Raising Hell: A Concise History of the Black Arts and Those Who Dared to Practice Them

by Robert Masello

  Raising Hell

  A Concise History of the Black Arts—and Those Who Dared to Practice Them

  Robert Masello

  FAUST: Did not my conjuring raise thee? Speak.

  MEPHOSTOPHILIS: That was the case, but yet per accidens:

  For when we hear one rack the name of God,

  Abjure the Scriptures and his savior Christ,

  We fly in hope to get his glorious soul.

  Nor will we come unless he use such means

  Whereby he is in danger to be damn’d.

  Therefore the shortest cut for conjuring

  Is stoutly to abjure all godliness

  And pray devoutly to the Prince of Hell.

  Christopher Marlowe,

  The Tragical History of the Life and Death

  of Doctor Faustus (c. 1594)

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  I. BLACK MAGIC AND SORCERY:

  The Magus • The Sacred Circle • Pentagram and Hexagram • The Great Grimoires • Conjurations from the True Grimoire • The Liber Spirituum • The Unholy Pact • The Occult Philosophy • Agrippa the Magician • Magic Candles, Magic Hands • Curses and Incantations • Love and Death • The Evil Eye • The Black Mass • Bell, Book, and Candle

  II. RAISING THE DEAD:

  Necromancy • Grave Encounters • Demons in the Coliseum • Friar Bacon • The Bell of Girardius • Dr. Dee and Mr. Kelley • The Lodge of the Mysteries • The Monks of Medmenham • Eliphas Lévi • La Voisin

  III. MYSTICAL ORDERS:

  The Seeker and the Sorcerer • The Gnostics • Simon Magus • The Cabbala • Defenders of the Faith • The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross • The Freemasons • The Grand Copt • The Order of the Golden Dawn • The Great Beast • Dion Fortune • Mme Blavatsky

  IV. THE SECRET DOCTRINE:

  The Alchemists’ Art • The Origins of Alchemy • The Philosophers’ Stone • The Elixir of Life • The Alkahest • Paracelsus • Robert Fludd • Alexander Seton • The Scourge of Milan • The Man Who Could Not Die

  V. FATE AND THE FUTURE:

  The Divinatory Arts • The Sibylline Books • The Hand of Fate • Reading the Stars • The Little Animal in the Sky • Tycho Brahe • The Devil’s Picture Book • Mother Shipton and the Cheshire Prophet • Nostradamus

  GLOSSARY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  PREFACE

  When anyone invokes the Devil

  with intentional ceremonies,

  the Devil comes, and is seen.

  Eliphas Lévi,

  French occultist

  (c. 1810–75)

  Who in full possession of his faculties would ever deliberately invoke the Devil?

  Who would call up infernal powers and then hope, once the demons were conjured, to be able to control them?

  If the history of black magic and the occult reveals anything at all, it reveals that the drive to marshal the unseen powers of the dark and bend them to a mortal will is as old as mankind itself. Men and women have believed, in virtually every age and in every land, that there is another world—this one invisible, eternal, and essentially unknowable—coexistent with the one we inhabit every day. It is the world of spirits and souls, angels and demons, gods and monsters, and in it can be found the answers to all the great questions: What is life all about? Does man decide his own fate? Is death truly an end? Is there a Heaven? And is there, perhaps more important, a Hell?

  Magic, the mystical precursor of religion, professed to have the answers. But where “white magic” looked for these answers from a divine, or holy, source, black magic looked in the other direction; by enlisting the aid of Satan or his spawn, sorcerers and magicians claimed to be able to probe the great mysteries. They made pacts with demons, promising their immortal souls in exchange for a lifetime of riches or a godlike glimpse of the cosmic order. They raised the souls of the dead, to ask them where they’d gone and how they’d gotten there. They pored over ancient and sacred texts, the Holy Scriptures, the Cabbala, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, searching through the cryptic words for clues and advice.

  Along the way, these occult pioneers often stumbled upon real and verifiable truths: the astrologers mapped the heavens and paved the way for the astronomers who followed; the alchemists, in their futile quest to make gold from lead, performed thousands of experiments which led to the discovery of everything from phosphorus, sodium sulfate, and benzoic acid to the manufacturing of steel. Even the seers, who read palms and interpreted dreams, contributed to the vast catalog of human thought and deed, and anticipated in their own way such later practices as psychology and hypnosis.

  What made their efforts all the more surprising—in some cases, dare it be said, even inspiring—were the dangers, both real and imagined, that these explorers of the dark side faced. First, there was the ever-present threat of ecclesiastical or royal condemnation. Dabbling in the occult could get you interrogated, excommunicated, tortured, mangled, hanged, burned at the stake. (Or, as in the case of Father Grandier, who was accused of bewitching the nuns of Loudun, all of the above.)

  Then, there was the imagined danger implicit in the act of conjuration—if you summoned a demon straight from Hell, there was a very good chance he’d try to take you back home with him. In all the grimoires (grammars) of black magic, there were repeated warnings and explicit instructions about what to watch out for. Demons were wily sorts, the books declared, who weren’t too happy about taking orders from any witch or magician; given the slightest opportunity, they’d do their best to kill the conjurer’s mortal body and make off with his immortal soul. When at long last it came time for Faust to make good on his deal with the devil, for instance, his body was found torn to pieces in an open field, and his soul—well, that was assumed, according to most accounts, to have been carried off to perdition.

  Even so, the occult arts have never disappeared and have frequently flourished. Though many of them had their origins in the ancient nations of the Middle East (where they formed the very basis of the faiths of Babylon and Egypt), during the Middle Ages and Renaissance they reached their zenith in western Europe. There, the antique practices were revived, revered, and refined; there, they were combined with the latest discoveries in medicine, metallurgy, astronomy, anatomy, botany, and zoology and subjected to the spirit of inquiry that increasingly distinguished the era. What started as magic occasionally became fact. Occult arts over time turned into rudimentary science.

  And though the Devil and his minions were gradually ushered from the scene, they were never altogether banished. They were always waiting in the wings . . . listening patiently for their cue to return . . . ready to offer, to anyone foolhardy enough to accept it, their unholy bargain.

  BLACK MAGIC

  AND

  SORCERY

  I hereby promise the Great Spirit Lucifuge, Prince of Demons, that each year I will bring unto him a human soul to do with as it may please him, and in return Lucifuge promises to bestow upon me the treasures of the earth and fulfill my every desire for the length of my natural life. If I fail to bring him each year the offering specified above, then my own soul shall be forfeit to him.

  Signed_____________________[Invocant signs pact with his own blood.]

  “The Complete Book of Magic Science,”

  unpublished manuscript in the British Museum

  THE MAGUS

  In the West, he has gone by many names. Magus, sorcerer, wizard, magician. We know him best as
a figure in a long robe, bespangled with stars, wearing a pointed hat and a long white beard, wielding a magic wand. He is the master of the occult world and its invisible forces, able to call up storms, cast spells, defy nature, and make all things do his bidding.

  But the true origins of the magus lie in the East, in the ancient empire of Persia.

  There, the magi, or wise men, were the high priests, the interpreters of the wisdom of Zoroaster. Our word “magic” is derived from their name. They were revered for their profound learning and for their gift of prophecy; rulers consulted them on everything from matters of personal health to great affairs of state. In their own temples, built on the highest mountaintops, the magi made the search for truth their chief aim; to that end, they studied the sky and the stars and made sacrifices to the elements. Because they believed in the transmigration of souls, they generally abstained from eating any kind of meat.

  The wise men who brought their gifts to the infant Jesus were magi from the Orient: named Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, they were, according to some theologians, master astrologers who, after following the star to Bethlehem, abandoned their pagan beliefs. (And, if legend is to be believed, their bones are now interred in Cologne Cathedral.)

  Over the centuries, and with the gradual decline of the Persian empire, the wisdom of the magi made its way westward. Soldiers who survived the Crusades brought back with them news, and bits of arcane lore, from the eastern lands; trade routes were forged and frequently traveled among the Mediterranean nations. What the magi had begun, European magicians quickly adopted and developed. But they added to it their own mystical precepts and philosophy, culled from the Jewish Cabbala and early Christian theology. It was a curious but potent brew, a mix of alchemy and chemistry, metallurgy and medicine, astrology, anatomy, divination, metaphysics. It was all things thrown together, an amalgam out of which the magicians hoped to extract answers to all things mysterious. “Magic,” Paracelsus wrote, “has power to experience and fathom things which are inaccessible to human reason. For magic is a great secret wisdom, just as reason is a great public folly.”

  Each man, it was believed, was a miniature cosmos, replicating in his own constitution the natural order and affected, at the same time, by the larger universe he inhabited—the motions of the planets and stars, the winds that blew and the rain that fell, the changing of the seasons. The magus, it was thought, could work his wonders in two ways. First, by controlling and directing his own inner forces, he could project his will and desires outward, influencing the actions of others. At the same time, he could call down, or invoke from the outside, powers and intelligences that he could then use to effect his own aims. Agrippa von Nettesheim, one of the greatest magicians of the sixteenth century, described the magus as one “who has cohabited with the elements, vanquished Nature, mounted higher than the heavens, elevating himself to the archetype itself with whom he then becomes co-operator and can do all things.”

  Eliphas Lévi, sometimes called the last of the magi, wrote in 1855 The Doctrine and Ritual of Magic. In it, he offered anyone wishing to pursue the occult some critical advice: “To attain the sanctum regnum, in other words, the knowledge and power of the magi, there are four indispensable conditions—an intelligence illuminated by study, an intrepidity which nothing can check, a will which nothing can break, and a discretion which nothing can corrupt and nothing intoxicate. TO KNOW, TO DARE, TO WILL, TO KEEP SILENCE—such are the four words of the magus.”

  But success could prove dangerous. Even if the magus met all the requirements, both personal and professional, he could still find himself in deep trouble. If, for instance, he summoned up infernal forces that he was not able to control, either through the strength of his imagination or through his magical techniques, he ran the risk of being overpowered by them. The spirits of the dark were never noted for their charity. In the batting of an eye, the magus could lose his life and, if he really wasn’t careful, his immortal soul to boot.

  THE SACRED CIRCLE

  The circle has always held great meaning for magicians and mystics, philosophers and priests, alchemists and astrologers. The simple act of drawing a circle around something or someone was often considered a means of protecting it from outside forces of evil. If someone fell ill in ancient Babylon, a circle was drawn around the sickbed to defend the patient from the demons who were presumably preying upon him; in medieval Germany, Jews did the same when a woman was giving birth, just to make sure no mischievous spirits got into the act. When Roman emissaries were sent to deliver news (or ultimatums) to foreign rulers, they drew a circle around themselves with the base of their staff to symbolize that they should be immune from retribution. Even prehistoric societies revered the circle, as the circular stone monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury attest.

  Why? What gives the circle such a powerful reputation? In part, it is the figure’s simplicity; the circle is, at once, capable of circumscribing anything and everything, and at the same time it contains nothing. At its center it is a hole. Over time, and in many disparate cultures, the circle has become a symbol of the unity, the oneness, of all things, a single line that seemingly has no beginning and no end, a figure that can suggest everything from the eternal to the idea of perfection.

  Alchemists used a symbol they called the ourobouros. A circle formed by the image of a dragon or a serpent swallowing its own tail, this mystical symbol sometimes carried the Greek phrase En to Pan, or “All is One.” Using the kind of numerology at which alchemists were so skilled, they counted the three words in the Greek phrase, the seven letters of which the words were comprised, and then added them together to get 10—a number that itself was thought to mean “all things.” Not only does 10 mark the completion of the primary numbers, it is also made up of a 1 and a 0; add a 1 and a 0 and what you get, again, is a 1. Many a learned treatise was written to elaborate on all this.

  Magicians used the circle for a couple of different reasons. On the one hand, by drawing a circle and remaining inside it, the magician thought it would be easier to marshal and concentrate his powers. The circle would keep the unseen energies from running off every which way. But more important, the circle would also provide a protective barrier against the infernal forces his incantations might summon up. The demons outside could gibber and rail, but as long as the magician—and in some cases his assistant—stayed inside the magic circle, all dangers could be kept at bay.

  If, that is, the circle had been done right.

  Though the recipe differed in many details, the general instruction remained fairly consistent. The circle was drawn on the floor or in the dirt (a wooded glen was often a good choice of locale) with the tip of a sword, a knife, a staff. Sometimes charcoal or chalk was used. A French grimoire from the 1700s suggested the circle should be fashioned from strips of skin, cut from a young goat, and secured to the floor with four nails pulled from the coffin of a dead infant.

  It was also important when drawing the circle to do so in the appropriate direction. If it was drawn in a clockwise manner, or deasil, it was designed to perform feats of white, or good, magic. If it was drawn counterclockwise, its purpose was malign. Going to the left in this way was called widdershins, a word derived from an Anglo-Saxon phrase that meant “to walk against.” The sun went from east to west, from right to left, and anything that went in the opposite direction was thought to be moving against nature and, consequently, against the powers of good.

  As to size, nine feet was generally considered the proper diameter of the outer circle, with another, smaller circle—eight feet in diameter—drawn inside it. In that narrow space between the rims of the two circles, the magician placed various holy objects and talismans that were thought to ward off evil forces. He might put crosses there, a bowl of pure sanctified water, and plants like vervain (which demons supposedly hated). But most important of all, he had to make sure the circle was completely closed. Any little gap, and an enterprising creature could weasel its way in, possess his immortal soul, a
nd cart it off to the infernal regions.

  The magician himself had so much to do it’s a miracle he could ever remember it all. Among other things, there was a host of sartorial requirements. The standard garb, or pontificalibus as it was called, included a long robe made of black bombazine, to which two drawings on virgin parchment were attached, depicting the two seals of the earth. Under this outer robe, a ceremonial apronlike vestment known as an ephod was worn; the ephod, which was held up by two shoulder straps, was made of fine, white linen. Around his waist the magician wore a wide, consecrated girdle inscribed with magical words; on his feet, shoes decorated with crosses; on his head, a sable silk hat with a high crown. In his hands, the sorcerer held a wand and a Bible, either written or printed in the original Hebrew. So accoutred and equipped, he was ready to start his incantations.

  Standing safely inside the inner of the two magic circles, and within the smaller triangle that was often demarcated inside of that, the magus was as protected as he could be from the demonic forces he was about to unleash. Which was just as well, since their return was heralded by the most dreadful and harrowing sounds—shrieks and growls, anguished cries, and angry barking. Long before they could be seen, the spirits and demons ranted and raved at the perimeter of the circle, trying to scare the daylights out of the magician and persuade him to abandon his nefarious scheme.

  If that didn’t work, they took on visible shapes, also designed to intimidate and terrify. They appeared as lions and tigers, belching flame, snarling and snapping and clawing. If the magician faltered in his resolve, if—God forbid—he picked up his robes and tried to make a run for it, he’d be ripped to pieces the moment he left the confines of the circle. But if he was stalwart, if he held on to his Bible and his wits, and continued uninterrupted to repeat the necessary conjurations, the demons would eventually be drawn close to both the outer circle and the innermost triangle and settle down; they would shed their beastly shapes and reconfigure themselves as naked men of a peaceful demeanor.