Long time ago it was forbidden to look good and feel good, freedom of speech didn’t exist plus …..not in Church, sad to say people were brutal in 17th century modern Europe , so many accusations without evidence and also executions that led ….. But he was more victim than monster. the Loudun parish church priest was handsome and overweeningly vain, a mesmerizing preacher and a wholesale seducer of Loudun's pious virgins and e and place. In the early Middle Ages, the devil’s field of action was the imagination, not the body: the devil was portrayed as a deceiver who employs fantasmata to lead the soul astray (one fell prey to the devil particularly in dreams). In the 13th century, however, the church reversed this position and attributed corporeal reality to the devil’s fantasmata. A pontifical constitution rendered nocturnal dream voyages into quasi-religious meetings marked by physical, not imaginary, acts of incest, sodomy, and infanticide – Sprenger and Kramer (1486/1968) specified this change took place around the year 1400. Witches and sorcerers were henceforth described as have abjured their Christian faith by inviting devils to enter their bodies.

As the body became the target of diabolical attack, the terms ‘possession’ and ‘obsession’, which had been used almost synonymously, diverged in meaning. Etymologically, obsidere denotes ‘to sit at or opposite to’, ‘to sit down before’, or ‘to besiege’, as when an enemy force sits down before a fortress. And possidere denotes ‘to be able to sit’. Hence, an obsessive spirit was thought to assail, haunt, harass a person from outside, while a possessing spirit was considered to have taken up residence inside the body, to ‘occupy’, to tyrannically ‘take over the seat’ of the self. At Loudun, on 1 October 1632, three nuns were declared ‘possessed’; by December 1634 nine were declared ‘possessed’ and eight others ‘obsessed’.

The first task of an exorcist was diagnostic: to identify by name the devil to whom the demoniac gave voice and to discover where in the body it resided. The body of Jeanne des Anges housed seven demons, among them one lodged in her forehead, one below the last rib on her right side, one at the base of her stomach. The map of the correspondences between the diabolical and bodily hierarchies in Jeanne des Anges’s case (Certeau, 1970) demonstrates how the demons took up their physiological residences in an orderly fashion according to rank: Seraphim in the head, Powers in the upper body, Thrones further down. The exorcists alone constructed this far-from-haphazard map, since the demoniac herself was expected to emerge from each attack with no memory of what the devil inside her had said or done. This public mapping of Jeanne des Anges’s demons functioned as authentication. Still there were doubts expressed about the possessions, because devils must be heard to converse in foreign languages unfamiliar to the demoniac, and they must perform acts of clairvoyance, as well as of supernatural strength such as levitation. disconsolate widows.