In religious and magical practice, insufflation and exsufflationInsufflation (from Latin word elements meaning "a blowing on") and exsufflation ("a blowing out") often cannot be distinguished in usage, and so are considered together in this article. are ritual acts of blowing, breathing, hissing, or puffing that signify variously expulsion or renunciation of evil or of the devil (the Evil One), or infilling or blessing with good (especially, in religious use, with the Spirit or grace of God).
In historical Christian practice, such blowing appears most prominently in the liturgy, and is connected almost exclusively with baptism and other ceremonies of Christian initiation, achieving its greatest popularity during periods in which such ceremonies were given a prophylactic or exorcistic significance, and were viewed as essential to the defeat of the devil or to the removal of the taint of original sin.See Franz Josef Dölger, Der Exorzismus im altchristlichen Taufrituel, Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Altertums 3 (Paderborn, 1909), chap. 7 "Die Exsufflatio" (pp. 118-130); Edmond Martène, De antiquis ecclesiae ritibus libri tres (Venice, 1763), I.1.viii-xiv ("Ritus instituendi catechumeni"); Rudolf Suntrup, Die Bedeutung der liturgischen Gebärden und Bewegungen in lateinischen und deutschen Auslegungen des 9. bis 13. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1978), pp. 307-310; and Henry A. Kelly, The Devil at Baptism: Ritual, Theology, and Drama (Ithaca, 1985).
Ritual blowing occurs in the liturgies of catechumenate and baptism from a very early period and survives into the modern Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Maronite, and Coptic rites.Alongside Martène and Suntrup (cited above), convenient collections of illustrative material include W. G. Henderson, ed., Manuale et Processionale ad usum insignis Ecclesiae Eboracensis, Surtees Society Publications 63 (Durham, 1875 for 1874), especially Appendix III "Ordines Baptismi" [cited below as York Manual]; Joseph Aloysius Assemanus, Codex liturgicus ecclesiae universae, I: De Catechumenis and II: De Baptismo (Rome, 1749; reprinted Paris and Leipzig, 1902); J. M. Neale, ed., The Ancient Liturgies of the Gallican Church...together with Parallel Passages from the Roman, Ambrosian, and Mozarabic Rites (London, 1855; rpt. New York, 1970); Enzo Lodi, Enchiridion euchologicum fontium liturgicorum (Rome, 1978); Johannes Quaesten, ed., Monumenta eucharistica et liturgica vetustissima, Florilegium Patristicum tam veteris quam medii aevi auctores complectens, ed. Bernhard Geyer and Johan Zellinger, fasc. 7 in 7 parts (Bonn, 1935-1937); E. C. Whitaker, Documents of the Baptismal Liturgy, 2nd ed. (London, 1970); and Thomas M. Finn, Early Christian Baptism and the Catechumenate: Italy, North Africa, and Egypt (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992). Catholic liturgy post-Vatican II (the so-called novus ordo 1969) has largely done away with insufflation, except in a special rite for the consecration of chrism on Maundy Thursday.F. L. Cross, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed., rev. by F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (Oxford, 1998), s.v. "insufflation," p. 839. Protestant liturgies typically abandoned it very early on. The Tridentine Catholic liturgy retained both an insufflation of the baptismal water and (like the present-day Orthodox and Maronite rites)The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed., 840. For the Maronite rite, derived from the ancient Syriac liturgy, see Mysteries of Initiation, Baptism, Confirmation, Communion according to the Maronite Antiochene Church, (Washington, DC, 1987); summarized by Bryan D. Spinks, Early and Medieval Rituals and Theologies of Baptism..., (Aldershot, Hants., 2006), 89-91. an exsufflation of the candidate for baptism, right up to the 1960s:
[THE INSUFFLATION] He breathes thrice upon the waters in the form of a cross, saying: Do You with Your mouth bless these pure waters: that besides their natural virtue of cleansing the body, they may also be effectual for purifying the soul.Saint Andrew Daily Missal..., by Dom Gaspar Lefebvre (Bruges [Belgium]: Biblica, 1962), 492 [liturgy for the Easter vigil].
THE EXSUFFLATION. The priest breathes three times on the child in the form of a cross, saying: Go out of him...you unclean spirit and give place to the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete.Saint Andrew Missal (Bruges, 1962), 1768 [ceremonies of baptism].
Insufflation vs. exsufflation
From an early period, the act had two distinct but not always distinguishable meanings: it signified on the one hand the derisive repudiation or exorcism of the devil; and, on the other, purification and consecration by and inspiration with the Holy Spirit. The former is technically "exsufflation" ("blowing out") and the latter "insufflation" ("blowing in"), but ancient and medieval texts (followed by modern scholarship) make no consistent distinction in usage. For example, the texts use not only Latin insufflare ('blow in') and exsufflare ('blow out'), or their Greek or vernacular equivalents, but also the simplex sufflare ('blow'), halare ('breathe'), inspirare, exspirare, etc.P. Pashini, et al., ed., Enciclopedia Cattolica (Florence, 1949-1954), s.v. "insufflazione," pp. 55-56. Compare Neale, The Ancient Liturgies of the Gallican Church..., p. 266, note m; Whitaker, Documents of the Baptismal Liturgy, p. 256; Kelly, The Devil at Baptism, p. 235. Döger, Der Exorzismus im altchristlichen Taufrituel, p. 130 similarly distinguishes between exsufflation and "halation"; and Suntrup, Die Bedeutung der liturgischen Gebärden, p. 307 warns that the distinction is a hard one to maintain. The Episcopal Dictionary of the Church, s.v. insufflation (accessed 14 Jan 2007) similarly says that "the distinction between insufflation and exsufflation has not always been preserved." And the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed., p. 839, is content to give both inspirational ("to symbolize the influence of the Holy Spirit") and exorcistic ("the expulsion of evil spirits") meanings under the single heading of "insufflation."
Typical is the 8th-century Libellus de mysterio baptismatis of Magnus of Sens, one of a number of responses to a questionnaire about baptism circulated by Charlemagne. In discussing insufflation as a means of exorcising catechumens, Magnus combines a variety of mostly exsufflation-like functions≈
"Those who are to be baptised are insufflated by the priest of God, so that the Prince of Sinners [i.e. the devil] may be put to flight from out of them, and that entry for the Lord Christ might be prepared, and that by his insufflation they might be made worthy to receive the Holy Spirit."Patrologia Latina, 102:982D.
This double role appears as early as Cyril of Jerusalem's 4th-century Mystagogic Catacheses; as Edward Yarnold notes, "Cyril attributes both negative and positive effects [to insufflation]. … The rite of breathing on the [baptismal] candidate has the negative effect of blowing away the devil (exsufflation) and the positive effect of breathing in grace (insufflation)."Cyril of Jerusalem, by Edward J. Yarnold (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 203.
History
Early period
What might neutrally be called "sufflation" is found in some of the earliest liturgies dealing with the protracted process of initiation known as the "catechumenate," which saw its heyday in the 4th and 5th centuries. The earliest extant liturgical use is possibly that of the Apostolic Tradition attributed to Hippolytus of Rome, from the 3rd or 4th century, and therefore contemporary with Cyril in the east:The date is controversial. The text is usually connected with practice in Rome and dated in its earliest form to the early 3rd century. But the surviving text is fragmentary, many portions surviving only in much later versions in several different languages. Chapter 20, the relevant chapter, is perhaps from the 4th century (see Maxwell E. Johnson, The Rites of Christian Initiation: Their Evolution and Interpretation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 78-81). For the standard reconstruction of the text, see Bernard Botte, La "Tradition Apostolique," 42-45 (chapter 20). Whitaker, Documents, p. 4, reprints the translation of Gregory Dix, The Treatise on the Apostolic Tradition, p. 32 (sect. xx.8). Botte renders the Coptic original of the sufflation passage as "exsufflet," though Kelly (Devil at Baptism, p. 87) points out that the significance of the gesture is uncertain. Geoffrey Cumming gives the more neutral translation "breathe on": Hippolytus: A Text for Students (Bramcote, Notts, 1976), p. 18, as reproduced more fully below.
Those who are to be baptized should … be gathered in one place. … And [the bishop] should lay his hands on them and exorcize all alien spirits, that they may flee out of them and never return into them. And when he has finished exorcizing them, he shall breathe on their faces; and when he has signed their foreheads, ears, and noses, he shall raise them up.Cuming's translation, reprinted by Maxwell Johnson, Rites of Christian Initiation, p. 74.
Distribution, geographical and functional