JON KANEKO-JAMES looks at historic cases of children being possessed by demons – and discovers some potentially easy explanations.
Possessed children are a staple in modern horror: from The Exorcist’s Regan in her blue dress to the unfortunate girl in The Exorcism of Emily Rose, possessed children have a lot of currency at the movies – and the younger the better.
From the Medieval to the Early Modern period possession was a very real thing. Young, attractive women were consisted the most vulnerable but children were certainly next on the list.
The historian Kathleen R. Sands theorises that a great many Early Modern demoniacs were children because of the pressures placed on them in Puritan communities: the education of children was based on the idea that the young were inherently immoral and bestial in nature.
The ‘correct’ moral complex would have to be ground into the child through a regime that modem observers would find tyrannical, if not borderline abusive: children were not permitted to furrow their brows, whistle through their noses, puff out their cheeks, press their lips together, yawn, laugh excessively or let their hair fall on their foreheads. Violation of these rules was seen as indicating any number of character flaws.
These children’s daily routine was punishingly full: they were made to rise early, pray, attend lessons and memorise new bible verses in their spare time, punish themselves for infractions, undertake household chores and were discouraged from any kind of solitary activities except study and reading.
Whether or not we believe in demons, pressure of that kind will find a release.
The Throckmorton Children
In November 1589 in Warboys, Essex, Jane Throckmorton began to suffer ‘a strange kind of sickness and distemprement of the body.’ Descriptions of her illness describe convulsions severe enough to damage furniture and even after repeated testing by medical professionals, doctors had little to offer other than the possibility of witchcraft and demonic possession.
In fact, Jane’s mother resisted the idea of possession for a great length of time: she sent her daughter to Dr Philip Barrow for treatment for the sickness of epilepsy, but to no avail. Eventually, another facet of her child’s sickness gained notice – her repeated accusations of witchcraft against an elderly local woman known as Alice Samuel.
In fact, with a month of Jane Throckmorton’s first symptoms, two more of their daughters had fallen into similar states of possession.
By February the following year, the Throckmorton parents were in such a state of desperation that when Jane was in a convulsive fit they brought her Alice Samuel so that Jane could try the traditional -but unlawful – remedy of ‘scratching’, whereby a victim of witchcraft would make a vicious and bloody scratch on a witch’s skin to drive away any malefic magic.
The children utterly subverted their relationship with the elderly Mother Samuel, and also their parents: the girls had regular ecstatic outbursts where they would vocally criticise the old woman, something unheard of at the time.
The children also took an otherwise unthinkable level of control over their daily routine. They said that they could only eat in the shadow of a certain tree and could not bear to hear the sound of Scripture being read. The punishments for parental infractions were puritanically severe: convulsive fits, screaming visions of Alice Samuel and clenching their jaws so tightly that ‘they could not be fed milk through a quill’.
Read More – Shocking Child Demonic Possession Cases in Medieval England
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