World Famous Cults and Fanatics Read Free Page B

cow’s milk.
    After staggering away from the eater of excrement, Montgéron had to endure a worse ordeal. In another part of the churchyard, a number of women had volunteered to cleanse suppurating
wounds and boils by sucking them clean. Trying hard to prevent himself vomiting, Montgéron watched as someone unwound a dirty bandage from the leg of a small girl; the smell was horrible. The leg was a festering mass of sores, some so deep that the bone was visible. The woman who had volunteered to clean it was one of the convulsionnaires – she had been miraculously
cured and converted by her bodily contortions, and God had now chosen her to demonstrate how easily human beings’ disgust can be overcome. Yet even she blenched as she saw and smelt the
gangrened leg. She cast her eyes up to heaven, prayed silently for a moment, then bent her head and began to lap, swallowing the septic matter. When she moved her face farther down the
child’s leg Montgéron could see that the wound was now clean. Paige assured him that the girl would almost certainly be cured when the treatment was complete.
    What Montgéron saw next finally shattered his resistance and convinced him that he was witnessing something of profound significance. A sixteen-year-old girl named Gabrielle Moler had
arrived, and the interest she excited made Montgéron aware that, even among this crowd of miraculous freaks, she was a celebrity. She removed her cloak and lay on the ground, her skirt
modestly round her ankles. Four men, each holding a pointed iron bar, stood over her. When the girl smiled at them they lunged down at her, driving their rods into her stomach. Montgéron had
to be restrained from interfering as the rods went through the girl’s dress and into her stomach. He looked for signs of blood staining her dress. But none came, and the girl looked calm and
serene. Next the bars were jarrred under her chin, forcing her head back. It seemed inevitable that they would penetrate through to her mouth; yet when the points were removed the flesh was
unbroken. The men took up sharp-edged shovels, placed them against a breast, and then pushed with all their might; the girl went on smiling gently. The breast, trapped between shovels, should have
been cut off, but it seemed impervious to the assault. Then the cutting edge of a shovel was placed against her throat, and the man wielding it did his best to cut off her head; he did not seem to
be able even to dent her neck.
    Dazed, Montgéron watched as the girl was beaten with a great iron truncheon shaped like a pestle. A stone weighing half a hundredweight (25 kilograms) was raised ahove her body and
dropped repeatedly from a height of several feet. Finally, Montgéron watched her kneel in front of a blazing fire, and plunge her head into it. He could feel the heat from where he stood;
yet her hair and eyebrows were not even singed. When she picked up a blazing chunk of coal and proceeded to eat it Montgéron could stand no more and left.
    But he went back repeatedly, until he had enough materials for the first volume of an amazing book. He presented it to the king, Louis XV, who was so shocked and indignant that he had
Montgéron thrown into prison. Yet Montgéron felt he had to “bear witness”, and was to publish two more volumes following his release, full of precise scientific testimony
concerning the miracles.
    In the year following Montgéron’s imprisonment, 1732, the Paris authorities decided that the scandal was becoming unbearable and closed down the churchyard. But the convulsionnaires had discovered that they could perform their miracles anywhere, and they continued for many years. A hardened sceptic, the scientist La Condamine, was as startled as
Montgéron when, in 1759, he watched a girl named Sister Françoise being crucified on a wooden cross, nailed by the hands and feet over a period of several hours, and stabbed in the
side with a spear. He noticed that all this obviously