Sister Maria Crocifissa and the Devil's Letter

In the early hours of August 11, 1676, the sisters of the Benedictine convent of Palma di Montechiaro in southern Sicily found one of their number, a thirty-one-year-old nun called Sister Maria Crocifissa della Concezione, lying senseless on the stone floor of her cell. Her habit and face were smeared with ink. Beside her on the writing-desk lay a single sheet of paper covered in dense, unfamiliar writing in a script none of the sisters recognized, mingled with letters and signs that resembled Greek, Latin, and the Arabic that had once been spoken on the island. When she recovered, Sister Maria insisted that the Devil himself had stood at her shoulder during the night, dictating the letter. She had taken it down, she said, in a trance, before fainting from the strain.

Background

Sister Maria Crocifissa was born Isabella Tomasi in 1645, into the noble Sicilian family that would much later produce the novelist Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The family had founded the Benedictine convent at Palma di Montechiaro in the 1650s as a memorial to its piety, and Isabella entered as a novice at fifteen. By all accounts she was a model religious: ascetic, learned in Latin, given to prolonged fasts and to lengthy solitary prayer. She was also subject to severe headaches, fainting spells, and periods of trance, which the convent at the time understood as either mystical favors or trials sent by the Adversary. Her superiors leaned toward the second interpretation. Several years before the celebrated letter, Isabella had begun to report nocturnal struggles with what she called the demon, and to ask the prayers of the community against him.

The Letter

The document that has survived measures roughly twenty by fourteen centimeters and consists of fifteen lines of mixed script. It includes recognizable Greek and Latin characters, certain runic-looking forms, and a number of signs that scholars have variously identified as alchemical, kabbalistic, or invented. The convent preserved it as a curiosity for more than three centuries; it now resides in the convent archive at Palma di Montechiaro, where it is occasionally displayed under glass.

For most of its history the letter resisted interpretation. The community of Palma regarded it as proof of Sister Maria’s encounter with infernal forces, sent in part to torment her and in part to entice her away from her vows. Periodic attempts to translate it were made by visiting clergy, with no success. By the twentieth century it had become a minor tourist attraction.

The 2017 Decryption

In late 2017, researchers at the Ludum Science Center in Catania announced that they had achieved a partial decryption using software originally developed for breaking modern encryption. Their analysis suggested that the letter had been composed by combining glyphs drawn from several alphabets known to a literate seventeenth-century Sicilian: ecclesiastical Latin, ancient Greek, Hebrew, runes likely derived from a printed grimoire, and Arabic. The decoded portion appeared to express a coherent if disjointed message rejecting central tenets of the Christian faith and asserting that the Triune God, the Holy Spirit, and Mary had been invented by humanity. Other lines remained illegible.

The Catania team carefully avoided claims about supernatural authorship. They suggested instead that Sister Maria had probably suffered from a serious psychiatric condition, possibly schizophrenia, and that the letter represented a sincere production of an altered state of consciousness drawing on religious and esoteric vocabulary she would have encountered in the convent library. The conclusion is consistent with what little is known of her mental life from convent records, which describe long periods of distress, weeping, and self-inflicted mortification.

Skeptical Analysis

Modern medical readers have suggested several diagnoses. The episodic trances, the visual hallucinations of an adversary, the writing in altered states, and the periods of relative lucidity all fit reasonably well with a chronic psychotic disorder of the schizophrenic spectrum. Severe migraines accompanied by visual phenomena, common in her case, can also produce experiences that a devout seventeenth-century mind would have interpreted in religious or demonic terms. The letter itself, far from being supernatural, can be read as the work of a lonely and intelligent woman who had spent fifteen years immersed in books written in three or four different scripts, and who under the pressure of mental illness produced a pastiche that her contemporaries could not parse.

This reading does not diminish the historical interest of the case. The Palma episode illustrates with unusual clarity how a Catholic religious community in the late seventeenth century interpreted what we would now call mental illness through a vocabulary of possession and demonic temptation, and how the resulting narrative could persist for more than three hundred years before yielding to a different sort of investigation.

Legacy

Sister Maria Crocifissa lived another twenty-three years after the night of the letter. She died in 1699, having spent the rest of her life at Palma di Montechiaro and never repeating the episode. Her cause for beatification was opened in the early eighteenth century and remains nominally open today. The letter itself has become a small but persistent touchstone in writings on the Loudun possessions and on early modern convent culture more broadly, comparable in its way to the convent crises of Aix-en-Provence in 1611 and the better-known Louviers case of 1647.

Sources

• Aragona, Daniele. “Decoding the Devil’s Letter.” Ludum Science Center Reports, Catania, 2017.
• Gentilcore, David. From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto. Manchester University Press, 1992.
• Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe. I racconti. Feltrinelli, 1961.
• Convent archive, Palma di Montechiaro, MS Tomasi 4.