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PETER A. GODDARD
The Devil in New France: Jesuit Demonology, 1611 - 50
Ce divin employ de Missionnaire devoit renverser la tyrannie des demons.(f.1)
The Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune described New France as the 'Empire of Satan.' His colleague Jean de Brebeuf called the Huron country the 'Devil's kingdom,' while Jerome Lalemant referred to the Huron themselves as 'slaves of the Devil.' The pioneer missionary Pierre Biard suggested that the sauvages of Canada had some idea of God, 'but they are so perverted by false ideas and by custom, that they really worship the Devil.'(f.2) Others speculated that the Devil animated shamanic activity and meddled in dreams, thereby controlling these unfortunate peoples. In Relations addressed to the faithful in France, the Devil appears as the formidable enemy of the French Jesuits' most important seventeenth - century mission.(f.3)
Accepting these declarations, modern scholars attribute to these Jesuits an active diabolism, or belief in the real presence of the Devil among the Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples. Credulity about Jesuit diabolism is upheld by Bruce Trigger, who asserts that 'the Jesuits ardently believed in the power of Satan and his attendant devils.' Karen Anderson argues that 'the Jesuits were convinced that the native people of New France were truly a fertile ground for the Demon.' William Eccles, in a standard textbook account, suggests that 'the Jesuits at first regarded the religious beliefs of all the Indians as the work of Satan, and every setback was attributed to his efforts.' J. Baird Callicott, who gives voice to the opinion that missionary records are 'so hopelessly abject as to be more entertaining than illuminating,' claims also that Europeans believed aboriginal peoples to be 'mindfully servants of Satan.' These modern and postmodern commentators all appear to follow the lead of Francis Parkman, who in The Jesuits in North America (1867) stated that demonic resistance to their mission was 'an unfailing consolation to the priests.'(f.4)
This apparent consensus among historians of early modern Canada should not surprise us. An active diabolism, and its attendant demonology (the study of devilish phenomena), is consistent with the thorough - going religiosity that characterized the missionary mind during that 'golden age of the Devil.'(f.5) In its classic form, which posited the reality of the Devil...