Raising Hell (13 page)

But hanging on to the title was never easy—whenever she became unsure of her hold on the king, de Montespan returned to La Voisin for a sort of refresher spell. On one such occasion, La Voisin whipped up an aphrodisiac for her, concocted from dried moles, the blood of bats, and cantharides (which was more commonly known as Spanish fly, the powdered remains of blister beetles). On another occasion, when things were looking especially dire, de Montespan implored La Voisin for something even more powerful.

The answer was Abbé Guibourg, a corrupt old prelate known for his sensual nature. He was a tall, bulky creature whose fleshy face was disfigured by a permanent squint. Using de Montespan’s naked body as his altar, he performed a secret Mass to ensure the king’s devotion.

According to accounts left by La Voisin’s daughter, Marguerite (who witnessed several such Masses), the marquise was laid out on her back with her arms outstretched; black candles were balanced on each palm. A napkin embroidered with a cross was laid on her chest, and the chalice was placed upright on her belly. It was then the true horror occurred: a child was sacrificed, its throat cut, and the blood was poured into the chalice, where it was mixed with flour to make the unholy host. In de Montespan’s name, Guibourg then recited the incantation: “Astaroth, Asmodeus, princes of amity, I conjure you to accept the sacrifice of this child, which I offer in return for what I ask: that the King and the Dauphin will continue their friendship towards me, that I may be honored by the Princes and Princesses of the Court, and that the King will refuse nothing I ask of him, both for my relatives and my retainers.” When she was done serving as the altarpiece, de Montespan took some of the foul wafer and dried blood and slipped them into the king’s next meal.

In March 1669, the marquise bore a child by the king, baptized Louis-Auguste, who was promptly handed off to another woman to be raised. Over the following years, she had six more children by the king. But his interest, inevitably, began to wane.
While he stopped by her apartments in the palace for regular chats—she was, by all accounts, a clever and cultivated woman, whose conversation was admired by the likes of Saint-Simon and Marie de Sévigné—the king’s romantic inclinations were now directed at a younger newcomer by the name of Angélique de Fontanges. The marquise was not about to stand for this and consulted, as usual, La Voisin about the course she should take.

A short time later, Angélique died of mysterious causes. Poison was suspected but never proved.

Poison, as it turns out, was being suspected more and more at the court of Louis XIV. Henrietta, the duchesse d’Orléans, was thought to have been murdered with a poison. The duchesse de Bouillon was accused of trying to do away with her husband in order to make a better marriage with the duc de Vendôme and was banished by the king. Indeed, the nobility were so busy practicing sorcery and witchcraft against each other that in 1680 the king decided to do something about it by convening the Chambre Ardente ("burning chamber"). A court that met in secret, in a room where the only illumination was provided by lighted torches, the Chambre Ardente tried only the most serious crimes of heresy and witchcraft, and its sentences, from which there was no appeal, were notoriously harsh. Most of the accused who stood before it were later burned alive at the stake.

La Voisin and her confederates, not suprisingly, were some of the first to be tried. La Voisin herself was briefly tortured, then burned alive on February 20, 1680. Abbé Guibourg was thrown into the dungeons of the castle of Besançon, where he was chained to a wall for three years before he died. Thirty-five others, also condemned for crimes of magic, were burned; five more were sent to the galleys. Some unfortunates, who were found innocent of actual crimes but were held to be in possession of knowledge the king and judges did not wish to become generally known, were simply imprisoned for life; their jailers were given orders to flog them into silence if they ever tried to impart anything of what they knew.

Many others, however, who were too well established in the court hierarchy, or too closely tied to the king himself, went
unpunished altogether or were merely banished (the duchesse de Bouillon for one). The marquise de Montespan, who had clearly been a steady customer of La Voisin, was allowed to retire to the Convent of St. Joseph with a pension of half a million francs; there she devoted the remaining years of her life to good works—donating funds to charities and hospitals—and doing penance for her earlier transgressions. When she died on May 27, 1707, the king forbade the illegitimate children he’d had by her to wear any sign of mourning.

MYSTICAL

ORDERS

The mind is the great

Slayer of the Real.

Madame Blavatsky

THE SEEKER AND THE SORCERER

Although mysticism and its professed aims—the penetration of the mysteries of the cosmos, the unification with the godhead—were good, and even laudable, over the centuries this valiant search for meaning often pushed into darker territory. Its practitioners sought not only knowledge but power—power that was sometimes subverted to evil purposes. The line between seeker and sorcerer was often forgotten, and easily crossed.

And though both might balk at being so linked, the mystic, with his avowedly holy aims, and the magician, with his frankly secular schemes, have always had more in common than they’d like to admit.

For one thing, both of them seek to attain a higher state, a knowledge of things unknowable by traditional means. For another, they both believe that the ability to achieve such a state resides within themselves, in a power that lies latent within the normally uncultivated regions of their mind and soul. Before the mystic and the magus separate to seek their respective goals, they are heading in much the same direction, and for much of the way they might even be said to keep company.

But where the magus stops short, the mystic presses on.

In broad terms, the aim of the magician is to find a way to conquer and control the forces of the universe, to find out how to use his will and the powers of his imagination to acquire the worldly things he desires. Love, riches, glory—the magician believes that all of these things can be had if only he is wise enough, and skilled enough, to decipher and then speak the secret language of the occult.

The mystic, too, must penetrate this unseen world, must travel beyond the knowable, the visible, the tangible. He must elevate himself from this plane to the next, must believe so fervently in the existence of some higher state that doubt and fear do not tether him inextricably to the mundane world. He must share with the magician a strange amalgam of humility, acknowledging
that there is so much of which he is ignorant, and hubris, believing that he can, and will, ultimately attain to this higher wisdom.

But where the magician seeks to manipulate the things of this world, the mystic seeks to detach himself from them. Where the magus hopes to absorb all things within himself, and within the scope of his powers, the mystic desires to merge himself into the godhead, the ineffable source of everything.

“Then God enlightened me with his spirit, that I might understand his will and get rid of my sorrow,” wrote the German mystic Jakob Boehme in his
Aurora
(1612), “then the spirit penetrated me, and now, since my spirit, after hard struggles, has broken through the gates of hell to the innermost origins of godhead, and been there received with love, it has seen everything, and recognized God in all creatures, even in plant and grass; and thus immediately with strong impulse my will was formed to describe the nature of God.”

One of the impediments to this spiritual breakthrough—and this held true for many magicians as well as mystics—was the strong hold that the things of this world could exert. Even the alchemist, who bent his every effort to transmuting base metals to gold and silver, was advised to live an everyday life of austerity. His home was usually a hovel, in a back alley of the town, where he could perform his experiments in obscurity; his poverty was seen as a sign of his seriousness of purpose. Magicians, too, often led meager and barren lives, presumably because they were bound up in the pursuit of higher things, oblivious to the baser needs of human nature.

The mystic, however, often took this asceticism to new heights, purposefully ignoring the ordinary human needs and even performing grisly mortifications of the flesh (Origen, on whose writings much of later mysticism drew, castrated himself in order to get rid of the distractions of lust and sensuality). Other Christian mystics, such as Catherine of Siena and Padre Pio, displayed the stigmata—the wounds of the crucified Christ. Though differing in degree, and even in their espoused aim, the
mystic and the magus shared a rejection of conventional wisdom while embracing an otherworldly outlook.

Over the centuries, many different mystic sects were formed—the Waldenses, the Cathari, the Beguines, to name a few—and many influential mystic teachers emerged, including Emanuel Swedenborg, Meister Eckhart, and Jan van Ruysbroeck. In the Middle Ages, there was a strong reaction to the seeming coldness and formality of the Catholic Church; people were suffering greatly from war, poverty, and, in the fourteenth century, the absolute devastation of the Black Death. They needed comfort, they needed answers, they needed a sense that they were not so far removed from God. They also needed to know that there was no immense bulwark (as the church must have sometimes seemed to be) standing implacably between them and the Divine.

Mysticism, in its many strains, provided that reassurance and gave them, as St. Bernard observed in his
De Diligendo Deo
(c. 1126), a feeling of being included, forever and always, in some greater providential plan:

As the little water-drop poured into a large measure of wine seems to lose its own nature entirely and to take on both the taste and the colour of the wine; or as iron heated red-hot loses its own appearance and glows like fire; or as air filled with sunlight is transformed into the same brightness so that it does not so much appear to be illuminated as to be itself light—so must all human feeling towards the Holy One be self-dissolved in unspeakable wise, and wholly transfused into the will of God. For how shall God be all in all if anything of man remains in man? The substance will indeed remain, but in another form, another glory, another power.

This was welcome news—the universe was in us, and we were, forever, a part of the universe—that many at the time felt
an overwhelming need to believe. And, if we are to judge from the popularity of many New Age beliefs that are so similar to earlier mystic teachings, there is a great and growing number of people who feel that same need today.

THE GNOSTICS

Although the Gnostics by no means created Satan, many of their beliefs, most notably the idea that there are opposing gods of good and evil, and two worlds, one of light and one of darkness, certainly offered him room to grow and take hold in the imagination of mankind.

The Gnostic sects, which proliferated in the early centuries
A.D.,
in and around the Middle East, offered rival views to the Judaic and early Christian theologies. The very word “Gnostic” meant “one who knows,” and what the Gnostics knew, the secret knowledge that they possessed, wasn’t something easily demonstrated or proved. What the Gnostics knew was that the world, as they saw it, was unmitigatedly evil and that no supreme deity could possibly have made it that way. Consequently, they argued, the supreme deity must be far, far away, pretty much existing on his own in a heaven of his own making. What we were left with here was something created by proxy, a world fashioned by lesser deities, known as archons (rulers), who had made a hash of the job.

It was the archons, for instance, who had created man. They’d seen a brilliant vision of a man flash above them, but they’d been unable to hold the image fast. What exactly was it that they’d seen? Working from memory, they tried to re-create the image, but the man they made was so badly built, according to some of the Gnostic teachings, that he couldn’t even stand up on his own; he squirmed around like a giant earthworm until God caught a glimpse of him and flicked the divine spark his way. This, at least, got man onto his own two feet.

In the view of some of the Gnostic teachers, these archons were in fact rebel angels; in the second century
A.D.,
Satuminus
of Antioch taught his followers that the world had been created by seven of these fallen angels, whose leader was the God of the Jews. These seven had deliberately misled Moses and the Old Testament prophets so that they in turn would lead mankind down the garden path. In the opinion of many Gnostic followers, the God of the Old Testament was a brutal, evil deity; some of them even equated Jehovah with the Devil. They praised his enemies, condemned the prophets and patriarchs, and made some other, equally incendiary arguments. In some Gnostic sects, the serpent was worshiped, and the serpent in the Garden of Eden was proclaimed a friend to Adam and Eve. Why? Because, by Gnostic lights, the serpent was just doing its level best to open Adam and Eve’s eyes to the difference between good and evil. And when it came to Cain and Abel, the Gnostics, predictably, sided with Cain; only an evil deity would prefer Abel’s blood sacrifice to Cain’s nonviolent fruits and berries.

All in all, the Gnostics could be counted on to turn upside down nearly every traditional Judeo-Christian value. In a world created and governed by evil, you might just as well throw caution to the wind and do as you pleased; after all, you didn’t get to Heaven by following the rules laid down by archons. You got there by possessing within yourself the gnosis, or true knowledge, of the way things were. Some of the Gnostics interpreted this as a virtual license to steal, embarking on wild lives of sexual profligacy and forbidden magical practices. But normal heterosexual sex was frowned on, because there was such a good chance it would wind up creating another human being who would only add one more slave to the archons’ battalions.