THAT THE PYTHIA HAD BEEN inspired by a demon, and that her oracles ceased with the coming of Christ, was an early modern commonplace—but it was not dogma. Rhodiginus, as we have noted, saw no contradiction in also decrying the oracles as the work of cunning priests, requiring nothing of the supernatural to compose their verses. In this he was not alone: scholars of all stripes continued to reject the Pythia as a fraud, a tradition that culminated with Antonie van Dale, and his adapter Fontenelle, in the 1680s. Others held that oracular prophecy could be explained partly or even entirely by natural causes of one kind or another: the influence of the stars, or a derangement of the soul by inflamed humours or narcotic vapours, or both. The oracles, then, could be seen as a supernatural effect, a natural effect, or a mere counterfeit.
This triad was regularly acknowledged as exhaustive: as Sir Thomas Browne put it, ‘Men looked upon ancient oracles as natural, artificial, demoniacal, or all.’1 The same triad could apply to any marvel, any case of witchcraft or possession. In 1599 the peasant girl Marthe Brossier appeared at the Parisian court, allegedly possessed by the Devil, and able, without moving her lips, to speak languages she had never learned—an engastrimyth, like Jacoba, only Brossier did not claim to predict the future. On reviewing her symptoms and behaviour, the royal physicians commented, ‘Everything which remains to be specified here must of necessity be referred to one of three causes—sickness, pretence, or diabolic possession.’2
The physicians concluded that the possession was genuine. A second group, whose report was quickly written up and published by Michel Marescot, thought Brossier a fraud. They had witnessed nothing that was, in Marescot’s words, ‘above the common laws of nature’. Some of Brossier’s alleged symptoms were denied outright, others explained away. Invoking the same explanatory triad, Marescot decided that there was in Brossier ‘nothing of the Devil; many things invented; a few ailments’.3 If Jacoba of Rovigo offered scholars a contemporary parallel for the diabolic Pythia, Marescot’s Brossier could have figured the other Pythias, distempered and fraudulent. The physician knew well how many apparent marvels could be explained by the secret operations of nature, for he was familiar with the works of the modern philosophers: Levinus Lemnius, Girolamo Fracastoro, and ‘that which a learned man of the time has written on miracles’.4 This last was probably Pietro Pomponazzi, the great theorist of nature, whose remarks on the oracles we shall examine in the next chapter. Marescot must also have known Foesius’s Hippocrates, construing the engastrimythic voice as a symptom of quinsy.5 Gabriel Naudé, who helped disseminate the work of Pomponazzi and other natural philosophers among the savants of seventeenth-century France, would later defend Marescot’s findings.6
To the extent that Marescot’s ideas reached back to Pomponazzi and forward to Naudé, he may be said to have played a minor part in the intellectual tradition, or series of traditions, that have come to be known as libertinisme érudit—in part, the search for naturalistic and sociological explanations of popular marvels. Two generations of scholars, especially in France and Italy, have characterised these traditions as a heroic revolt against theological orthodoxy, or even Christianity itself; Anglo-American scholars have been more hesitant to reach this conclusion.7
The oracles, too, played their part in these traditions, and the ghost of heterodoxy haunts the following two chapters, which investigate the Pythia under the conditions of nature and fraud respectively. If it was common belief that the oracles had been the work of the Devil, and had ceased with the coming of Christ, then to deny these may have been an act of radicalism or impiety, bound up with the libertin currents that reached France from Italy around 1600. The cast of such a narrative is certainly illustrious: Pomponazzi, Cardano, Vanini, La Mothe Le Vayer, the Theophrastus redivivus, and, of course, Fontenelle—libertin champions one and all.8
But that narrative, while it passes neatly from one figure to another, has three weaknesses. First, it ignores works outside the established libertin canon, both those of other countries and those of philosophical moderates, who struggled to find a balance between naturalistic and theological explanations of marvellous phenomena like the oracles. Second, as a philosophical narrative, it undervalues the verbal textures of its subjects, with the result that certain views appear more perspicuous, and more perspicuously radical, than closer examination reveals them to be.9 Third, and perhaps most seriously, it assumes that orthodoxy, and therefore heterodoxy, are fixed quantities, intrinsic to given ideas or given authors. In a telling passage on the oracles, Henri Busson wrote, ‘It is easy to conceive how the rejection of the traditional thesis affected religious faith’.10 It is, indeed, easy. But whether such a rejection did affect religious faith is another matter, and one not investigated by Busson or his scholarly heirs. Without a more detailed study of the subject, we cannot simply assume that libertin views of the oracles were heterodox. Heterodoxy, when it exists, exists in the reading eyes, rarely in the scribbling pen. In other words, it is specific to a community of interpreters, such as the sequence of Italian philosophers who condemned Pomponazzi’s views on miracles in the later sixteenth century. More often than not it is a chimaera, conceived by modern scholars when it is easy to conceive.
Of the libertin descriptions of the pagan oracles, the majority are too ambiguous to interpret with certainty: ideas are floated, and then rejected, or juxtaposed with others, lacking firm statement on the matter. Both naturalist theories and the idea of fraud shade finely into the common belief in demonic activity. One of my intentions in the following chapters is to undermine confidence in the reading of these texts, and ultimately to substitute, for the discourse of heterodoxy, an analysis of function. The Russian critic Vladimir Propp, making a similar turn in his seminal work on folklore, discovered a deeper unity beneath the apparent heterogeneity of the tales he examined.11 We, too, shall find similarity more fundamental than difference. For most natural philosophers and libertins, just as for devout theologians and witch hunters, the oracles functioned rhetorically as the antithesis of true revelation, or of the true acquisition of knowledge by philosophical and scientific inquiry. In this respect their views were quite amenable to orthodoxy. When ink started flowing not just in disagreement but in outrage, it was always because something more important was perceived to be at stake: the uniqueness and superiority of Christianity, for instance, or the authority of the Church Fathers—‘those ancient oracles, those old oaks of Dodona’.12 The debates on the nature of the pagan oracles thus reflected the demands of Christian history, which among the learned became, over two centuries, central to Christian identity.
1 Thomas Browne, ‘Of the Answers of the Oracle of Apollo at Delphos to Croesus King Of Lydia’, in Miscellany Tracts (1684), in Works, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 4 vols. (London, 1928), IV, p. 121. See Antonio Bernardi at chapter three, n. 106, or Girolamo Cardano at n. 186.
2 [Michel Marescot], Discours veritable sur le faict de Marthe Brossier de Romorantin, pretendue demoniaque (Paris, 1599), p 18: ‘tout ce que dessus restant à specifier cy apres, doive necessairement se referer de trois causes à l’une, qui sont maladie, feintise, ou possession diabolique.’ On Marescot and the Brossier case, see Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (London and New York, 2004), pp. 40–59. On the three options for explaining possession, see the elegant summary in D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Exorcism and Possession in England and France (London, 1981), pp. 14–15, and p. 37 in relation to Marescot. Philip C. Almond, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England: Contemporary Texts and Their Cultural Contexts (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 38–39, finds a similar conceptual framework in England.
3 [Michel Marescot], Discours veritable sur la faict de Marthe Brossier de Romorantin, pretendue demoniaque (Paris, 1599), p. 13: ‘par dessus les loix communes de nature’, and, p. 6: ‘Nihil a Daemone: Multa ficta: A morbo pauca.’
4 [Marescot], Discours, pp. 29–30: ‘ce qu’un docte homme de ce temps a escrit des miracles’.
5 See chapter two above, p. 49.
6 [Gabriel Naudé], Iugement de tout ce qui a esté imprimé contre le Cardinal Mazarin ([Paris, 1650]), pp. 310–311.
7 This division is perhaps best represented by two authors: René Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1943), on the Continental side, and Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford, 2003), pp. 80–98, on the other. Other significant works include Giorgio Spini, Ricerca dei libertini: La teoria dell’impostura delle religioni nel seicento italiano (Rome, 1950); J. S. Spink, French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire (London, 1960); Tullio Gregory, Etica e religione nella critica libertina (Naples, 1986); and Françoise Charles-Daubert, Les libertins érudits en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1998).
8 Theophrastus redivivus, ed. Guido Canziani and Gianni Paganini, 2 vols. (Milan, 1981), II, pp. 380–381; Gianni Paganini, ‘Fontenelle et la critique des oracles entre libertinisme et clandestinité’, in Fontenelle: Actes du colloque tenu à Rouen du 6 au 10 octobre 1987, ed. Alain Niderst (Paris, 1989), 333–349.
9 Some recent scholarship has shown an increased sensitivity to language and context; see, e.g., Ruth Whelan, ‘The Wisdom of Simonides’, in Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Richard Popkin and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden, 1993), 230–253.
10 Henri Busson, La Religion des classiques, 1660–1685 (Paris, 1948), p. 267: ‘Il est facile de concevoir comment le rejet de la thèse traditionnelle affectait la foi’.
11 Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale (1928), trans. Laurence Scott, rev. Louis A. Wagner (Austin, 1968), p. 23.
12 Jean-Pierre Camus, L’Avoisinement des protestans vers l’eglise romaine (Paris, 1640), p. 43: ‘ces anciens oracles, ces vieux chesnes de Dodone’.