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

by Robert Masello

  When a messenger later arrived in the town to proclaim the great victory Henry VII (aka Harry) had won at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the townspeople quickly told him that Nixon had been shouting about it already. The messenger repeated this story to the new king, who then sent for Nixon himself.

  But even before word of this royal edict could get back to the town, Nixon knew about it. To the amusement of his neighbors, he was heard running about the streets, shouting that the king had sent for him, the king had sent for him! Nobody paid much attention until the messenger rode into town and asked where he could find Robert Nixon. Then they directed him to the family’s farm, where the messenger found him hard at work.

  Brought to court, Nixon was introduced to the king, who’d already set up a little test for him. He told Nixon that he’d lost a priceless diamond ring, and nobody could find it. Could he? Nixon simply replied, “He who hideth can find.” And the king was satisfied.

  When he wasn’t making runic predictions, which were dutifully taken down, Nixon was fretting about being starved to death while he was at court. One minute he was declaring, “The weary eagle shall to an island in the sea retire, Where leaves and herbs grow fresh and green” (a prediction that was later thought to refer to Napoleon’s exile to Elba), and the next minute he was hoarding food and quaking with fear. The king, to calm him down, gave Nixon the full run of the palace—including the kitchens—and for a time Nixon seemed to relax.

  But one day, when the king was setting out on a hunting trip, Nixon came running up to him in a panic and begged to come along. The king said that would be impossible and instructed an officer of the household to watch over him. Nixon insisted that if the king didn’t let him come along, he would surely starve to death before the king could return. The king scoffed and rode away, leaving Nixon shouting that His Majesty would never see him alive again!

  Nixon quickly returned to the kitchen and larder, but the servants teased him so much, and he made such a racket, that the officer decided to lock him in a closet until he quieted down. Unfortunately, the officer was sent for shortly thereafter and left the castle without remembering to set Nixon free. When he got back, several days later, he opened the closet and found him—just as Nixon had predicted—dead.

  NOSTRADAMUS

  According to his contemporaries, Nostradamus predicted the precise time of his own death—and even composed one of his famous quatrains to commemorate the unhappy event. Translated from the original French, it read, “On his return from his embassy, the king’s gift put in place, he will do no more, having gone to God. By close relations, friends, blood brothers, he will be found near the bed and bench.”

  Having just returned from a mission to Aries, the sixty-two-year-old seer was found dead, lying on a bench that he regularly employed to help himself get in and out of bed. Following detailed instructions he had left behind, his body was buried standing upright in a wall, just to the left of the door in the church of the Franciscan friars, in the town of Salon.

  Arguably the most renowned astrologer and prophet of all time, Nostradamus, in predicting the conditions of his own demise, had only done for himself what he’d been doing for others—from commoners to kings—all his life: he had consulted the stars and cast his own fortune. His psychic gift, which has come down to us today in the form of one thousand rhymed prophecies, is one of the most celebrated, and debated, in history.

  Born in St.-Rémy, France, in 1503, he was christened (though he came from Jewish ancestry) Michel de Nostradame. His father was a notary, but his grandfathers on both sides were physicians, and they undertook to make a doctor out of young Michel, too. In preparation, he was taught Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and astrology, then sent to continue his studies at the University of Montpellier. There, he excelled in the classroom and proved his mettle as a practicing physician when the plague broke out in Provence. Described as a short, florid, and energetic man, he made the rounds of the town unafraid and unaffected by the contagion.

  After earning his medical degree, he spent eight years traveling in western Europe, and it was during this time that he began to exhibit his gift of prophecy. Legend has it that when he was in Italy, he passed a young swineherd named Felix Peretti, who had become a monk. Nostradamus fell to his knees and called him “His Holiness.” Peretti was as baffled as everyone else, though years later, long after Nostradamus was dead, he was indeed made Pope Sixtus V.

  On another, and later, occasion, Nostradamus was walking through the courtyard of a castle in Lorraine when two pigs—one black and one white—ran across his path. To test his guest’s much-vaunted skills, the lord of the castle asked Nostradamus what the fate of the two pigs would be.

  Portrait of Nostradamus at the Age of Fifty-nine. Sixteenth-century print.**

  “The black one we shall eat,” the seer replied, “and a wolf shall eat the white.”

  That same day, in an effort to foil the great prophet, the lord privately instructed his cook to kill and cook the white pig and serve it for dinner.

  The cook did as he was told, but left the roasted white pig in the kitchen unattended—where a wolf managed to sneak in through the door and gobble it up. The cook quickly killed the black pig and served that one for dinner instead—without advising his master of what he’d done.

  The lord, laughing, said to Nostradamus, “Well, you must have been wrong about that wolf eating the white pig because the white pig is what we’re eating now.”

  Nostradamus, however, stuck to his guns and said that that was impossible. This was the black pig they were eating.

  To settle the question, the lord had the cook brought into the dining room, asked him which pig they were eating, and nearly fell out of his chair when the cook, flustered and fearful, explained what had happened in the kitchen.

  But it was his medical skill that eventually brought Nostradamus back to France, where he fought outbreaks of the plague in Marseilles, Aix-en-Provence, and Lyons. (He had already lost his first wife and two children to a previous outbreak.) For his remarkable and brave services, he was awarded a pension and settled in the town of Salon with his second wife. Their house, on a dark and narrow street, had a winding staircase that led to a top-floor study; there, with the rooftops of the town spread out below him, Nostradamus composed his almanacs of astrology and, more important, the prophetic verses that remain his legacy. In two such verses, he described how his visions came, in the still of those midnight hours:

  Gathered in night in study deep I sate

  Alone, upon the tripod stool of brass,

  Exiguous flame came out of solitude,

  Promise of magic that may be believed.

  The rod in hand set in the midst of the Branches,

  He moistens with water, both the fringe and foot;

  Fear and a voice make me quake in my sleeves;

  Splendour divine! the God is seated near.

  Judging from this account, Nostradamus held in his hand a forked wand, much like a divining rod, while surrendering to his divinely inspired visions: “The things that are to happen can be foretold,” he wrote in the preface to his prophecies, “by nocturnal and celestial lights, which are natural, coupled to a spirit of prophecy.” He penned his predictions in four-line verses, which were gathered into groups of one hundred and later published as Centuries. The obscurity of their meaning can be attributed in part to the mystery of their origin—the Divine Being is not about to spell things out in the most literal fashion—and partly, as Nostradamus himself confesses, to avoid political and religious repercussions for the seer and his family. Predicting the rise and fall of kings and queens could, for obvious reasons, land one in a dungeon overnight. (As late as 1781, the prophecies were condemned by a papal court, for cryptically predicting the fall of the papacy.)

  Nostradamus himself said that his predictions would be borne out over a period of hundreds of years, so that it would take many generations before their truth could in every instance be revealed. Consequently, ea
ch generation has pondered their runic utterances and tried to decipher the secret meaning. The quatrains have been thought to predict everything from World War II to the end of the world. And some have indeed been interestingly on target, particularly those that seem to describe the period of the French Revolution, which was still over two hundred years in the future. There is, for instance, one verse (century IX, quatrain 20) that goes:

  By night shall come through the forest of Reines,

  Two married persons, by a tortuous valley, the Queen a white stone, The black monk in gray into Varennes,

  Elected king, causes tempest, fire, blood, cutting.

  Varennes shows up only once in the greater scheme of European history, and that is when the French king Louis XVI ("elected” because he was the only king to hold his title by will of the Constituent Assembly rather than divine right) and his queen, Marie Antoinette, were captured there after their flight. Louis was disguised in gray, the queen was dressed in white, and after they were returned to the maelstrom of blood and destruction they had unleashed, they were themselves (as the last word of the prophecy indicates) cut—beheaded by the guillotine.

  And then there are the lines (century III, quatrain 35) that appear to predict the rise of Napoleon:

  In the southern extremity of Western Europe

  A child shall be born of poor parents,

  Who by his tongue shall seduce the French army;

  His power shall extend to the Kingdom of the East.

  Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Corsica, into an impoverished family. His bold commands won the hearts of the French troops and enabled him to lead them successfully into Egypt (a campaign that even the Directory, which had dispatched them, thought was likely to end in disaster). Whether by luck or something more, Nostradamus had once again managed to hit the nail on the head.

  But while it would take centuries for some of his prophecies to be fulfilled, he was renowned in his own day for his ability to cast astrological charts and offer advice of a more immediate and practical nature. Henry II, the king of France, summoned him to Paris and rewarded him for his labors with a hundred gold crowns in a velvet purse; Catherine de Medici, the queen of France and an ardent believer in the occult, provided him with the same amount, and even sent him on to Bloise, to give the royal children a health checkup. When Charles IX succeeded to the throne, Nostradamus was named physician-in-ordinary to the king himself.

  On his death in 1566, a marble tablet was erected to his memory in Salon. The inscription chiseled in the stone read, in part:

  “Here lie the bones of the most famous

  NOSTRADAMUS

  One who among men hath deserved the opinion of all, to set down in writing with a quill almost Divine, the future events of all the Universe caused by the Coelestial influences.”

  GLOSSARY

  A guide to terms, titles, and proper names used in the text. A missing date of birth or death means none has been recorded with any certainty.

  adept—one highly skilled in the occult arts

  Agrippa—(1486–1535) Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Agrippa von Nettesheim, German magus, author of The Occult Philosophy

  Albertus Magnus—(1193–1280) German alchemist, reputedly the inventor of the pistol and cannon

  alchemy—the mystical art of transmuting base metals to gold

  alectromancy—divination using a barnyard cock inside a magic circle

  alkahest—universal solvent searched for by alchemists

  Apollonius of Tyana—Pythagorean philosopher of first century A.D., reputedly able to foretell the future

  Aquinas, St. Thomas—(c. 1227–74) Italian scholastic philosopher and major theologian of Roman Catholic Church

  Aristaeus—prophet, healer, and divinity worshiped in ancient Greece

  augurs—seers and diviners of the ancient world

  Avicenna—(980–1037) Persian physician and philosopher

  Bacon, Roger—(1214–92) English friar and magician

  Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna—(1831–91) Russian founder of Theosophical Society

  Boehme, Jakob—(1575–1624) German mystic and philosopher

  Brahe, Tycho—(1546–1601) Danish astronomer and astrologer, author of extensive planetary tables

  Cabbala—body of mystical Jewish writings and theosophy

  Cagliostro—(1743–95) a celebrated mystic, healer, and magician

  Cardan, Jerome—(1501–76) a.k.a. Girolamo Cardano, Italian physician, astrologer, and mathematician

  Cellini, Benvenuto—(1500–71) Italian goldsmith and artisan

  Chaldeans—ancient Semitic people who lived in what was then Babylonia (a region of lower Tigris and Euphrates valley)

  Chambre Ardente—the Burning Court of Louis XIV, to prosecute poisoners and others

  Chiancungi—an Egyptian fortune-teller who became famous in eighteenth-century England

  chiromancy—divination by studying the hand (palm reading)

  Crowley, Aleister—(1875–1947) British occultist and mage

  Cyprian, St.—(c.200–58) early church father and martyr

  Dashwood, Sir Francis—(1708–81) English aristocrat who founded a diabolical order in Buckinghamshire

  Dee, Dr. John—(1527–1608) English alchemist and necromancer

  del Rio, Martin Antoine—(1551–1608) Jesuit scholar, renowned prosecutor of sorcerers and witches

  deasil—going to the right, the direction of good

  Eckhart, Johannes—(c. 1260–?1327) Meister Eckhart, Dominican preacher, father of German mysticism

  elementals—minor spirits of earth, air, fire, and water

  ephod—white linen vestment worn by a necromancer

  Fludd, Robert—(1574–1637) English alchemist and Cabbalist, author of The History of the Microcosm and Macrocosm

  Fortune, Dion—(1891–1946) English occultist and author of Psychic Self–Defense

  Fox sisters—Kate, Margaret, and Leah, who founded American spiritualism in Arcadia, New York, in 1848

  Freemasons—ancient and powerful secret society, practicing mystical rites

  Galen—(c. 130–c. 200) Greek physician and writer on medicine

  Gaufridi, Father Louis—French priest executed for witchcraft in 1611

  Girardius—inventor in 1730 of the necromantic bell

  Glauber, Johann Rudolf—(b. 1603) German author of many texts on medicine and alchemy, including Miraculum Mundi

  Gnosticism—mystical religion that flourished in the first and second centuries A.D.

  Gowdie, Isabel—Scottish witch of the sixteenth century

  Grand Copt—the prophet Enoch, founder with Elijah of the Egyptian rites for Freemasons

  Grandier, Urbain—priest accused of bewitching nuns in Loudun, executed in 1634

  grimoire—a manual of black magic

  Guazzo, Francesco-Maria—Italian friar, expert witness in seventeenth-century witch trials

  gyromancy—divination by means of spinning in a circle marked with letters and occult symbols

  Hand of Glory—a hanged man’s hand, used to cast spells

  Helmont, Jan Baptista van—(1577–1644) Dutch alchemist and doctor

  hexagram—six–pointed star, also known as Seal of Solomon

  homunculus—artificial human, or dwarf, made by alchemy

  Iamblichus—(c.250–c.326) Neoplatonist philosopher and theurgist

  Kelley, Edward—(1555–93) English alchemist and scryer, accomplice to Dr. John Dee

  Knights Templar—military and religious order founded to protect Christian pilgrims

  Kunkel, Johann—(1630–1703) German chemist and alchemist

  Lévi, Eliphas—(c. 1810–75) French occultist and author of The Doctrine and Ritual of Magic

  liber spirituum—the book of spirits, kept by sorcerers

  magus—a master magician (plural, magi)

  Maimonides—(1135–1204) Jewish philosopher and theologian

  Malleus Maleficarum—manual of witchcraft, aka The
Witches’ Hammer, written by Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer (1486)

  Mathers, MacGregor—(d. 1918) founder of the Order of the Golden Dawn

  Mora, Pietro—alchemist and poisoner in seventeenth–century Milan

  necromancy—the magical art of summoning the dead

  Nostradamus—(1503–66) French astrologer and seer

  oneiromancy—divination by dreams

  Order of the Golden Dawn—magical society founded in London in 1887

  Origen—(c. 185–c.254) immensely productive and influential theologian of the early Christian church

  Paracelsus—(1493–1541) Swiss physician, alchemist, and astrologer

  pentagram—a five–pointed star, used in magical rituals

  Perkins, William—author of the Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1608)

  Petit Albert, Le—manual of magic published in Cologne in 1722

  Philalethes, Eirenaeus—(fl. 1660) pseudonym of English alchemist, possibly Thomas Vaughan (brother of poet Henry Vaughan)

  philosophers’ stone—the secret material sought by alchemists to convert base metals to gold

  Plutarch—(c.46-c. 120) Greek biographer

  pontificalibus—the ceremonial attire worn by a necromancer

  rhabdomancy—the magical use of a wand or divining rod

  Rosencreutz, Christian—thirteenth–century founder (probably mythical) of Rosicrucian society

  Rosicrucians—a mystical order of adepts and philosophers announced in Germany in 1614

  Ruysbroeck, Jan van—(1294–1381) father of mysticism in the Netherlands

  St. Bernard—(1090–1153) abbot of Clairvaux, influential theologian and mystic

  St.-Germain, Comte de—(c.1710–c.1780) alchemist prominent at various European courts