The Demonic Possession Of A Nun And Her Letter From Satan
Daniele AbateSister Maria Crocifissa della Concezione’s letter was written in an unknown language.
On Aug. 11, 1676, a 31-year-old nun named Sister Maria Crocifissa della Concezione penned a letter “from the devil” as she struggled with an alleged demonic possession in Palma di Montechiaro, Sicily.
As the story goes, Sister Maria was found that day lying on the floor of her cell. Her face was covered in ink, and there was a letter nearby containing 14 lines written in an unknown language. The nun claimed that the letter had been written by the devil, who’d tried to convince her to abandon God.
Though the letter was written using strange symbols, researchers took a crack at deciphering it in 2017. They used modern-day software to study the 341-year-old letter and were able to untangle its meaning.
Archenzo/Wikimedia CommonsA church in Palma di Montechiaro, the Italian town where Sister Maria Crocifissa della Concezione penned her letter.
According to Live Science, the research team theorized that Sister Maria had created the foreign script based on actual languages that she knew. Sure enough, they found that her letter contained words from ancient Greek, Latin, Runic, and Arabic.
“We analyzed how the syllables and graphisms [or thoughts depicted as symbols] repeated in the letter in order to locate vowels, and we ended up with a refined decryption algorithm,” Daniele Abate, the director of the Ludum Science Center, told Live Science.
Abate’s team found that Sister Maria’s jumble of ancient symbols did include coherent messages, though it also rambled at parts. One passage read: “God thinks he can free mortals… The system works for no one… Perhaps now, Styx [the river that separates the dead and the living] is certain.” Another passage referred to the Holy Trinity “dead weights.”
At the time, the church considered Sister Maria a victim of demonic possession and her mysterious letter from the devil evidence of “innumerable evil spirits.” She was blessed soon after writing it, leaving the meaning of her demonic dispatch unknown for three centuries.
