In the Dictionnaire Infernal of 1863, Collin de Plancy sets down a story he takes from the mathematician Girolamo Cardano. There was a woman in Milan named Marguerite who let it be known everywhere that she had a familiar spirit, a demon that followed her and went absent only two or three months of the year. She made a living from it. People called her to their houses, and when they asked her to raise the spirit she would bow her head, or cover it with her apron, and begin to adjure it in Italian. A voice answered. It was thin and weak, more a murmur than a voice, and it seemed to come from a distance, as if out of a hole in the wall. If anyone crossed to the spot where it was sounding, they found the voice had moved to some other corner of the room. Marguerite acted as its interpreter and told the company what it had said. Women who watched her closely said she kept the spirit shut in a linen cloth, and that she bit her mouth so hard her lips were almost always ulcerated. She was held in such horror that no one would give her a room.
De Plancy closes the entry with one flat sentence. We need not add, he writes, that this was a trick of ventriloquism.
The verdict is his, added in 1863 to older material that had reported the case straight. The gloss itself is not new. It runs about two thousand years older than de Plancy, and it was first written into scripture.
The belly-speakers
The Greeks had a word for what Marguerite did, and it is the same word we still use, only in Greek. An engastrimythos is a belly-speaker, from en (in), gaster (belly), and mythos (speech). Latin built the same word out of its own parts, venter and loqui, and gave us ventriloquist. The word carries a whole theory of the voice inside it. The sound came from the belly because a spirit, usually of the dead, was thought to be living there, and the person who housed it did not so much speak as translate. That was Marguerite’s arrangement: the spirit murmurs, and she tells the room what it means.
The most famous of these figures was Eurycles of Athens, who worked in the fifth century BC. He was proverbial enough that Aristophanes could reach for him in the Wasps and expect a laugh, comparing his own hidden influence on other poets to the prophetic power that “hid in the belly of Eurycles.” Plato uses him the same way in the Sophist, describing people who, “like Eurycles,” carry a voice about in their own bellies that argues back at them. Belly-speakers became known as eurycleides after him.
Plutarch, writing his treatise on why the oracles had fallen silent, gives the neatest summary of the whole tradition in a single line. The belly-diviners, he says, “used to be called Eurycleis, but now Pythones.” That second name is the loose thread that ties the pagan oracle to the Christian scripture. Python is the serpent of Delphi, and a pythonic spirit is an oracular one. When the Book of Acts describes a slave girl at Philippi who followed Paul around with a “spirit of python,” her owners making money from her fortune-telling, it is describing this same figure: a person believed to host an oracular voice, which the standard Greek lexica connect directly to the belly-speaking tradition.
The oldest debunk is in the Bible
The clearest case of a belly-speaker in the ancient record is also the most famous act of necromancy in the Hebrew Bible, and they are one and the same episode.
In 1 Samuel 28, King Saul, abandoned by God on the eve of battle, goes in disguise to a woman at Endor and asks her to bring up the prophet Samuel from the dead. The Hebrew calls her a ba’alat ob, a mistress of an ob, a word that means a spirit, or a necromancer, or the pit from which the dead were called. English Bibles have long rendered it “a woman with a familiar spirit.” The Septuagint, the Greek translation made by Jewish scholars at Alexandria in the second century BC, renders it engastrimythos, belly-speaker.
Many scholars read that choice as a rationalizing move by the Alexandrian translators, who tended to blunt the raw supernatural of the older text; by calling her a ventriloquist rather than a genuine raiser of the dead, the Greek quietly turns Endor into a performance. The point was not lost on the early Church, which argued about it for centuries. Origen, in the third century, took the passage at its word: the woman really did bring Samuel back. Eustathius of Antioch, in the fourth, wrote an entire treatise against him, On the Belly-Speaker, insisting that whatever appeared to Saul was a demonic phantom and not the true prophet. The whole argument ran on the meaning of a single Greek word, the belly-speaker.
The man whose testimony debunks Marguerite of Milan had a familiar spirit in his own family. Girolamo Cardano wrote that his father, Fazio, was attended by a spirit for decades. The skeptic who explains away the belly-voice grew up in a house that believed in one.
It was never the belly
The physical claim buried in the word is wrong: no one speaks from the stomach. The sound is made where all speech is made, in the larynx and the mouth, but a trained belly-speaker produces it with the lips barely moving and the jaw nearly still, on a slow controlled release of breath through a tightened throat. Muffling the voice this way strips it of the cues the ear normally uses to place a sound in space. A voice you cannot localize will be filed by the brain as coming from wherever the situation suggests: the ceiling, the next room, a hole in the wall. That is why Marguerite’s spirit seemed to shift corners whenever someone crossed to the first. Nothing had actually moved; the listeners were guessing at the source, and their guess followed them around the room.
The technique costs the body something, which is the last detail the Milan account records. Holding the throat in that constriction, and clamping the lips shut to hide the source, is a strain, and Marguerite’s perpetually bitten, ulcerated mouth reads less as a spiritual affliction than as an occupational injury. The dead were not speaking through her; she was working.
The Enlightenment takes the voice apart
It fell to the eighteenth century to measure the trick instead of only denouncing it. In 1772 a French academician, Jean-Baptiste de La Chapelle, published Le Ventriloque, ou l’Engastrimythe, a two-volume study that pulled the phenomenon out of demonology and set it down among the natural sciences. He worked from living subjects, chiefly a grocer named Saint-Gille and an Austrian baron, de Mengen, watching them at close range and describing what they did.
The French Royal Academy of Sciences examined Saint-Gille and reached the conclusion the word had resisted for two millennia: the stomach, they found, played no part at all, and the effect “was caused solely by a certain constriction of the throat, acquired by habit.” The voice from the belly came from the throat, and always had.
One episode in the file turns the old fear on its head. Saint-Gille, passing a monastery, threw his voice up toward the roof and let the friars hear a disembodied voice speaking of one of their own dead brothers. They took it for a genuine visitation from heaven, and were shaken, until he told them how it was done. The technique that had produced two thousand years of oracles and familiar spirits was now put to work faking an apparition on purpose, a demonstration of how little it took to produce one. Belly-speaking had turned against the belief it once served. The historian Leigh Eric Schmidt calls this the road “from demon possession to magic show,” and Saint-Gille is standing at the turn in it.
From the oracle to the dummy
Once the voice belonged to the throat, the stage could claim it. The nineteenth century made ventriloquism an act. Charles Mathews built an entire one-man show, At Home, in which he played every character himself, and William Edward Love toured as “the Polyphonist,” conjuring crowds of voices out of an empty stage. The seated dummy, the wooden partner who talks back, came later, and it completed the domestication. What had been the Pythia at Delphi and the woman at Endor was now a man in a good coat making a carved head insult him for money.
The cultural historian Steven Connor, whose Dumbstruck is the fullest account of all this, reads the long arc as one chapter in a larger story about the disembodied voice, the voice cut loose from a visible source, which runs on past the stage into the telephone and later the recording. The technique was always ordinary, a matter of breath and a tightened throat, and the Greek Bible had already named the woman at Endor a ventriloquist before the Common Era began. Yet a voice with no mouth to own it has never quite lost its strangeness, and it kept finding new work, from the tripod at Delphi to the séance table and the loudspeaker. The trick was solved a long time ago. The unease it plays on was not.
Related on Crazy Alchemist
The line between a real technique and a supernatural reading runs through a lot of our material. Giambattista della Porta, Professor of Secrets built a career on this seam, cataloguing the natural mechanisms behind effects that looked like magic. The cat as a witch’s familiar sits in the corner of Le Breton’s Marguerite plate for a reason, and the history of exorcism across religions is the other half of the possession story, the voice that speaks through a body against its will.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire Infernal (Paris, 6th ed. 1863), entries ‘Marguerite (italienne)’ and ‘Cécile’
- Nicolas Lenglet-Dufresnoy, Recueil de dissertations anciennes et nouvelles sur les apparitions (1751), t. I, p. 156, relaying the testimony of Girolamo Cardano
- The Septuagint of 1 Samuel 28 (the medium of Endor rendered engastrimythos); Eustathius of Antioch, De engastrimytho contra Origenem (4th c.), ed. R. Greer and M. Mitchell, The ‘Belly-Myther’ of Endor (SBL, 2007)
- Plutarch, De defectu oraculorum 9 (Moralia 414E); Aristophanes, Wasps 1017-1020; Plato, Sophist 252c
- Jean-Baptiste de La Chapelle, Le Ventriloque, ou l’Engastrimythe (1772)
- Leigh Eric Schmidt, ‘From Demon Possession to Magic Show: Ventriloquism, Religion, and the Enlightenment,’ Church History 67:2 (1998), 274-304
- Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford, 2000)
