Explaining the early modern witch hunts continues to suggest new, and occasionally mysterious, interpretations. Most historians consider magic and demons to be fictional creations, yet for several hundred years Europeans' feared that witches and evil spirits were involved in a satanic conspiracy. Early modern English accounts of demonic possession blur the lines between fact and fiction. Victims actually exhibited symptoms identified with possession, even if supernatural origins remain questionable for the modern reader. To explain how possession was understood, Kirsten Uszkalo's new study, Bewitched and Bedeviled: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Early English Possession, offers a multidisciplinary approach based on both close reading and current psychological theories.
Her book is part of a series on cognitive studies that usually deals with literature and theater. Uszkalo's subject, however, enters living history, using methodology based on neuroscience and cognitive psychology to explain the behaviors of the possessed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Her reading of possession narratives shows similarities which seem to support an explanation of possession as performance. Uszkalo largely bypasses the cultural, social, or theological context of both the possessed and their exorcists in order to spotlight certain symptoms and behaviors.
As Uszkalo reviews, even early modern medical science diagnosed natural “diseases,” such as melancholy or hysteria, as causes for the afflictions that some considered supernatural. In chapter 1, she explains the similarity between the treatments for those maladies and those for possession. The duration of possession varied, as did its cure rate. The allegedly possessed presented a variety of symptoms. Some became catatonic, senseless, unresponsive to sight, sound, touch, and unable to move, staring blankly with gaping mouths. Others showed opposite effects, shouting blasphemy, contorting the body, shaking with seizures, and striking themselves or others. Victims often swung between these two extremes. Another common manifestation included vomiting up pins or stones. Uszkalo argues that demoniacs developed “conceptual and somatovisceral memory” (33) of such behaviors, integrating them into their bodies at the neurological level. The repetitive actions of the possessed enabled the symptoms to become embodied or actualized.
Uszkalo seizes on the emotion of “rage” as the basis for these performances, which became disease. She discounts derealization or dissociative disorder as possible psychological diagnoses for either hysteria or possession. Instead, extreme anger roils up powerful emotions to manifest as possession. In chapter 3 she analyzes rage using a model called “embodied cognition” (63). Repetitive performance transformed the actor into the demoniac, or, as Uszkalo puts it, “fits and torments … played out as complex and multimodal simulations informed by numerous categories and subcategories of shifting embodied and emotional perceptual knowledge” (67). Her term “microinteriority” indicates that the possessed person had physically internalized various social assumptions into bodily tissues and organs.
Often the suspicion arose that the possessed was faking the possession. For Uszkalo such a distinction becomes meaningless as the mere simulation of possession rewired and reworked the body to internalize the possession behaviors. Whether feigned or genuine, the active physiological performance affected the psychological status.
The possessed became a stage of activity. A performance, of necessity, requires an audience. Uszkalo uses the term “intersubjectivity” to note the conflict of the “self” as it is created during an interaction of individual and group (although that sounds to me like the conflict of ego and superego from psychoanalysis, which she claims has been largely discredited). In effect, the possessed infected others, whether through the empathy of family and audience, or imitation (“compathy,” as Uszkalo terms it) by observers.
Uszkalo examines dispossession, or the cure to the disease, in chapter 5. The solutions of the physicians and exorcists in treating the possessed (as well as hysterics) offered creative torments, intended to beat the will of the possessed back to normalcy. Concrete actions such as bloodletting, genital rubbing, emetics, or binding, were less effective than “affective coherence,” namely feedback from others that externally reinforced and confirmed the internal experience of the possessed. By acknowledging the feelings of the victim, a path was opened for healing through a rewiring of the brain and a return to health. Another form of validation for the demoniac was the imprisonment or execution of a witch on whom the possession was blamed.
Uszkalo's focus on the possessed rarely allows much insight into the impact on the accused witches. She does mention how the sources attribute supernatural causation to possession, such as refusing charity to an alleged witch or an imagined encounter with the devil in the shape of man or magical beast. Yet she does not really distinguish between “bewitchment” and “bedevilment.” The former often sought a human to blame, while the latter could vaguely hold “evil” responsible. Instead, she interchangeably concentrates on those performative behaviors which those kinds of possessions shared in common.
The possessed do not remain in the past. Uszkalo's conclusion offers a final example of relevancy concerning a relatively recent group event in upstate New York, although her one-page description does not adequately connect it to her subject. As for possessions in early modern England, however, Uszkalo presents some theoretical suggestions for understanding what was really happening. She has drawn on many good accounts of possession sources, including a few unpublished narratives. Uszkalo's models of performance and neuroscience offer intriguing viewpoints grounded in physical reality to understand encounters with supposed witches and demons.
