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

by Robert Masello

  The ingenuity of witch judges and Inquisition officials in inflicting pain was quite remarkable—they invented a whole array of instruments and techniques to cause unbearable agony and elicit the wanted information. When in 1611 Father Louis Gaufridi was accused of having bewitched and seduced a nun in Aixen-Provence, he was subjected to several forms of torture, including two of the most horrible.

  First, he suffered the strappado: his arms were tied behind his back and then hooked to a hoist which was used to lift him high off the floor; hanging in agony, he had weights tied to his feet to intensify the pain. Then the torturers proceeded to the squassation, dropping him suddenly, then pulling up on the rope just before his feet touched the ground. Done right, squassation could wrench out of place every joint in the body.

  The tortures worked so well on Gaufridi that, although he had repeatedly proclaimed his innocence, in the end he signed a confession that included not only the original charges—"More than a thousand persons have been poisoned by the irresistible attraction of my breath which filled them with passion"—but additional crimes, such as eating babies and celebrating the Black Mass. As a final mercy, and because he had begged the pardon of God, he was strangled before his body was burned over a slow fire.

  The tortures had to be designed to do two things, really: to inflict great pain while at the same time preserving the life of the victim long enough to ensure there’d be time for both that highly desirable confession (customarily, witches could not be put to death until they’d actually admitted their guilt) and a public execution. The burning or hanging of the witch was considered more than entertainment for the crowd that would gather; it was considered an edifying experience, the culmination of the judicial process and a clear indication that dealing with demons would not be tolerated.

  In Bamberg, Germany, the town fathers even had the foresight to construct what was, for 1627, a kind of maximum-security prison for witches, which they called the Hexenhaus ("House of Witches"). Several stories high, and built above a running stream, the Hexenhaus could hold up to twenty-six witches at a time, each one in a private cell with a small window up near the ceiling. There was a chapel, an interrogation room, and, of course, a state-of-the-art torture chamber (where the stream came in handy for drowning techniques). Though drawings and floor plans of the Hexenhaus still exist, the building itself has long since been torn down.

  But awful as the physical agonies were for anyone convicted of practicing black magic, the spiritual penalty was almost as bad. In Catholic countries, to be excommunicated from the church was to be sentenced to an eternity of pain and loss. In effect, the sorcerer or witch was cursed by the church itself, in a ritual that stemmed from the lines of Matthew 18:18: “Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth,” Jesus tells his disciples, “shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” In other words, judgments made here would be upheld there. If a soul was cast out of the Christian community on earth, and failed to offer sufficient repentance to gain readmission, it was doomed in the afterlife, too.

  The House of the Witches at Bamberg. Seventeenth-century print preserved in the Staatsbibliothek at Bamberg.**

  The ceremony of excommunication came to be known as bell, book, and candle, as these were the three elements needed to see it through. The curse of excommunication was first read from a book, which the cleric then closed. A bell was tolled, as if for a dead man, and then candles were blown out, to signify the extinguishing of the offender from the very sight of God. In a variation of the ceremony, devised by Pope Zachary in the eighth century, the pope wore his miter and violet robes, he was assisted by twelve priests carrying the candles, and he deliberately deprived the guilty party of the Mass and of any commingling with uncorrupted Christians: “We exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in heaven and on earth . . . and we judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate, so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance and satisfy the Church.”

  RAISING THE

  DEAD

  The Church does not deny that, with a special permission of God, the souls of the departed may appear to the living, and even manifest things unknown to the latter. But, understood as the art or science of evoking the dead, necromancy is held by theologians to be due to the agency of evil spirits. . . .

  The Catholic Encyclopedia

  NECROMANCY

  Of all the black arts, undoubtedly the most dangerous was necromancy—the summoning of the dead. In a way, it was the pinnacle of the magician’s art, the most extreme and impressive feat he could add to his professional résumé. In part this was due to its difficulty—the ritual requirements were extraordinarily elaborate—and in part it was due to the great risks any magician was expected to encounter the moment he summoned ghosts and devils from the underworld. These spirits were often quite unhappy at having to make the trip.

  So why bother them? Necromancers had all kinds of motives, some of which were more pure than others.

  Spirits were sometimes conjured up out of affection—the magician missed a loved one who had departed this vale of tears.

  Sometimes spirits were summoned up because the sorcerer wanted the arcane or secret knowledge that only spirits were reputed to possess.

  And sometimes—perhaps quite often—spirits were called upon to divulge the whereabouts of hidden treasure hoards. It was generally understood that the dead may have lost their lives in the normal sense but that they had gained the ability in the afterlife to uncover all secrets and see into all things. According to the common folklore, these spirits could be found loitering around their burial place for one year after their interment. After that, however, getting in touch with them became increasingly difficult, if not impossible.

  Not that it was ever easy. First, the proper location had to be found to perform the magical rites. Some of the preferred spots for necromancy were underground vaults, hung with black cloth and lighted with torches, or forest glens where no one was likely to intrude. Crossroads were popular, too—perhaps on the theory that many souls, both living and dead, were accustomed to passing by. Ruined castles, abbeys, monasteries, churches, were all considered good venues, as were, of course, graveyards.

  The Witch of Endor evoking the Prophet Samuel. Johann Heinrich Schönfeld (seventeenth century). Author’s collection.**

  The best time for necromancy was, as might be expected, midnight to 1:00 A.M. If a bright full moon hung in the sky, that was fine. But even better was a tempestuous night, one filled with wind and rain, thunder and lightning. And it wasn’t just for effect. Spirits, it was thought, had trouble showing themselves and remaining visible in the real world, but stormy weather for some reason helped them in their efforts.

  The necromancer had many preparations to make. In the nine days preceding an attempt to raise the dead, he and his assistants were required to steep themselves in every way imaginable in the gloom of death. They took off their normal, everyday attire and put on faded, worn clothes that they had stolen from corpses; as they put them on for the first time, they were required to recite the funeral rites over themselves. And until the actual necromancy had been performed, they were forbidden to take these clothes off.

  There were other restrictions, too. They were not allowed even to look at a woman. The food they ate had to be taken without salt, because salt was a preservative—and in the grave, the body, putrefied, did not remain intact. Their meat was the flesh of dogs, for dogs were the creatures of Hecate, goddess of ghosts and death, whose appearance was so terrible that anyone conjuring her was warned to avert his gaze; one look at her, and the mind would be destroyed. And, in a kind of necromantic version of the Holy Communion, the bread they ate was black and unleavened; their drink was the unfermented juice of the grape. These symbolized the emptiness and despair of the realm they were about to explore. In all these preparations, the aim was to create a kind of sympathetic bond between the necromancers an
d the souls of those they were hoping to summon.

  Once everything was in order, the necromancer and his accomplices went to the churchyard and, by the light of their torches, drew a magic circle around the grave they were planning to disturb and set fire to a mixture of henbane, hemlock, saffron, aloes, wood, mandrake, and opium. After unsealing the coffin, the body was exhumed, then laid out with its head to the east (the direction of the rising sun) and its limbs arranged like those of the crucifed Christ.

  Next to the body’s right hand, the necromancer placed a small dish, burning with a mixture of wine, mastic, and sweet oil. Touching the corpse with his wand three times, the conjurer recited a conjuration from his grimoire. Though the wording of these conjurations differed from book to book, one of them went: “By the Virtue of the Holy Resurrection and the agonies of the damned, I conjure and command thee, spirit of [the name of the person] deceased, to answer my demands and obey these sacred ceremonies, on pain of everlasting torment. Berald, Beroald, Balbin, Gab, Gabor, Agaba, arise, arise, I charge and command thee.”

  In a slight variation, if the soul being summoned had committed suicide, the sorcerer was required to touch the cadaver nine times and invoke it using other powers, including the mysteries of the deep and the rites of Hecate; he could also ask it why it had cut short its own life, where it resided now, and where it was likely to go hereafter. The spirit was enjoined to answer the sorcerer’s queries “as thou hast hope for the rest of the blessed and the ease of all thy sorrow.”

  If all went well, the spirit reentered its old, cast-off body and caused it slowly to stand up. In a weary, sepulchral voice, the deceased would answer each question the necromancer put to it—what lay beyond this world of tears, which demons were causing us harm, where a buried treasure might lie. When the interrogation was over, the sorcerer rewarded the spirit for its cooperation by assuring it of undisturbed rest in the future; he burned the body or buried it in quicklime, which would dissolve it. Either way, the spirit knew the body would be gone, and it could never be forced to enter it again.

  GRAVE ENCOUNTERS

  Although with some adjustments necromancy could be performed in the comfort of one’s own home, graveyard necromancy, or raising the dead right where they lay, was understandably the most popular form of the black art. There were many precedents, and several famous cases often cited in legend and lore, which no doubt provided much encouragement to would-be raisers of the dead.

  Norse wizards were reputedly so skilled at the art that they didn’t even need to wait for the body to be plunked into the grave; they could enjoin hanged men, still swinging from the gallows, to speak to them.

  In medieval Spain, necromancy was taught, like any other discipline, in Toledo, Seville, and Salamanca—except that the classrooms were deep, dark caverns, often lying beneath cemeteries and mausoleums. When Isabella, a Catholic, came to the throne, she sealed up these subterranean lecture halls.

  One of the earliest stories of necromancy appears in the Bible’s First Book of Samuel, chapter 28. Looking out over the enemy army of the Philistines, King Saul “was afraid, and his heart greatly trembled.” Wondering what to do, and what the outcome of the battle would be, he turned to his seers, who could tell him nothing; he looked to his dreams, but they were unclear; he prayed to the Lord, but the Lord was silent. Finally, in desperation, he begged his servants to find him someone who could raise spirits, and they advised him to consult with the woman known as the Witch of Endor.

  Disguising himself (which was especially important, in view of the fact that by his own decree all wizards and such had been banished from the land), Saul went to the witch and asked her to summon a spirit for him. At first, she was reluctant; she knew the law, and she was afraid she was being lured into a snare. But Saul swore to her that no punishment would befall her, and she finally agreed. She asked whom he wanted to see, and Saul told her the prophet Samuel.

  Shaking and fearful, the witch performed the necessary rites, and the shade of Samuel, an old man in a long robe, soon appeared. At first, Saul could only bend low and press his face to the ground. “Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?” the ghost asked, and when Saul summoned the courage to ask his questions, it wasn’t good news that he received. “Tomorrow,” Samuel intoned, “shalt thou and thy sons be with me: the Lord also shall deliver the host of Israel into the hand of the Philistines.”

  Saul, knowing now that both he and his army were doomed, threw himself on the ground in despair.

  Sextus, the son of Pompey the Great, had a similar experience with a witch. He, too, was wondering what the outcome of a battle would be; his father was campaigning to become ruler of the Roman empire, but when Sextus tried to find out from the oracles whether the campaign would succeed or not, he got such confusing answers he threw up his hands in disgust. According to Lucan, who recounted the story in his Pharsalia, Sextus decided to consult with the celebrated witch Erichto.

  This wasn’t a step to be taken lightly.

  Erichto was a frightening creature, who’d been mixing up her personal and professional life for many years. To facilitate her communications with the dead, she had taken up residence in a graveyard, sleeping in a tomb, surrounded by bones and funerary relics. When Sextus asked her to look into the future for him, she said they’d first have to get hold of a fresh corpse.

  Luckily, there was a battlefield quite nearby, and after they’d combed over the casualties for a while, they found the body of a recently slain soldier that Erichto said would suit them just fine. The fact that his body was still warm indicated that the energy of life, which could quickly dissipate, was still there. Just as important, he hadn’t been wounded in the mouth, lungs, or throat; if he had been, he might not be able to talk once they’d gone to all the trouble of reviving him.

  Together, Sextus and the witch dragged the body into a cave, which was concealed by yew trees and consecrated to the gods of the underworld. There, Erichto went about fixing a ghastly stew, using the flesh of hyenas that had fed on the dead, the skin of snakes, the foam from the muzzles of mad dogs, and assorted, foul-smelling herbs. When the vile concoction was ready, she ordered Sextus to cut a hole in the corpse of the soldier, just above the heart, so she could pour in this new substitute blood.

  Then she began to recite her incantations, calling upon Hermes, the guide of the dead, and Charon, who ferried dead souls across the inky waters of the river Styx. She appealed to Hecate and Proserpine, the queen of the underworld, and Chaos, the dark lord whose aim was to spread destruction and discord among men. She reminded them all that she had always been their faithful disciple, that she had poured out human blood on their altars and sacrificed infants in their names. From the sky, thunder pealed, and all around the entrance to the cave Sextus could hear wolves howling and snakes hissing.

  But Erichto kept up her chant, and gradually Sextus could make out the spirit of the dead soldier, hovering in the dark air above its own mangled corpse. Erichto ordered the spirit to reenter the body, but the spirit refused; she ordered it again, threatening to dispatch it straight to Hell. The spirit still wouldn’t do it. Then she tried a different tack: if the spirit would do her bidding, she said, she promised to utterly destroy the corpse; that way, no other magician could ever use it to perform such an awful rite again.

  This time the spirit acquiesced; it entered the corpse, and the blood began to circulate in its veins, the limbs twitched with life, and slowly, unsteadily, the body rose up on its feet. In halting speech, it described for Sextus the dismal outcome of his father’s campaign—the imminent battle would be lost, and Sextus himself would die an early death. But when it had finished, and Sextus was satisfied that he had received the true, if unhappy, news, Sextus and the witch built a funeral pyre, and the dead soldier stretched himself out on it. True to her word, Erichto recited a spell that freed the spirit from any earthly bonds, and the pyre was set ablaze.

  The dead could be more, however, than just the bearers of goo
d or bad tidings—they could also be dispatched on errands of evil.

  According to a Greco-Egyptian text, a clever necromancer could use the dead to seduce whatever woman he desired. First, the magician had to make a wax doll and pierce it with thirteen needles, through the eyes, ears, mouth, hands, feet, stomach, brain, anus, and genitals. At sunset, he was to go to the cemetery and place the doll on the grave of someone who had died by violence or early in life. To summon the corpse from the grave, he then called upon the spirits of everyone who had ever died a premature death, along with the powers still held by an eclectic group of gods and spirits which included Persephone, Ereshkigal (a queen of the underworld in ancient Sumeria), Adonis, Hermes, Thoth, and Anubis (the Egyptian god of the dead, usually depicted with the head of a jackal).

  The corpse, reanimated now, was ordered to march to the desired woman’s door “and bring her hither and bind her. . . . Let her sleep with none other, let her have no pleasurable intercourse with any other man, save with me alone. Let [her] neither eat nor drink nor love, nor be strong or well, let her have no sleep except with me. . . .” And so on. It’s hard to imagine any woman resisting such a lovely seduction.

  When it wasn’t love or hidden riches that the necromancer was after, it was sometimes just the cadavers themselves. In ancient Egypt, sorcerers bought dead bodies from the embalmers and kept the mummies on hand for any future rites. And in the Middle Ages, sorcerers haunted tombs and gravesites in search of pieces of the corpses themselves, which were thought to hold powerful occult properties. Most prized were the bodies of people who had died suddenly, by accident or violence or execution; it was generally conceded that sudden deaths left a goodly measure of the precious life force still unused.