Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  The alchemist Trithemius recalls a meeting with Faustus Junior as early as 1507, and dismisses him as a fool, a boaster, and a charlatan. In the few other references we have he is casting horoscopes, making prophecies, or being driven from town to town by his unsavoury reputation as a sodomite and necromancer (one who foretells the future by communicating with the dead). From Johann Wier, an acquaintance of Faust who wrote about him, we learn that Faust was wont to boast about ‘his friend the Devil’—which may have been nothing more than a typical piece of bombast. A story of Faust’s malicious humour recorded by Wier describes how Faust, when a prisoner in the castle of Baron Hermann of Batenburg, offered to show the nobleman’s chaplain how to remove his beard without a razor, in exchange for a bottle of wine. The chaplain was to rub his beard with the ‘magic formula’, arsenic. The gullible chaplain did this. His beard fell out, just as Faust had prophesied—but it took most of the chaplain’s skin with it. Wier also tells us that Faust was a drunken wanderer who spent much of his time in low taverns, impressing the locals with conjuring tricks. Other contemporary chroniclers describe him as a liar and a ‘low juggler’.

  We do not know when Faust died—it was probably in the 1540s—but we do know how his legendary fame began. A Swiss Protestant clergyman, Johanne Gast, once dined with Faust, and was unfavourably impressed by him—perhaps because of Faust’s hints at his pact with the Devil. At all events Gast later spoke of Faust in one of his sermons, declaring that he had been strangled by the Devil, and that his corpse had persisted in lying on its face, although it had been turned on its back five times. This story had the right touch of horror to appeal to the imaginations of his congregation. Soon other stories grew up. One told how the Devil had twisted Faust’s head around completely so that it looked down his back. Another recounted how, toward the end of his life, Faust began to hope that he might escape the Devil’s clutches—but the trembling of the house at night warned him that the end was near.

  The 16th century was an age of religious persecution, a time when a man could be executed on the mere suspicion that he did not believe in the Trinity. The very idea of a man selling his soul to the Devil was enough to make Faust’s contemporaries turn pale. Little wonder, then, that Spies’ Historia became one of the most popular works of its time. Phillip Melancthon, a follower of Luther, also preached about Faust. He gilded the lily somewhat with a story that Faust had defeated and eaten a rival magician in Vienna. Luther also has two slighting references to Faust in his Table Talk, from which it is clear that he regarded Faust as a common charlatan rather a demonic wonder worker. The only powers that some of Faust’s educated contemporaries were willing to grant him were the gifts of casting accurate horoscopes and of foretelling the future. In 1535, for instance, Faust correctly predicted that the Bishop of Munster would recapture the city, and in 1540 he foretold the defeat of the European armies in Venezuela.

  Legend has made Faust the most famous figure in the history of necromancy. But when we peer through the legendary mist, what do we find? Most of the more sensational stories about the man as told by people who knew him, tell of feats that have been more or less duplicated by other men of strange powers down the ages. It is difficult to decide whether this helps to support or to discredit Faust? credentials as a magician. When we try to sift fact from legend, it becomes clear that Faust knew something about hypnosis. It may be that he also knew how to conjure poltergeists. The priest Gast claimed that when Faust was angered by the poor hospitality offered to him by some monks, he sent a poltergeist to trouble them. Apparently the rattling spirit created such a furore that the monks had to abandon their monastery. Accounts made it plain that Faust was stupid, boastful, and malicious. The same is true of many men of strange powers. As we shall see, Faust’s restless egoism, his desire to impress, his need to bend nature to his will are characteristic of many of the best-known magicians from Simon Magus onward. Magicians are not comfortable people to know.

  Faust was not the most celebrated magician of his age. He had two remarkable contemporaries, Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, whose fame greatly and deservedly surpassed his own, and who were undoubtedly white magicians. Agrippa and Paracelsus were both students of that strange mystical system of knowledge called the Cabala, whose purpose is to show the fallen man his way back to Paradise and the godhead. The two works that contain the essence of cabalistic teaching—the Sefer Yetsirah, Book of Creation, and the Zohar, Book of Splendor—are of such profound importance in the history of magic that we must say a few words about them here.

  The Book of Creation dates from the 2nd century AD. The Book of Splendor appeared in an Aramaic manuscript written by a student named Moses de Léon in the late 13th century. It is, however, a tradition that the teachings of both books date from the beginning of human history, when angels taught Adam the secret of how to recover his lost bliss. Cabalists think of man as a being who is tied up and enveloped in a complicated straitjacket—like Houdini before one of his celebrated escapes—and whose problem is to discover how to untie all the knots. Most men do not even realise that they are tied up. The cabalist not only knows it: he knows also that man’s highest state is total freedom.

  According to the Cabala, when Adam sinned he fell from a state of union with God. He fell down through 10 lower states of consciousness into a state of amnesia, in which he totally forgot his divine origin, his true identity. Man’s task, therefore, is to clamber back until he once more attains his highest state. The journey is long and hard. It is not simply a matter of climbing, like Jack clambering up the beanstalk, because the ‘beanstalk’ passes through 10 different ‘realms’. But even that image is too simple: the beanstalk does not pass straight upward, like a fireman’s pole, but wanders from side to side.

  The image of the beanstalk is apt because the Cabala is essentially the study of a sacred tree—the Tree of Life. At the top of the tree is God the Creator, who is called Kether (the crown). The nine other branches of the tree are wisdom, beauty, power, understanding, love, endurance, majesty, foundation, and kingdom. These are known collectively as the Sefiroth—emanations, or potencies, and it is they that constitute the realms through which the beanstalk passes. There is a further complication. The traditional picture of the Tree of Life looks rather like a diagram of a chemical molecule, in which the atoms are connected to each other by lines. These lines correspond to the 22 paths of the Cabala that connect the realms.

  The Tree of Life no longer grows on earth. How, then, does the aspirant set about climbing it? There are three main ways. First, one may explore the realms on the astral plane. Another way to explore the realms of the Cabala is through inner vision—that is, by achieving a semi-trancelike or visionary state in which the realms appear before the inner eye. A third way is the obvious one: study of the Cabala itself. It is, however, perhaps the most difficult way of all, because its revelations of man’s consciousness and destiny are not spoken of directly, but lie hidden in an enormously complex system of symbols.

  The realms of the Sefiroth, however, are not themselves symbols. According to the Cabala, they are real worlds. For instance, if the wandering astral body finds itself in a realm containing doves and spotted leopards, a land bursting with an almost overwhelming glory of life, it is almost certainly in the realm of Netshah, or Venus—symbol of endurance and victory.

  The doctrines of the Cabala were probably far above the head of a charlatan such as Faust. But Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus were not charlatans. They regarded themselves as scientists and philosophers, and they were far more intelligent than Faust. Yet both of them were flawed by the defects we have come to realize are characteristic of so many magicians: a craving to be admired, and a crude will to power. When these ambitions are frustrated, even men of genuine powers will often misuse their powers like a charlatan.

  Like Faust, Cornelius Agrippa became the subject of many remarkable legends. What was the truth behind such incredible tales? Cornelius Agrippa—whose real name w
as Heinrich Cornelis—was born in Cologne in 1486. His parents were sufficiently well-off to send him to the recently founded university of Cologne, where he proved to be a brilliant scholar. It was an exciting time for young intellectuals. Gutenberg had invented the printing press some 50 years before Agrippa was born, and the printed book had created the same kind of revolution as radio and television were to do five centuries later. Agrippa read everything he could lay his hands on. One day he discovered the Cabala, and it at once appealed to something deep within him. A magician was made.

  At the age of 20 Agrippa became a court secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor, and a distinguished career seemed assured for him. But Agrippa was a divided man. Part of him, as we have said, craved celebrity and power; but he loathed the world of diplomacy and courtly intrigue by which such success could be achieved. By now he was also obsessed by the ultimate other world of the Cabala.

  At about this time, he attended the University of Paris where he studied mysticism and philosophy. There he met a Spaniard named Gerona, who had recently been forced to flee from his estate in Catalonia after a peasants’ revolt. Agrippa offered to help him, sensing that if their mission succeeded, Gerona’s gratitude might enable Agrippa to settle in Spain and devote his life to study of the Cabala. They went to Catalonia, and Agrippa devised a brilliant plan that enabled them to capture a stronghold from the rebels. But they were later besieged, Agrippa was forced to flee, and Gerona was captured and probably murdered. The episode was typical of the bad luck that was to pursue Agrippa for the rest of his life.

  He returned to his job as court secretary, but he felt so frustrated that he left after a few months and began wandering around Europe. Within a year or two he had acquired a reputation as a black magician, and it was to cause him a great deal of trouble. In 1509 he taught in Dôle, France under the patronage of Queen Margaret of Austria. The local monks became jealous of this patronage, however, and plotted against him. When one of them preached against him in the presence of the queen, Agrippa decided it was time to move on. In 1515 he was knighted on a battlefield in Italy, and became Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim—a name taken from that of a small village near Cologne.

  He was granted a pension by King Francis I of France, but this was revoked when Agrippa refused to cast horoscopes for the king’s mother. Agrippa was later made official historian by Queen Margaret, but was unwise enough to publish a work in which he attempted to demonstrate that all knowledge is useless. This so enraged his academic colleagues that he lost his job. Soon he was imprisoned for debt. Agrippa certainly lacked tact, for after this he again made the mistake of speaking his mind about Queen Margaret, for which he was thrown into prison and tortured. His health broken, he died in 1535 at the age of 49. Legend says that, as he lay on his deathbed, he cursed his wasted life and the black arts that had seduced him. Whereupon his black dog rushed out of the house and threw itself into a river—clearly proving thereby that it was a demon in disguise.

  These biographical snippets, however richly spiced with legends, hardly add up to a man of strange powers. The certainty that Agrippa was indeed a magician, however, lies in the three volumes of his treatise The Occult Philosophy, which is regarded as one of the great magical texts. The book makes it clear that Agrippa knew all about thought pressure. Magic, he insists, is a faculty that springs from the power of the mind and imagination. There are mysterious relations between the human body and the universe, and between the earth on which we live and higher spiritual worlds. Thus, he argued, a stone can teach us about the nature of the stars. Agrippa believed that all nature is bound together by a kind of vast spider’s web. Most human beings never learn to use their innate magical powers because they believe that they are cut off from the rest of nature. The magician, on the contrary, knows that his thought, if properly directed, can set the web vibrating and cause effects in far distant places.

  Agrippa wrote his extraordinary masterwork when he was only 23 years old. It shows that, even at this early age, his study of the Cabala had given him some profound insights. Because he was always in danger of being burned as a black magician, he was careful to insist in his book that his knowledge is of a kind that any serious student can acquire from study of the great philosophers and mystics. But he also admits that he has successfully practised divination and foretelling the future. For example, he describes two methods by which he claims to have detected the identity of thieves. One method is to pivot a sieve on forceps held between the index fingers of two students. The sieve will begin to swing like a pendulum when the name of the guilty person is mentioned. Similarly, if the sieve is pivoted so that it can be made to spin, it will stop spinning when the thief’s name is spoken.

  Agrippa insists that the success of these and other magical techniques are due to spirits—similar, presumably, to the spirits that help fakirs to perform their wonders. The overwhelming impression that emerges from the book is that Agrippa was a sensitive—born with the gifts of precognition, telepathy, and the ability to influence events by using the power of his mind. His belief that mind is more powerful than matter runs like a thread through the book. The Occult Philosophy is the work of a young man—full of vitality and brilliance—and of a dreamer who peered into a world that few of us have the gift to see.

  The case of Paracelsus is even more tantalising than that of Agrippa. His writings prove him to have been a more remarkable man—a great scientist as well as a magician. But, again, seeking the truth about him is like groping about in a fog, so obscured is his life with myth and legend.

  He was born as Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim in 1493, the son of an impoverished Swiss nobleman who had become a doctor. He studied medicine in Basel and completed his education at universities in Italy and Germany. His gifts as a physician were immediately apparent, and a series of remarkable cures soon earned him a formidable reputation. In 1524, when he was only 29 years old, he was appointed professor of medicine at Basel University. In nine years he had become one of the great names in medicine in Europe.

  It was at this point that his career, so rich in both achievement and promise, was undermined by the same kind of character defects that brought ruin to Agrippa, and that seem to be hallmarks of so many magicians. He was vainglorious. He chose the pseudonym ‘Paracelsus’ because it implied that he was greater than Celsus, the famous physician of ancient Rome. He was a heavy drinker, and was prey to sudden violent tempers. One of his first acts as professor at Basel University was to order his students to hold a public burning of the books of Avicenna, Galen, and other famous doctors of the past. This enraged his colleagues, who condemned him as an exhibitionist and a charlatan. When they plotted against him, Paracelsus compounded his unpopularity by calling them names—like many paranoid people he had a powerful gift for invective. For a while his reputation held his enemies at bay and when he cured the publisher Frobenius of an infected leg that other doctors had decided to amputate, it seemed that he had become invulnerable to attack. Soon after this, however, a patient declined to pay his bill and Paracelsus took him to court. Owing to the plots of his enemies, he lost the case, whereupon he rained such violent abuse on the heads of the judges that a warrant was issued for his arrest. He was forced to flee Basel—and his long soul-destroying downfall had begun.

  For the remainder of his life Paracelsus wandered all over Europe as an itinerant doctor, writing book after book of which few were published in his lifetime, and pouring scorn and invective on his enemies. Fourteen years of wandering and disappointment wore him out. In 1541, when he was 48 years old, he was invited by the Prince Palatine to settle at his seat in Salzburg. At last he might have found contentment in a quiet life of study. But he continued to drink too much, and six months later he rolled down a hill in a drunken stupor, and died of his injuries.

  Then, ironically, his books began to be published, and they spread his fame over Europe once more. They have a range and boldness of imagination that is reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci’s
notebooks. Paracelsus immediately became a kind of patron saint of occultism—a position he maintains even today, with his writings being studied by a new generation of occultists.

  As with Agrippa, it is difficult to discover four centuries later what genuine powers lay behind the many legends of Paracelsus’s magical prowess. One thing is clear: most of the stories concern remarkable cures, and this suggests that he was primarily gifted with seemingly magical powers of healing. For example, we are told that he cured an innkeeper’s daughter who since birth had been paralysed from the waist down. The medicine he gave her was probably saltpetre in teaspoonfuls of wine. This would obviously have had no effect, but it seems that the hypnotic force of his personality and his natural healing power brought about a cure. We are also again confronted by the paradox of the split personality: a man who was bad-tempered, thin-skinned, and boastful, yet who could be taken over by some strange power that rose from his subconscious depths and made him a great healer.

  So we reach the odd conclusion that the contemporaries of Agrippa and Paracelsus were probably right when they called them charlatans—but that, at the same time, both men possessed genuine powers. It would be another four centuries before the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung attempted to explain these powers scientifically in terms of that vast reservoir of energy known as the subconscious mind.