y exorcised, tried, tortured, convicted, and executed.
The great St. Ambrose tells us that a priest, while saying mass, was
troubled by the croaking of frogs in a neighbouring marsh; that he
exorcised them, and so stopped their noise. St. Bernard, as the monkish
chroniclers tell us, mounting the pulpit to preach in his abbey, was
interrupted by a cloud of flies; straightway the saint uttered the
sacred formula of excommunication, when the flies fell dead upon the
pavement in heaps, and were cast out with shovels! A formula of exorcism
attributed to a saint of the ninth century, which remained in use down
to a recent period, especially declares insects injurious to crops to
be possessed of evil spirits, and names, among the animals to be
excommunicated or exorcised, mice, moles, and serpents. The use of
exorcism against caterpillars and grasshoppers was also common. In the
thirteenth century a Bishop of Lausanne, finding that the eels in Lake
Leman troubled the fishermen, attempted to remove the difficulty by
exorcism, and two centuries later one of his successors excommunicated
all the May-bugs in the diocese. As late as 1731 there appears an entry
on the Municipal Register of Thonon as follows: "RESOLVED, That this
town join with other parishes of this province in obtaining from Rome
an excommunication against the insects, and that it will contribute pro
rata to the expenses of the same."

Did any one venture to deny that animals could be possessed by Satan,
he was at once silenced by reference to the entrance of Satan into the
serpent in the Garden of Eden, and to the casting of devils into swine
by the Founder of Christianity himself.(361)

(361) See Menabrea, Proces au Moyen Age contre les Animaux, Chambery,
1846, pp. 31 and following; also Desmazes, Supplices, Prisons et Grace
en France, pp. 89, 90, and 385-395. For a formula and ceremonies used in
excommunicating insects, see Rydberg, pp. 75 and following.

One part of this superstition most tenaciously held was the belief that
a human being could be transformed into one of the lower animals. This
became a fundamental point. The most dreaded of predatory animals in the
Middle Ages were the wolves. Driven from the hills and forests in the
winter by hunger, they not only devoured the flocks, but sometimes came
into the villages and seized children. From time to time men and women
whose brains were disordered dreamed that they had been changed into
various