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“Like a Magician Who Tricks the Eyes”: Demonism, Epistemological Uncertainty, and Religious Heterodoxy in Seventeenth-Century Ukraine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2024

Maria Grazia Bartolini Open the ORCID record for Maria Grazia Bartolini [Opens in a new window]
Maria Grazia Bartolini*
Affiliation:
University of Milan, maria.bartolini@unimi.it
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Abstract

This paper situates early modern Ukrainian demonological discourse within the framework of the major religious, cultural, and political disruption that affected Ukraine between 1596 and 1686. I will argue that the confessional struggles that followed the Union of Brest, the period of civil war known as “The Ruin,” and the eschatological expectations of the year 1666 contributed to a perception of increased diabolic activity but also to the problem of recognizing the possible discrepancies between reality and non-reality. How could one distinguish true visions from illusory phenomena, if the devil could enter the mind through “bad thoughts” and threaten the stability of one's cognitive experience? Furthermore, if there was more than one church, how could one distinguish between true and false doctrine? These questions, in turn, prompted early modern Ukrainian Orthodox intellectuals to question the role and reliability of sensory perception and human cognition, with issues of epistemology and deception becoming increasingly entangled with confessional polemics and religious dispute.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 82 , Issue 3 , Fall 2023 , pp. 689 - 713
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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References

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18. Eukhologion, albo Molytvoslov, ili Trebnyk (Kyiv, 1646), 386. The Trebnyk (Book of Needs) is an Orthodox liturgical book that contains the sacraments and related services and prayers.

19. Inokentii Gizel΄, Myr s Bohom cheloviku (Kyiv, 1669), 68.

20. Ioanykii Galiatovs΄kyi, Hrikhy rozmaiitii (Chernihiv, 1685), 12v.

21. On magic and demonology in Muscovy, see Robert Mathiesen, “Magic in Slavia Orthodoxa: The Written Tradition,” in Henry Maguire, ed., Byzantine Magic (Washington, DC, 1995), 173; Kivelson, Desperate Magic, 52–54.

22. See Valerie Flint, “The Demonisation of Magic and Sorcery in Late Antiquity,” in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, eds., Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome (Philadelphia, 1999), 277–348.

23. Galiatovs΄kyi, Bohy pohanskii, 25r, 29r. All Bible quotations are taken from the King James Version.

24. On the early modern theory of spirits, see Euan Cameron, “Angels, Demons, and Everything in Between: Spiritual Beings in Early Modern Europe,” in Clare Copeland and Johannes Machielsen, eds., Angels of Light?: Sanctity and the Discernment of Spirits in the Early Modern Period (Leiden, 2013), 17–52. On the study of Thomism at Kyiv College, see James Cracraft, “Theology at the Kyiv Academy during its Golden Age,” Harvard Journal of Ukrainian Studies 8, 1–2 (June 1984): 136–54.

25. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, Pt. I. question 50, articles 1 and 2, at https://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/1225-1274,_Thomas_Aquinas,_Summa_Theologiae_%5B1%5D,_EN.pdf (accessed September 19, 2023).

26. Johann Wier [Weyer], Witches, Devils and Doctors in the Renaissance: Weyer’s De praestigiis daemonum, ed. George Mora and Benjamin Kohl, trans. John Shea (Binghamton, NY, 1991), 40.

27. Galiatovs΄kyi, Bohy pohanskii, 29r.

28. Ibid., preface to the reader, 1r–1v; Saint Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, book 8, chapter 24, trans. Gerald G. Walsh and Grace Monahan (Washington DC, 1952), 68.

29. Galiatovs΄kyi, Bohy pohanskii, 10r; Rhetorica ad Herennium, IV. LIII 67, trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb Classical Library 403 (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), 400. On demons and amphiboly, see also Ludwig Lavater, De spectris (Geneva, 1570), 168.

30. Galiatovs΄kyi, Bohy pohanskii, 14r, 16v.

31. Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt. 1, q. 114, art. 4.

32. Galiatovs΄kyi’s polemical works include Mesiia pravdyvyi (1669), also appeared in Polish translation as Messiasz prawdziwy (Kyiv, 1672), Rozmowa białocerkiewska (Novhorod-Sivers΄kyi, 1676), Stary kościół zachodni (Novhorod-Sivers΄kyi, 1678), Łabędź z piórami swemi (Novhorod-Sivers΄kyi, 1679), Alphabetum rozmaitym Heretykom (Chernihiv, 1681), Fundamenta na których łacinnicy iedność Rusi z Rzymem fundują (Chernihiv, 1683), and Alkoran Machometow (Chernihiv, 1683).

33. Galiatovs΄kyi, Bohy pohanskii, 16v.

34. “Skazaniia Petra Mogily o chudesnykh i zamechatel΄nykh iavleniiakh v tserkvy pravoslavnoi iuzhno-russkoi, moldo-vlakhskoi i grecheskoi,” Arkhiv Iugo-Zapadnoi Rossii 7 (1887): 105–8. This miracle is briefly mentioned in Dysa, Ukrainian Witchcraft, 74.

35. Stuart Clark, “The Reformation of the Eyes: Apparitions and Optics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe,” The Journal of Religious History 23, no. 2 (June 2003): 143–60.

36. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (New York, 1971), 588–89.

37. Clark, Thinking with Demons, 79.

38. On ghosts as demons in Protestant theology, see Cameron, “Angels, Demons, and Everything in Between,” 48.

39. On Catholic exorcisms as “baroque spectacles,” see Henri Weber, “L’exorcisme à la fin du XVIe siècle, instrument de la contre réforme et spectacle baroque,” Nouvelle revue du seizième siècle 1 (1983): 79–101.

40. “Skazaniia Petra Mogily,” 62.

41. Ibid., 115. This miracle is briefly mentioned in Dysa, Ukrainian Witchcraft, 73.

42. “Skazaniia Petra Mogily,” 116.

43. Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, & Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago, 2008), 1.

44. On the early modern exorcist as “forensic expert,” see ibid., 82.

45. “Skazaniia Petra Mogily,” 80.

46. See Dysa, Ukrainian Witchcraft, 79.

47. Paterik, ili otechnyk pecherskii (Kyiv, 1661), preface, 6r; Ioanykii Galiatovs΄kyi, Nebo novoe (L΄viv, 1665), 193r.

48. Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit, 62. On Mohyla’s reforms and the role of the priest, see Liudmila Charipova, “Peter Mohyla’s Translation of ‘The Imitation of Christ,’” The Historical Journal 46, no. 2 (June 2003): 237–61.

49. Trebnyk, 308–85.

50. “Skazaniia Petra Mogily,” 107. On the judicial practice of interrogating the demon, see Brian Levack, The Devil Within: Possession & Exorcism in the Christian West (New Haven, 2013), 66.

51. “Skazaniia Petra Mogily,” 80 and 116.

52. For a brief overview of the Pateryk’s textual transmission, see The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, trans. Muriel Heppell (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), xxix–xxxix. A facsimile edition of Kossov’s translation can be read in Seventeenth-Century Writings on the Kievan Caves Monastery (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 3–118.

53. Paterik, 149v, 152r. For a comparison with the text of the Cassian redaction, see The Paterik, 205–10.

54. Levack, The Devil Within, 43. On the role of Beelzebub in highly publicized early modern cases of demonic possession, such as those of Nicole Aubry and Marthe Brossier in sixteenth-century France, see Jonathan L. Pearl, “Demons and Politics in France, 1560–1630,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 12, no. 2 (July 1985): 243; Moshe Sluhovsky, “A Divine Apparition or Demonic Possession? Female Agency and Church Authority in Demonic Possession in Sixteenth-Century France,” Sixteenth Century Journal 27, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 1041–42.

55. Paterik, 147r. For a comparison with the text of the Cassian redaction, see The Paterik, 108–110.

56. On devils as Ethiopians, another detail that is absent from the Cassian redaction and that is clearly articulated in both Patristic and medieval literature, see Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons & Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, 2003), 80; Iakovenko, U poshukah, 441.

57. The Caves Monastery’s miraculous power to cast out demons was well known during the second half of the seventeenth century. See, for instance, Stefan Iavors΄kyi’s Sermon on Saint Theodosius of the Caves (1036–1074), pronounced at the Caves Monastery on the saint’s feast day in 1696, which defines the Lavra as the “dread of demons” (strashylyshche bisov). Stefan Iavors΄kyi, “Pretiosissimus Thesaurus in agro absconditus Regnum Dei,” Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi i istoricheskii archiv, fond 834, opis΄ 2, delo 1592, fol. 1035v.

58. Paterik, preface, 1–7.

59. Ibid., preface, 2r.

60. Clare Copeland and Johannes Machielsen, “Introduction,” in Angels of Light?, 10.

61. Paterik, 117v–118r. See The Paterik, 114 for the Cassian redaction.

62. Radyvylovs΄kyi, Vinets, 410v.

63. Godefroid Henschen and Daniel Papebroch, eds., Acta Sanctorum Aprilis: Tomus III. Quo ultimi IX dies continentur (Antwerp, 1675), 694c–94d. This episode is mentioned in Stuart Clark, “Angels of Light and Images of Sanctity,” in Angels of Light?, 288, which brought it to my attention.

64. Gizel΄, Myr s Bohom, 600. On melancholy as a major preoccupation of the early modern period, see H. C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Stanford, 1999), 20, who speaks of “an age of melancholy.” On melancholy, witchcraft, and demonism, see Charles Zika, Exorcising Our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2003), especially 333–74.

65. Radyvylovs΄kyi, Vinets, 136v–7r.

66. The engraving is monogrammed by L.M., an engraver active in Kyiv in the first half of the seventeenth century. See Iaroslav Isaievych and Iakim Zapasko, Pam΄iatky knyzhkovoho mystetstva: Kataloh starodrukiv vydanykh na Ukraїni. Knyha persha (L΄viv, 1981), nr. 152; Dmitrii A. Rovinskii, Podrobnyi slovar΄ russkikh graverov XVI-XIX vv., vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1895), col. 598.

67. Jerome, “Chapter 7” in The Life of Paulus the First Hermit, at www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.vi.i.html (accessed September 20, 2023).

68. Ot otechnyka skytskoho povist΄ udyvytelna o diavoli iako priide do Velykomu Antoniiu, v obrazi chlovechestvi, khotia kaiatysia (Kyiv, 1626). On Saint Anthony’s prominence in the early modern tradition of discretio spirituum, see Clark, “Angels of Light,” 294; Michael Cole, “The Demonic Arts and the Origin of the Medium,” The Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (December 2002): 626.

69. The classic study on the devil and the Jews is Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (New Haven, 1943).

70. Galiatovs΄kyi, Mesiia pravdyvyi, 405v–406r. Cassian’s exemplum (De lapsu et deceptione monachi Mesopotameni) is contained in Book 2, Chapter 8 of the Collationes, at https://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/0360-0435,_Cassianus,_Callationum_XXIV_Collectio_In_Tres_Partes_Divisa_[Schaff],_EN.pdf (accessed October 22, 2023).

71. Galiatovs΄kyi, Mesiia pravdyvyi, dedication to the tsar, 2v.

72. Ibid., dedication to the tsar, 3v.

73. Ibid., 74r, 191r.

74. Ibid., preface to the tsar, 6v.

75. Bodin’s De la démonomanie des sorciers is quoted in Galiatovs΄kyi, Mesiia pravdyvyi, 158v. The episode Galiatovs΄kyi refers to is contained in book 4, chapter 5 of Bodin’s work and concerns a magistrate in Padua who convicted a Jew who feigned conversion to Christianity. On Bodin’s “political demonology,” see Clark, Thinking with Demons, 668–82.

76. Galiatovs΄kyi, Mesiia pravdyvyi, 72v.

77. Clark, Thinking with Demons, 532. On visual delusions and demonism, see also Clark, Vanities, 78–160.

78. On this point see Clark, Vanities, 53, who writes of an early modern link between perceptual accuracy and “ethical, religious, and political stability.”

79. Compare, for instance, the excerpt of Mesiia pravdyvyi, 190v, which explains that devils are widespread among men and can possess and torment them, with that in Bohy pohanskii, 4v.

80. On the triad of heresy, idolatry, and apostasy in witchcraft trials, see Martine Ostorero, Le Diable au sabbat: Littérature démonologique et sorcellerie (1440–1460) (Florence, 2011), 755–56.