Raising Hell

Raising Hell

A Concise History of the Black Arts—and Those Who Dared to Practice Them

Robert Masello

C
ONTENTS

PREFACE

I. BLACK MAGIC AND SORCERY
:

The Magus
•
The Sacred Circle
•
Pentagram and Hexagram
•
The Great Grimoires
•
Conjurations from the
True Grimoire
•
The
Liber Spirituum
•
The Unholy Pact
•
The Occult Philosophy
•
Agrippa the Magician
•
Magic Candles, Magic Hands
•
Curses and Incantations
•
Love and Death
•
The Evil Eye
•
The Black Mass
•
Bell, Book, and Candle

II. RAISING THE DEAD
:

Necromancy
•
Grave Encounters
•
Demons in the Coliseum
•
Friar Bacon
•
The Bell of Girardius
•
Dr. Dee and Mr. Kelley
•
The Lodge of the Mysteries
•
The Monks of Medmenham
•
Eliphas Lévi
•
La Voisin

III. MYSTICAL ORDERS
:

The Seeker and the Sorcerer
•
The Gnostics
•
Simon Magus
•
The Cabbala
•
Defenders of the Faith
•
The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross
•
The Freemasons
•
The Grand Copt
•
The Order of the Golden Dawn
•
The Great Beast
•
Dion Fortune
•
Mme Blavatsky

IV. THE SECRET DOCTRINE
:

The Alchemists’ Art
•
The Origins of Alchemy
•
The Philosophers’ Stone
•
The Elixir of Life
•
The Alkahest
•
Paracelsus
•
Robert Fludd
•
Alexander Seton
•
The Scourge of Milan
•
The Man Who Could Not Die

V. FATE AND THE FUTURE
:

The Divinatory Arts
•
The Sibylline Books
•
The Hand of Fate
•
Reading the Stars
•
The Little Animal in the Sky
•
Tycho Brahe
•
The Devil’s Picture Book
•
Mother Shipton and the Cheshire Prophet
•
Nostradamus

GLOSSARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

P
REFACE

When anyone invokes the Devil

with intentional ceremonies,

the Devil comes, and is seen.

Eliphas Lévi,

French occultist

(c. 1810–75)

Who in full possession of his faculties would ever deliberately invoke the Devil?

Who would call up infernal powers and then hope, once the demons were conjured, to be able to control them?

If the history of black magic and the occult reveals anything at all, it reveals that the drive to marshal the unseen powers of the dark and bend them to a mortal will is as old as mankind itself. Men and women have believed, in virtually every age and in every land, that there is another world—this one invisible, eternal, and essentially unknowable—coexistent with the one we inhabit every day. It is the world of spirits and souls, angels and demons, gods and monsters, and in it can be found the answers to all the great questions: What is life all about? Does man decide his own fate? Is death truly an end? Is there a Heaven? And is there, perhaps more important, a Hell?

Magic, the mystical precursor of religion, professed to have the answers. But where “white magic” looked for these answers from a divine, or holy, source, black magic looked in the other direction; by enlisting the aid of Satan or his spawn, sorcerers and magicians claimed to be able to probe the great mysteries. They made pacts with demons, promising their immortal souls in exchange for a lifetime of riches or a godlike glimpse of the cosmic order. They raised the souls of the dead, to ask them
where they’d gone and how they’d gotten there. They pored over ancient and sacred texts, the Holy Scriptures, the Cabbala, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, searching through the cryptic words for clues and advice.

Along the way, these occult pioneers often stumbled upon real and verifiable truths: the astrologers mapped the heavens and paved the way for the astronomers who followed; the alchemists, in their futile quest to make gold from lead, performed thousands of experiments which led to the discovery of everything from phosphorus, sodium sulfate, and benzoic acid to the manufacturing of steel. Even the seers, who read palms and interpreted dreams, contributed to the vast catalog of human thought and deed, and anticipated in their own way such later practices as psychology and hypnosis.

What made their efforts all the more surprising—in some cases, dare it be said, even inspiring—were the dangers, both real and imagined, that these explorers of the dark side faced. First, there was the ever-present threat of ecclesiastical or royal condemnation. Dabbling in the occult could get you interrogated, excommunicated, tortured, mangled, hanged, burned at the stake. (Or, as in the case of Father Grandier, who was accused of bewitching the nuns of Loudun, all of the above.)

Then, there was the imagined danger implicit in the act of conjuration—if you summoned a demon straight from Hell, there was a very good chance he’d try to take you back home with him. In all the
grimoires
(grammars) of black magic, there were repeated warnings and explicit instructions about what to watch out for. Demons were wily sorts, the books declared, who weren’t too happy about taking orders from any witch or magician; given the slightest opportunity, they’d do their best to kill the conjurer’s mortal body and make off with his immortal soul. When at long last it came time for Faust to make good on his deal with the devil, for instance, his body was found torn to pieces in an open field, and his soul—well, that was assumed, according to most accounts, to have been carried off to perdition.

Even so, the occult arts have never disappeared and have frequently flourished. Though many of them had their origins in
the ancient nations of the Middle East (where they formed the very basis of the faiths of Babylon and Egypt), during the Middle Ages and Renaissance they reached their zenith in western Europe. There, the antique practices were revived, revered, and refined; there, they were combined with the latest discoveries in medicine, metallurgy, astronomy, anatomy, botany, and zoology and subjected to the spirit of inquiry that increasingly distinguished the era. What started as magic occasionally became fact. Occult arts over time turned into rudimentary science.

And though the Devil and his minions were gradually ushered from the scene, they were never altogether banished. They were always waiting in the wings . . . listening patiently for their cue to return . . . ready to offer, to anyone foolhardy enough to accept it, their unholy bargain.

BLACK MAGIC

AND

SORCERY

I hereby promise the Great Spirit Lucifuge, Prince of Demons, that each year I will bring unto him a human soul to do with as it may please him, and in return Lucifuge promises to bestow upon me the treasures of the earth and fulfill my every desire for the length of my natural life. If I fail to bring him each year the offering specified above, then my own soul shall be forfeit to him.

Signed_____________________[Invocant signs pact with his own blood.]

“The Complete Book of Magic Science,”

unpublished manuscript in the British Museum

THE MAGUS

In the West, he has gone by many names. Magus, sorcerer, wizard, magician. We know him best as a figure in a long robe, bespangled with stars, wearing a pointed hat and a long white beard, wielding a magic wand. He is the master of the occult world and its invisible forces, able to call up storms, cast spells, defy nature, and make all things do his bidding.

But the true origins of the magus lie in the East, in the ancient empire of Persia.

There, the magi, or wise men, were the high priests, the interpreters of the wisdom of Zoroaster. Our word “magic” is derived from their name. They were revered for their profound learning and for their gift of prophecy; rulers consulted them on everything from matters of personal health to great affairs of state. In their own temples, built on the highest mountaintops, the magi made the search for truth their chief aim; to that end, they studied the sky and the stars and made sacrifices to the elements. Because they believed in the transmigration of souls, they generally abstained from eating any kind of meat.

The wise men who brought their gifts to the infant Jesus were magi from the Orient: named Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, they were, according to some theologians, master astrologers who, after following the star to Bethlehem, abandoned their pagan beliefs. (And, if legend is to be believed, their bones are now interred in Cologne Cathedral.)

Over the centuries, and with the gradual decline of the Persian empire, the wisdom of the magi made its way westward. Soldiers who survived the Crusades brought back with them news, and bits of arcane lore, from the eastern lands; trade routes were forged and frequently traveled among the Mediterranean nations. What the magi had begun, European magicians quickly adopted and developed. But they added to it their own mystical precepts and philosophy, culled from the Jewish Cabbala and early Christian theology. It was a curious but potent
brew, a mix of alchemy and chemistry, metallurgy and medicine, astrology, anatomy, divination, metaphysics. It was all things thrown together, an amalgam out of which the magicians hoped to extract answers to all things mysterious. “Magic,” Paracelsus wrote, “has power to experience and fathom things which are inaccessible to human reason. For magic is a great secret wisdom, just as reason is a great public folly.”

Each man, it was believed, was a miniature cosmos, replicating in his own constitution the natural order and affected, at the same time, by the larger universe he inhabited—the motions of the planets and stars, the winds that blew and the rain that fell, the changing of the seasons. The magus, it was thought, could work his wonders in two ways. First, by controlling and directing his own inner forces, he could project his will and desires outward, influencing the actions of others. At the same time, he could call down, or invoke from the outside, powers and intelligences that he could then use to effect his own aims. Agrippa von Nettesheim, one of the greatest magicians of the sixteenth century, described the magus as one “who has cohabited with the elements, vanquished Nature, mounted higher than the heavens, elevating himself to the archetype itself with whom he then becomes co-operator and can do all things.”

Eliphas Lévi, sometimes called the last of the magi, wrote in 1855
The Doctrine and Ritual of Magic.
In it, he offered anyone wishing to pursue the occult some critical advice: “To attain the sanctum regnum, in other words, the knowledge and power of the magi, there are four indispensable conditions—an intelligence illuminated by study, an intrepidity which nothing can check, a will which nothing can break, and a discretion which nothing can corrupt and nothing intoxicate. TO KNOW, TO DARE, TO WILL, TO KEEP SILENCE—such are the four words of the magus.”

But success could prove dangerous. Even if the magus met all the requirements, both personal and professional, he could still find himself in deep trouble. If, for instance, he summoned up infernal forces that he was not able to control, either through the strength of his imagination or through his magical techniques,
he ran the risk of being overpowered by them. The spirits of the dark were never noted for their charity. In the batting of an eye, the magus could lose his life and, if he really wasn’t careful, his immortal soul to boot.