(Many sorcerers have died in obscurity and poverty, providing an inevitable and facile cautionary tale for moralists and fundamentalists, but one wonders if the unfortunate magi had simply been too addicted to the delights and challenges of the other-world ultimately to bother to forge much of a life in this one.80 To be ravished by even the least spectacular magic often means ignoring bills - and the necessity to find the means to pay them81- and maintaining social ties. However, many scholars in disciplines other than the occult have also succumbed to the enchanted addiction of learning, but the moralists ignore the inconvenient fact that they, too, died of starvation and destitution, also utterly alone and without even the excuse of soul-devouring demons at hand.)
Even though receiving the equivalent of a knighthood from the King of Bohemia, Kelley's good fortune came to an abrupt end, although - as with much about his life - the precise circumstances are not known. Perhaps he had returned to his previous career as a forger, or the monarch simply tired of his empty promises to produce gold. Kelley was repeatedly thrown in jail, from where he wrote - full of indignation and self-righteousness - to the king, hinting once more that he could create gold for him from base metal. The tone may be seen from the opening passage:
Though I have already twice suffered chains and imprisonment in Bohemia, an indignity which has been offered to me in no other part of the world, yet my mind, remaining unbound, has all this time exercised itself in the study of that philosophy which is despised by the wicked and foolish, but is praised by the wise. Nay, the saying that none but fools and lawyers hate and despise Alchemy has passed into proverb. Furthermore, as during the preceding three years I have used great labour, expense, and acre in order to discover for your Majesty that which might afford you much profit and pleasure, so during my imprisonment - a calamity which has befallen me through the action of your Majesty - I am utterly incapable of remaining idle. Hence I have written a treatize ... But if my teaching displease you, know that you are still altogether wandering astray from the true scope and aim of this matter, and are utterly wasting your money, time, labour, and hope .. sz
This mixture of indignation, barely veiled accusation and bombast was not well advised. Kelley ended his days trying to escape from jail in 1595.83
As for Dee, he seemed increasingly a broken man. Money was a serious problem, although Queen Elizabeth constantly reassured him that one day he would be granted a profitable living. It never came. Then came absolute disaster for such a dedicated scholar: his precious library and laboratory were razed to the ground by a mob who believed him to be in league with the Devil, and despite his royal patronage, it was with such an unenviable reputation that he eked out his last years. Then a double blow: the Queen's great councillor, Lord Burleigh (William Cecil), and Dee's friend and patron, died in 1598, and then the regal Gloriana herself passed on in 1603. For his last three years Dee entered not a single thought in his diary. The sad old man seemed to be living out Prospero's decline:
A trite and contrived end for a great magician. He went to join his Queen - and possibly Edward Kelley - on 26 March 1609.
It is easy for twenty-first-century readers to dismiss the angelic dealings of the Dee-Kelley team as foolishness, illusion, the product of suggestibility - even afolie a deux - or simply the result of some nifty stage-management from the unscrupulous croppedeared mountebank. Indeed, unsurprisingly, the first of the angelic messages urged Dee to pay Kelley the then considerable sum of £30 a year as a pension, together with the plain statement `none shall enter into the knowledge of these mysteries but this worker': similarly, the order to exchange wives coincided neatly with the climax of Kelley's lust for Mrs Dee. But as with many cases of the paranormal, bald scepticism rarely provides the complete answer.s5
As set down in Dee's Liber Logaeth, Enochian (communicated via Kelley from an angel called Nalvage) seems to be a valid language, complete with its own vocabulary, grammar and syntax - difficult, if not impossible for a non-academic such as Kelley to have invented, at least consciously. The problem is that even in the twenty-first century we have little idea about the capabilities of the human unconscious, although the annals of abnormal psychology offer a glimpse of a dark, Luciferan world of immense and labyrinthine possibilities.
Dr Dee was by no means the only person to have received a completely new language under what might be termed paranormal circumstances. In the late nineteenth century, Catherine Elise Muller, a Spiritualist medium from Geneva, Switzerland, proved that while in trance she would produce automatic writing in Arabic, or - through a spirit `control' called Leopold - speak what she claimed to be Martian. She even drew crude sketches of life on Mars, complete with streets, houses and the latest Martian fashions.
As her fame spread, the renowned Swiss Professor of psychology, Theodore Flournoy, took an intense interest in Catherine - now operating under the pseudonym of Helene Smith - spending five years sitting in on her seances and recording her `Martian' outpourings. Applying psychoanalytical techniques, he concluded that she was abnormally imaginative, her fantasies emerging as highly coloured fact during the dissociative state of trance. She may not have been consciously cheating, but her unconscious mind was. However, Flournoy added that Catherine's exceptional gift for fabrication was probably augmented by real psychokinesis (mind over matter) and a certain amount of telepathy - a conclusion that would be far too brave and subtle for today's media-hungry alleged `parapsychologists', eager to make their names as professional debunkers, a species of televangelists for a particularly aggressive and bigoted form of rationalism.
Moreover, although a Sanskrit expert declared that 98 per cent of Catherine's `Martian' words could be traced to known languages, he claimed that her outpourings behaved like a real tongue, with authentic grammatical constructions. If a relatively uneducated young woman in the nineteenth century could unconsciously invent a passable language, it is possible that in the heightened atmosphere of a sixteenth-century sorcerer's laboratory, so could Edward Kelley.
As we will see when discussing The Book of the Law, produced by ritual magician Aleister Crowley in 1904, inspired or `channelled' writings usually appear to have originated with another personality or mind entirely, which is why they are so compelling in the first place. Of course these days we know all about dissociation in principle - the apparent splitting of an individual's consciousness to reveal seemingly discrete personalities. The most obvious example of this is multiple personality, where a single person can exhibit such entirely different modes of thinking and expression that other people appear to be trapped, as it were, inside the `host' body. Although this is understood to be classic dissociation pure and simple, certain related phenomena take multiple personality into the category of `extreme possibilities' (as The X-Files' Fox Mulder would say): for example, while six of the seven personalities obediently slumber after the host takes a strong sleeping pill, the last one refuses to succumb and stays awake. But how? In other cases one particular personality might claim to suffer from diabetes - which is confirmed by a blood test, although none of the other personalities test positive when it is their turn to take over ...
We may label yesterday's magical activity either as fraud or `abnormal psychology' but that does not mean that by the simple but satisfying act of categorization it is actually tamed or even explained. By their very nature paranormal events are impossible to pin down, even often difficult to interpret.
Back from the grave
Were Dee's magical operations actually demonic, as the mob of arsonists that destroyed his library and laboratory believed? It must be remembered that although he may have thought differently from most of today's mainstream academics,R" Dee was by nobody's standards a fool. Frances Yates in her book, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972), claimed that he was one of the founders of the Rosicrucian movement and that it was essentially English, although Tobias Churton disagrees, saying `Germany and Bohemia had sufficient Magi (if not so universally brilliant as Dee) of their own t
o initiate their own movement', although he does admit that the time Dee and Kelley spent abroad `was a significant influence on the alchemico-magico-apocalyptic reforming philosophy', especially through his Monas Hieroglyphica (1564), `which laid out a complex theory of cosmic unity whose aim was to integrate all knowledge in a cosmic spiritual/mathematical system: an aim implicit in the Rosicrucian endeavour.'R' Churton could have been describing Leonardo.
Even Dee's non-esoteric achievements are astounding enough: coining the word `Britannia', he tried to ensure she ruled the waves by drawing up the first comprehensive, long-term plan for the British Navy. The first scholar to apply Euclidian geometry to navigation, he built the necessary instruments to do so, trained several of the greatest navigators of the Age of Discovery, and charted the Northeast and Northwest Passages accurately, without leaving his Surrey home.
Even where his magical work was concerned, Dee was ever on his guard for `illuders', or low-level (mischievous or time-wasting) spirits that masqueraded as angels. He took command of any ambivalent situations, on one occasion compelling an illuder to confess, and then consigning it to the flames, saying `Master Kelley, is your doubt of the spirit taken away?'g8
Yet whenever spirits are involved in any human endeavour, there must remain some questions about both their authenticity and their motives, even if they claim to be angels. In effect, the modus operandi of the Kelley-Dee team was closer to Spiritualism - Kelley is often referred to as `the first medium' - than much previous occult work, which is not without its problems, although perhaps less obviously so than the `cursed necromancy' itself. Indeed, Kelley (together with a magician called Waring)" is said to have successfully raised a corpse from its grave in the churchyard at Walton-le-Dale in Lancashire to command it to predict the future.
Montague Summers is, of course, swift to condemn trafficking with any kind of spirits as diabolism pure and simple. He notes apropos of allegations that witches `flew' to their Sabbats, that `.. . outside the lives of the Saints, spiritistic [sic] seances afford us examples of this supernormal phenomenon.'90 More in character, he declares forthrightly: `Camouflage it how you will ... this "New Religion" [of] Spiritualism and its kindred superstitions ... is but the old Witchcraft' 91
Today when Spiritualists follow their own version of the Christian religion, and many famous mediums proved their astounding abilities repeatedly under strict conditions, besides giving untold comfort and hope to thousands, it is difficult to conceive of the movement having any possible association with anything devilish. However, even leaving the preconceptions of Summers aside, in the old heyday of `physical mediums', theirs was a considerably more ambiguous activity, often carrying a distinct whiff of sulphur.
In 1911 twenty-three-year-old Brazilian Carmine Mirabelli was sacked from his job in a shoe shop because the shoes insisted on flying around by themselves. Duly confined to a lunatic asylum for nineteen days, two doctors watched him closely. They concluded that he possessed an extraordinary excess of nervous forces - remarkably similar to the modern idea that poltergeist attacks usually centre on teenagers undergoing particularly tumultuous puberties. Mirabelli's mere presence caused some extraordinary phenomena: inanimate objects moved about and even apparently liquefied. He also produced reams of automatic writing92 in 30 languages, exhibited extraordinary powers of telepathy and clairvoyance - and was frequently reported to travel instantaneously, by teleportation (basically similar to the mode of transport celebrated in Star Trek's famous line: `Beam me up, Scottie').
Mirabelli's achievements allegedly included levitating himself nearly seven feet off the ground, an event that was photographed. However, there is some dispute about this: it is now claimed that the photograph has been tampered with to show the medium apparently in mid-air, whereas in fact he was simply standing on the top of a step-ladder - later erased in the finished picture - to indicate how high he had levitated.
A leading light of the Brazilian Spiritist movement (devotees of the French medium Alan Kardec), on one occasion, it is said, Mirabelli not only levitated while handcuffed, but as he rose into the air he dematerialized, the handcuffs clattering to the floor. He was discovered behind a locked door. But his most controversial feat was to materialize the dead - apparently more successfully and dramatically than even the practised necromancer Edward Kelley.
At Mirabelli's seances, sometimes held in brightly lit rooms, skeletons would gradually form in the air, clothed horrendously with ragged flesh - and stinking of decay . . . At his most successful, he is said to have eventually materialized solid human beings. In one case the man he apparently conjured out of thin air was clearly of African origin, while on another occasion a dead poet materialized between Mirabelli and a sitter - who not unnaturally is rigid with fear, the whites of his eyes showing like a terrified horse. This poses the important question: Mirabelli's mediumship may have been genuine - but was it nice? Was his laudable attempt to present evidence for an afterlife merely conjuring up dark forces? Like many cases from the annals of materialization (or `physical') mediums, the sheer horror involved surely rendered that form of continued existence akin to the obscene undead, vampires and ghouls. No one would like to think of their loved ones returning for an hour or so to stink of the grave, or indeed, to look forward with any enthusiasm to the prospect of doing so themselves.
Once, when a skull that Mirabelli had merely looked at began to move, the eminent psychiatrist Dr Franco da Rocha noted:
When I picked up the skull, I felt something strange in my hands, something fluid, as if a globular liquid were touching my palm. When I concentrated my attention further, I saw something similar to an irradiation pass over the skull when you rapidly expose a mirror to luminous rays 93
(It should be noted that Spiritualists describe necromancy as pretended communication with the dead, for they believe that the dead cannot be forced, under the normal `rules', to have any contact with the living. Spiritualists themselves believe they merely invite the dead to communicate.)
Mirabelli died in 1951 after being hit by a car. But although few researchers took an interest in him during his lifetime, in 1973 the Brazilian Institute for Psychobiophysical Research (BPP) appointed a team to compile a dossier on his extraordinary phenomena. Its members included the British writer-researcher Guy Lyon Playfair, who spread the word in Britain.
Mirabelli's sons, although sometimes highly sceptical of Spiritism, were adamant that their father had made astonishing things happen `almost every day, any time and any place' .9' His family were united in denying that he had cheated - or, indeed, that he had any motive for doing so.
Yet Theodore Besterman of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) had no hesitation in denouncing Mirabelli as a fraud, even though he had himself witnessed examples of apparent psychokinesis (mind over matter) in his presence, and seen the medium write a 1,700-word automatic script in under an hour in French - a language he did not know. (He also produced intelligible automatic writing in Hebrew, Japanese and Arabic, just like 'Hel'en Smith' and her alleged Martian, and Kelley and Enochian.)
The mysterious movement of objects Besterman ascribed to the use of `hidden threads', although neither he nor the other members of the research team managed to explain how they could have produced such a variety of phenomena. Despite Besterman's scepticism, however, Professor Hans Driesch of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and May C. Walker of the American SPR found Mirabelli `most impressive',95 while Guy Lyon Playfair also discovered no evidence of cheating.
Perhaps the last word should be given to Dr Felipe Ache, who hazarded that Mirabelli's strange gifts were `the result of the radiation of nervous forces that we all have but that Mirabelli has in extraordinary excess.' In other words, perhaps we all have such astounding abilities in latent form, but only certain rare people, with a distinct psychological and perhaps even physiological make-up, will ever possess the weird talent to activate it. If it means conjuring up putrefying corpses, perhaps we should be grateful
for that.
Another major case from the annals of the Golden Age of physical mediumship reveals the difficulty in separating apparently genuine phenomena from fraud, at least on a conscious level as far as the medium was concerned. And it shows how dramatic, but often unpleasant, the world of the seance room once was.
Eusapia Palladino remains the most thoroughly investigated medium in the history of psychical research, certainly over a protracted and chronological period. A Neapolitan, she was studied for more than twenty years by at least fifty scientists - many of them internationally acclaimed - from Italy, France, Poland, Russia, England and the US.
Eusapia's life began inauspiciously. Her mother died shortly after the future medium was born in 1854, and her father was murdered when she was twelve. Perhaps this trauma was in some way the cause of the phenomena that surrounded her first attendance at a seance the following year, at which the furniture moved towards her and rose into the air.
Then in 1872 the English wife of one Damiani, an Italian psychical researcher, attended a seance in London at which a spirit calling itself `John King' came through and informed her that there was a very powerful medium in Naples who was the reincarnation of his daughter Katie King, already a well known haunter of seance rooms herself. The ghostly John King then gave the complete address of the house where this reincarnation could be found. In due course, Damiani followed this up, finding the house - and Eusapia Palladino. Much impressed, as well he might be, Damiani helped to foster the Neapolitan's powers.
The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code Page 24
