Raising Hell (9 page)

Shaking and fearful, the witch performed the necessary rites, and the shade of Samuel, an old man in a long robe, soon appeared. At first, Saul could only bend low and press his face to the ground. “Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?” the ghost asked, and when Saul summoned the courage to ask his questions, it wasn’t good news that he received. “Tomorrow,” Samuel intoned, “shalt thou and thy sons be with me: the Lord also shall deliver the host of Israel into the hand of the Philistines.”

Saul, knowing now that both he and his army were doomed, threw himself on the ground in despair.

Sextus, the son of Pompey the Great, had a similar experience with a witch. He, too, was wondering what the outcome of a battle would be; his father was campaigning to become ruler of the Roman empire, but when Sextus tried to find out from the oracles whether the campaign would succeed or not, he got such confusing answers he threw up his hands in disgust. According to Lucan, who recounted the story in his
Pharsalia,
Sextus decided to consult with the celebrated witch Erichto.

This wasn’t a step to be taken lightly.

Erichto was a frightening creature, who’d been mixing up her personal and professional life for many years. To facilitate her communications with the dead, she had taken up residence in a graveyard, sleeping in a tomb, surrounded by bones and funerary relics. When Sextus asked her to look into the future for him, she said they’d first have to get hold of a fresh corpse.

Luckily, there was a battlefield quite nearby, and after they’d combed over the casualties for a while, they found the body of a recently slain soldier that Erichto said would suit them just fine. The fact that his body was still warm indicated that the energy of life, which could quickly dissipate, was still there. Just as important, he hadn’t been wounded in the mouth, lungs, or throat; if he had been, he might not be able to talk once they’d gone to all the trouble of reviving him.

Together, Sextus and the witch dragged the body into a cave, which was concealed by yew trees and consecrated to the gods of the underworld. There, Erichto went about fixing a ghastly stew, using the flesh of hyenas that had fed on the dead, the skin of snakes, the foam from the muzzles of mad dogs, and assorted, foul-smelling herbs. When the vile concoction was ready, she ordered Sextus to cut a hole in the corpse of the soldier, just above the heart, so she could pour in this new substitute blood.

Then she began to recite her incantations, calling upon Hermes, the guide of the dead, and Charon, who ferried dead souls across the inky waters of the river Styx. She appealed to Hecate and Proserpine, the queen of the underworld, and Chaos, the dark lord whose aim was to spread destruction and discord
among men. She reminded them all that she had always been their faithful disciple, that she had poured out human blood on their altars and sacrificed infants in their names. From the sky, thunder pealed, and all around the entrance to the cave Sextus could hear wolves howling and snakes hissing.

But Erichto kept up her chant, and gradually Sextus could make out the spirit of the dead soldier, hovering in the dark air above its own mangled corpse. Erichto ordered the spirit to reenter the body, but the spirit refused; she ordered it again, threatening to dispatch it straight to Hell. The spirit still wouldn’t do it. Then she tried a different tack: if the spirit would do her bidding, she said, she promised to utterly destroy the corpse; that way, no other magician could ever use it to perform such an awful rite again.

This time the spirit acquiesced; it entered the corpse, and the blood began to circulate in its veins, the limbs twitched with life, and slowly, unsteadily, the body rose up on its feet. In halting speech, it described for Sextus the dismal outcome of his father’s campaign—the imminent battle would be lost, and Sextus himself would die an early death. But when it had finished, and Sextus was satisfied that he had received the true, if unhappy, news, Sextus and the witch built a funeral pyre, and the dead soldier stretched himself out on it. True to her word, Erichto recited a spell that freed the spirit from any earthly bonds, and the pyre was set ablaze.

The dead could be more, however, than just the bearers of good or bad tidings—they could also be dispatched on errands of evil.

According to a Greco-Egyptian text, a clever necromancer could use the dead to seduce whatever woman he desired. First, the magician had to make a wax doll and pierce it with thirteen needles, through the eyes, ears, mouth, hands, feet, stomach, brain, anus, and genitals. At sunset, he was to go to the cemetery and place the doll on the grave of someone who had died by violence or early in life. To summon the corpse from the grave, he then called upon the spirits of everyone who had ever died a premature death, along with the powers still held by an
eclectic group of gods and spirits which included Persephone, Ereshkigal (a queen of the underworld in ancient Sumeria), Adonis, Hermes, Thoth, and Anubis (the Egyptian god of the dead, usually depicted with the head of a jackal).

The corpse, reanimated now, was ordered to march to the desired woman’s door “and bring her hither and bind her. . . . Let her sleep with none other, let her have no pleasurable intercourse with any other man, save with me alone. Let [her] neither eat nor drink nor love, nor be strong or well, let her have no sleep except with me. . . .” And so on. It’s hard to imagine any woman resisting such a lovely seduction.

When it wasn’t love or hidden riches that the necromancer was after, it was sometimes just the cadavers themselves. In ancient Egypt, sorcerers bought dead bodies from the embalmers and kept the mummies on hand for any future rites. And in the Middle Ages, sorcerers haunted tombs and gravesites in search of pieces of the corpses themselves, which were thought to hold powerful occult properties. Most prized were the bodies of people who had died suddenly, by accident or violence or execution; it was generally conceded that sudden deaths left a goodly measure of the precious life force still unused.

“Some take a small piece of buried corpse,” wrote Paolus Grillandus, a sixteenth-century witch judge, “especially the corpse of anyone who has been hanged or otherwise suffered a shameful death,” and employ it for occult purposes. Very little of the corpse went to waste: “the nails or teeth . . . the hair, ears, or eyes . . . sinews, bones or flesh,” all of these, according to Grillandus, were put to some use. In an even grimmer note, the flesh of unbaptized babies was much sought after; their graves were often desecrated as a result. Isabel Gowdie, the Scottish witch, once dug up the body of a freshly buried infant and buried it in a farmer’s manure pile, as a way of putting a curse on him and his crop.

Not surprisingly, the Christian church took a very dim view of all this. The Bible inveighed against such practices—Saul and the Witch of Endor as a case in point—and the third-century theologian Tertullian roundly condemned anyone who would
disturb or desecrate a grave. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the church was even arguing that these spirits were nothing more than demons taking on a mortal disguise. William Perkins, in his 1608
Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft,
wrote that “the Devil being sought unto by witches appears to them in the likeness of a dead body.”

DEMONS IN THE COLISEUM

Although Benvenuto Cellini was best known for his brilliance as a goldsmith and artisan to popes and princes, he was also a devoted fan of occult studies, and recounted in his autobiography several harrowing experiences with the denizens of the otherworld.

Once, having met a Sicilian priest who was reputedly skilled in the black arts, Cellini confessed to him his great interest. “A stout soul and a steadfast must the man have who sets himself to such an enterprise,” the priest replied, and Cellini, never one to duck a challenge, a fight, or a romantic assignation, immediately said that he was ready for anything. “If you have the heart to dare it,” said the priest, “then I will amply satisfy your curiosity.”

The next night, the priest, his assistant, Cellini, and a friend entered the Coliseum. The priest gathered everyone around him, drew the magic circle, and assigned each one of them a task: the necromancer-in-training was told to hold the pentagram, while Cellini and his friend were instructed to keep the fire burning; they were also told to feed the flames with various perfumes, or noxious weeds. As for the priest, he recited the necessary incantations for the next hour and a half, until he declared that the Coliseum was now filled with legions of devils.

“Benvenuto,” he said, “ask them something,” and Cellini requested that the infernal horde reunite him with Angelica, his Sicilian mistress. But the devils wouldn’t say yes or no. The priest dismissed them for the night and told Cellini they’d have to try again.

On their next pass, they brought with them, at the priest’s request, “a little boy of pure virginity.” Again, the priest drew the magic circle, and again he recited the prayers in Hebrew, Latin, Greek; he called upon the lords of the infernal world to bring their legions with them, and in no time “the whole Coliseum was full of a hundredfold as many as had appeared upon the first occasion.” Cellini reiterated his earlier request, and this time the priest said, “Hear you what they have replied; that in the space of one month you will be where she is?”

Cellini would have been happier to hear it if he hadn’t noticed that the priest himself was now quaking with fear. The demons he’d summoned were so numerous, and so fierce, that the priest was afraid he’d never be able to get them peaceably to go. The little boy, who claimed he could see four giants trying to force their way into the magic circle, stuck his head between his knees and cried, “This is how I will meet death, for we are certainly dead men!”

But Cellini plucked up his courage and rallied the others; he had them throw more foul-smelling weeds on the fire. And eventually, the devils departed. By the time the matin bells had begun to ring, it appeared to be safe to leave the circle and make their way home. The priest threw off his necromancer’s robe, picked up the pile of books he’d brought, and they all left the Coliseum, “huddling as close as we could to one another,” Cellini recalled, “especially the boy, who had got into the middle, and taken the necromancer by his gown and me by the cloak.”

But what of the devils’ promise? Cellini got into a terrible scrape a short time later—knocking a man out in a street fight—and had to get out of town fast. He wound up in Naples, staying at an inn where, lo and behold, a fellow guest was his Sicilian mistress, Angelica. “While drinking deep of this delight,” he writes, “it occurred to my mind how exactly on that day the month expired, which had been prophesied within the necromantic circle by the devils. So then let every man who enters into relation with those spirits weigh well the inestimable perils I have passed through!”

FRIAR BACON

When it came to estimating the dangers of conjuring up demons, no one was more persuasive than Roger Bacon, the Franciscan friar.

In his
Discovery of the Miracles of Art, Nature and Magick,
written in the thirteenth century, Bacon argued that “there is a more damnable practice, when men despising the Rules of Philosophy, irrationally call up Wicked spirits, supposing them of Energy to satisfie their desires. In which there is a very vast errour, because such persons imagine they have some authority over Spirits, and that Spirits may be compelled by humane authority, which is altogether impossible, since humane energy or Authority is inferiour by much to that of Spirits.” It was a lot easier to get what you wanted, Friar Bacon went on, by invoking “God, or good angels"—though he doesn’t seem to have stuck to his own advice.

Throughout his life, Bacon wrote learned tracts and essays, extolling the virtues of art and nature, praising science over superstition, devout prayer over magic. But if there’s any truth to the many legends that surround his name, he never quite gave up on magic. He studied alchemy, astrology, and necromancy; he believed strongly in the power that incantations might possess, admitting that “all the miracles since the world began, almost, have been wrought by words.” And he warned often that the Antichrist would one day come, and use these powers—both natural and magical—to bring destruction on the world.

Born in 1214, near the town of Ilchester in Somerset, Bacon studied at Oxford, taught there, and later moved to Paris; it was while he was in France, and already a member of the Franciscan order, that he first ran into trouble; in a letter to the pope, he complained that “the Prelates and Friars have kept me starving in close Prison nor would they suffer anyone to come at me, fearing lest my Writings should come to any other than the Pope
and themselves.” This at least piqued the interest of the papal office—what could this humble friar be writing that was so dangerous? Bacon was asked to forward a copy of his work so the pope could see what all the fuss was about, and Bacon did so, sending on his
Opus Majus, Opus Minus,
and
Opus Tertium.

In these works, Bacon described a world of wonders, of instruments, experiments, and techniques that could be used to plumb the depths of the natural world. He outlined what could be a diving suit for the exploration of the ocean floor and recounted experiments with niter that foretold the discovery of gunpowder. In the
Opus Tertium,
a kind of overview of the first two books, he predicted the use of “burning glasses which operate at any distance we can choose, so that anything hostile to the commonwealth may be burnt—a castle, or army or city or anything; and the flying machine, and a navigating machine by which one man may guide a ship full of armed men with incredible speed; and scythe-bearing cars which full of armed men race along with wondrous machinery without animals to draw them, and break down or cut through all obstacles.”

It’s easy to see why such suppositions were considered so volatile; weapons like these, in the wrong hands, could indeed do the Devil’s work. Although he was released from his confinement and returned to Oxford in 1268, his life remained one of trial and turmoil. Imprisoned again ten years later, once more for his writings, he spent fourteen years under arrest. Which makes it all the more amazing that by the time he died, most probably in 1294, he had left behind him such a legacy of stories and adventures. In sixteenth-century England, there was a Bacon revival of astounding proportions.