(Some authorities, however, say that it was the smoke of burning bay-leaves that the Oracle inhaled.)
The offensive odour of hell adheres to all the devils right down to modern times. In the Middle Ages you could always toll the Evil One by his sulphurous stink, but, unfortunately for the tempted, it was not usually observed until after his departure.
But evil odours not only attended the devil himself : they were also generated by the sins. For St. Joseph of Copertino, “seeing beneath the envelope of the body,” was able to recognise the sins of the flesh by their odour. And St. Paconi, so it was said, could even smell out heretics in his day, presumably in the same way as witches are now discovered in Africa.
Moreover, as the devil and his minions are attended with a vile smell, the odour of their infernal home, so naturally they detest what we call sweet and aromatic perfumes and are repelled by them, as the following tale from Sinistrari of Ameno shows. I give it verbatim as it appears in Sax Rohmer’s “Romance of Sorcery” :
“In a certain monastery of holy nuns there lived as a boarder a young maiden of noble birth who was tempted by an Incubus, that appeared to her by day and by night, and with the most earnest entreaties, the manners of a most passionate lover, incessantly incited her to sin; but she,
