Demons and the Mind
As we have seen, when a servant of the Prior of Colchester was seized by a demon, he became physically violent and struck his friends with his hands (‘Sociis autem ei manus injicientibus’).[1036] However, once he was restored (‘redditus’) by the holy water of Thomas Becket, he claimed that it was not him who had been in control of his hands[1037] The demon had interrupted, or had been allowed entry because of an interruption in, the natural balance between body and mind[1038] For William of Canterbury, the fact that the man was unable to maintain this balance in his own body was symptomatic of his mental distress.
According to Hippocratic medical texts, the type of which, as we have seen, both Benedict and William likely had some knowledge, the ability to remember and comprehend lay in the mental faculties of the brain. The frontal lobe of the brain housed the common sense, which was also possessed by animals and allowed one to make basic judgements about the world around oneself (speed, distance, size) and which was fed information by the senses, hence its proximity to the sense-receptors in the face. Also in the frontal lobe was the imaginative faculty, which formed sensory stimuli into images. This information was passed on to the central, reasoning faculty which processed it into concepts and judgments (something that non-rational beasts could not do). Processed images were stored as memories at the back of the brain; these memories were literally imprinted on the wet brain matter, and memory could be compromised if the brain became too dry. The servant lost these mental faculties when possessed, and their restoration resulted in renewed self-control over his body.Many of the demoniacs cured at Becket’s shrine were described as being “restored” upon their cure. Matilda of Cologne was restored (‘restituta est’), as was Hardwin (‘restitutus est’).[1039] [1040] The use of the language of restoration was not exclusive to cases of demonic madness, and other mad pilgrims were also restored upon their cure; Ralph the Black, sent mad for refusing to allow his shipmates to complete a pilgrimage to Becket’s shrine, had to await his restoration (‘reddita suis redderetur’) in chains.51 Osbern, a mad knight, was restored (‘redditus est') by Thomas Becket.[1041] [1042] [1043] [1044] All of these cures imply that, when in a state of madness (both demonic and non-demonic), the person was not “right”, and thus needed restoration. Sufferers lacked the mind's natural restraint over the body. Sometimes, the loss of this restraint could reduce a person to a state that was barely human, as was the case with the wild man whose miraculous cure was quoted at the beginning of this chapter. 53 In other instances, it could cause a person to commit actions deemed socially and morally unacceptable, such as Matilda of Cologne's fatal attack on her own child, and near-fatal attack on another child at Canterbury.54 Thus, whether or not demonic interference was responsible for bouts of madness, the condition led to an unnatural state in which the mind no longer controlled the body, and the body was therefore subject to shocking and unrestrained urges. Demons appear to have bypassed the minds of their victims in order to use their bodies for their own means, hence the connection between demoniacs and behaviours commonly associated with demons, such as the gift of tongues (most often used to spout blasphemies). Such theories, however, were not alternatives to learned medicine and sat alongside them in the miracle collections, as is particularly evident in William of Canterbury's collection. William was unmistakably proud of his medical learning, and was quick to criticise alternative theories that he did not find plausible. For example, when the Italian epileptic, Hingram, suggested that his condition was caused by the cycles of the moon, William mused that perhaps the moon could induce a damp atmosphere that would negatively affect the humours of an epileptic, but stated that it certainly could not cause epilepsy.55 Demonic explanations for illness were not criticised in such a way, and William seems to have accepted them into his discourse on health and especially on madness. Demons were part of the natural world in which disease and illness existed, and were thus connected to both. When exploring medieval concepts of “natural” and “supernatural”, Bartlett looked to twelfth-century theologians, like Peter Lombard, for whom the natural world was made up of those things whose nature was known to man, and the supernatural world consisted of things whose nature was known to God alone.[1045] [1046] [1047] [1048] Demonic interference was a form of magic, an art with its routes in natural knowledge, and not in God.57