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At this point a doubt as to the credibility of the clerical reporters may well arise in our minds and warn us not to waste our labours on a product of monastic superstition. We are told that several clerics, mentioned by name, assisted at the exorcism and were present in the Chapel when the Devil appeared. If it had been asserted that they, too, saw the Devil appear in the form of a dragon and offer the painter the paper written in red (Schedam sibi porrigentem conspexisset), we should be faced by several unpleasant possibilities, among which that of a collective hallucination would be the mildest. But the Abbot Franciscus’s testimony dispels this doubt. Far from asserting that the assisting clerics saw the Devil too, he only states in straightforward and sober words that the painter suddenly tore himself away from the Fathers who were holding him, rushed into the corner of the Chapel where he saw the apparition, and then returned with the paper in his hand.¹

The miracle was great, and the victory of the Holy Mother over Satan without question; but unfortunately the cure was not a lasting one. It is once more to the credit of the clergy that they have not concealed this. After a short time the painter left Mariazell in the best of health and went to Vienna, where he lived with a married sister. On October 11 fresh attacks began, some of them very severe, and these are reported in the diary until January 13. They consisted in visions and ‘absences’, in which he saw and experienced every kind of thing, in convulsive seizures accompanied by the most painful sensations, on one occasion in paralysis of the legs, and so on. This time, however, it was not the Devil who tormented him; it was by sacred figures that he was vexed - by Christ and by the Blessed Virgin herself. It is remarkable that he suffered no less through these heavenly manifestations and the punishments they inflicted on him than he had formerly through his traffic with the Devil. In his diary, indeed, he included these fresh experiences too as manifestations of the Devil; and when, in May, 1678, he returned to Mariazell, he complained of maligini Spiritûs manifestationes.

¹ . . . ipsumque Daemonem ad Aram Sac. Cellae per fenestrellam in cornu Epistolae, Schedam sibi porrigentem conspexisset, eo advolans e Religiosorum manibus, qui eum tenebant, ipsam Schedam ad manum obtinuit. . . .’