Part One 

THE VIRGIN BIRTH RECORD UNKNOWN  
IN A PREALEXANDRIAN EGYPT PERHAPS 
 
         Extraordinarily little is known of Egypt before its demise brought about by a CE and Virgin Mother Goddess treason against heterosexuality. It was a human traffic of babies presented by a man who was the supposed father, but rather a kidnapper, to conceal a same-gender relationship, which ultimately led to the criminal foundation of Christianity. Here is all that I have found, an article of archeological record which concerns a time before Alexander the Great and a man who aspired to the Greek influence of an Egypt which ceased to exist autonomously of the Mother Goddess worship of Isis and the posthumous origin of her son. 
It was after Greek influence, and the lies spread by the ancient prostitution presence of the customer to prefer a young man before a woman in sexual union. It is the reason that to this day a young woman becomes a commodity for the price of sex at the expense of her original preference for a first boyfriend she felt she was fair to say was his or her business to none but each other and trusted family and friends. 
https://rock.geosociety.org/.../8/pdf/i1052-5173-17-8-4.pdf  
        I apologize if this article gives no answer, but it is what I found prior to Greek influence on Egypt and prior to fake Virgin birth. 
 
THE POWER OF MAKE-BELIEVE (A POEM) 
 
Cigarettes and ashtrays and make believe, 
Cotton candy, apple sauce, hard liquor,  
Tombs full of gold, sealed with a curse,  
And a cradle high up on a bough. 
 
I was wondering who farted, 
Then I realized I was the only person in the room, 
So, it had to be me. Yet is a fart laid by someone when no one else is around really a fart? 
 
These and other things occur to me when I think of the power of immaculate conception. 
Nothing is real and substantially less material than reality that is too gross an idea to endure. 
 
[B.A.R.] 
 
 
Part Two

THE THEOLOGICAL PREOCCUPATION  
WITH CORRECT RELIGIOUS PRACTICEi 
 

The theological preoccupation with correct religious practice was born of the potent desire to find order and cosmological certainty in a very uncertain world: 
In brief, the practice of discerning spirits was a complicated technique for authenticating divine miracles through the systematic suggestion and elimination of alternate heuristic frameworks within which individual charisms could be understood. The logic of discernment proceeded along the following lines: Were miraculous phenomena, such as trances, truly supernaturally accomplished? If so, then were they due to the intervention of the divine or of a demonic spirit? If not, were they simulations—human deceptions? Or might they have resulted from an organic pathology or state of mental instability? 
In sum, though we might expect the discernment of spirits to be a purely supernaturalist and metaphysical branch of study, in fact discernment was, concurrently, a highly naturalized and empiricist discourse in the later Middle Ages and beyond. It was, in short, a form of scientific inquiry that sought to verify, as empirically as possible, the unseen causes of observable behaviors such as trance or prophesizing. 
The theory of the four humors, which was used in the Middle Ages to describe different personality types as well as different body types, assigned a "cold and moist" complexion to women, one dominated by the humor known as black bile. This particular physiological balance was said to engender a highly impressionable, melancholy temperament in women; melancholia, in turn, made women particularly prone to egocentric and delusional fantasies, in which they perpetually existed at the center of great dramas. According to Bartholomew the Englishman, melancholics suffered from all kinds of ridiculously grandiose fantasies, while Vincent of Beauvais simply noted that cold-complected individuals were prone to a "habit. . . called 'alienation of the mind,' which certainly either enfeebles them or brings about harm.” Antoninus of Florence explained that a humoral balance that was strongly melancholic could cause a permanent alteration of the senses, leading to mania and insanity. Significantly, for Antoninus "inordinate vigils, fasts, zeal, scrupulosity, or deep thinking" exacerbated a propensity toward melancholia.. Presumably women, already predisposed toward melancholia, should avoid excessive asceticism and intellectual challenges—yet these are, of course, precisely the kind of behaviors we find among women aspiring to religious authority. 
The theologian and bishop William of Auvergne, for example, warned of the existence of a demonic hierarchy of "anti-saints" modeled on the divine, but "in thrall to demons." The latter use their victims to "parallel and assimilate [infernal] orders to [celestial] orders. For instance, false apostles to God's holy apostles, and also false martyrs to God's holy martyrs, and in the same way with confessors and virgins." Personal confessors to visionaries, and even sometimes their hagiographers, openly wondered whether their spiritual charges were deceiving them and colluding with the ancient enemy: "If, in detriment to the truth, she lied repeatedly when speaking about God, about the saints, and about herself, then it necessarily follows that she cannot be a member of Christ, who is Truth, but a member of the Devil, who is a Lie and the father thereof." Meanwhile, popes from Innocent III onward warned against the unchecked enthusiasm of the masses for anyone credited with a miraculous healing, however spurious. By seizing control over canonization, he and his successors arrogated to themselves sole authority to define the realm of the immanent supernatural. As Innocent noted in one sermon, "We must beware, lest in seeking saintly patronage we give offense by using as intercessors persons whom God hates." 
Yet treatises explicitly devoted to the discernment of spirits were rather slow to appear. Some earlier works, such as Henry of Freimar's The Four Inspirations, likely composed in the early part of the fourteenth century, discussed the different origins of various miraculous behaviors but did not offer any specific recommendations to the reader about how to discern among them. We must wait until the year 1383 for a more pragmatic approach to the issue, when Henry of Langenstein, professor of theology at the University of Paris (and later the University of Vienna), composed On the Discernment of Spirits.. In turn, Langenstein was widely read in the Parisian circles frequented by Pierre D'Ailly and Jean Gerson. Although D'Ailly's two treatises On False Prophets address the question of discernment, it was his pupil Gerson who penned the most lastingly influential treatments of the issue, shaping the debate for generations to come. The following pages therefore focus on Gerson's On Distinguishing True Visions from False (1401), On the Testing of Spirits (1415), and On the Examination of Doctrines (1423). Like many of Gerson's compositions, these works are highly polemical yet extremely pragmatic, a combination that undoubtedly was instrumental to their success over the long term. This success stood in striking contrast to the reception of Gerson's work among his immediate contemporaries, which may be described as tepid. By the end of the fifteenth century they had become unqualified "classics" in the field, however, and they proved wildly popular in early modern print editions for centuries thereafter.  
Certain exorcists, like Girolamo Menghi, achieved a degree of fame for their compilations of liturgical exorcisms, which were then widely reprinted, read, and copied. The most important sources for transmitting these rites to later generations, however, come from three printed versions of such manuals: two incunabula and one early sixteenth-century work. The Coniuratio malignorum spirituum in corporibus hominum existentium transcribed a conjuration that had been practiced in the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome since at least the later Middle Ages; it was first put into print some time before 1495. Two years later, the Coniurationes Demonum was first printed in Rome. Finally, in 1502 the Tractatulus Quid a diabolo sciscitari Et qualiter Malignos spiritus possit quisque expellere de obsessis appeared in Bologna; this work, unlike the others, is attributed to a specific author, Silvestro Mazzolini Prierio (or Prierias). These manuals instructed exorcists how and where to conduct exorcism and expel demons, as well as offering advice on how to negotiate with demons without falling into necromancy. They described the appropriate setting and unfolding of an exorcism, and they prescribed liturgical adjurations and rites. The manuals created a clear distinction between authorized (clerical) exorcists and lay folk healers and instructed the former about the division of labor between physicians of the soul (as they liked to refer to themselves) and physicians of the body. As such, the manuals demarcated a new area of professional expertise. Exorcism was transformed from a set of idiosyncratic and individual practices into an art, a body of knowledge. This was obviously on the mind of the most prolific Italian exorcist, the Franciscan Girolamo Menghi, who titled his vernacular guide A Compendium of Exorcismal Arts (1576). 
Instructing exorcists on how to discern spirits was intrinsic to this legitimizing agenda. From Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarumto Menghi's popular and often reprinted manuals, special attention was paid to the importance of discerning possessing spirits. These works repeatedly coached exorcists to remain skeptical about apparent cases of possession, and—to quote the Spanish Franciscan friar Martín de Castañega—to first "determine whether the afflicted person is really possessed by the Devil or whether he is suffering from an illness that attacks his heart or his brain." In such a case, a "wise physician should be consulted." Menghi, too, insisted that the exorcist's first duty was to make sure he was confronting a genuine case of diabolic possession rather than a natural affliction, and to consult with physicians. Physical pains that resist natural medicine and that exhibit horror at sacred objects should raise suspicion of demonic possession, while the ability to speak foreign languages not previously learned by the afflicted person and to exhibit wisdom above one's level of education were clear demonic indications as well. Alas Menghi, too, ultimately was forced to admit that all these signs could also be signs of divine possession; likewise, that sometimes demons, in order to humiliate and ridicule the exorcist, pretended not to understand foreign languages (as had happened to Menghi himself). 
As these examples make clear, one of the exorcists' major concerns was to discern between natural and preternatural afflictions. This is an important issue. Some of the seminal works on the rise and decline of witchcraft accusations in early modern Europe have posited that magic declined as scientific thinking gained ground. This view supports Weberian and other narratives of onward march toward progress, according to which the early modern period was a time of transition from a medieval acceptance of supernatural causality, to a more sophisticated, scientific, and rational way of conceptualizing an increasingly disenchanted world. Our examination of discernment and exorcismal manuals, however, suggests a more nuanced view, and calls for a revision of this teleological interpretation. The employment of naturalistic and medical vocabularies in the early modern period was a change of quantity and systematization, but was neither innovation nor scientific progress. Indeed, late medieval theologians, long before the supposed invention of a rationalistic and naturalistic episteme, already had insisted that afflicted individuals and their relatives should look first to natural causes and medical cures. The afflicted were to avail themselves of the help of physicians, or of more accessible folk healers who employed a mélange of natural and supernatural remedies. Only after the failure of a naturalist medical treatment should one posit a supernatural causality and turn to supernatural healers— namely, exorcists. 
The late medieval and early modern Church was very explicit and persistent in its teaching: assuming a supernatural etiology of affliction, and having recourse to supernatural cures without careful examination, was a demonstration of vain credulity. As such, this was highly superstitious behavior. Consultation with trained physicians is required in all early modern guides for exorcists, including Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum. More important, such consultation became an official policy of the Catholic Church when it was mandated by Cardinal Giulio Antonio Santori, who was commissioned in 1584 by Pope Gregory XIII to compile the first unified rite of the Catholic Church; and in the official Roman Rite of 1614. Rule 3 of the latter document exhorts the exorcist "not to assume easily that someone is possessed." He must recognize the signs that distinguish the possessed from the melancholic or the mentally disturbed, and to discern between diabolic possession and physical illness. Indeed, the Rite returns time and again to the complex relations and external similarities between natural illness and demonic possession: rule 7 warns that sometimes demons try to deceive exorcists to believe that possession is a natural affliction, while rules 11 and 18 address people who are both physically ill and possessed. The exorcist, who does not have the physician's training and competence, should not give "or recommend any sort of medication." This is the physician's task (rule 18).  
One should not, however, exaggerate the distinction between healers of the body and healers of the soul. Medieval and early modern exorcists used medical techniques and herbs as part of their healing rituals (we have seen both Nider and Kramer approving these practices), and physicians often advised patients to look for spiritual or supernatural cures. Like exorcists and theologians, physicians, too, believed in preternatural and supernatural causality and etiology of affliction. In fact, at the same time that theologians and exorcists were trying to demarcate boundaries between the natural and the preter- and supernatural, physicians were debating the likely natural causalities of what looked, externally, like demonic or divine possession. And while most of these physicians argued that many cases of alleged possession were nothing but natural pathologies, they nonetheless insisted that demonic and divine possessions were possible, and that in such cases remedia ecclesiae was the only cure. These physicians collaborated with and were an integral part of the attempt by the Church authorities to restrict the unsupervised, and often abusive, activities of folk healers and some Mendicant exorcists. Rather than positing a model of naturalist physicians versus preter- and supernaturalist ecclesiastics, medical treatises and exorcismal manuals present theologians and learned physicians working hand in hand to curtail activities of unlearned lay and clerical exorcists. 
Finally, collaboration between exorcists and physicians was not restricted to manuals and theological tracts. When sometime during the last years of the sixteenth century Milan established a special hospice for possessed individuals, it was to be staffed by both paid exorcists and physicians, who were to collaborate in healing demoniacs. It was the responsibility of these practitioners to make sure that people who were not possessed but merely insane, and those who suffered from melancholic humors, frenzy, and mal della matrice (a sensual hysteria common among women in general and nuns in particular), should not be mistaken for demoniacs. Exorcisms and confessions were to take place daily, medical examinations  .  
Obviously, there was a crucial difference between the mechanical and even routine nature of the formulae in exorcismal manuals and the more abstract and theoretical issue of the discernment of spirits. But there is no reason to assume that practicing exorcists were not concerned with the theological issue. As an example, the Dutch Franciscan friar Henrick van Ryssel, an exorcist practicing in the middle years of the sixteenth century, compiled his own manual, copying into a notebook numerous rites of exorcism that he must have found in different collections. These included established formulae, such as the exorcisms attributed to Saints Ambrose and Anthony, as well as familiar benedictions against vermin, storms, and hail. But the collection also included adjurations and spells against bewitchment, mostly potions consisting of herbs, wine, honey, and consecrated incense. One of its formulae, for example, calls for cutting the possessed person's hair and nails, and mixing them with the victim's urine. After boiling this concoction for a novena and using it during the exorcism, the patient should recover. Van Ryssel, then, was typical of the traditional (likely itinerant) Mendicant practitioner, whose journal included methods only now being separated into authorized versus unauthorized rites. Yet this obscure friar also copied Jean Gerson's entire On the Testing of Spirits, and annotated it with personal observations and comments, clearly feeling the need to comprehend his practical expertise within the larger setting of the theological discourse of the discernment of spirits.  
Thus far we have argued that the systematization of exorcismal practices and the professionalization of exorcists is linked to the growing attention to practices of discernment of spirits in early modern Catholic Europe. A third, equally important cause for the proliferation of writings about discernment was the continued presence of self-proclaimed female visionaries and lay prophetesses, and the spread, first in Spain and later in France and Italy, of new spiritual tendencies. This new devotional movement emphasized passivity in order to achieve an emptying and annihilation of the self, rather than prayers and meditative exercises. Only after attaining a state of complete indifference to external feelings, images, and thoughts, could the practitioner become fully open to the divine spirit. This movement—really a loose set of practices—was later to be known as quietism, and it aroused intense suspicion from its inception. Who was to judge the reliability of such interior experiences? Who had the authority to supervise them? How should such supervision be practiced? And who was to tell whether the possessing spirit that entered the emptied self was divine, as the practitioner hoped, or, alas, diabolic? Once again, anxieties about the spread of new, lay forms of spirituality and purported access to the divine provided a frame for writings about the discernment of spirits. The chronological and geographical overlap is striking. 
Both Castañega and Ciruelo crafted their guides for exorcists in the very same years that the form of mental prayer and meditation known as recollection (recogimiento)—previously practiced chiefly in Franciscan houses and hermitages—was percolating into the laity. The practice quickly gained popularity and its adherents came to be known as Illuminated (Alumbrados). Since many Alumbrados were women, it is therefore not surprising to find Castañega warning that women, given their more carnal, credulous, curious, and talkative natures, were more easily tricked by the demon than were men. Given women's weakness, they were also likely to simulate divine or diabolic possession: "They do so because of some dissatisfaction they have with their lovers or husbands, or because of the great carnal passion they have for someone, or because of the terrible temptations of the flesh that demons ignite in them."  
Writing the following year, Ciruelo echoed these fears. Both theologians argued that divine and demonic possessions were more likely to be deceptions or natural illnesses. By so doing, these Spanish theologians went beyond Gerson's diabolization of feminine spirituality, and the apprehension in exorcismal manuals against mistaking natural afflictions for demonic possessions. By applying strict doubts about all purported cases of possession, regardless of whether they were divine or demonic, and by warning that altered states of consciousness in women always were more likely due to natural causes such as illness or criminal deception, they discredited the entire spiritual school of Alumbradismo. Their contemporary compatriot Luis de Granada put it succinctly: Women who prophesy and pretend to enjoy divine revelations, he stated, end up possessed by the demon, who perverts and deceives them. 
In the second half of the sixteenth century, as pre-quietist and quietist tendencies spread to Italy and France, so, too, did manuals for the discernment of spirits proliferate in those countries. These manuals systematically narrowed the space for "authentic" possessions, whether divine or diabolic. Writing in the mid-sixteenth century, Filippo Neri, himself a renowned exorcist, argued that "for all sorts of reasons, women simulate possession by the demon." Santori's draft for a Roman Rite concurred, positing that, due to human depravity, "it often happens that some simulate possession, whether due to material or carnal lust, or to avoid punishment, or due to hatred or desperation." Simulated possession was soon to be joined by the revival of another category, simulated sanctity. Theoretically, this was no different from the traditional accusations of false prophecy and hypocrisy. But growing suspicions about feigned sanctity were to reshape the entire discourse of spirituality from the later half of the sixteenth century, until the successful eradication of quietist spiritual pursuits in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. While discussions of false prophecy usually referred to human error in deciphering the content of a revelation, detection of simulated sanctity demanded scrutiny of the personal morality and comportment of the protagonist. As such, it was discerned not according to the characteristics of the spiritual experience itself, but according to a set of social criteria that referred to unacceptable behaviors characteristic of simulating women (and a few men)—who, the argument went, merely mimicked the external characteristics of a living saint. 
The Ambrosian brother Francesco Maria Guazzo, the most prominent synthesizer of Italian thinking about possession, exorcism, and the discernment of spirits, argued in his Compendium Maleficarum of 1608 that, "concerning revelations or visions, and as to the character of the person who sees them, much must be taken into consideration if the true is to be distinguished from the false." It must first be determined "whether the visionary or demoniac is a good Catholic, and whether the person's honesty and virtues point to the sincerity of his faith . . . for we must not believe the proud and ambitious, the impatient, the carnally minded, drunkards, those who cherish anger or stir up hatred and spread dissent, or those who defame others; nor hypocrites who display and parade some exceptional proof of devotion and penitence, against the approval of their superiors in the Church." 
The exorcist should also verify that the person does not suffer from poor health, excessive fasting, or want of sleep. Brain damage may cause "clouding of the imagination," and people who fall into any of the above categories sometimes see, hear, or taste things that are not there, "for the devil easily deludes them, since they eagerly accept and believe images and false appearances." More important, demons can increase the humor of black bile and thereby engender a melancholic balance—then they take advantage of melancholic people to afflict and possess them. The age and sex of the person also are crucial. The old are known to be delirious, the young, stupid, and "as for the female sex, it is agreed that it must be regarded with the greater suspicion." People who adhere to a spiritual regimen are especially suspect; it is interesting to note that when Guazzo talked about these people, he unconsciously slipped from the generic masculine to the feminine pronoun: "If the person is an old practitioner of spiritual exercises, or whether she is only a novice; whether the devil has in other ways attempted, with or without success, to deceive her . . . there must be suspicion of fraud."  
With simulation, hypocrisy, and intentional deception increasingly displacing a supernatural etiology of spiritual possessions, practitioners were to be punished rather than exorcized. This was the fate of Magdalena de la Cruz, the prioress of the convent of the Poor Clares in Cordova. She had widely been regarded as a mystic and a living saint, until she admitted in 1543 that she had been aligned with Satan since early childhood, and that she had faked her sanctity. She was imprisoned and spent the rest of her life in jail. This was also the experience of the illiterate Neapolitan laywoman Alfonsina Rispola, who spent the 1580s and 1590s in prison while being examined as "suspected of simulating sanctity." Since the Inquisition could not determine the veracity of her visions, she remained incarcerated. Similar arrests, banishments, and public acts of supplication followed in the seventeenth century. By this time many prominent sources—including Jean Gerson, Johannes Nider, Heinrich Kramer, Francisco Guazzo, the French jurist Jean Bodin, and the Jesuit demonologist Martín del Rio—had succeeded in crafting an authoritative litany: Women's fervor is too eager, their minds too weak, their bodies too humid. They are more prone to perceive phantoms, and slower to resist temptations. Women are more lascivious, luxurious, and avaricious. They are also more foolish than men, have less reasoning power, and are "more apt to mistake natural or diabolic suggestions for ones of divine origin." Guazzo, while admitting the possibility of divine possession in theory, ruled it out in practice by arguing that all cases of possession, both divine and diabolic, were more likely deceptions, simulations, or simple natural illnesses, for women should never be trusted. By ascribing most cases of possession to women's deceptive nature, imbecility, melancholic humors, or uterine vapors, he (like many contemporary theologians and physicians) made femininity itself the major reason for distrusting women's ecstatic and spiritual  . 
By the 1620s and 1630s, simulation of sanctity became a legal category used to criminalize individuals (again, mostly women) who alleged that they had received visions, even when nothing heretical was found in the content of their revelations. In the 1630s, Cardinal Desiderio Scaglia compiled a Handbook for Proceedings in Cases Before the Holy Office (Prattica per procedere nella cause del S. Offizio), in response to cases of what he termed "false devotion" and "Free Spirit indiscrete devotion." The work, circulated in manuscripts among exorcists, devoted an entire section to the legal issues surrounding simulated sanctity, and directly connected this crime to women, especially those who were spiritually inclined. These sorts of women, it argued, were all deceivers, hypocrites, and frauds. Due to their "weak-mindedness, sometimes through pretense motivated by the prideful ambition to be considered holy and dear to God, and sometimes through [diabolic] illusion,  they say that they have received revelations from God . . . and that they have been favored by divine visions, and that God and the saints speak to them."  
Quietist spirituality (in all its various incarnations) forced the Church to ask what constituted a genuine spiritual experience, what was possible, what was natural, and what was illusory. As such, the discernment of spirits was an epistemic endeavor, an integral component of the early modern attempt to redraw boundaries between the natural and the supernatural realms. The process was accompanied by the naturalization and medicalization of both divine an 
d diabolic possessions, the demarcation of clearer boundaries between authorized and superstitious practices, and the professionalization of exorcists. But most important, the process dramatically restricted women's ability to pursue lay forms of unsupervised and unregulated spirituality, and it discredited claims by women to supernatural interactions. 
Against this background, however, we found certain themes to be more continuous over the longue durée than others. The drive toward medicalization and naturalization, for instance, once it became one of the terms of discussion for the discernment of spirits in the thirteenth century, maintained a fairly stable position thereafter. Thirteenth-century encyclopedists attributed vision and trance behavior to uterine pathologies or a melancholic temperament; so, too, did Gerson in the fifteenth century, Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century, and Federico Borromeo in the seventeenth. While some historians have been tempted to locate the birth of empiricism within the early modern period, our research suggest that the discernment of spirits already was putting theories of medicine and physiology to empiricist ends quite early on. From its inception, the testing of spirits required the testing of bodies in stringent, meticulous ways, as a means to disprove a natural causation for the disputed behaviors at the center of the debate. 
All this, obviously, was part of an even larger process, namely, the long-term tightening of control over miracles, sainthood, and rituals. In 1599 the French physician Michel Marescot argued that "nothing should be attributed to the demons unless it is extraordinarily above the law of nature." By about 1650, this rule—according to which whenever an event could be attributed to naturalistic explanation, it should not be assumed to be miraculous—was shared by the Catholic Church itself. 
In its systematization of preexisting and long standing epistemological and diagnostic methods of investigation, and in its trust in objective laws and the importance of observation, experiential science resembled the new experimental science. And like the latter, the former assisted in dramatically curtailing the realm of the supernatural in daily life. Yet it did so without putting into doubt the existence of the supernatural tout court, and without advancing a newly disenchanted rationality. 
Significantly, in fact, the shrinking realm of the supernatural led theologians to pay ever 
more attention to the preternatural. This third category became crucial for the reconfiguration of the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, for a process of naturalizing the world without actually disenchanting it. 
The discourse of discerning spirits and the new experiential science to which it gave rise created a new epistemic space that contributed, in its own way, to the curtailment of the supernatural and to the disenchantment of Europe. As a collaborative venture between a medieval and an early modern historian, this article has sought to complicate received historical narratives about the origins of certain heuristics and rationalities. Like experimental science, the disciplining endeavor known as the testing of spirits encouraged the systematic questioning of the exact boundaries among the natural, the supernatural, and the ever elusive preternatural. Their pursuit was parallel to, but not necessarily shaped by, the rise of mechanical philosophy, experimental science, and clinical medicine in the seventeenth century. A lingering hesitancy as to whether materialistic or supernatural explanations better account for specific events continuously shaped the emergence of experiential science. Thus, the testing of spirits—a purely religious discourse—developed in tandem and in dialogue with two relatively profane discourses: natural philosophies and scientific inquiries. Yet the goal of all three epistemologies was the same: to categorize the sensory world with greater regularity and accuracy; to probe hidden aspects of reality in order fully to grasp the harmony and grandeur of the cosmos. That the end result of such endeavors would be to disenchant the world and to remove many of its religious mysteries, divine and demonic alike, could not have been foreseen by the authors we have examined. 
 
 
Part Three

APARTMENT BUILDING HALLWAYS 
 
             Perhaps I have used the word liminal to mean a threshold between imagination and reality in a somewhat unorthodox way, connoting a psychological state that I cannot help but undergo or conclude I am in based on excursions into idea based states of reality that take on the truth-like quality of narratives of memory or feelings which suggest that I have lived a series of particular but unreal experiences; that those experiences are rather the result of an idleness; that they are products of my imagination; and that, I am experiencing these sensations as a “liminoid” being in a liminal space which I occupy in this world as a liminal member of society. 
          I am forever either in the extant example of the apartment building hallway of a loud florescent light with doors connected to it leading to apartments which I do not occupy; that, even in such a small apartment building in which I live is itself liminal in the lifespan of my life; that, in its existence, it is a place among many I have resided in since I had a home with my mother; that, no matter how many such small residences I have occupied since having a home, I have been unable to comfortably reestablish the feeling of belonging and comfort since I once had a home with my mother; that, this place I live is just another hallway on a floor of many floors of apartment buildings with loud florescent light; that, it is liminal, a threshold, yet never where “the laughter rang and the tears were spilt;” and that, no matter how accustomed I am to being in my current residence or any former residences, I am necessary alone in a confined space where no matter how autonomously and apart from the outer world securely I exist, it is never anything but a place where no structured ritual of regular scheduled intervals of responsibility nor recreation give meaning to a continuous passage of time. My place is subsequently non-ritualistic, conducted by no master of ceremonies, who might guide me to another space in which I have a meaningful or fulfilling sense of belonging. Rather, it is like being in a hallway of apartments that are represented as closed doors leading to units, but I have no right to access them because they are homes of other people’s property and not any of them my rightful place to live. 
         This sense of constantly being in liminal places or thresholds between places has defined my life circumstance since I dropped out of high school in my graduating year well back (and please forgive my age) thirty-five years ago. Since then, have been those hallways with loud florescent light, and in the past fifteen years I have experienced through idleness or my liminality a psychological drift between imagination and reality, the likeness of each of those two sharply demarcated states of phenomena having become blurred and difficult to always distinguish. 
        Thus, I invest much time in either a preoccupation to distinguish real from fictitious experience or invest it in a transcendence into engagements of ideations which are excursions into high adventures in impermanent landscapes, and howsoever they are populated with social relationships and significances, always wind up leaving me feeling afterwards in a stupor or questioning of the true significance of who I am and what I do in life. 
      In upcoming books, I will be sharing a more detailed history of my adult life since being a high school drop-out, with the idea of the liminal, and my existence as a “liminoid” in thresholds in which I have been unable to cross into a space that was ever as comfortable or socially satisfying as my long lost, and lately even forgotten youth. For as time wears on, the tangible feelings of belonging and protection of my formative years’ reality have been eroded, and yet never replaced. Instead, there remains a floor of florescent light forbidding a home sweet home, without satisfying recreations or occupations different from somewhere which would otherwise perhaps become a welcome place or satisfying station in life. 

Appendices b

 

• Iudicium Dei or Iudicium Hominis: Ordeal, Ritual, and Religion in Iberian Municipal Law by Rachel Q. Welsh/New York University

 

Medieval ordeal – the iudicium dei, or judgment of God – is rightly understood as a religious phenomenon, as this physical test appealed directly to God’s judgment to reveal an accused person’s guilt or innocence. This miraculous judicial intervention, however, was not confined to the religious sphere; in medieval Iberia in particular, ordeal was administered by local secular authorities with only minimal religious involvement. Moreover, ordeal remained in use throughout Castile and León long after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 prohibited priests from blessing the instruments or otherwise participating in ordeal. The religious ritual of ordeal, then, also functioned as a secular legal ritual. This paper examines the ritual and religious aspects of ordeal within local municipal law in Castile and León from the mid twelfth through the late thirteenth century. In particular, this paper analyzes how ordeal could function without priests, as a purely municipal ritual, and how the meaning of the ritual itself shifted with this desacralization. Drawing on municipal legal codes (fueros) and liturgical material, this paper reframes ordeal within its local and secular legal context and suggests that judicial ordeal in central Iberia might better be understood not as an iudicium dei, but as an iudicium hominis, a judgment of man.

 

• Judicium Dei: the social and political significance of the ordeal in the eleventh century*

 

Morris, Colin. “Judicium Dei: The Social and Political Significance of the Ordeal in the Eleventh Century.” Studies in Church History 12 (1975): 95–111. Web.]

 

Extract

 

‘Church, Society and Politics’ is a theme of great importance, and for most of the history of the church christians have been aware of the distinction between these three areas of human activity. They have differed about their relationship, and in particular about the extent to which political action and social order ought to be controlled directly by the christian ethic, but it has been widely recognised that the conduct of government, for example, was a field which had its own special requirements and expertise, in which God’s personal intervention would be neither expected nor welcomed. ‘Aid from heaven’, went one nineteenth-century comment, ‘aid from heaven you may have by saying your prayers, but no angel will come to name the junior lords of the Treasury’.

 

References

 

1

A good survey, with abundant references to the older literature, is Nottarp, [H.], [Gottesurteilsstudien] (Munich 1956)Google Scholar and our particular theme is explored in Leitmaier, C., Die Kirche und die Gottesurteile (Vienna 1952)Google Scholar. Relevant material is usefully collected by Browe, [P.], [De Ordaliis] (Rome 1932-3)Google Scholar. I am indebted to my colleague, Dr Paul Hyams of Pembroke College, Oxford, for supplying helpful references and comments.

2

Vernacular usage is not well evidenced before 1100, but we can find bavarian urteil, frisian ordeel and anglo-saxon ordal. It seems that only in England was there a special word for ‘ordeal’, for ordal definitely had this sense, and the latinised form ordalium can occasionally be found here (for references, see Nottarp pp 16-17).

3

PL 162 (1889) col 258c.

4

Ad hoc quoque lapsus est, ut Dei iudicio incredulus fieret iniustitiaeque illud arguens, Deum aut facta hominum ignorare aut aequitatis ea lance nolle pensare astrueret. Eadmer, , Historia Novorum 2, PL 159 (1903) col 412cGoogle Scholar.

5

PL 146 (1884) col 1406d. The absence of the ordeal from, or its condemnation in, the older collections was a major influence on the critics of the system from Ivo of Chartres onwards.

6

ut omnes iuditium Dei credant absque dubitatione. MGH, Leges 2, 1 (1883) p 150.

7

Evidenced in a Worcester manuscript of c 1025. Liebermann, F., ‘Ein Ordal des Lebendig-Begraben’, ZRG, CA, 19 (1898) p 140 Google Scholar.

8

[Regestruin de] Varad, printed Endlicher, S.L., Rerum Hungaricarum Monumenta Arpadiana (Sangalli 1849) pp 640–742 Google Scholar, and discussed by Dareste, R., Études d’histoire du droit (Paris 1889) 1, pp 259-64Google Scholar.

9

res supradicti episcopatus per bellum et omnibus modis requirendi et excutiendi (Browe 1, no 16). In this context bellum must mean judicial combat, in spite of the view of Schwentner, B., ‘Die Stellung der Kirche zum Zweikampf’, Theologische Quartalschrift 111 (Munich 1930) p 205nGoogle Scholar.

10

The evidence for this duel and for the (probably legendary) ordeal by fire which is said to have followed, is discussed by David, P. ‘L’abolition du rite hispanique’, Études historiques sur la Galice et le Portugal (Lisbon/Paris 1947) pp 400-2Google Scholar, and by Hitchcock, R., ‘El rito hispánico, las ordalías y los mozárabes en el reinado de Alfonso VI’, Estudios Orientales 8 (Colegio de México 1973) pp 19–41 Google Scholar.

11

Instances are given by Franz, [A.] [Die Kirchlichen Benediktionen im Mittelalter] (Freiburg 1909) 2, pp 347-9Google Scholar. Examples in our period are the use of fire by abbot Gauzlin of Fleury in 1013 to test the sudarium of Christ—Vita Gauzlini, ed R-H Bautier (Paris 1969) p 60; the trial of relics of the anglo-saxon saints by abbot Walter of Evesham on the advice of archbishop Lanfranc—Chronicon Abbatiae de Evesham, RS 29 (1863) p 323; and the trial of the holy lance and of Peter Bartholomew with it, on the first crusade.

12

The best edition of the ordines iudiciorum Die is that by Zeumer, [K.], [MGH, Leges 5] (1886) pp 599–725 Google Scholar. Further material may be found in Franz 2, pp 307-98. Doubt has recently been expressed whether or not these liturgies were still in use. See Dürig, W., ‘Gottesurteile im Bereich des Benediktinerklosters Weihenstephan (Freising) unter Abt Erchanger (1082-96)’, Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 15 (Munich 1973) pp 101-7Google Scholar. I am not, however, convinced by the evidence that the ordeal had become a purely popular custom, unblessed by the ritual of the church.

13

Zeumer p 672.

14

Ed Lot, F., Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études 204 (Paris 1913) pp 87–90 Google Scholar.

15

Zeumer p 711; Browe 2, no 5.

16

Browe 2, no 43. Other marvels are to be found in the narratives, especially in those connected with Leo IX discussed later. In 1172 a heretic was found burned by the ordeal of hot iron, not only on the right hand, but all over his body, Annales Colonienses, MGH, SS, 17 (1861) pp 784-5.

17

Genzmer, E., ‘Quare Glossatorum’, Gedächtnisschrift für E. Seckel, Abhandlungen aus der Berliner juristischen Fakultät 4 (Berlin 1927) p 49, no 147 Google Scholar.

18

Cited from an eleventh-century french manuscript by Brunner, H., Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, 2 (2 ed Munich/Leipzig 1928) p 544nGoogle Scholar.

19

Varad no 332. P 723.

20

Zeumer pp 697-8. Compare the oath of Liprand at Milan in 1103: Ego ad fiduciam maleficii, aut incantationis vel carminis non intro hoc iudicium, sic me Deus adjuvet, et ista sancta Evangelia in isto sancto iudicio: Landulf, Junior, [Historia Mediolanensis] cap 10, PL 173 (1895) col 1466cGoogle Scholar.

21

Colman, R.V., ‘Reason and Unreason in early medieval Law”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4 (1974) pp 571-91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22

Zeumer p 615.

23

PL 150 (1880) col 1547c.

24

Vita Leonis 2, 5, PL 143 (1880) col 493b. This is the only source to report the miracle.

25

Berschin, W., Bonizo von Sutri (Berlin/New York 1972) p 96nGoogle Scholar.

26

Vita Leonis 2, 4, col 492c.

27

Ibid 2, 7, col 495b.

28

Compare the words of the priest Liprand before undergoing ordeal by fire at Milan in 1103: Nonne ille diabolus, qui suasit ilium fieri simoniacum per pecuniam suadere potest ut adhuc majorem pecuniam daret, et veritatem occultaret et testes et judices mundanos mihi auferret? et non nescitis quia propter vitandam astutiam diaboli et pravorum hominum, ego elegi Deum judicem, qui neque per pecuniam, neque aliquo modo potest falli in iudicio? Landulf Junior, cap 10, col 1464c.

29

Vita Leonis 1, 2, cob 467-8.

30

For the following section, see the discussions by Miccoli, G., Pietro Igneo (Rome 1960)Google Scholar and Werner, [E.], [Pauperes Christi] (Leipzig 1956) pp 101-10Google Scholar.

31

Andreas, , [Vita Gualberti] cap 24, MGH, SS, 30, 2 (1934) p 1086 Google Scholar.

32

Andreas cap 73, p 1095: favebat enim maxima pars episcoporum parti Petri et omnes pene erant monachis adversi.

33

Ibid cap 75, p 1098.

34

Werner p 106: Die ganze Zeremonie des Feuerwerkes war ein übles Bubenstück, aufgebaut auf Trug und der Leichtgläubigkeit der Zuschauer.

35

Ecce corpus dominicum, quod sumpturus ero, in experimentum hodie fiat innocentiae meae, ut omnipotens Deus suo me hodie iudicio vel absolvat obiecti criminis suspicione, si innocens sum, vel subitanea interimat morte, si reus, MGH, SS, 5 (1844) pp 250-60.

36

Ibid pp 295-6.

36a

Bonizo, , Liber ad Amicum 9, MGH Lib 1 (Hanover 1891) pp 616-17Google Scholar. Bonizo is vague about the date, but cicumstantial evidence fixes it in 1080 rather than 1076, and this is confirmed in the Chronicle of Sigebert. In view of Bonizo’s comments there can be no doubt that this prophecy actually was delivered, and was widely known.

36b

Damian, Peter, ep 1, 20, PL 144 (1892) col 247bGoogle Scholar.

37

Printed MGH, SS, 8 (1848) pp 460-1n.

38

Reported in a letter of bishop Peter of Pavia to Henry IV preserved in the Codex Udalrici, ed Jaffé, P., Monumenta Bambergetisia, Bibliotheca Rerum Germanicarum 5 (Berlin 1869) p 196 Google Scholar.

39

Landulf Junior, cap 11, cob 1462-6.

40

Gregors, Das Register VII, ed Caspar, E., MGH, Epp 4, 2 (2 ed Berlin 1955) ep VIII 9, p 527 Google Scholar.