationsFormal commands addressed directly to a spirit, invoking a higher authority, rather than requests or prayers addressed to God on the spirit's behalf., and blessings written for a priest standing in front of the thing itself.
Translating it means sitting with an era's most direct confrontation with darkness, in its own words and its own procedural detail, rather than at a psychological remove from it.
Its use to the reader's own will toward the good lies less in the demons it names and categorizes than in the discipline and steadiness it demands of the one who faces them — a formal, repeatable posture toward what resists the good, rather than an improvised one.
The translation itself is now complete. What remains is composition: its front matter and back matter are both still waiting to be laid out and set, after which, like the rest of this list, it awaits final formatting and editing.
Read an Excerpt ▾
The Exorcist must take care not to give credence to an unclean Spirit which declares itself to be the soul of some wicked man (a thing they are wont often to assert), lest men be led thereby into that Heresy which holds that the souls of wicked men, after death, are converted into Demons, or into whatsoever brute Animals are congruous to their deserts — a Heresy which Augustine, in his book Of Heresies, chapter 86, lays at the feet of Tertullian. What it was, however, that could have moved Tertullian to fall into this error, I confess I do not see, unless perhaps it was that saying of the Lord, spoken to the most wicked Jews in the Gospel of John: You are of your father the Devil.
From all these things it is plain what must be answered to Demons asserting such things: namely, that this is false, and heretical, and contrary to the determination of the Holy Roman Church. And the Exorcist ought to preach to the bystanders that this is by no means to be believed; nay rather, it is to be fled from, and condemned by all the faithful of Christ, as a heretical thing, and a device found out by the Devil.
Bologna
Emilia-Romagna, Italy
Girolamo Menghi’s Fustis Daemonum was first printed at Bologna in 1584, when the city belonged to the Papal States.
Reviewing this book, or writing about it? Request a review copy.
Use ← → to browse titles, next: On the Manner of Discerning and Healing the Bewitched