by J H Brennan
Ryback made a thorough examination of the entire collection. Among other interesting works he discovered Foundations of the Nineteenth Century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the same demonically inspired author whose ideas profoundly influenced the kaiser. But perhaps more significant, he also found that certain of the volumes had been annotated by Hitler himself, a clear indication of his specific sixty-six interests. The most heavily annotated, with a total of sixty-six marginal markings, was a curious work by a Dr. Ernst Schertel, signed and dedicated to Hitler by its author. The name of the work that so fascinated Hitler was Magische: Geschichte/Theorie/Praxis, or, in translation, Magic: History/Theory/Practice. In it, Dr. Schertel wrote: “Only by doing magic, through practice and gaining experience, will we recognize divinity and learn to be one with her.” And earlier on the final page of his book: “The first and only important thing is communion with the demon.”13
19. A MUSEUM OF SPIRIT CONTACT
THE MORE CLOSELY WE EXAMINE THE PHENOMENON OF SPIRIT INFLUence, the more dramatic—and at times almost unbelievable—the picture becomes. In what we like to term more credulous ages, occultism was everywhere and nowhere more apparent than in the halls of the mighty. The examples already cited scarcely skim the surface. A hypothetical Museum of Spirit Contact might also contain the case of the seventeenth-century alchemist and wizard, Dr. Lamb. On one occasion, contemporary documents record, Lamb entertained Sir Miles Sands and a Mr. Barbor by making a tree appear in his rooms, then magically conjuring three little spirits with axes to cut it down. This sounds like a trick or hypnotism but Mr. Barbor—against instructions—pocketed a chip of wood from the tree. That night he and his wife were plagued by poltergeist manifestations until he threw the chip away, at which point the house became quiet.
Dr. Lamb was an influential occultist. He was personal physician to the powerful Duke of Buckingham and a close friend of the king. In 1640, his sinister reputation provoked a riot and, having pursued him across London to St. Paul’s Cross, the mob stoned him to death. When news of the incident reached King Charles I, he rode out personally to help but arrived too late. He was, however, so incensed that he fined the city £600 for failing to punish the ringleaders.
Like his predecessor, Charles II came under esoteric influence. His chaplain was Joseph Glanvill, an Oxford scholar and occultist whose interest in the paranormal was so profound that he is sometimes called the father of psychical research. He took part in numerous séances at Ragley Castle, the home of Lady Anne Conway and, one must assume, carried messages from the Otherworld back to the king.
Charles II of England, one of many monarchs who fell under spirit influence
Two centuries earlier, in 1441, a witchcraft trial unearthed further evidence of occultism in high places. Among the accused were the Duchess of Gloucester and Roger Bolingbroke, a world-famous scholar of his day. Bolingbroke was an alchemist and astronomer (which almost certainly means he was an astrologer as well). He enjoyed considerable personal influence with the Duke of Gloucester and his reputation assured a more diffuse influence over a far wider field. Although the judicial procedures of witchcraft trials have made the evidence they present notoriously unreliable, Bolingbroke does seem to have been a practicing magician, for his ritual implements were discovered. The courts did not take kindly to his activities, which, it was claimed, were designed to murder the king at a distance. Bolingbroke was hanged, beheaded, and quartered. The Duchess, charged with necromancy, witchcraft or sorcery, heresy, and treason, got off comparatively lightly. After public penance in London, she was jailed for life.
Nor, as we have seen, was occult influence confined to England. Close at hand, Ireland’s first witch was a member of the aristocracy. Lady Alice Kyteler was charged on a variety of counts in 1324. She escaped the scandal by sailing for England, but her maid, Petronilla de Meath, was flogged, then burned alive. Further afield, the king of Sweden hired four sorcerers in 1563 to march with his army against the Danes. Their job was to raise storms that would confuse the enemy.
Our hypothetical museum would certainly feature an amazing magical scandal that erupted in France in 1398, when the Duke of Orleans was accused of sealing a pact with the Devil in order to murder the king. The monarch, who was in any case three-quarters mad, attempted to fight fire with fire and called in witches to cure his illness. When their arts failed, two magicians, who happened also to be Augustinian monks, were required to try their skill. They too failed and were subsequently beheaded.
The museum would also include the lives of the early popes, for several were enthusiastic magical practitioners. Among them was Benedict Caetini who was elevated to the papacy in 1294. Caetani’s first act was to intern his predecessor, the elderly Pope Celestine V, in the Castle of Fumone. The old man died soon after and there was talk Caetini had him murdered. As Pope Boniface VIII, Caetini soon found his enemies multiplying. Large numbers of Franciscans turned against him. The poet Iacopone da Todi opposed him (and was jailed for his pains). When he issued a bull forbidding the taxation of clergy, he found himself in bad odor with the kings of England and France. Philip IV of France was particularly active in his opposition. He struck to the heart of papal revenues by banning the export of money from France and expelling foreign merchants. The Colonnas, an influential Roman family that included two cardinals, added to his problems with an insurrection that culminated in the armed robbery of papal treasures. Boniface went to war, but it took a year of bitter conflict to force the Colonnas into submission. Although not excommunicated, their possessions were seized and the pope bluntly refused to reinstate the cardinals to their former offices. The Colonnas promptly rebelled again and, unable to withstand Boniface militarily, fled Italy for France where they continued to conspire with the disaffected king.
In 1301, Philip imprisoned the French bishop, Bernard Saisset of Pamiers, to the fury of Boniface who issued another bull (delightfully entitled “Listen Son”) that rebuked the king and demanded the bishop’s release. Philip remained defiant. A secret meeting was held at the Louvre in Paris, during which Philip’s councillor, Guillaume de Nogaret, demanded Boniface be denounced by a general council of the Church, then went off to Italy to try to stir up a rebellion. Although the rebellion never happened, Nogaret nonetheless became embroiled in an operation to undermine the pope. When he discovered that Boniface was about to issue a bull announcing Philip’s excommunication, he decided on a kidnap attempt. He enlisted the help of some cardinals, one of the Colonnas—Sciarra—and several civic dignitaries of Anagni, the city where Boniface was spending the summer. None of them liked the pope very much and the kidnapping went off like clockwork. Unfortunately for Nogaret, however, the Anagni burghers had second thoughts and mounted a successful rescue mission just two days later. But Boniface had been badly beaten and abused by Sciarra Colonna (who wanted to kill him), and died on October 11, 1303, shortly after his return to Rome.
Incredibly, death failed to put an end to his problems. In 1310, seven years after Boniface was laid to rest, Philip convened a trial at Avignon. The defendant was the dead pope who now faced charges of murder, sodomy, and, most serious of all, consorting with devils. Witness after witness paraded into the courtroom to testify to these crimes. Even during his lifetime there had been rumors of the pope’s sorcery. He was widely believed to have installed a demon as his personal adviser and consulted it on both spiritual and political questions. Now it was claimed that he had been in contact with not just one demon, but three. One had been given to him by an unnamed woman, another by a Hungarian, and the third by his namesake Boniface of Vincenza. Witnesses claimed the pope named this third demon “Boniface” because it amused him to think that Boniface had been given to Boniface by Boniface. Other accusers told how Boniface carried around a spirit in a finger ring.
All this, of course, sounds utterly preposterous to modern ears—the sort of medieval nonsense, rooted in naïveté and superstition, that fueled the Inquisition and triggered Europe’s witch hu
nts. Nor is there any doubt that the trial was a politically inspired sham. King Philip, whose financial problems later persuaded him to move against the Knights Templar, was trying to put pressure on the current pope, Clement V, who was resident at Avignon. He wanted Clement’s support for a lunatic scheme that would have placed him (Philip) at the head of a vast Christian empire centered on Jerusalem. When Clement finally gave in after a year, the trial was promptly abandoned. Most modern historians leave it at that. They accept that the charges against Boniface were fabricated and fantastic. While murder might be a possibility and Boniface would not be the first (nor, indeed, the last) pope to be suspected of sodomy, no one now takes the demonic accusations seriously. Yet there are elements in the evidence that might lead one to wonder if we should not give just a little more credence to his accusers. These elements concern the pope’s alleged consultation with a spirit. When he needed its advice, witnesses claimed he would lock himself in his room. Soon there would emerge hissing sounds, followed by noises like the stampeding of cattle. Those waiting outside would feel the ground shake violently beneath their feet.
Incredible though it seems, early settlers in North America reported essentially the same phenomena when they witnessed the Shaking Tent Ceremony of Canada’s Algonquin Indians. Sober anthropological studies later confirmed what had initially appeared to be wildly exaggerated or fictitious claims. When an Algonquin medicine man wished to consult with his spirits, he was first tied up securely by members of his tribe, then wrapped in a cloak, and placed, apparently helpless, in a large, barrel-shaped tent reserved for ceremonial purposes. The tent was not a flimsy structure. It was built around uprights as thick as tree trunks, lashed together to form a solid frame. Yet only minutes after the medicine man was placed inside, the tent would begin to tremble. The first signs of movement were usually accompanied by hissing noises, followed by a low, ominous rumbling like the stampeding of buffalo. After this, the tent would begin to shake with increasing violence until the very ground around it started to tremble. The spirit would then take possession of the medicine man inside and answer questions put to it by the tribe. A medieval pope seems to have been caught up in the same type of shamanic spirit experience. He was not the only one.
By the time Maffeo Barberini became pope in 1623, he had proved as astute at making friends as his predecessor Boniface was at making enemies. The new pope, Urban—the eighth to take that name—came from an aristocratic Florentine family and had followed a distinguished church career. He had learned the skills of diplomacy and knew how to make people like him. As pope, he supported France, engaged in building programs, strengthened the papacy’s military capabilities, and acquired the Duchy of Urbino. Before long, the papal states came to dominate central Italy. He was a patron of the arts who was to succeed quite brilliantly in everything he attempted, until he made the mistake of declaring war on the Duke of Parma in 1642. But long before that, Urban was consorting with spirits
The interest arose out of a curious set of circumstances. In 1626 someone leaked (or possibly forged) an important document—the pope’s horoscope. Suspicion must fall on the Spanish, for Spain thoroughly disapproved of the pontiff’s support for France. But whoever was responsible, the leak was potentially damaging. The horoscope predicted Urban would die sometime early in 1628. Spanish cardinals began, ostentatiously, to make preparations to elect a successor. As the predicted date of death approached, Urban appears to have become increasingly uneasy. With death hanging over him, he hired himself a magician.
The 17th Century Pope Urban VIII, who employed a magician to call up spirits whose advice he sought
The magician’s name was Tommaso Campanella. He was born in Naples (then a kingdom) and became a Dominican monk at the age of fourteen. Seven years later he was imprisoned for heresy. It was just the beginning of a colorful career. He was no sooner released from prison than he found himself back again, having only just had time to make the acquaintance of Galileo, the great astronomer. From the comfort of his cell in Padua, he set about writing books so infuriating to Pope Clement VIII that Campanella was transferred to the prisons of the Holy Inquisition in Rome. It was the equivalent of a death sentence, but he hurriedly penned another book that argued that Clement should be made leader of the entire world and the pope released him in 1595. He then wandered the country stirring up trouble and predicting massive social changes for the year 1600. The doctrine attracted followers, many of them Dominicans like himself, but the authorities moved with ruthless efficiency so that by 1599 Campanella was back in jail, this time under torture. He escaped by pretending he was mad.
Campanella was to spend most of his remaining life in and out of jail. But his conviction that popes would make excellent world leaders attracted the interest of Urban, who had now acceded to the papal throne. By then, Campanella’s association with astrologers and mystics had given him a reputation as something of a magician. Soon the rumors began to spread. The pope and the disreputable heretic of a Dominican were meeting secretly. But for what? Some far-fetched political plot? A homosexual liaison? The speculation grew wilder and wilder, but none of it matched what was actually happening. Urban and Campanella were engaged in midnight rites of evocation. They were calling up spirits.
The spirits apparently took the impending astrological threat to the pope quite seriously for they recommended the performance of a planetary ritual—an act of ceremonial magic designed to influence a forthcoming eclipse of the moon and substitute favorable conjunctions for those that had appeared in Urban’s horoscope. Urban himself doubtless believed the operation was a success for he lived long beyond the predicted year and died peacefully in Rome in the summer of 1644. Like Boniface’s “spirit-in-a-ring,” the idea of using “planetary magic” to influence a horoscope seems quaint today. But this is hardly the point. A seventeenth-century pope was not just a spiritual leader. He was a man of immense political power—in today’s terms, a cross between an American president and an Iranian ayatollah. His actions influenced the fates of nations. It is astonishing to think that such a man would base what he saw to be a life-and-death decision on spirit advice.
Astonishing or not, many other popes followed his example. One, Honorius III, was actually reputed to have written a grimoire, a magical textbook, that taught how to evoke evil spirits. The Borgia dynasty in particular showed signs of occult interest, closely related to their skills with poisons. Poisoning and the darker reaches of esoteric practice often went hand in hand, as shown by the Chambre Ardente affair in the reign of Louis XIV, which deserves an honored place in the museum. This began as an investigation into the widespread use of poison among the French nobility. In 1673, two Notre Dame priests told the police that they had learned through the confessional how large numbers of their flock were finding murder an efficient escape route from matrimonial difficulties. True to the ethics of the confessional, no names were mentioned, but four years later, Nicholas de la Reynie, then the Parisian police commissioner, discovered an international poison ring. This organization, which had structural parallels with modern dope rings, was headed by the aristocratic François Calaup de Chasteuil, who ran it along with a lawyer, a banker, and several of his friends among the nobility. Poisons were smuggled in from England, Portugal, and Italy, then distributed across France through a network of middlemen.
When the police swooped, vast stores of poison were uncovered. But de Chasteuil escaped. Rigorous questioning of his colleagues failed to bring out the full extent of their organization. Then, in 1679, a policewoman acting incognito discovered that a fortune-teller called Marie Bosse was not only marketing poison but that all her clients were members of the aristocracy. Investigations extending over several months soon showed that literally hundreds of courtiers had been making use of poisons. An appalled King Louis XIV agreed to set up a star chamber (the Chambre Ardente) to look into the allegations. One of its first witnesses was another psychic, Catherine Deshayes, Widow Montvoison, who has gone down in history
as “La Voisin.”
The cross-examination of La Voisin extended the net further and unearthed the information that abortion had been a major preoccupation of those involved —one witness claimed La Voisin had terminated twenty-five hundred unwanted pregnancies. By May 1678, the Chambre Ardente had condemned Marie Bosse and another fortune-teller, La Dame Vigoreux, to death by burning. Marie Bosse’s son, François, was hanged. Judgment was reserved in the case of La Voisin and yet another professional psychic, La Lepere. Inquiries continued and more testimony was heard. As the months went by, it became increasingly obvious that the Royal Court had been thoroughly infiltrated by poison dealers, among them several ladies-in-waiting to the king’s various mistresses. On January 23, 1680, the Chambre Ardente moved vigorously to arrest no fewer than eight aristocrats, including the king’s favorite, Madame de Polignac. But poison was not the whole story. A witness named Lesage extended the inquiry to more esoteric realms when he accused three priests of conducting the notorious Black Mass—a rite designed to make contact with the Devil—over the bodies of naked girls. Then in February 1680, the Abbe Mariette was arrested, accused of making wax figurines and sacrificing pigeons. Yet another psychic was involved, a fortune-teller name La Filastre. She told of a rite in which she sacrificed a child, then went on to admit participation in a Black Mass. She implicated two further priests, Abbe Cotton and Abbe Deshayes. Her own newborn baby was sacrificed during a magical ceremony and Mass said over the placenta.
A highly imaginative depiction of the notorious Black Mass, a ceremony designed to make contact with demonic spirits