We have seen what a similar hysteria - mass craziness - did to Europe as the Inquisitors' eagerness to exterminate witches wiped out whole communities, especially in France and Germany. However, the Devil need not be invoked as such: Hitler persuaded most ordinary German citizens that all Jews were evil and that any indignity and horror could be inflicted on them because they were not human. Yet lesser-known contagions are often more instructive about the extraordinary capacity decent folk have for being blinded - almost literally - by an idea that provokes hysteria.
During the Second World War bomb-maddened and half-starved British folk often turned on any strangers in the neighbourhood, believing them to be Nazi spies, with a viciousness that their decent pre-war selves would never have believed possible. Occasionally, however, a kind of madness overrode even their persecution of strangers: on one occasion in remote East Anglia, the mob turned on a man who far from being a new face in the area was actually one of them, a neighbour known well to them all. Happening to be out on a Home Guard patrol, he was seized, roughed up, and, despite his desperate and bewildered protestation that he was their long-time neighbour, shot dead. He had spoken to the crowd, reminded them of his identity, and even shown them his papers, but they were so possessed by bloodlust that they literally could not see him as he was. The next day when the red rage had ebbed away, the people were stunned by the fact of a very familiar but very dead man, and the bewildered grief of his traumatized family. No one had any way of explaining what had happened .9
His satanic majesty
The last major fling of the English witch-hunters took place in the seventeenth century, as Elizabeth I's successor, James I (1566-1625)1° spread his own fear - amounting to a phobia - of witches through a land already raw with religious division, plotting and paranoia. His predecessor, while mouthing platitudes about individual consciences, had made it impossible for Catholics to worship legally in her kingdom, and resentment grew among them exponentially. Known as `the wisest fool in Christendom' (although even that remarkably back-handed compliment is debatable), James had survived the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 when he and his Parliament were targeted by a group of Catholic fanatics, which merely added fuel to the fires of religious intolerance and a heightened atmosphere of suspicion.
Even before Guy Fawkes and his co-religionists attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament," James had published his Daemonologie (1597), providing zealous witch-hunters with plentiful ammunition. In the book, the narrator Epistemon explains what categories of `unlawful charms, without natural causes' are to be considered witchcraft:
I mean by such kind of charms as commonly daft wives use, for healing of forspoken [bewitched] goods, for preserving them from evil eyes, by knitting ... sundry kinds of herbs to the hair of the goods; by curing the worm, by stemming the blood, by healing of horse-crooks ... or doing such like innumerable things by words, without applying anything meet to the part offended, as mediciners do.
This was a licence to persecute herbalists and traditional healers - be they efficacious or basically harmless, continuing the ancient traditions of folklore. Even if the healer's aim was only to do good, it was still witchcraft. (Many fundamentalist Christians take much the same view about healers today - unless they are of the same persuasion.) Yet what were the poor folk to do in an age when toothache could kill and `official' medicine was not only often worse than useless but also expensive, and the local wise woman with her mysterious jars of herbs might just provide some relief?
Under James, witches were everywhere, like the later `Reds under the bed' hysteria of twentieth-century America. The king himself took an active interest in the major cases, even participating in a number of the trials. Not surprisingly with this unofficial royal warrant, the courts were soon full of wall-eyed, deformed and senile old women on their way to the gallows.
In Scotland, the witch mania saw women at Forres bent double into barrels filled with tar, rolled down Cluny Hill and set alight at the bottom. This would have particularly satisfied James, who was convinced he had been cursed by witches during a visit to Forres in 1600. Having fallen ill while in the neighbourhood he had the area searched: a coven was found in the very act of melting a wax image of the monarch. (Somewhat suspiciously perfect timing.) They were tried and rolled down the hill to their deaths. Of course it is perfectly possible that people were trying to kill James with any means at their disposal - including the `sympathetic magic' of stabbing his image - but whether or not that made them witches or merely desperate to get rid of him must remain open to question.
As his reign progressed, James abandoned his belief in the supernatural abilities of witches, but persisted in seeing them as anti-social elements with subversive potential. Ordinary folk were slower to strip witches of their powers. For, as H. T. F. Rhodes notes in his The Satanic Mass (1954):
Witchcraft was not thought less a social and theological danger with the change of religion in Europe [i.e. from Catholic to Protestant]. It is a singular fact that opinions and beliefs concerning it became even less critical.12
The Jacobean playwright and cleric Thomas Heywood described in his Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels (1635)
ceremonies of the Sabbat where in the worshippers renounce Faith, Baptism and Eucharist, acknowledge Lucifer, and worship him with "contrarie" rites and ceremonies. To this he adds an original piece of embroiderie of his own by reporting that the witches worship their God standing upon their heads."
The contemporary Duke of Newcastle echoed the contradictory nature of the general attitude to witches in a conversation recorded by his servant Hobbes:
To which my Lord answered, That though for his part he cared not whether there were witches or no; yet his opinion was That the Confession of Witches, and their sufferings for it proceeded from an erroneous belief, viz, That they had made a contract with the Devil to serve him for such Rewards as were in his power to give them; and that it was their Religion to worship and adore him; in which Religion they had such firm and constant belief, that if anything came to pass according to their desire, they believed the Devil had heard their prayers, and granted their requests, for which they gave him thanks; but if things fell out contrary to their prayers and desires, then they were troubled at it, fearing that they had offended him, and not served him as they ought, and asked for forgiveness of their offences. Also (said my Lord) they imagine their dreams are real exterior actions; for example, if they dream they flye in the Air, or out of the Chimney top, or that they are turned into several shapes, they believe no otherwise, but that it is really so. And this wicked opinion makes them industrious to perform such Ceremonies to the Devil that they may worship him as their God, and chuse to live and dye with him.14
Hobbes may pour scorn on the poor deluded Devil-worshippers who thanked their god if things went right for them but were troubled and wondered how they offended him if matters took a bad turn, but it could equally be an accurate description about how many Christians actually view their own relationship with God, even today.
`Satan in the suburbs'
If the coming age of the true Lucifer means the western world was flooded with light, then - apart from the usual horrors of war and pestilence - there must have been attempts to harness and celebrate the opposite, the mentally and spiritually befogging darkness of Satan. While it is true that the Inquisition continued its satanic depredations on freedom of thought and spirit, there were those who sought to enter into a more immediate and intimate relationship with the Lord of Hell.
Of course, as we have seen, both the Cathars and the Knights Templar had been accused of being Satanists, but as the centuries progressed groups and individuals emerged from the shadows whose entire raison d'etre was not merely to indulge in what outsiders would consider dubious and weird rites, but explicitly to worship the Evil One. Many of these Satanists were claimed by one writer to have been priests - some defrocked - but a high proportion simply worked secretly for the opposition.
One of the c
ommonest of their dark rituals was the parodying of the Mass, with the intention of destroying a living person. As H. C. Lea noted in Materials Towards A History of Witchcraft (1939):
Wicked priests employed the mass as an incantation and execration mentally cursing their enemies while engaged in its solemnization, and expecting that in some way the malediction would work evil on the person against whom it was directed. Nay, it was even used in conjunction with the immemorial superstition of the wax figurine which represented the enemy to be destroyed, and mass celebrated ten times over such an image was supposed to ensure his death within ten days.15
Despite the evidence of repeated experience, Devil-worshippers were seen as richer, healthier and happier than Christians, and this myth may have fostered the occasional outbreak of somewhat pathetic half-hearted Satanism. In his Tableau de L'Inconstance des mauvais Anges (1613), Pierre de L'Ancre - admittedly a Catholic bigot - declares unequivocally `La plus grande partie des Prestres sont Sorciers' ('The majority of priests are sorcerers'.)16 He also believed that it was poverty that drove them to the Black Arts, although boredom and sexual frustration may well have been important factors, as we saw in the case of flamboyant possession in the religious houses.
As ever, secret societies or at least groups operating under conditions of secrecy are inevitably accused of wild orgies of the most ingeniously perverted kind imaginable. And just as inevitably, especially where Satanism is concerned, some of those rumours will be true. Indeed, the Black Mass as we know it today was invented - admittedly a somewhat dubious honour - by the seventeenth-century alchemist, abortionist and poisoner, Catherine La Voisin, who studded it with sexual sacrileges.
Montague Summers describes the diabolical activities at La Voisin's Paris home" (although his credulity and callousness make him hard to read and even harder to like, his scholarship is not always questionable):
It was in 1666 ... [that] night after night ... at the house of the mysterious Catherine la Voisin the abbe Guibourg was wont to kill young children for his hideous ritual, either by strangulation or more often by piercing their throats with a sharp dagger and letting the hot blood stream into the chalice as he cried: "Astaroth, Asmodee, je vous conjure d'accepter le sacrifice que je vous presente!" (Astaroth! Asmodeus! Receive, I beseech you, this sacrifice I offer unto you!) A priest named Tournet also said Satanic Masses at which children were immolated . . .'8
(Poor Asherath - `Astaroth' - has fallen a long way since her days as consort of God.)
For once, it seems that La Voisin and her confederates did use dead babies in their satanic rites, although they may not have been murdered specially. Apart from doing a brisk trade in harmless stuff such as cosmetics and love philtres, she branched out into a highly lucrative sideline as abortionist, once again underlining the connection - this time almost certainly real - between diabolism and abortion. From there for this highly ambitious and ruthless woman it was but a short step to providing poison for wives who urgently wished to be widows, together with all the evocative paraphenalia of Devil-worship.
La Voisin's expertise was called upon by the cream of Parisian society - even Madame de Montespan, one of King Louis XIV's mistresses, who desired to be raised to what she considered her rightful place as his consort. When La Voisin was arrested and horribly tortured, a veritable Satanic network was revealed of at least 246 people of high social standing, many of whom thought it prudent to suffer voluntary exile, while others of their class were jailed. Thirty-six of the `lower orders' were executed. Incriminating pages were removed from the archives, and the king forbade any mention of Madame de Montespan in connection with the scandal, although it did her little good: after the death of the queen in 1683, Louis took the good Catholic Madame de Maintenon as his wife.19
Child-killing in the name of Satan had become something of a cliche in France - which, for some reason, seems to have had more than its fair share of Satanists in the past, although now the United States is catching up rapidly. Perhaps it is France's long history as the heartland of heresy20 that provided such fertile soil: the heretics perhaps coming to believe their own bad publicity, with a Gallic shrug accepting their fate as `natural' Satanists.
Perhaps the most shocking satanic individual of medieval times was another Frenchman, Joan of Arc's marshal, Gilles de Laval, Marechal and Baron de Rais,21 a sexual pervert who derived ecstatic pleasure from the torture and butchery of children. In 1440 he was accused of the abduction and murder of 140 named children, but some estimate the number as high as 800. However, he was not always criminally insane, or if he was he hid it well: as a young man he had been remarkable for his absolute piety and generosity towards the Church.
At just twenty-four years old he was a national hero, due to his heroic exploits at the side of La Pucelle ('The Maid', or Joan of Arc); later he became Marechal (Marshal) of France. After Joan's burning as a witch and the end of his martial exploits, Gilles retired to his country estates - and began his life as a serial sex murderer.
A homosexual, Gilles would lure a handsome lad into his castle, hang him by his heels, but before he lost consciousness he would be taken down and reassured. Nothing horrible was really going to happen: it was all just a game. This was pure sadism, for then the bewildered boy would be violently raped, after which Gilles or one of his henchmen would cut his throat or slice off his head. The corpse continued to exert an irresistible allure, however, and Gilles piled necrophilia on to the horrors he had inflicted on the living boy, by slitting open the stomach and sitting among the intestines to masturbate. He also indulged in variations on this theme, for example procuring two boys, one of whom had to watch the other being tortured and killed while waiting his turn.
Gilles' intense bouts of sadism were like an attack of madness: he would collapse after each individual abomination and not regain consciousness for many hours. His fellow monsters meanwhile would cut up the corpses and burn them. However, they were not always very thorough, and it was their laxity that brought disaster to Gilles' insane bloodlust.
Having recklessly overspent, Gilles was desperate for money, and alchemy seemed like a promising solution, even though it was illegal. A magician named Francois Prelati impressed upon him that the only way to make alchemical gold was by selling his soul to the Devil, which he always refused to do, but had no scruples when told that in any case he must sacrifice boys in order to stand a chance of benefiting from the magical gold. Their rituals were often distinguished by violence both within and without the protective circle from invisible forces, and once by the hallucination of a monstrous green snake.
By 1440 the local authorities and the Inquisition had a list of forty-seven charges against Gilles (the indictment was forty-nine paragraphs long), including conjuration of spirits, heresy and sexual perversions against children - and human sacrifice to demons. Although he himself was not tortured, presumably because of his high status, his servants were `put to the Question', but not one of his 500 attendants were required to give evidence in court. Gilles was not allowed to defend himself nor employ counsel. Begging for forgiveness and asking for the prayers of the onlookers - who openly wept at his plight - he was strangled and his body burnt. His two associates were burnt alive. The Church became phenomenally wealthy after seizing his land and property.
The terrible blood-spree of Gilles de Rais forms a grim background to J. K. Huysmans' La Bas (Down There, 1891),22 which discursively tells the story of a vampiristic sexual relationship in contemporary Paris, but which is famed for its apparently authentic description of a black mass. In his tour de force, The Occult, Colin Wilson writes of the critical scene:
The altar boys are ageing poufs, covered with cosmetics. The chapel is dingy and damp, with cracked walls. The face of Christ on the cross is painted so that it laughs derisively. [The] Canon ... pours out ... invective on the Crucified: `Thou hast forgotten the poverty thou didst preach, thou hast seen the weak crushed ... thou hast heard the death rattle of the timid . . .' The women
then begin to have convulsions in the manner of the Loudun nuns. One of the aged choir boys performs an act of fellatio on [Canon Docre, who] ejaculates on the host and tosses it to the convulsed women; he also apparently defecates on the altar. Huysmans' language is not explicit, but ordure obviously plays a central part in the mass 23
Wilson sagely notes that uppermost in the black mass is the `desire of the participants to shock themselves out of their normal state of dullness.'24 Yet even so, their activities never reach beyond a puerile attempt to upset bourgeois sensibilities - with their emphasis on undoing all the accepted ideals of cleanliness - and, of course, an equally childish attack on the Church. As Colin Wilson says: `The "blasphemies" sound completely harmless to anyone who is not a Catholic and who does not accept that disbelief in the divinity of Christ involves eternal damnation.'25 This sort of backstreet Satanism was described perfectly by the twentieth-century British philosopher Bertrand Russell as `Satan in the suburbs'.
One of the most intriguing of the French `Satanists' was Eugene Vintras (1807-75), who established his Church of Carmel - also known as the Oeuvre de la Misericorde (Work of Mercy), in the early 1840s. Clearly a charismatic figure, Vintras appealed to high society, but soon his movement was accused of Satanism, largely because his rites were highly sexual in nature. Worse, Vintras was embroiled in a massive political scandal centred on Charles Guillaume Naundorff (1785-1845), who claimed to be the `lost' King Louis XVII, believed by most to have died during or shortly after the French Revolution in the 1790s. Naundorff and Vintras publicly backed each other, the latter ending up in what was clearly a show trial accused of fraud. After five years in jail, Vintras fled to London, as France was rapidly becoming too hot to hold him. A former member of his Church of Carmel, one Father Gozzoli published a pamphlet accusing him of organizing the most debauched orgies imaginable - and Gozzoli seems to have possessed a particularly lurid imagination. In 1848 the sect was declared heretical by the Pope and all its members excommunicated, whereupon they established themselves as a totally independent entity, with both male and female priests, rather like the Cathars.
The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code Page 26
