Joseph-Antoine Boullan

Abbé Boullan

Joseph-Antoine Boullan (* 18th February 1824 in Saint-Porquier , Tarn-et-Garonne , † 4 January 1893 in Lyon ), commonly known as Abbé Boullan , was a French Roman Catholic priest , who because of Satanism was sentenced .

Life

Joseph-Antoine Boullan studied at the seminary in Montauban with very good results and was ordained a priest in 1848. He then completed a doctorate in theology in Rome. Returned to France, he became head of the House of Missionaries of the Precious Blood in Les Trois-Épis in Alsace .

In 1854 he left this office and went to Paris as a priest . There he took over the spiritual leadership of the lay sister Adèle Chevalier in 1856, who was healed of her blindness after a pilgrimage to the Madonna of La Salette-Fallavaux .

In a magazine he founded, the Annales de la Sainteté , he argued that forgiveness could only be obtained through physical suffering combined with prayer. With the approval of the Bishop of Versailles he founded a religious community in Sèvres together with Adèle Chevalier , through which a sexual relationship with her should be hidden. Scandalous events took place there, B. the "healing" of sick people with hosts that were contaminated with urine and feces. There was also talk of animal and human sacrifices. On December 8, 1860, Boullan disappeared the child that Adèle Chevalier had given birth.

Although the crime was never discovered, the bishop received complaints about the strange treatment methods and Boullan's financial demands on the victims. They were arrested and charged. In 1861 Boullan and his lover were sentenced to three years in prison for willful fraud. He served the sentence in Rouen until September 1864. It was not until 1869 that a religious trial against him was opened before the Holy Office . In the monastery cell in which he was housed during the trial, he wrote a confession which was found among his papers by the symbolist , decadent author Joris-Karl Huysmans after his death and has been in the Vatican Library since 1930 . Boullan was given full absolution : he returned to Paris in late 1869.

In his journal, however, he continued to develop strange theories, which the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Guibert , believed to be heretical . Under the pretext of exorcism , Boullan tried to teach supposedly possessed people how to establish sexual relationships with Jesus and the saints. In July 1875 he resigned from the Catholic Church. He contacted the thaumaturge Eugène Vintras , a former paper worker from Bayeux , who believed he was a reincarnation of the prophet Elijah and had been sent to earth to prepare for a Third Reich. Vintras sent him wafers painted with blood with Kabbalistic symbols. After Vintras 'death in December 1875, Boullan called himself to be his successor at the head of a "work of mercy" and went to Lyon in 1876 to study Vintras' archives and to immerse himself in his teachings. The majority of Vintras' followers refused to follow him. Therefore he only succeeded in rallying a small circle of supporters in Lyons. Occult rites such as the “sacrifice to the glory of Melchizedek ” were celebrated together. These rituals involved all kinds of fornication , as critics were quick to discover. With his new lover Julie Thibault, he placed redemption through sex at the center of the so-called "Union of Life".

Judgment and death

Gradually Boullan lost the caution he had previously practiced and openly admitted occultists hostile to the Church to his circle. The poet, occultist and founder of the Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix , Count Stanislas de Guaita , waged a psychological war against him and had him symbolically sentenced to death before a court of honor. In 1891 he made Boullans teachings and sexual magic known practices of the wider public. In 1892, Boullan was convicted by the Trévoux Court for illegal medical practice. He died in 1893. He attributed his sudden illness and impending death - strengthened by Julie Thibault, who was allegedly gifted with vision - to Guaita's black magic.

Huysmans, on the other hand, sympathized with Boullan's teachings during these arguments. For his novel Là-bas (" Tief unten ", 1891) Boullans (or Berthe de Courrière, 1852-1916) provided the template of a satanic priest. Huysmans and the esoteric author Henri Antoine Jules-Bois fought Guaita in an occult feud because they held him responsible for Boullan's death. Julie Thibault brought Huysmans over to Boullan's manuscripts after his death and lived with him for months; However, after reading it, he felt deceived and threw Thibaud out.

literature

• Pierre Dufay: L'Abbé Boullan et le “Chanoine Docre”. In: Mercure de France , no. 882, vol. 258, March 15, 1935, pp. 509-527, online .
• Robert Baldick: La Vie de Joris-Karl Huysmans. Denoël, Paris 1975.

Web links

• Boullan's biography

Individual evidence

1. ^ Maurice Garçon: Vintras, hérésiarque et prophète. Paris: Émile Nourry 1928.