by Colin Wilson
In the 16th century it was still dangerous for a man of knowledge to gain a reputation as a wizard or sorcerer. The witch hunting craze was spreading across Europe, and many people were being burned for being in league with the Devil. This no doubt explains why we know so little of the lives of the alchemists who followed in the footsteps of Agrippa and Paracelsus. That remarkable 16th century French physician and prophet Nostradamus took care to hide his visions in verse of such obscurity that even nowadays we cannot be certain what most of them mean.
Dr John Dee, the most highly regarded magician of Shakespeare’s time, is almost unique among magicians in that he possessed practically no occult powers. Perhaps this is why he managed to avoid the usual magician’s destiny of spectacular success and tragic downfall.
He was born in 1527, the son of a minor official in the court of King Henry VIII. From childhood on he was an avid reader, and when he went to Cambridge University at the age of 15, he allowed himself only four hours’ sleep a night. After Cambridge he went to the University of Louvain in Belgium, where Agrippa had also studied. When Dee read Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy, he knew that he had stumbled on his life’s work—the pursuit of magical knowledge. At the age of 23 he gave a series of free lectures on geometry in Rheims, France, and was so popular that he was offered a professorship. But he preferred to return to England to pursue his occult studies.
When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, she asked Dee to cast a suitable date for her coronation. Dee did so, and from this time on he enjoyed royal protection. Even so, as one suspected of magical practices, he still had to behave with extreme caution. Moreover, Queen Elizabeth was notoriously stingy: her patronage did nothing to improve Dee’s finances, and he remained poor all his life. Dee married a lady-in-waiting who bore him eight children. He lived quietly and studied astrology, crystal-gazing, and alchemy.
The aim of crystal-gazing is to induce a semi-trancelike state in which the subconscious mind projects future events as images in the crystal. Dee was too much of an intellectual to be good at this. He realized that what he needed was a working partner with natural occult faculties, especially in scrying. In 1582 he met Edward Kelley, a young Irishman who claimed to have second sight. Kelley was undoubtedly a crook—he had had both his ears cut off for forgery—but it seems equally certain that he did possess second sight, and that he was also a medium. Dee’s wife took an immediate dislike to the Irishman, but when Kelley went into a trance and began to get in touch with spirits, Dee was so delighted that he overruled his wife’s objections.
How did Dee and Kelley go about summoning the spirits? One famous print shows them in a graveyard practicing necromancy. From what we know of the pious Dee, however, it seems unlikely that he went in for this sort of thing. We can learn more from his Spiritual Diaries. It is clear that he went into training before endeavouring to summon the spirits. He abstained for three days from sexual intercourse, overeating, and the consumption of alcohol, and he took care to shave his beard and cut his nails. Then began a two-week period of magical invocations in Latin and Hebrew beginning at dawn and continuing until noon, then beginning again at sunset and continuing until midnight. Kelley, meanwhile, gazed intently into the crystal ball. At the end of fourteen days, Kelley would begin to see angels and demons in the crystal. Later, these spirits would walk about the room. Dee, however, does not seem to have seen the spirits, but he recorded lengthy dialogues he had with them.
One’s instant response to this is the conviction that Kelley made Dee believe that nonexistent spirits had manifested themselves. The trouble with this view is that the conversations, which came via the mouth of Kelley, were often so crammed with abstruse magical lore that it is almost inconceivable that the illiterate Irishman could have made them up as he went along. Dee, of course, was familiar with the lore, and certain of the demons quoted chunks of Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy. This makes it possible that Dee transmitted them telepathically to Kelley. The likeliest explanation, however, is that Kelley was a natural medium.
Count Adalbert Laski, a servant of Henry III of France, was so impressed by these seances of Dee and Kelley that he invited them to visit the king of Germany. Dee and his family, and Kelley and his wife spent four years travelling around Europe as guests of various kings and noblemen, and their performances were sensationally successful.
Kelley was a difficult man, given to sudden tantrums and to fits of boredom and depression; but in spite of their ups and downs, he and Dee continued to work together for many years. They finally separated while they were still on their travels in Europe. Kelley achieved some success on his own as an alchemist and scryer, but eventually he died in prison. Dee returned to England in 1589 and lived for another nineteen years, hoping in vain that the spirits would lead him to a crock of gold. Today his reputation among occultists is secure, for he was the first magician on record to make use of spirit communication. He was two hundred years before his time; but in spite of his lack of worldly success, he remains one of the great names in the history of magic.
The tide turned in the 17th and 18th centuries—the age of scientists such as Newton, Huygens, and Harvey—and the seeker after forbidden knowledge once again became respectable, at least in Protestant countries. Sir Isaac Newton—one of the greatest names in science and philosophy—spent as much time in his alchemical laboratory as at his telescope.
The career of Anton Mesmer—which was described in Chapter 2—illustrates the difficulty of distinguishing between the scientist, and the magician. Mesmer regarded himself as a scientist, but his belief in the ‘vital forces’ of the universe classifies him among the mystics and magicians. Mesmer has an important place in the history of magic for another reason: that unlike some of his great predecessors, it is difficult to draw a line between where the scientist ended and the charlatan began. And this, as we shall see, is a problem that continues to plague the history of magic into the second half of the 20th century.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of the man whose name has become synonymous with seduction: Jacques Casanova, the adventurer and confidence trickster who flourished in the second half of the 18th century. Not only was Casanova an accomplished faith-healer (he cured an ailing Venetian senator by means of suggestion), but he was also remarkably successful at fortune-telling by means of cards and other oracles. Indeed, the accuracy of his predictions sometimes alarmed Casanova himself. For instance, he told one girl that she would go to Paris and become the King’s mistress—and that is exactly what happened. Casanova believed that he somehow conjured up real spirits when he was muttering his bogus incantations. What seems more likely is that he possessed the same occult faculty as Paracelsus or Faust to some degree.
Casanova met, and immediately disliked, another charlatan who acquired a reputation as a great magician: the man who called himself the ‘Count of Saint-Germain’. When Saint-Germain arrived in Vienna in the mid-1740s he seemed to be about 30 years old—a man of powerful and dominant personality, with the typical magician’s streak of boastfulness and desire to astonish. In Vienna he was befriended by members of the nobility, and was brought to Paris by the Marshal de Belle-Isle. By 1758 he had become a close friend of Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour.
Part of Saint-Germain’s attraction was his reputation as a man of mystery. No one seemed to have any idea of where or when he was born. But his knowledge of history seemed to be enormous, and occasionally he said things that suggested he knew far more about certain events in the remote past than any mere student possibly could know. In short, he implied that he had actually witnessed them in person. He would learnedly discourse on the priesthood of Egypt in a way that suggested he had studied in ancient Thebes or Heliopolis. Another puzzle was that he was never seen to eat, although it is now known that he had a special diet. He explained that he lived on some elixir of which only he knew the formula. He was a student of alchemy, and claimed to have discovered the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone.
What is certain is that he had learned a great deal about metallurgy and chemistry.
Saint-Germain continues to fascinate students of occultism. Many of them believe he is alive today—possibly in Tibet. The unromantic truth is that he died in his mid-70s in 1784, suffering from rheumatism and morbid depression. Accounts of people who met him indicate that, far from being a man of mystery and an enigma, he struck many intelligent people as a fool, charlatan, boaster, and swindler.
If Saint-Germain seems to have been fundamentally a confidence man, the same cannot be said of his famous contemporary Count Alessandro di Cagliostro. That he was a fraud there can be little doubt, but that he also possessed highly developed occult faculties is fairly certain. His enemies said that Cagliostro’s real name was Giuseppe Balsamo, and that he had been a confidence trickster in his native Italy. As a schoolboy he was exuberant and ungovernable, and ran away from seminary school several times. In his teens he became a wanderer, like many talented and penniless young men, and lived by his wits. But he was also an avid student of alchemy, astrology, and ritual magic, and he soon had a wide, if not very coherent, knowledge of occultism.
At the age of 26 in 1769 Cagliostro fell in love with Lorenza, the beautiful 14-year-old daughter of a coppersmith. They married, and for many years she was his partner in adventure and fraud, her beauty being one of their greatest assets. When Casanova met them in the south of France the year after their marriage, as they were returning from a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella in Spain, they appeared to be people of means, travelling in style and distributing alms to the poor. In Paris, the couple came under the protection of a nobleman, who then seduced Lorenza and tried to make her leave her husband. Cagliostro had her thrown into jail, but later reunited with her and took her to England.
In London he joined the Freemasons. Soon, however, he founded his own masonic order, infusing its ceremonies with occult rituals purportedly based on ancient Egyptian practices that Cagliostro claimed he had discovered in an Egyptian manuscript on a bookstall. Cagliostro was undoubtedly convinced that his Egyptian masonry was the product of divine inspiration. It was certainly the turning-point in his fortunes. From London he journeyed to Venice, Berlin, Nuremberg, and Leipzig. In each city, he visited the masonic lodge, made speeches on his Egyptian rite, and initiated members. His argument seems to have been that the Egyptian rite was as different from, and as superior to, established freemasonry as New Testament Christianity is from Old Testament Judaism. He was feted and admired, and became a rich man.
Cagliostro came to Strasbourg in 1780, and soon became the most talked about man in town. Although he was wealthy, he lived modestly in a room above a tobacco shop. His cures became legendary. He was often able to heal the sick simply by the laying on of hands. On one occasion he successfully delivered a baby after midwives had given up the mother for dead.
It was in Strasbourg that he met the man who was to bring about his downfall: Cardinal de Rohan. He was a churchman who longed for royal favour, but vho unfortunately was disliked by Queen Marie Antoinette. Caglostro deeply impressed Rohan, who spoke of his luminous and hypnotic eyes with almost religious fervor.
The cardinal’s downfall occured in 1785 in the famous Affair of the Diamond Necklace. A prety swindler who called herself the Countess de la Motte Valois became Rohan’s mistress, and persuaded him that the queen vanted him to secretly buy a diamond necklace worth $300,00. In fact, the queen knew nothing of it, and the money raised by the cardinal went straight into the countess’s pocket. When tie jewellers finally approached the queen for a long overdue instament on the money, the whole affair came to light. The countess was tried and publicly flogged. Rohan and Cagliostro were also tried and, although they were acquitted, the scandal damaged both of them irreparably. In addition, the months that Cagliostro spent in jail before trial broke his nerve—and his luck.
Cagliostro went to London after leaving prison. There he accurately predicted the nature and date of the French Revolution and of the fall of the Bastille. Then he travelled around Europe, often hounded by the police. Finally, he made the extraordinary error of going to Rome to propagate his Egyptian freemasonry under the nose of the Pope. He wis arrested and thrown into the papal prison in the Castel Sant’ Aigelo, and was later transferred to the even worse prison of San Leo. Eight years after his arrest in 1787, French soldiers capturec San Leo prison and searched for Cagliostro, intending to treat him as a revolutionary hero. In fact, he had been dead for sevenl years—though exactly when and how he died is still unknown.
Of all the great charlatan-magicians, Cagliostro is the most tragic. One of his enemies said that he possessed ‘a demonic power that paralyzes the will’. Bit in retrospect he seems less a demon than a fallen angel.
In 1801 there appeared in London a work called The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer by Francis Barrett. It was supposed to be ‘a complete system of occult philosophy’. Nowadays it is not highly regarded by students and adepts of the magic arts, because many of the rituals it details are garbled and inaccurate. Nevertheless, it was an important work for it was almost the first attempt at a serious description of magical practices since Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy nearly three centuries earlier. After Agrippa’s time, fear of persecution had driven the magicians underground for two hundred years.
The Age of Reason, as thinkers and writers of mid-18th century Europe called their period, had made magic superfluous—or at least unfashionable. But the tide soon turned again. For the popular imagination, at least, reason was not enough. All over western Europe novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto began to appear, in which high adventure and crimes of passion were mixed with supernatural events. Of course, most readers did not really believe in the supernatural trappings of such stories—but their enormous popularity shows that ghosts, magic, and the paranormal continued to fascinate. At the end of The Magus, Barrett printed an advertisement asking for students to help him found a ‘magic circle’, and an active group was established at Cambridge.
Nine years after publication of The Magus, there was born in Paris a remarkable man who, more than any other, was responsible for the great magical revival that swept across Europe in the 19th century: Alphonse-Louis Constant, better known as Eliphas Lévi. The son of a poor shoemaker, Lévi was a dreamy, sickly, highly intelligent and imaginative child with powerful religious inclinations. At the age of 12 in 1822, he decided he was destined for the Church. He had a craving to belong to some spiritual order, some great organization, that would enable him to devote his life to the truths of the spirit. His teacher at the seminary of Saint Nicholas du Chardonnet was Abbot Frere-Colonna, a remarkable idealist who believed that man was slowly ascending toward God, and that a great age of the Holy Spirit was at hand. The abbot had studied Mesmer’s doctrines, and believed that they were inspired by the Devil. He devoted some time to denouncing them in class, but succeeded only in awakening young Lévi’s interest in such forbidden matters. When the abbot was dismissed through the intrigues of jealous colleagues, Lévi’s disillusion with the Church began.
Lévi still hungered for a faith, however. He became a sub-deacon, and one of his chief tasks was teaching catechism to the young girls. One day a poor woman begged him to prepare her daughter for first communion, and Lévi’s initial feelings of protectiveness developed into a wild infatuation for the girl. Nothing came of it, but the experience convinced him that he was not intended for the priesthood. When he turned away from his vocation, his mother committed suicide.
After fourteen years in a seminary, Lévi found the world a hard place to adjust to. He still wanted to be a believer, and dreamed of Frere-Colonna’s spiritual rebirth of mankind. So, although he began to write for radical newspapers—and spent time in prison on sedition charges as a result—his search for a faith continued. He discovered the writings of Swedenborg, and then the Cabala with its doctrine that man can overcome original sin and rise toward the godhead. Honoré de Balzac’s mystical nove
l Louis Lambert was also a vital influence. Lévi studied that strange fortune-telling deck of cards known as the Tarot, and linked its 22 cards of the Major Arcana with the 22 paths of the Cabala. Lévi came to certain important conclusions about magic. The first was that the will is a far greater power than we realize, and that magic is learning how to use this power. The second was that all space is permeated with a medium that Lévi called astral light, which can take the impression of thoughts and feelings, and is the medium through which thoughts are conveyed in telepathy. Third, he believed deeply in the microcosm-macrocosm doctrine enshrined in Hermes Trismegistus’s inscription, ‘As above, so below.’
Lévi was in his 40s when his Dogma and Ritual of High Magic was published in 1856, and it established a reputation that was consolidated four years later by his History of Magic. In the first book he describes one of the most curious incidents of his life. On a visit to London, he records, he was asked to try to raise the spirit of the ancient Greek magician Apollonius of Tyana. After a month of preparation and fasting, Lévi spent twelve hours in ritual incantations. At last, the shade of Apollonius appeared in a gray shroud, and telepathically answered questions Lévi put to it about the future of two of his acquaintances. It prophesied the death of both. Lévi’s description of the invocation has considerable dramatic quality:
‘I kindled two fires with the requisite prepared substances, and began reading the invocations of the “Ritual” in a voice at first low, but rising by degrees. The smoke spread, the flame caused the objects on which it fell to waver, then it went out, the smoke still floating white and slow about the marble altar. I seemed to feel a quaking of the earth, my ears tingled, my heart beat quickly. I heaped more twigs and perfumes on the chafing dishes, and as the flames again burst up, I beheld distinctly, before the altar, the figure of a man of more than normal size, which dissolved and vanished away. I re-commenced the evocations, and placed myself within a circle which I had drawn previously between the tripod and the altar. Thereupon the mirror which was behind the altar seemed to brighten in its depth, and a wan form was outlined therein, which increased and seemed to approach by degrees. Three times, and with closed eyes, I invoked Apollonius. When I again looked forth there was a man in front of me, wrapped from head to foot in a species of shroud, which seemed more gray than white. He was lean, melancholy, and beardless, and did not altogether correspond to my preconceived notion of Apollonius. I experienced an abnormally cold sensation, and when I endeavoured to question the phantom I could not articulate a syllable. I therefore placed my hand upon the sign of the pentagram, and pointed the sword at the figure, commanding it mentally to obey and not alarm me, in virtue of the said sign. The form thereupon became vague, and suddenly disappeared. I directed it to return, and presently felt, as it were, a breath close by me; something touched my hand which was holding the sword, and the arm became immediately benumbed as far as the elbow. I divined that the sword displeased the spirit, and I therefore placed it point downward, close by me, within the circle. The human figure reappeared immediately, but I experienced such an intense weakness in all my limbs, and a swooning sensation came so quickly over me, that I made two steps to sit down, whereupon I fell into profound lethargy, accompanied by dreams, of which I had only a confused recollection when I came to myself. For several subsequent days, the arm remained benumbed and painful.’