year 5331. When I was in Safed, my teacher of blessed memory instructed me to expel evil spirits by the power of the yiḥud that he taught me. When I went to him, the woman was lying on the bed. I sat beside her, and he turned his face away from me to the other side. I told him to turn his face towards me to speak with me, and that he depart, but he was unwilling. I squeezed his face with my hand, and he said to me, “Since I did not face you, you struck me? I did this not out of evil, but because your face is alight with a great burning fire, and my soul is scorched if I gaze at you because of your great holiness.”72
The clairvoyant powers attributed to the spirit in the woman are unabated, even though she was clearly afflicted and indeed bedridden. Avoidance of face-to-face contact with Vital, the spirit explains, was due to Vital’s sublime holiness, a quality of Vital’s that seems to have been appreciated primarily by men and women gifted with clairvoyant powers. Although Vital’s spiritual stature was recognized by Karo’s Maggid, Luria, R. Lapidot Ashkenazi, the Shamanic Kabbalists Avraham Avshalom of Morocco and Shealtiel Alsheikh of Persia, palm readers, Arab seers, and a number of visionary women in Safed and Damascus, he appears to have been underappreciated by those lacking visionary powers.73 For Vital, this meeting with the possessed widow was recalled precisely because it constituted an encounter with yet another visionary capable of assessing his spiritual stature. Although Vital was quite willing to accept the testimony of visionary women to this effect, this short entry exhibits, through its fluid instability of pronouns, the volatility and ambiguity of customary conceptions of gender when confronting a visionary of this kind—demonic/clairvoyant/female/male: “The woman was lying on the bed. I sat beside her, and he turned his face away from me … [and] I told him” Clearly, in Vital’s view, the woman’s body is little more than a physical frame containing the soul of the deceased rabbinic student with whom he is trafficking. Yet it would be wrong to downplay the significance of this bodily frame or to exaggerate Vital’s sense of its exceptionality. Far from being a pathological exception, Vital’s discussions elsewhere of the problems associated with the “normal” transmigration of male souls into female bodies suggest just how complex his construction of gender was. Vital believed, for example, that his own wife Hannah was in fact a male soul, the reincarnation of Rabbi Akiva’s father-in-law.74
Vital perceived the refusal to face him as insolence and did not hesitate to use physical intimidation against the disrespectful spirit/woman, forcing him/her to face him. Positioned at the widow’s bedside, Vital “squeezed his face” to bring about the face-to-face encounter. Indeed, as he himself understood it, Vital’s soul genealogy inclined him to violence. Luria required Vital to be especially careful to keep this tendency in check, ordering him to avoid killing even fleas or lice. (Luria himself, Vital reports, killed no creatures intentionally.) Vital was also to remove knives from the table before reciting grace after meals and was never to function as a mohel (circumciser) or slaughterer-butcher (or even to observe them at work).75 In this journal entry, nevertheless, Vital hides neither his immodest approach to the woman’s bed nor his assault, albeit limited, upon her body. Moreover, the rare opportunity to compare a revealing first-person description by the exorcist himself with the later popular accounts is particularly telling. Three clear deviations from Vital’s account may be discerned, all of which point essentially in the same direction. First, none of the three popular accounts makes mention of the fact that the woman was in bed when Vital arrived. The choreography of the scene is modestly ambiguous. Second, all popular accounts claim that Vital used a “decree” to force the spirit to face him; no physical contact with the woman, which too might have been construed as immodest, was necessary.76 Finally, it is the spirit’s sinfulness that, in popular accounts, explains the spirit’s inability to face Vital, rather than its visionary insight of Vital’s spiritual grandeur. From these differences, we may see precisely the areas in which accounts that have some factual basis are reported quite accurately, but with omissions and additions that bowdlerize the texts where they might prove embarrassing, or insufficiently didactic. Apparently a portrait of Vital grabbing a visionary woman in her bedchamber was not what the writers and redactors of these accounts had in mind.77
And sexual transgression is indeed at the heart of the case, the spirit’s sin being the fathering of bastards in an adulterous affair with a married woman. In his conversation with Vital, the spirit recounts his sins and, at greater length, the travails he has undergone since his death by drowning.78 Refused entry into Gehinnom by 10,000 protesting sinners ostensibly more worthy than he, the spirit attempted to find refuge in the body of a Jewish inhabitant of the city of Ormuz.79 To his chagrin, not a single Jew in that city could provide him with an inhabitable body. Here again, sexual transgression figures prominently. Owing to their “fornication with menstruating [Jewish] and Gentile women,” the bodies of these Jews are contaminated, filled, and surrounded with the forces of defilement. The account of this case, perhaps more than any other, is indeed rife with images of bodies filled—filled with forces of defilement, with souls of the living and the dead, and even with fetuses. When the spirit cannot possess a Jew in Ormuz without harming further his own reprobate soul, he enters a doe in the wilderness of Gaza out of sheer desperation.80 This doe, however, was itself an unsuitable container—“for the soul of a human being and the soul of a beast are not equal, for one walks upright and the other bent.” The spirit, then, is not what would be thought of today as “spiritual”; it has physical form and dimensions, and only the human body is contoured such as to make it an apposite host. It is matter, albeit of a much finer grade than that of which the body is formed. “Also, the soul [nefesh] of the beast is full of filth and is repulsive, its smell foul before the soul of a human being. And its food is not human food.” In the spirit’s description of his travails, he makes clear that the host’s pains and pleasures are fully shared by the temporary, unwelcome squatter. And if the mismatch wasn’t uncomfortable enough given the differences of form and diet, the spirit explains that in this case, the doe was pregnant and was therefore already quite full. The result was pain for the spirit and the doe alike, for “three souls cannot dwell together” in a single body. The doe, in agony, ran wildly in the hills and through rocky terrain, her belly swollen, until it split open, pouring out the three occupants with her death.81
The next bodily container for the spirit was to be a Kohen (a Jew of the priestly caste) in the city of Nablus. This gentleman, apparently realizing that he was possessed, called in the local expert exorcists for assistance. In this case, the spirit tells us that Muslim clerics were summoned, not kabbalists. This detail accords well with what we know about Jewish life in mid-sixteenth-century Nablus. Unlike the Jews in Safed who lived in a separate Jewish quarter, the Jews of Nablus lived in mixed Jewish-Muslim neighborhoods.82 It is also indicative of the acceptance of non-Jewish magical healers in Jewish society that we shall consider at greater length below. The Islamic holy men—using incantations, adjurations, and amulets—do, in fact, succeed in exorcising the spirit from the Kohen. Here again, it is the bodily vessel and its contents that determine the matter. Responding to Vital’s astonishment that the Muslims’ magico-mystical arsenal was capable of effecting the exorcism, the spirit explains that the techniques employed by the Muslims infused the Kohen’s body with so many defiling spirits that he had to leave to avoid the kind of contamination he had feared contracting from the impure contents of the bodies of the Jews of Ormuz.83 This fascinating turnabout takes us from what at first appears to be a model of magico-therapeutic syncretism to a devastating critique of such syncretism. The ambivalence felt in the wake of a successful exorcism performed by the “competition” is articulated in terms that authorize that power while simultaneously undermining its religious credibility; they won the race but failed the drug test. This critique, moreover, is somewhat ironic given the widespread use of demonic adjurations to expel evil spirits found in Jewish magical manuscripts. Such demonic adjurations work along similar lines, essentially forcing out the spirits by their own malevolent presence and potency.84
What motivated the spirit’s possession of the widow? Early modern Christian attitudes regarding demonic motivations underlying possession reflected theological premises quite remote
