LUDOVICO MARIA SINISTRARI: PART TWO (Demoniality)

demoniality-liseux-version
To quickly summarize what I’ve already written about Ludovico Maria Sinistrari: he was a Franciscan Friar who wrote a book that was basically a list of all of the sins that he could imagine. I wrote a lengthy blog post explaining Sinistrari’s beliefs about sodomy, and while I believe it was an informative and insightful post, it may have seemed slightly out of place in this blog. I mean, isn’t this supposed to be a blog about Satan and the paranormal and spooky stuff? Surely sodomy isn’t very spooky? Well, no, but the chapter on Sodomy from Sinistrari’s De Delictis is one of the two sections from that book that is widely available in translation, and I don’t like half-assing things. The other, more infamous section, which we are going to look at today, fits far more comfortably within the context of this blog; it is a chapter on Demoniality. Demoniality, for those of you who don’t know, is the act of having sex with demons. Oh yeah, now we’re getting back on track.

The story of the manuscript of Demoniality is as interesting as its contents. In 1872, a French bookseller named Isidore Liseax spent a short holiday in England rummaging about in some antique booksellers. In one of these stores, he found a short manuscript titled “Dæmonialitas” and bought it for sixpence. He took it back to France, translated it, and published it 3 years later. It wasn’t until I read an essay on Sinistrari by Alexandra Nagel that I realised why this story sounded so familiar. Remember what I wrote about the opening to Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni?

Liseux had never heard of Sinistrari, and he spent a long time trying to figure out who had written the text he’d purchased. Its author was listed as Ludovicus Maria of Ameno, but Liseux wasn’t able to find out any reliable information about such a man, and it wasn’t until he serendipitously opened a copy of the list of writers banned by the Vatican to just the right page that he discovered that this Friar of Ameno was the same person as the author of De Delictis. De Delictis had been unbanned for more than a century at this stage, and while it wasn’t widely available, Liseux managed tracked down a copy with a little persistence. Once he understood the nature of that work, he was certain that his manuscript on demoniality belonged to it. It followed the same structure as the other entries, and indeed De Delictis contained a chapter on demoniality. Liseux’s copy, however, while it started and ended the same way as the chapter in De Delictis, was largely expanded. The chapter in De Delictis is a mere 5-6 pages long, while Liseux’s manuscript was more than 80 pages. Liseux, by a stroke of extreme good luck, had found and paid next to nothing for the uncut edition of a paper on sexual intercourse with devils and spirits, the cut version of which was included in a book that was banned by the Vatican, the text of which had been written by a perverted, 17th century, Franciscan Friar. Holy quaint and curious volumes of forbidden lore!

There has been some discussion about the authenticity of the text. Why wasn’t the full text of Demoniality included in De Delictis? (Remember that De Delictis had actually only been banned for what it said about the qualifications of Judges, not for its details on sexual depravities. The lurid details in the apocryphal Demoniality pale in comparison to ‘the Doctrine of the Clitoris’ as laid out in the canonical chapter on sodomy.) Also, if you read Liseux’s introduction to his English translation of the text, several discrepancies arise. Alexandra Nagel has done an impressive job of listing and accounting for these discrepancies in her essay “Tracing the mysterious facts in Isidore Liseux’ publication of De Daemonialitate by Ludovico M. Sinistrari”, and if you’re interested in the details, her paper is better researched and more informative than what you’re going to read here. Suffice to say, the expanded version of Demoniality was probably intended to be included in a later edition of De Delictis that was never published. While I believe Nagel’s conclusion that Sinistrari was in fact the author, I wouldn’t be terribly disappointed if he wasn’t. This is a book about fucking monsters (and I use ‘fucking’ here as a verb, not an adjective). Does it really matter who wrote it?

Liseux found the manuscript in 1872, published the first French edition in 1875 and followed with an English Translation in 1879. This translation was popular enough to convince him to publish another section of De Delictis, that on sodomy, a decade later. One of the readers of Liseux’s translation of Demoniality was our old friend, Montague Summers. Summers was thoroughly impressed with the contents of the work but not the translation. In 1927, he re-translated Demoniality from the original Latin and wrote an introduction and set of notes to go with the text. I own a copy of Summer’s translation, but Liseux’s is available online. Summers spells Sinistrari’s first name ‘Lodovico’ (here and in his other works), but I haven’t seen that spelling anywhere else.

demoniality-summers-version Demoniality (The Montague Summers Edition) – Lodovico Maria Sinistrari
Dover Occult – 1989 (This translation first published in 1927)

The book starts off explaining that demoniality is a separate offence to bestiality. Bestiality is having sex with an animal, but while demons are alive, they are not entirely corporeal and therefore don’t really count as animals. Sinistrari knows what demons are not, but it’s trickier to say what exactly they are. He distinguishes between evil demons who only fuck people to bring them into the power of Satan and a far less dangerous class of spirits who only fuck because they’re horny. These other spirits are composed of incubi and succubi. (Incubi are male spirits who fuck females, and succubi are female spirits who fuck men.) Surprisingly, most of what Sinistrari has to say is on the less malevolent, horny spirits, and the result is that this text feels more like a book on cryptozoology than a book on traditional demonology.

This succubus is a bit little. That man is a nonce.

In fact, if like me, you have an interest in books about cryptozoology/the paranormal/the Fortean, you’re very likely come across references to this text. Sinistrari’s descriptions of fuckable spirits are broad enough that they seem to fit many of my favourite monsters. Sinistrari argues, with evidence from Saint Anthony, that the gods, centaurs, fauns and nymphs of Paganism were all real entities and that the stories of them seducing humans were actually true. Montague Summers, in the introduction to his translation of Demoniality, argues that both the Jinns of Islam and the fairies and leprechauns from W.B. Yeats’ Celtic Twilight (an awesome book) fit Sinistrari’s decription perfectly. Hmmmmm, what other group of unproven creatures have been compared to fairies? I believe that our old pal, Whitley Strieber argued that his visitors had a lot in common with the fairy abductors of celtic lore. If that’s not enough for you, Strieber actually presents Sinistrari’s ideas as evidence for his visitors in Communion; in fairness, the similarities between stories of alien abductions and visits from incubbi/succubi are striking. Dmitri Bayanov presents ideas from Sinistrari’s Demoniality in his essay Historical Evidence for the Existence of Relict Hominoids. A relict hominoid is basically a Bigfoot. Let’s just take a moment to acknowledge then that Demoniality is actually a book about sexual intercourse with Satanic demons, the Great God Pan, leprechauns, genies, fairies, aliens and sasquatches. I can’t say for certain that Sinistrari specifically intended for his text to be interpreted this way, but given his reasoning and willingness to accept the authority of other writers, I really don’t think he would have had a problem with this interpretation.

priest-having-sex-with-bigfoot-an-alien-and-a-demon It’s all good, baby!

According to Sinistrari, Incubi and Succubi are surprisingly like people. They have physical needs and desires; they eat smells (solid food would be too much for them), and they fuck each other, people and animals. These spirits are endowed with both free-will and morality, and Sinistrari even suggests that they might have their own form of organized religion and worship. They are more spirity than humans and hence also more spiritual and closer to God. The fact that they are closer to God means that it’s as bad for them to have sex with us as it is for us to have sex with animals.

This weird logic means that for a human to have sex with an incubus or succubus is actually a dignifying rather than a shameful experience. Sinistrari never openly condones sex with this class of spirits, but it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t consider it to be all that bad. In terms of sin, he puts demoniality in the category of pollution. This means its comparable to getting or giving oral sex or a single finger up the bum. You might get an extra Hail Mary as penance after confessing it, but that probably wouldn’t stop you from doing it again.

Shagging one of Lucifer’s Henchmen is a different story; doing so is only ever done to improve your relationship with the Dark Lord. Satan’s malevolent spirit-servants are incorporeal and must either create a body out of filth or possess a corpse in order to be able to fuck. Also, they feel no joy when they’re getting rode. If you shag one of these, you are going to Hell. The sexual act itself would only count as pollution, but as it also serves as a contract with Satan, it becomes a damnable offence. The problem is that most people don’t know the difference between a friendly neighbourhood succubi and a cacodaemon, and just as attempted murder is as bad as murder, attempted sex with an evil demon is just as bad as sex with an evil demon. This means that a minor fling with an amorous Incubus could potentially land a person in as much trouble as bending over for the cock of Asmodeus. Now you know the difference, I hope you’ll think to look before you leap!

Another thing to be careful of is the way that spirits can alter their form. Regardless of their true appearance, demons seem to be able to appear in whatever form is most pleasing to their lover. This shapeshifting can get their lovers even deeper into sin. If a demon was to have sex with a man whilst appearing as that man’s sister, the man would be guilty of incest as well as demoniality. If the demon was to appear as that man’s dog, the man would be guilty of bestiality. Even if you knew full well that your lover was a demon and ask you asked it to look like a corpse for 10 minutes, you’d soon be guilty of necrophilia. Basically, roleplaying counts. You’re already in trouble for fucking a spirit; don’t make it worse by getting kinky.

But wait; wasn’t Sinistrari’s main problem with sodomy that it was sexual activity that didn’t lead to procreation? How is having sex with airy spirits any worse? Surely that doesn’ lead to procreation either! Well, actually…

Haven’t you read the Bible? Remember the Nephilim from Genesis? The Nephilim were a race of giants that were created when the Sons of God (fallen angels) mated with the daughters of men. Remember Jesus Christ. Who was his Da again? Now if he Bible contains stories of Spirits mating with humans, you’d better believe it’s possible. So how do they do it? Babies come when a penis sperms into a vagina; how can a spirit be expected to do this? Well, it used to be assumed that the spirits would turn into a succubus, fuck a man, save his cum, turn back into an incubus, fuck a woman and then fill her with the cum that they had taken, but there are a few problems with this theory. The first being that the resultant baby wouldn’t actually be demonspawn; it would be a perfectly normal human baby whose parents had never met. Another problem that Sinistrari notes is the fact that sperm rapidly loses its potency once its outside the body. Semi-corporeal demons would have no way of keeping the gip warm during the interlude between extracting it and injecting it. There’s other problems here too that I’m sure you can work out, and Sinistrari concludes that demons must cum their own cum and that this cum is capable of impregnating humans.

incubus An Incubus works his magic. Why is he standing in a circle of eggs?

Sinistrari claims that Romulus and Remus, Plato, Caesar Augustus, Merlin, and “that damnable Heresiarch yclept Martin Luther” were all the offspring of spirits. You’ll notice that with the exception of Martin ‘the Proddy’ Luther’, these were all great men. That’s because spirits are closer to God than humans. The only problem is that human/spirit offspring are the same as horse/donkey offspring; they may get the beneficial aspects of both their parents, but mules can’t reproduce. Augustus had a daughter (who died very young), and Romulus may have had a son named Aollios and a daughter named Prima (such claims have been contradicted), but as far as I know all the other lads mentioned were either infertile, gay or just didn’t fuck. As mad as Sinistrari’s claims might seem to us, there was research and twisted, but apparent, logic behind them.

What about the Nephilim though? Why is it that demonspawn used to be giants, but modern day demonspawn are regular sized? Well there are four elements, right? So there must also be four kinds of spirits: air spirits, fire spirits, water spirits and earth spirits. (As silly as this might sound, it probably made decent sense to people living in the 17th century.) The spirits that fucked the daughters of men were air and fire spirits (again this is logical; angels came from the sky), and because fire and air are the more expansive elements, their offspring, the Nephilim were giant. After the flood, the fire and air spirits didn’t want to come down to Earth anymore because it was too wet for them, and so the only spirits left to fuck humans were the smaller, more condensed, water and Earth spirits. When you follow Sinistrari’s reasoning, it becomes apparent that he was actually a very smart guy living in a very dumb age.

demoniality-title-page The subtitle of the work, “A treatise wherein is shown that there are in existence on earth rational creatures besides man, endowed like him with a body and soul, that are born and die like him, redeemed by our Lord Jesus-Christ, and capable of receiving salvation or damnation”, has a nice ring to it; don’t you think? It just slides off the tongue.

I have plenty more to say about Sinistrari, but I’ve already written more than 5000 words about him, and I doubt anyone is that interested. (If you ever want to chat about him, e-mail me or leave a comment!) Demoniality is genuinely one of the most interesting texts that I have come across, both for its history and content, and I’ve no doubt that I’ll be referring to it again. If you have an interest in demonology or cryptozoology, this is is a must-read. Both Demoniality and Peccatum Mutum are available online too, so you have no excuse other than being boring.

Ludovico Maria Sinistrari: Part One (Peccatum Mutum – The Mute Sin, alias Sodomy)

Ludovico Maria Sinistrari (1622-1701) was a Franciscan priest, professor and advisor to the Holy Inquisition, a real smart guy overall. He spent the last 12 years of his life writing a book called De Delictis et Poenis Tractatus Absolutissimus or The Most Absolute Treatise of Crime and Punishment. This tome was basically a list of all the crimes that people could commit and the appropriate punishments to go with them. Sounds like a pretty useful book for an inquisitor to have, right?

Sinistrari was thorough in his work, and De Delictis, not only contains chapters on perjury, blasphemy, homicide and the likes; the author goes into delicious detail on the sins of the flesh, including incest, bestiality and ‘sacrilege with a nun’. Surprisingly enough, the book was put on the Vatican’s list of banned books for more than 40 years, not because of its lewd details, but because of what it says about the necessary qualifications of judges.

Unfortunately, the entire 600+ pages of Latin text that makes up De Delictis has never, to my knowledge, been translated into English. As far as I know, only three sections of the book have been translated: the chapters on Lewdness (Homosexuality), Sodomy and Demoniality. A professor named Hugh Hagius translated and published a small run of the section on Lewdness, but I haven’t been able to get my hands on a copy. The other two sections were translated and published by a guy named Isidore Liseaux and are widely available. Demoniality came out in 1879, and due to its popularity, Liseaux went ahead publishing Peccatum Mutum – The Mute Sin, alias Sodomy in 1893. I usually don’t start with the Sodomy till I’m nearly finished, but today I’ll make an exception.

peccatum-mutum
First of all, Sinistrari has to lay out what sodomy actually entails. He believes that Sodomy proper is fucking and cumming inside an arse. Things get tricky when he considers the guilt of an arse fucker who cums outside of the bum. He tells of Dominicus Raynaldus, who concluded that “whoever has thus penetrated even without offering libation to the case, is to be sentenced to death, though not to be burnt after death”, but Sinistrari isn’t convinced. He seems to think that those who cum outside the arse probably only deserve to be tortured a bit. He’s firm but fair, and he notes that if a man bums once or twice but doesn’t cum inside the shitter, his torture should be mitigated; however, no such leniency should be shown to repeat bummer who tries to beat the system by bumming freely but withdrawing to jip.

Is the fuckee as guilty as the fucker? Well, if they wanted to get bummed, then they’re getting executed. If they didn’t want to get bummed, it’s up to them to prove it. If the bummee is younger than 18 years old, they should only be “scourged in a jail, or confined a long time in it; or he should be dragged for a few moments through a blazing fire”. If the bummee is less than 14 years old, they go unpunished, unless they are “a very cunning lad” who “is up to trickery”. These cunning lads, some of whom are as young as 10, “ought to be caned inside the jail, or even flogged around the prison yard”. So if you walked into your house and saw a man sodomizing your 10 year old son, you’d have to be able to prove that your son hadn’t been up to any tricks if you wanted to save him from a whipping after his rape.

Sodomy, of course, is not exclusively practiced by gay men. Sinistrari considers whether a “husband may penetrate into his wife’s rear vase in order to get up his mettle, provided he has no intention or runs no risk of discharging in it”. He doesn’t condone such behaviour, but he definitely doesn’t consider it to be too serious. A spot of anal foreplay is a mere peccadillo. Naughty but nice, eh Sinistrari? This is all a bit surprising given that he later claims that sodomizing a woman is worse than sodomizing a man. I can’t remember the exact quote, but I believe it was something along the lines of; ‘Sure, if you’re bumming a man, the bum was your only choice, but why would you bum a woman when she has a lovely pussy that’s designed to take in your gip!’ By similar logic, it’s also worse to bum your wife than it is to bum a prostitute.

I want to add a quick autobiographical interlude while we’re on this topic. I first heard of anal sex when I was 10 or 11. My friends and I were kicking football down the road from our houses, when one boy, let’s call him Joe, stopped the game and asked, ‘Did yous know that you can have sex in the bum?’ There was a pause of a few seconds as we let that sink in. ‘Yeah, that’s how ye always have sex,’ another boy responded. His response was hardly surprising to anyone who had seen his drawings of the female anatomy. The genitalia in such pieces resembled a diamond shaped crease which housed three holes of equal diameter: one brown, one pink and one yellow: three separate but inter-changeable components of one busy orifice.

‘No, I don’t mean up the fanny, I mean sticking yer dick up the actual hole that the shit comes out of; it’s called anal sex and your da does it to your ma every night.’
We were impressed, but nobody was surprised. By age 11 we all knew that all adults engaged in an innumerable amount of depraved acts. The most recent additions to our list had been the revolting ‘rainbow shower’, the confusing ‘ice-cream lick’ and the abominable ‘toilet tart’.

‘That’s gross, you’d get shit on your willy,’ another boy exclaimed. He was a bit younger, and apparently, his willy had not yet become a dick. ‘Yeah, a shit smelling dick, then ye get a blow-job afterwards,’ I added; this was a good chance to show off my vocabulary. ‘I don’t know boys, you guys seem to think it’s gross,’ Joe, seeing that we were intrigued, spoke with delighted smugness, ‘it might seem gross at first… but it’s like I always say… What comes out, must go back in”

I don’t know if I appreciated quite how funny that line was at the time he said it, but I do recall thinking it was very funny indeed. It has stayed with me for nearly 20 years, and I like to quote it whenever the unspeakable sin of the Greeks comes up in conversation.

Anyways… Sinistrari considered sodomy a crime punishable by death for any layperson found guilty of it. Things are a bit different for Sodomite priests, but it’s a little unclear as to why and how this was so. Sinistrari lays out the Franciscans’ method for dealing with bummers within the order. The Sodomites would be stripped naked in front of all members of the order, soundly scourged (“soundly” means two whippers instead of one), and then pushed through a fire. The fire would hurt like fuck, but the real reason for this part was to the burn and scar the victim’s skin so they could be identified them as a bummy-man in future. Also, the punishment for sodomy should always involve fire. Duh! Remember what God did to Sodom? Oh, and after the fire, the victim was locked up in a cage and fed only bread and water 3 times a week for a total duration of 3 years, and this was best case scenario for a Sodomite priest. If they had been found guilty of multiple bummings, they would continue to recieve several scourgings a week during their time in the cage. If the public somehow found out about the priest’s sins, he would be hung. The punishment was more to preserve the good name of the Catholic church than it was to deal with the sinner.

Now, what if you agree with what Sinistrari has to say about Sodomy but you still feel the urge to go out and bum? Well, Sinistrari acknowledges that if a man is tempted by the arse of another, he “may lawfully kill the person compelling him to commit sin.” That’s right folks. Want to bum, but don’t want to be a bummer? BE A KILLER. Well, in fairness, Sinistrari doesn’t really promote that idea; he accepts it only if there are no alternatives. Still, I thought it an interesting insight into the perversity of Catholic thought.

Ok, let’s recap what we have learned so far. We know that sodomy is when an arse is fucked and came in. We know that sodomizers and sodomizees are equally as guilty. And we know that both men and women can be sodomized.
Keeping that in mind, let’s imagine a man having anal sex with his boyfriend. At the end, much to their mutual delight, the top blows his gip right up the bottom’s arse. It follows that the top has sodomized and is guilty of sodomy, and the bottom has been sodomized and is guilty of sodomy. Afterwards, they switch roles, and both lads have had to chance not only to commit sodomy, but also to sodomize. Happy days!
Now let’s imagine a male/female couple attempting the same feat. The man fucks his girlfriend in her ass and cums inside. He has sodomized and is guilty of sodomy, and his girlfriend has been sodomized and is guilty of sodomy. What now though? Is their night of passion over? Does the female never get the opportunity to sodomize back? What about lesbians? No sodomy for them at all? Sinistrari, 17th century, Franciscan friar though he may have been, seemed to believe in gender equality, and he seemed to think it was completely unfair that women were denied the chance to commit sodomy due only to their lack of the appropriate penetrative member.

“But of course women can sodomize!” I hear you say, “What about a finger or utensil up the bum?” Well, according to Sinistrari, a finger or dildo up the arse doesn’t quite cut the mustard. It’s a dirty practice of course, and he considers it pollution (a far less serious sin), but sodomy requires internal ejaculation (or at least the attempt to do so). He considers whether it’s possible if a woman could cum into another woman, but he regards this as unlikely. Interestingly, if a woman could come into another woman, it would count as sodomy regardless of the orifice. Now, if neither dildoing arses nor attempting to cum inside their partner’s holes through some form of erotic contortionism can deem a woman guilty of sodomy, is it at all possible for a woman to be a true sodomizer?

Well, I don’t want to be condescending here, but it seems to me, my good friend, that you have never heard of a little thing called the “doctrine of the clitoris”. It’s ok. there’s no need to be embarrassed. Lots of people haven’t heard of it yet. Sinistrari explains; “there is a particular part of the a woman’s body, which Anatamists call the clitoris. This part consists of the same tackles as a man’s yard, namely, sinews, veins, arteries, flesh and so forth. When in a chafe, it also resembles the yard. The clitoris distends with the rushing of seminal spirits, and, like the yard, is provided with a nut. At the top of the nut there is a hole”. Clitorises are funny things, and if they see too much use, they pop out. Yes, that’s right. A well-used clitoris is liable to burst the “exceedingly thin membrane that covers it” and rush out of its hidey-hole to remain dangling between the female’s legs for the rest of her life. A distended clitoris is often the size of a middle finger, but sometimes they are much bigger. In fact, “there was once at Venice a courtesan whose clitoris was the size of a gander’s neck.” Imposing clits are not overly common in polite European society, but in Ethiopa and other African countries, clitorises are burnt off at birth. This is because clitorises can get so big that they actually prevent the woman from being able to receive a penis into her vagina. Clits are the cause of several of the tales of women instantly turning to men. Popped clits don’t just look like cocks either; they act like them too. A clitoris is liable to grow “so big that it erects like a man’s yard, inticing them to coition, just as males”.

clits My friend Tim drew these pictures two years ago. They had nothing to do with Sinistrari, but they fit in pretty well here. Thanks Tim.

Now this is the interesting part. If a woman’s clit has popped out, it will swell and get hard as she gets horny. When this happens, the lascivious wretch might use it to “satisfy [her] filthy lewdness.” According to Sinistrari, women with wiggly, finger-like, distended clitorises like nothing better than impartially shoving these bizarre members into vaginas and anuses. That, dear readers, is how a woman can sodomize. This makes it rather easy to try a female accused of sodomy too; all you have to do is see if she has a huge clit. “Should the clitorus hang out in a woman, it is presumed she made use of it.” Case closed.

But what about the “must cum inside” rule that we talked of earlier? Well, Sinistrari does address this issue. He says; “If they make use of the clitoris as it is clearly demonstrated, in either of the female vases, they are guilty of downright sodomy; even thought the seed of the incuba does not enter at all into the case of the succuba, yet the crime is perfect in its kind. For there is copulation between them in due form, whilst generation can not ensue”. I can’t say I find this terribly convincing, but I am glad that he found a way to level the sodomy playing field. The punishment for female sodomites is same as for males. Women who clit men or women should be hung and burnt. Men and women who get clitted by women get the same treatment.

clitoris Just so you don’t think I’m making this up. (From page 13 of the book)

This post has become far longer than I expected it be, and if you have made it this far, I think you deserve a bit of a break before I start telling you about Sinistrari’s ideas on Demoniality (the fucking of demons). That text is more in line with the general theme of this blog, and you can expect the post on it at some stage in the next week or so. Until then, I want to make it very clear that I have been summarizing the ideas of a man who has been dead for more than 300 years, and I find his ideas both repugnant and very silly. The inherent homophobia and ignorance in his book is ludicrous, and the notion that we shouldn’t do something because it stops more people from being born is horrendous. The world is already horribly overpopulated, and I would encourage everyone to engage in sexual practices that don’t result in childbirth. Be safe, wear a condom, make sure your clitoris doesn’t pop out, and when in doubt, remember the schoolyard adage:
‘Up the Gee – HIV, but up the bum – no harm done.’