“She is regarded as one of the prophetesses by several doctors of the Roman Church…”

– from Dissertationes de sibyllis, earumque oraculis by Servaas Galle (1688).

The infamous Eugenio Torralva captured the imagination of sixteenth-century Castile and astonished members of the royal house of Habsburg with his seemingly miraculous powers of premonition. He was not, however, the only Spanish thaumaturge whose antics caught the public’s eye. In fact, one could say that Torralva’s abilities paled in comparison to those of his Andalusian counterpart, a renunciant named Magdalena.

Magdalena’s career began in 1504, shortly after taking her vows at the Poor Clares convent of Santa Isabel de Los Angeles in Córdoba. At first, she amazed her fellow sisters with the usual repertoire of charismata: transvection, telekinesis, prophecy, some stigmata here and there. As can be expected, the news of her unearthly abilities spread like wildfire. Her miracles became social currency as it were, and her popularity and reputation for sagacity increased exponentially. Before long, she was elected prioress.

By this time, many in Córdoba had made up their minds about her. To them, she was both saint and sibyl, a living demigoddess who effortlessly bent nature to her will. Cipriano de Valera, in his Los dos Tratados, del papa y de la misa (1588) reported that mariners had seen her appear in the midst of a storm and calm the sea. He also stated that witnesses had seen Magdalena wrap herself in “living flames” (bivas llamas) like a seraphic angel.

According to Valera’s mentor Casiodoro Reina (whose account of Magdalena was reprinted in 1600 in Johann Wolf’s Lectionum memorabilium et reconditarum) Magdalena’s blessings were sought not just by Andalusian commoners but also by ”pontiffs, emperors, and kings” (pontifices, imperatores, reges). Among her most prominent devotees were two of the most influential people in the West at the time, rulers whose hegemonic dominions included faraway lands beyond the Atlantic and vast swathes of territories across Continental Europe: Isabel, Queen consort of Spain and Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor.

These powerful admirers vouched for her sanctity and craved her ministrations, surely thinking that her miracles and utterances were direct acts of God. In this sense, Magdalena resembled the ancient Pythia. Her Delphi was Córdoba, and her adytum was an antral cell in the convent of Santa Isabel. She officiated in this sanctuary until 1542, the last year of her nine-year incumbency as prioress.

In 1543, for one reason or another (perhaps her failure to get re-elected had something to do with it), Magdalena asked to be exorcised. Subsequently, she confessed that her deeds were the result of her alliance with an infernal spirit named Balban. Like Torralva’s bright-eyed familiar Zequiel, this shapeshifting being (whom Magdalena described as “one of the seraphim that had fallen from the sky”) and his compañero Pitonio were the true power behind the throne. Apparently, the two spirits had managed her since childhood, sinisterly architecting her road to mystical stardom with lies and illusions.

After making a full confession in 1546, Magdalena was stripped of her voting privileges and banished from Córdoba. The deposed oracle then lived out the rest of her days in a nunnery in Andújar, presumably no longer under demonic supervision. This was certainly a peaceful conclusion to what Magdalena’s examiners must have seen as a life of deception, and it mirrored Torralva’s similarly lenient sentence (four years in prison). Perhaps this was Magdalena’s last act, a final demonstration of her uncanny prevoyance.

“Magdalena Crucia,

Nun, Abbess, Prophetess of Corduba.

Understood all the Worlds Transactions,

How, but by Devil’s strong Compactions?”

-from Canidia, or the Witches: A Rhapsody in Five Parts by Robert Dixon (1683).

Conceivably, Magdalena could have weighed her options and calculated that ingratiating herself with the Church would save her life. Thus, the Balban story could be seen as Magdalena’s way of concocting and employing a persuasive narrative to strategically indulge the collective imagination of her theologically-minded prosecutors; clericalists who were likely already predisposed to believe such things. From this perspective, Magdalena, by ascribing her genius to the diabolism of supernatural beings, can be seen as a bonafide enchanter, artful to the last.

“Those things which were miraculous in her were these; that she could tell almost at any distance how the affairs of the world went, what consultations or transactions there were in all the nations of Christendome, from whence she got to herself the reputation of a very Holy woman and a great Prophetesse.”

-from An Antidote Against Atheisme by Henry More (1653).

Yet there is also an aspect of Magdalena’s “blame-it-on-the-angels” story that savours of an ancient motif; one that has been described by nineteenth-century sex reformer Ida Craddock and others as “congress with demons” (congressus cum daemonibus). One of the oldest and most famous examples of this trope appears in the extrabiblical Book of Enoch. A portion of the text recounts how in the mythic past a troop of angels led by Semjaza descended on “Mount Hermon” and copulated with human women.

Like Magdalena’s Balban, these primaeval angelic paramours taught their mortal partners all kinds of secret arts, but chiefly “charms and enchantments”. Eventually, however, God and his dream team of archangel-prefects (like officious and imperious inquisitors) intervened and remanded Semjaza and his coadjutor Azazel. Their interspecies children were then summarily exterminated as a part of a series of retributive acts that led up to the Biblical Flood.

Given the popularity of this fable and others of like nature, it’s not inconceivable that Magdalena made a conscious decision to describe her main attendant spirit as a fallen angel. For Magdalena and her contemporaries (some of whom spent their lives vying for the attention of God’s celestial grandees), angels were the original transmitters of magic, entities whose power was inextricably bound to the terrestrial sphere. Thus, like the ancient priestess of Delphi who inhaled and was possessed by Apollo’s chthonic essence, Magdalena, in articulating her intimacy with Balban, laid claim to what many Christians at the time presumed was the oldest and most arcane source of knowledge on earth.

Therefore, one could interpret Magdalena’s confession as her way of expressing this exclusive relationship. As a holy energumen chosen by the fallen ones, she had achieved the congressus; she had decided not to take things further. At the time, this kind of self-assertion was dangerous, but for Magdalena, it merely initiated her retirement.

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