A simpler, though no less revolting, recipe is offered by Albertus Magnus in his “Of the Vertues of Hearbes.” After taking some leaves of the periwinkle and mashing them into a powder with “wormes of the earth,” add a dash of the succulent commonly known as houseleek. Use the result as a sort of condiment with the meat course and then just watch the sparks fly.
The plant kingdom actually yielded any number of aphrodisiacs, which included lettuce, jasmine, endive, purslane, coriander, pansy, cyclamen, and laurel. The ancient Greeks included carrots, perhaps because of their shape. The poppy and deadly nightshade plants were also thought helpful in the quest of love, but less because they inspired ardor than because they could render someone unconscious and therefore vulnerable.
In the Middle Ages, the mirror method was recommended to many a lovesick swain. The idea was to create in the looking glass itself a kind of link between yourself (the owner of the mirror), the woman you desired, and the act of making love. How did you do this? Simple.
First you bought a small mirror (without haggling over the price), and you wrote the woman’s name on the back of the glass three times.
Then you went out looking for a pair of copulating dogs and held the mirror in such a way that it would capture their reflection.
Finally, you hid the mirror in some spot you were sure the woman would be passing frequently and left it there for nine days. After that, you could pick it up again and carry it in your pocket. Without knowing why, the woman would find herself irresistibly attracted to you.
Conversely, if a woman had her eye on an elusive male, she could win his love by serving him, as it were, a casserole of herself. First, she had to take a very hot bath and then, as soon as she got out, cover herself with flour. When the flour had soaked up all the moisture, she took a white linen cloth and wiped all the flour away; then she wrung out the cloth over a baking dish. She cut her fingernails and toenails, plucked a few stray hairs from all parts of her body, burned them all to a powder, then added them to the dish. Stirring in one egg, she baked the whole awful concoction in the oven, and served it to the object of her affections. Assuming he could get a mouthful down, he’d be hers forever.
Casting a death spell was, for obvious reasons, a more dangerous matter than magical matchmaking. If you tried it, and were found out, the penalty could be your own life. As a result, the death spells were often reserved for very high-stakes games—most notably, royal thrones and titles. If you were a king or queen, chances are there was some malcontent in your kingdom casting a death spell your way.
In 1574, Cosmo Ruggieri, a Florentine astrologer at the French court of Charles IX, was accused of having created a waxen image of the king and then beating it on the head. He then made the mistake of asking around if the king was having any pains in his head of late—and was quickly placed under arrest. (It didn’t help that the king died that same year.)
In 1333, Robert III of Artois was banished from France by Philippe VI for forging land deeds to support his claim to the title of count; in revenge, Robert tried to cast a death spell on the French king, but his plot was revealed to the king by Robert’s priestly confessor.
And around 1560, the Privy Council of England was thrown into a panic when a waxen image of Queen Elizabeth, with a long needle stuck through its heart, was discovered in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Her advisers quickly called in Dr. John Dee for an immediate consultation with the young queen, who was dreadfully worried. Dee met with her in her private garden in Richmond, explained the mechanics of the death spell, and reassured her that it could be counteracted. As she reigned until 1603, he clearly did a good job of it.
Although there were plenty of methods for casting the death spell, the waxen image was one of the oldest and most popular. A little wax doll was made, representing the person on whom you wished to inflict the harm, which was then pierced with needles to inflict, by magical transmission, actual physical damage or death. If possible, it was a good idea to dress the figure up in the style of the intended victim; in a French engraving, Robert of Artois has dressed his figure of the king in the appropriate court costume.
An alternative to the waxen doll was an actual human heart. With the right incantations said over it, this inert heart could serve as an occult substitute for the one still beating in the victim’s chest. Again, a needle or two in the right place, according to the lore, could dispatch your foe.
For skilled sorcerers who wanted to enlist a demon to do their dirty work, there was a specific ritual to perform, known as the Ceremony of Mars. Mars, it will be recalled, was the god of violence and war; the planet named after him is called the red planet. To start the ceremony, the sorcerer draped the whole room in red and put on red robes to match; on his finger he wore a gleaming ruby. The instruments he used were made of iron, the wand he wielded was an unsheathed sword. Conjuring Asmodeus, “the arch-devil of the Fifth Infernal Habitation,” the sorcerer offered himself as a conduit for the malignant force of the demon, which he would then direct on toward the intended victim.
To make sure of his aim, however, the magician needed some link with the victim—some of his nail parings, an article of his clothing, the pipe he smoked. If he couldn’t lay his hands on any such item, he could resort to two alternatives. One method was to channel his lethal thoughts toward an object he’d left in the victim’s house or buried in a spot where he knew the victim would be stepping over it; the other was to make his own artificial connection to the victim by formally identifying something with him, before inflicting harm on it. Usually, this sad duty fell to an animal, which would be baptized with the victim’s name, then tortured or slain.
If a sorcerer had sufficient powers of imagination, he could even conjure up an elemental spirit of his own, to go forth and do his bidding. Elementals were minor spirits of fire, earth, air, and water, thought to exist invisibly all around us. By creating one of his own, which would hold only a temporary lease on life, the sorcerer got himself the perfect accomplice—one that ceased to exist once the job was done. Sometimes these creatures manifested themselves in animal form, as wolves or snakes or toads, and sometimes they appeared as half-human, half-animal. Either way, they could only be seen by those who were being attacked or by someone with great psychic gifts (such as the sorcerer).
Signs of such an attack included dread and anxiety, not to mention more visible tokens, such as a thick, foul-smelling slime, and bruises that took the shape of goat’s hooves or the ace of clubs. Sometimes an “astral bell,” which rang clearly, or almost inaudibly clicked, could be heard when the spirit was on the prowl. Francesco-Maria Guazzo, the Italian friar who wrote the Compendium Maleficarum in 1608, listed other symptoms of such an attack as mental lassitude, pricking pains in the chest, convulsions, fever, inexplicable sweating, and sexual impotence. The skin, he stated, could take on a yellowish cast, and the victim could find himself unable to look a priest in the eye; confronted with his tormentor, “the patient is at once affected with great uneasiness and seized with terror and trembling,” Guazzo wrote. “If it is a child, it cries.”
In one such case of psychic malevolence, in the English town of York in 1538, the perpetrator, Mabel Brigge, was hauled into court under suspicion of having made an occult attempt on the life of King Henry VIII. She was accused of having performed a ritual known as the Black Fast; while concentrating all her mental powers on his demise, she herself had abstained from eating any meat, milk, or dairy foods. While in court, she admitted to having earlier “fasted upon” a thief, who had broken his neck while her spell was in effect. Convicted of witchcraft, she was summarily executed.
And lest anyone think such powers have been dismissed in our own century, British witches in 1940 reportedly focused their psychic powers on Adolf Hitler, in this case to convince him that he could not bring his armies across the English Channel. In view of the fact that he never did, maybe the witches were onto something.
THE EVIL EYE
In Italy, it’s known as
malocchio, in Germany the böser Blick, in France the mauvais oeil. In Scotland, it was thought that a glance from the evil eye could sicken cattle; in England, it was considered capable of killing a person. Among colonial Americans, the evil eye was sometimes thought to be at the bottom of everything from soured milk to butter that turned in the churn. No matter how far back in history we go—to the ancient Mesopotamians or the Greek Pliny, who described the basilisk whose gaze was so terrible that it could die if it saw its own reflection—the eye has been considered much more than the mere organ of sight. Likened by the Egyptians to the sun itself, the eye has been considered a powerful source and repository of energy, will, and desire, capable of kindling love on the one hand and wreaking havoc on the other. But the evil eye has been something always to be feared.
Who had the evil eye? Who could, with a glance, project calamity or misfortune on another? There were many, some who came by the “talent” inadvertently, and some who practiced it with magical intent. Among those who were supposed to have been born with it were people whose eyebrows met over their nose or who were blind in one eye; those who were hunchbacks or dwarfs; those whose eyes were crossed or divergent, of different colors, or situated unevenly in their face. Gypsies were thought to be naturals at it. Among the ones who had to learn the malignant trick were witches, sorcerers, and magicians.
What could the evil eye do? Depending on the country and its particular customs, the evil eye could affect anything from childbirth to the crops in the field. It could cause such minor irritations as hiccups and headaches, along with major diseases that would lead a person to waste away and die. Sexual afflictions, such as impotence and frigidity, were routinely ascribed to having been “overlooked,” another way of describing the evil eye, and during childbirth the woman’s house would be sprinkled with urine as a preventive measure.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the witch craze was sweeping Europe, the evil eye was a charge often leveled at the unfortunates on trial. It was generally believed that when a witch made her compact with Satan, in return for doing his bidding on earth she received, along with other favors, the ability to cast spells with her eyes. According to the Malleus Maleficarum, the witchcraft manual compiled by two Dominican friars (and containing instructions on the torture, interrogation, and execution of the accused), “there are witches who can bewitch their judges by a mere look or glance from their eyes, and publicly boast that they cannot be punished.” As a result, many of the people charged with witchcraft were led into the courtroom backward.
Theoretically, the evil eye had its most devastating power when it first landed on the object of its intent. In other words, if you could avert a direct gaze for an instant, you could deflect its power; for that reason, people in some parts of Europe wore amulets, in the shape of a toad or a hunchback, which were thought to soak up some of the venom. In ancient Greece, they wore talismans of Medusa or the caduceus of the god Mercury; Romans wore beads made to look like a human eye or gold, silver, or bronze phalli (symbolic of the life force). Even such seemingly harmless customs as wearing a bridal veil and a boutonniere can be traced back to the belief in the evil eye: by wearing the veil, a bride is protected from the envious gaze of any ill-wisher, while the colorful flower in a man’s lapel will surely draw any eye first to the blossom instead of the face of the man wearing it.
But there were other ways, too, to ward off the evil eye. Spitting three times was a good precaution, as was carrying salt, a symbol of life and purification, in the pocket. Touching iron or carrying iron keys was recommended, as iron was credited with supernatural powers. The color red was useful, too: in England, homeowners sometimes nailed a red ribbon over the door, and in Scotland, farmers tied a red ribbon to the tails of their cattle.
A couple of hand gestures were popular remedies, too: one, called the mano fica (roughly translated, the “poking hand"), was made by inserting the thumb between the first and second fingers while making a fist; the other, the mano cornuta ("making the Devil’s horns") involved holding down the two middle fingers with the thumb while sticking up the index and little fingers. Parents could protect their children by making the sign of the cross with their tongues on the children’s foreheads or by tying little bells around their necks; the jingling of the bells was a sign of good luck. By one account, a Yorkshireman who was burdened with the unwanted power to throw the evil eye was very careful, first thing every morning, to look out the window at a pear tree in the yard. That first look of the day is considered the most lethal, and though the pear tree withered and died, his friends and family were spared the deadly rays.
THE BLACK MASS
The Mass, the sharing of the holy sacraments with the Christian faithful, is a ritual of such significance and power, its every element, from the words to the wine, so infused with meaning, that it would be surprising if it had not been altered or desecrated for occult and unworthy purposes.
And, of course, it has.
The Black Mass, the unholy parody of the Christian ritual, has been used for centuries by witches and sorcerers, to invoke not God, but Satan, to promote not good, but evil, and to achieve not sacred goals, but profane ones. Among these unholy aims, undoubtedly the worst has been the actual killing of another person. As early as the seventh century, there are records of the Mass being used to curse a living soul. "Requiem aeternam dona ei. Domine” ("Give him eternal rest, O Lord") was a chant meant to be recited only for the souls of the dead, but the Council of Toledo, meeting in 694, determined that priests had sometimes recited it for the living, too. Done this way, it amounted not to a prayer, but a death sentence. One particular priest, and the man who had paid him to perform the perverted Mass, were both banished for their sacrilege.
Nor was this the only such incident on record. On occasion, priests were said to fashion wax dolls of their intended victims, then lay them on the altar and curse them. In the thirteenth century, Giraldus Cambrensis asserted that there were corrupted priests who made a practice of reciting the Mass for the dead ten times, on the theory that their living victim would die on the tenth day or shortly thereafter. And in 1500, the bishop of Cambrai made an appeal to the University of Paris, arguing that his underlings were casting spells at him. According to the unhappy bishop, his dean and canons were inserting into the Mass condemnatory passages lifted from the Old Testament; furthermore, these passages were recited by the priest with his back to the altar, the choir singing in response. The university judges sided with the bishop.
One unholy rite, which came to be known as the Mass of St. Sécaire, originated in Gascony. The priest who wished to perform it had first to find an abandoned church that had fallen into disrepair and disuse. With a female server, one with whom he had pointedly broken his vow of chastity, he recited the Christian Mass—replacing the usual host, however, with a black, triangular host, and the consecrated wine with water drawn from a well in which an unbaptized infant had been drowned. The person against whom this Black Mass was directed would, according to the lore, die a slow and lingering death.
But if there was any one time, and any one place, at which elements of the Mass were routinely diverted toward evil aims, it was at the communal festivities known as the witches’ Sabbat. The Sabbats were held in forest glens and on mountaintops, in hidden valleys and at deserted crossroads. Witches gathered in these secret places to celebrate their victories, to swap trade secrets, to initiate new members, and to pledge their allegiance once more to their leader and Lord, Satan himself. It was Satan, or whatever emissary he sent, who presided over the unholy Mass.
With a devil behind the altar, everything was done, as might be expected, in an unnatural fashion. The wine in the chalice was replaced with water, urine, or the blood of a sacrificed child; the host was replaced by a blackened turnip. The words of the ceremony were purposely altered, so that “Our Father, which art in heaven” became, for instance, “Our Father, which wert in heaven.” Where Christians prayed, “Lead us not
into temptation,” Satan’s followers prayed that they would be led there. The Confiteor (confession of sins) was omitted from the ceremony, as it would be too much like bragging, and so was the Alleluia, a chorus of praise to the Christian God that the Satanists, of course, had renounced. Such prayers as were offered were invariably vile and offensive; one, which was made after the sacrifice of a lamb, went, “Lamb, which the priests of Adonai have made a symbol of sterility raised to the rank of a virtue, I sacrifice you to Lucifer. May the peace of Satan always be with you.”
The altar, too, was designed to be an abomination. Sometimes it was adorned with a naked woman; sometimes a naked woman, down on all fours, served as the altar itself. The demon or sorcerer officiating at the Mass wore a chasuble (the sleeveless outer robe) much like the one a priest wore, but this one might be bright red, with a green patch depicting a weasel and bear consuming the host, or on the back a picture of a black goat with shining silver horns.
In sum, at every step of the Sabbat Mass the most objectionable or sacrilegious substitutes for the Christian words or symbols were employed, with one purpose in mind: to refute the traditional Mass while at the same time converting its undeniable power to the glorification of the dark side.
BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE
As much as possible, sorcery and witchcraft were conducted in the strictest secrecy—in part because they were unholy rites, in part because they unleashed such unpredictable forces, and in part because the civil and ecclesiastical penalties were so extreme. Torture was common, and a capital sentence almost a foregone conclusion.
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