are you thinking something along the lines of syphilis eventually producing neurological or psychiatric symptoms?

That's my best guess! If he was known for being sexually lascivious and he has this known connection to the convent via the head nun, I don't think its a leap to think that perhaps he was fooling around with some of them. I mean, the head nun probably would not have asked him to be a spiritual head in her convent if he wasn't already familiar with the people there I imagine. And if the head nun thought he was attractive enough to pursue, then he probably did have decent success with the opposite sex. Perhaps the reason he said no is because he was already too deeply involved with some of the nuns already and it may have complicated his situation...but who knows honestly....I can only speculate. Its not impossible that he really was doing some magick, and his literacy ability was more likely on the higher side too. I just know how scant the evidence tended to be with convictions like this, and having powerful political enemies increases the likelihood of him being set up. I mean, do we know how they even came up with that evidence? Pretty convenient for him to have left a piece of paper with all the boogeyman words written all over it for the authorities to find 🙄 It would've been so easy for them to have planted that. 

The Fire and Earth meditation and attunement is something I use almost daily. There are a lot of really effective use cases for it, despite it being fairly simple. You’ll need to listen to your body and intuition to determine the length of it and I typically don’t do it for more than 10-20 minutes. 

What is it? We’re going to go back down to those energies and pull them up into ourselves to get more used to them and perform some other actions. Cake! Done, right? Maybe. We have to set the intent to use it in this manner and once we’ve decided to do that, we can then add other things to it to make it more multi-functional.

The meditation portion is where you’re “basking” in the energies pulled up and letting it do its work. You’re focused on that aspect of it. It can be walking or stationary and I typically use a lap around the building at work as my time for doing this. The meditation portion simply involves focusing on the energies, being with them in that moment, and listening for when it’s time to send them back.

The attunement portion is where we slowly get used to this mix of energies to acclimate to it like you would sun exposure or new climates that are different from your normal one. Here, we’re looking to build a sort of tolerance to this mix of energies, which will also help reduce the effects as we gain expertise and find ourselves using larger and larger amounts of energy in our rituals more frequently. This is also what I did to gain more of a tolerance to necromantic energies until I could have an open gateway at my house linked to various graveyards I’ve visited in the past without ill effects.

The Method:

Meditate in your chosen manner until you feel you have reached your magical state.

If you choose to cast a circle or do an area banishment, perform this.

Go down inside of yourself. 

Reach down into the Earth, to the core, where the pressure and heat have liquified the solid elements of the Earth itself. Feel the heat of it and notice the liquidity of its movements, even when slow.

From that inner part of yourself, connect it to that molten center, that lava undercurrent that is at the center of the Earth. Be sure to recognize this is Fire and Earth.

Pull this mixture up into yourself slowly. 

Gradually let this mix of Fire and Earth build up inside you until it comes out of your crown and starts bubbling over the outside of you as more comes from below.

Let this cycle continue.

When you feel the time is right, let it recede back into the Earth from where it came.

Simple, right? Sure, but now we’re going to talk about the different ways of using it for targeted benefits. There are some important tweaks we can make that would make them into their own focused ritual, but these initial ones can all be done together to save time.

Meditate in your chosen manner until you feel you have reached your magical state.

If you choose to cast a circle or do an area banishment, perform this.

Go down inside of yourself, dig deeply, dig by instinct, until you find the source of you - your power. Call upon this part of yourself. You need to grab hold of it. Take ownership and once you've done so, this part will respond to your thoughts and will, as if it's waiting to make your Will reality. This does not require excessive emotion and shouldn't.

Reach down into the Earth, to the core, where the pressure and heat have liquified the solid elements of the Earth itself. Feel the heat of it and notice the liquidity of its movements, even when slow.

From that inner part of yourself, connect it to that molten center, that lava undercurrent that is at the center of the Earth. Using your soul (not your mind), call that molten Earth upwards, through the layers, until it breaks the surface of the area where you stand.

Your mind will direct and form this Fiery essence into a protective shield that will surround the area you choose. Oversee this formation until it meets your requirements for the shape and area you wish to cover. The Mind directs, the Will sees it through.

If you wish to give additional instructions at this point in time, such as it being reactionary or to allow certain types of entities or energy through, do so at this time.

At this point, you have a choice. You can choose to leave your shield reactionary (which requires it to be flexible, like lava or as a strictly static form of protection, which involves cooling the lava to form a hard shell. This is a choice that must be made, but not one that cannot be changed. Add enough lava and older lava gets melted the same as anything else. It's not a zero-sum game in this case, if it's your energy and ward that you'd like to replenish and "re-train".

There are some key points I want to make that weren’t made in the first grimoire. You may find some helpful in other areas of your practice. The first is that one of the largest reasons  for centering your mind on your “Spark” is because it helps get your conscious mind out of the way for the rest of the work. It gives our mind something to focus on while a smaller part of it (and the rest of “You” can make the work happen. It’s easy to overthink something like this and try to will it up with our minds and not our actual Will. You will expend twice as much (or more) energy trying to do it with your mind, if you can manage it. Centering your main focus on that “Spark” is a convenient way to achieve that. Truth is, I didn’t know why the instruction was there when I first got the ward. That had to come later.

Second is that this pulling up exercise is crucial for some of the internal and external cordcutting and dissolving methods we will be using. We will be using that same pull upwards, direct the energy towards the outcome, and then get out of the way so it can get the work done more efficiently.

The third point is that it helps you practice locating desired sources of energy, tapping it, and bringing it forth in a way that is transitory. It allows the magician to reduce the effects that moving larger and larger energy amounts can have on the body. If I said that I wanted to sample the energies from, say, a Civil War battlefield, but not keep them inside me, it seems like a no-brainer. It may not be so obvious if it’s the various energies from Pele’s Fiery dome and you start to show signs of lethargy, hyperactivity, or inflammation. Or a hundred other variants, since we all react to energies differently. This set of skills can also help you move it back out of yourself and reduce any toll that the working may have on you.

With these points brought up, it’s time to take these practiced skills to the next level.

That's where @Norse900's folie à deux and Dancing Plague comparison becomes really interesting. Maybe what was spreading through the convent wasn't an infectious disease at all, but behavior, expectation, fear or some kind of psychological/social contagion.

When your life is on the line for not reacting appropriately, people will do things like this. The Russian "show trials" during the Stalin era are a good example of that. Family turning on Family. Spouses on each other.  I was reading the Inquisition book last night and it was talking about a lot of instances where family and spouses turned on each other out of self-preservation.

And that raises another possibility: what about the nuns themselves?

what if someone experimented with some form of spirit contact or magical material, something happened—or they believed something happened—and the whole thing snowballed from there?

Spirits mold our experiences of them to match what we already know. Leviathan to me is different than Leviathan for someone else for this reason (aspects aside, let's keep it simple). The only frame of reference these people may have had is the Catholic Church or similar. They will fit things to that known reference. Add in a little fear of the unknown, fear of demons, and fear of being burnt alive and it seems like quite the magical mix.

Did Grandier magically cause what happened inside that convent? I'm still not buying it.

He wouldn't have to. A lot of the rituals in Forbidden Rites are outdoors. How many of us have helped beginning practitioners close doors and get rid of attachments? Grandier could've just not had the ritual hygiene and the inability to feel or sense that something was amiss until an infestation happened. The evoker and the medium were separate jobs for a significant amount of time. He could've done the calling, not felt anything, and walked off without properly closing. Or he could've raised enough energy to catch the attention of some spirit in the environment that followed him. Sometimes spirits follow people home without any of that. Hard to say.

Edit - formatting

@Verdo, are you thinking something along the lines of syphilis eventually producing neurological or psychiatric symptoms? Because that's an interesting angle. Grandier's reputation with women certainly makes an STD plausible, and syphilis—the French disease, Neapolitan disease, Venetian disease, or apparently whatever name allowed you to blame your neighbors for it haha—could eventually produce some pretty nasty neurological consequences.

Where I have trouble making that fit the convent is the transmission route. As far as I know, we don't have evidence that Grandier was actually sleeping with the Ursuline nuns. Without that connection, an STD might explain symptoms in Grandier or one of his sexual partners, but it becomes much harder to explain why several women inside the same convent began displaying similar behavior.

That's where @Norse900's folie à deux and Dancing Plague comparison becomes really interesting. Maybe what was spreading through the convent wasn't an infectious disease at all, but behavior, expectation, fear or some kind of psychological/social contagion.

I do disagree a little with the literacy argument though. Literacy in the general population was certainly much lower than today, and obviously nobody could pull up a PDF of a grimoire on their phone. But Grandier wasn't an average person—he was an educated Catholic priest. Clergy knew Latin, worked with texts and already operated inside a highly ritualized environment. @Norse900's point about Forbidden Rites and the clerical underground working with grimoires is particularly relevant here.

And that raises another possibility: what about the nuns themselves?

Religious communities were also places where women could receive education and have access to books beyond what was available to many ordinary women of the period. I'm not saying we have evidence that the Ursulines at Loudun were secretly sitting around reading grimoires, because as far as I know we don't. But I don't think we can dismiss occult experimentation simply because they were seventeenth-century women in a convent either.

Which gives us a much more occult possibility to play with.

What if somebody inside the convent actually was experimenting with something?

Think of the modern story we've all heard a thousand times: a group of people decides to mess around with a Ouija board, nobody really knows what they're doing, something weird happens, one person gets scared, then another person starts experiencing something, and before long everybody is convinced they've opened a door they can't close.

Obviously there were no Ouija boards at Loudun. I'm talking about the principle: what if someone experimented with some form of spirit contact or magical material, something happened—or they believed something happened—and the whole thing snowballed from there?

That possibility would actually sit somewhere between our theories. Maybe there was genuine occult experimentation without Grandier having anything to do with it. Maybe there was an unusual experience that then developed into the kind of social contagion @Norse900 is describing. And once things got out of control, Grandier's reputation and political enemies provided a very convenient person to blame.

That's why I keep separating two questions:

Could Grandier have practiced magic? Absolutely possible in my opinion.

Did Grandier magically cause what happened inside that convent? I'm still not buying it.

But now I think there's a third question we didn't originally ask:

What if the occult element, if there actually was one, originated inside the convent rather than with Grandier?

Disease, social contagion, deliberate performance, actual occult experimentation—or some combination of all four?

I think we just made this case even more complicated 🤣 

Hail Marquis Marchosias!

🐺🐺🐺

Most people are occultists

sorry i meant most people aren't occultists

on post characters. The reason about only 1 image per post is not really because of a rule, it is about plugins lol. I didn’t pay for the premium feature of the plugin where multiple images are permitted. so feel free to post as many characters as you wish if there is a limit let me know and I will see if we get a plugin or what the issue is.