Raising Hell: A Concise History of the Black Arts and Those Who Dared to Practice Them

by Robert Masello

  But for all his intellectual gifts and growing reputation as astronomer, Dee hungered after knowledge that he could not discover—the secret of the philosophers’ stone, for instance—and talents he could not acquire, most notably second sight. He had become terribly interested in crystallomancy and spent hour after hour gazing into a convex mirror—his “magic glass"—that he believed had been bestowed upon him by the angel Uriel. But only once did he catch a fleeting glimpse of something, barely discernible, in the depths of the glass; he became convinced that if he was ever to make any headway in the unseen world, he would need an assistant—someone with the powers he lacked, whose visions, and conversations with the angels, he could record, analyze, and interpret.

  Enter Edward Kelley. Dee had already gone through a couple of assistants, of insufficient ability, before Kelley got wind of the opening and introduced himself. Up until that time, Kelley, a swarthy young Irishman, had not had the most illustrious career; at one time an apothecary’s apprentice, he had turned his hand instead to forging and counterfeiting. Convicted for those crimes, he’d had his ears cut off. When he presented himself to Dee in 1582, it was as a scryer, someone who could see and hear the denizens of the otherworld. Dee, wanting to make sure this new applicant understood exactly what kind of service he was entering into, explained that he did not consider himself a magician—the term carried some evil connotations and, depending on how the civil authorities were disposed at any particular time, grim penalties—and that before he made any attempts at crystal gazing, or whatever, he always asked for divine assistance. Kelley put Dee’s mind to rest on that score, dropping to his knees and praying for the next full hour, before looking into the magic glass and describing what he saw.

  Dee couldn’t have been more excited.

  What Kelley claimed to see there was a childlike angel, imprisoned in the glass, struggling but unable to make its voice heard. From the description Kelley gave, Dee identified the figure as Uriel. Dee, who was fifty-five years old at the time and beginning to despair of ever making his big breakthrough, welcomed Kelley not only into his employment but into his home, too. Dee’s much younger wife (whom he had married after his first wife died of the plague) was none too happy about the new domestic arrangement, but for the sake of her husband’s career, she was prepared to go along. Later, she’d come to regret it.

  Kelley, who wore a black cap to conceal his missing ears, spent the next several years communicating with angels and spirit guides for Dee and the many notable patrons they were able to acquire. Among the spirits Kelley spoke for was “a Spiritual Creature,” as Dee described her, “like a pretty girl of seven or nine years of age,” by the name of Madimi. (Dee named one of his eight children after her.) While Kelley relayed Dee’s questions and related Madimi’s answers, Dee made careful transcripts of the conversations. But despite her great willingness to chat, Madimi’s pronouncements weren’t all that revealing.

  On one such occasion, Dee welcomed the spirit by saying, “Mistress Madimi, you are welcome in God for good, as I hope; what is the cause of your coming now?” To which she replied, “To see how you do.” Dee went on: “I know you can see me often, and I see you only by faith and imagination.” The spirit pointed at Kelley: “That sight is perfecter than his. . . .”

  Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley raising a dead person from the grave in an English cemetery. Mathieu Giraldo, Histoire curieuse et pittoresque des sorciers (Paris, 1846).**

  After a few more questions designed to uncover the future for one of their clients, Count Albert Laski, a pretender to the Polish crown, and a few more cryptic replies, Kelley seemed to lose patience and went straight to the heart of what mattered to him most: “Will you, Madimi, lend me a hundred pounds for a fortnight?” And, like anyone else unexpectedly hit up for a loan, Madimi gave him the brush-off. “I have swept all my money out of doors,” she said. Dee quickly jumped in to smooth things over: “As for money we shall have that which is necessary when God seeth time.”

  Madimi, in one of the responses so typical of otherworldly entities, concluded the conversation by instructing them to “Hear what I say. God is the unity of all things. Love is the unity of every Congregation (I mean true and perfect love). The world was made in the love of the Father.” And so on and so forth.

  Kelley then decided to try necromancy. In the graveyard of Walton Le Dale in Lancashire, he went with his assistant, a fellow named Waring, to elicit information from a freshly buried corpse. But his luck wasn’t much better. There, he drew a magic circle and inscribed its border with the names of several helpful angels—Raphael, Rael, Miraton, Tarmiel, and Rex. Standing inside the sacred space and reading by torchlight from a book of incantations, Kelley was purportedly successful in coaxing the corpse, still in its burial cloth, to rise from the grave and speak to him, though no record exists of what they talked about.

  Interestingly, there was one subject on which the spirit Madimi’s instructions were quite clear and explicit. According to Kelley, he was consulting her one day when she advised him that he and the good doctor should “share all things in common, including their wives.” Jane Dee had seen this one coming and flew into a rage. Mrs. Kelley’s reaction has gone unrecorded, but it’s safe to say she wasn’t too pleased about it either.

  Encountering such strong opposition, Kelley quit his post. And even though Dee himself had been no less appalled by the immoral instruction, he soon found himself missing the best scryer he’d ever had. Later, when Kelley came back, once again consulted the magic glass, and this time said that Uriel, too, was advocating the wife-swapping scheme, Dee gave in: “There is no other remedy,” Dee wrote, “but as hath been said of our cross-matching, so it must needs be done.” According to Dee’s diary entry on Sunday, May 3, 1587, the two husbands and their wives “covenanted with God, and subscribed the same for indissoluble and inviolable unities, charity, and friendship keeping, between us four, and all things between us to be common, as God by sundry means willed us to do.”

  The new peace didn’t last long. The wives fought bitterly, the husbands ran short of cash, and Dee decided the partnership wasn’t working, after all. Kelley packed up his old kit bag, filled with magic powders and trinkets, and traveled through Bohemia and Germany, telling fortunes and selling his wares. He was arrested twice as a heretic; the second time, afraid that he might actually wind up with a sentence of death, he tried to climb over the dungeon wall, lost his grip, and fell. He broke both legs and two of his ribs, and in February 1593, he died of his injuries.

  As for Dee, he set up shop in his ancestral home in Mortlake, where gradually he slipped into penury. A couple of new scryers he employed proved to be incompetent, and his pursuit of the philosophers’ stone was fruitless. He wrote voluminously, but with little effect or public acclaim. The queen came to his rescue with a small appointment, but when she died and was replaced by James I, no friend to men with a reputation for sorcery, Dee knew that he’d run out of luck. A lonely and impoverished old sorcerer (his second wife, too, had died), he passed away at his home in 1608, surrounded by arcane texts and the strange instruments of his trade.

  THE LODGE OF THE MYSTERIES

  On October 29, 1768, Johann Georg Schropfer opened a small café in the town of Leipzig. But Schropfer’s café offered something not seen on the menu in most such establishments—initiation into the mysteries of magic and the occult. Schropfer, who joined Cagliostro as one of the most renowned sorcerers of his day, served up a magic punch made from his own secret recipe, along with lessons in the summoning of the dead, for anyone brave enough to undertake them.

  Unlike many other necromancers, however, Schropfer disdained the use of corpses. He was something of a purist in that regard. When Schropfer went about conjuring the dead, he began by fasting and praying for three days. Then, when he was ready, he took off his shoes, dropped to his knees (while ordering anyone else present to do the same), and placed two fingers on the Gospel of Matthew. The room, which he had s
pecifically outfitted for these rituals, had a black carpet and a black altar, on top of which he placed two candles and a skull.

  After lighting the incense, he drew a magic circle around the altar, warned everyone to stay inside its boundaries, and began the invocations. The first spirits he conjured were always good and benevolent ones; Schropfer said he needed them for their help and for the protection they could provide against the evil spirits to follow. If all went as planned, the evil ones did indeed come next, their entry marked by the dousing of all the lights, a rumbling in the floor and walls of the room, and noises of violence and rage. The spirits appeared, in the smoke from the incense, and grudgingly snarled out answers to the questions the necromancer put to them, before vanishing again into the mist and shadow. One more fitful rattling of the walls, and peace would return to the house.

  But for all his success and generally polite demeanor, one day Schropfer apparently said something unflattering about Prince Charles of Saxony, and word of it got back to him. The prince dispatched one of his officers to teach the upstart magician a lesson. The officer was doing just that, whipping and pummeling him, when Schropfer broke loose for a moment, threw himself on his knees in the corner, and called up his infernal allies. They came to his aid so quickly that the officer had to run for his life.

  But then so did Schropfer. Fearing the prince would send soldiers after him again, he fled to Dresden, where he passed himself off as a French army colonel. But the masquerade didn’t last long—soon his new hometown knew that they had the celebrated magician, who had done such wonders in Leipzig, living among them. And Prince Charles began to hear stories of the magician’s latest, and most miraculous, feats.

  Finally, the prince couldn’t stand it anymore; he had to see these marvels for himself. He issued a public apology to Schropfer and invited him to return—which Schropfer did. But no matter how many tricks and conjurations the magician performed for him, Charles was really interested in seeing only one thing—an evocation of the dead.

  He even had a perfect candidate in mind—his late uncle, the chevalier of Saxony. For one thing, the chevalier had died only recently—which, in theory, made raising his spirit somewhat easier—and for another, he’d bequeathed to his nephew the palace in Dresden where he’d died. Somewhere in this palace, rumor had it, vast treasures were hidden away. Charles hoped that his uncle’s ghost might show him where they were.

  Schropfer agreed to do it, but the plan had to proceed in secrecy; the elector of Saxony, under whose jurisdiction the Dresden palace fell, was an ardent opponent of magic. On the appointed night, the prince and seventeen of his most trusted friends stole into the gallery of the palace, locked all the doors and windows, and prepared to witness the invocation of the spirit. Schropfer urged them all to drink a glass of his punch first, to fortify themselves against the horrors to come, and most of them did. But one, who later provided the eyewitness account of what happened that night, wanted to be absolutely sure his senses were unclouded: “I am come here to be present at raising an apparition. Either I will see all or nothing. My resolution is taken, and no inducement can make me allow anything to pass my lips.”

  Schropfer, unperturbed by this refusal, retired to a corner of the room, where he began the ceremony. First, he recited a lengthy prayer, calling upon the Holy Trinity and petitioning the Lord to protect him against the demons he would soon be raising. His shoulders heaved with emotion, his body twisted as if in agony. All of a sudden, there was a loud clattering noise outside the window, and the gallery shook as if struck by an earthquake. Then there came a squeaking sound, like wet fingers sliding on glass. Though the onlookers quailed, Schropfer seemed pleased, claiming that these were the signs that the guardian spirits had entered the room.

  But as expected, the good spirits were quickly followed by their evil brethren, and the noise they made was an infernal howling. While the prince and his friends flattened themselves against the walls in terror, Schropfer held up a crucifix and demanded the spirits’ obedience. The doors to the gallery flew open, and according to the account left by the spectator who’d refused the punch (and which was later recorded in N. W. Wraxall’s Memoirs of the Courts of Berlin, Dresden, Warsaw, and Vienna in the Years 1777, 1778, and 1779): "something that resembled a black ball or globe rolled into the room. It was invested with smoke or cloud, in the midst of which appeared to be a human face, like the Countenance of the Chevalier de Saxe. . . . From this form issued a loud and angry voice, which exclaimed in German, ‘Charles, what wouldst thou with me? Why dost thou disturb me?’ “

  Charles, who’d been waiting for this moment, desperate to ask his dear departed uncle if there was indeed a treasure hidden in his palace, now found himself speechless with terror. So were all his friends. While the black globe gasped and groaned and rolled back and forth the length of the gallery, the prince and his friends cringed and cowered. They begged the Lord’s forgiveness and pleaded with Schropfer to dismiss the spirit forthwith.

  Schropfer, apparently, was only too willing. But even his best incantations were proving futile; he prayed, he exorcised, he waved his crucifix and called upon the power of Christ. It was only after a full hour had passed (or so the witnesses claimed) that the smoky black phantom rolled back out the door.

  The necromancer, the prince, his cohorts, all nearly fainted with relief—when suddenly the door burst open again, and the phantom appeared once more! Schropfer rallied, and barely managed to exorcise it again—this time, it seemed, for good. When all had gathered their wits, they silently disbanded, afraid to speak of it even among themselves. According to Wraxall’s account, the witnesses long continued to “dread and deprecate a renewal of the images . . . and a lady earnestly besought of me, not to press her husband on a subject, of which he could never think or converse without passing a sleepless night.”

  Even the magician himself may have been haunted by the awful events of that night. Schropfer, afraid that the elector of Saxony would punish him for practicing necromancy, returned to Leipzig, where he continued to perform his magical feats. But he became increasingly depressed and troubled, burdened by his own reputation and by the hellish sights he had conjured up in the course of his career.

  In the summer of 1774, while promising to show them something more marvelous than they had ever seen, Schropfer led three gentlemen beyond the city gates of Leipzig and into the wood of Rosendaal. It was a warm night, about three or four in the morning. He stopped in a quiet grove and told his companions to wait on one side of the clearing while he made the necessary invocations on the other. They did so, until they heard a pistol shot a few minutes later. They ran to the other side of the grove and found Schropfer lying there, fatally wounded by his own hand. Though none could ever say for sure, it was generally acknowledged that the demons, with whom he’d had so many encounters, had finally driven him to madness and, ultimately, suicide.

  THE MONKS OF MEDMENHAM

  Though they liked to call themselves monks, they were anything but. They were, in fact, a dozen dissolute English gentlemen who formed one of the most notorious “Hell-Fire Clubs” of the eighteenth century.

  These clubs, devoted to debauchery and sometimes Satanism, had sprung up in such profusion that by 1721 an official proclamation was made, banning “certain scandalous Clubs or Societies of young persons who meet together, and in the most impious and blasphemous manner insult the most sacred principles of our Holy Religion, and morals of one another.” Gathering in backstreet taverns or other out-of-the-way spots, these Hell-Fire Clubs indulged in everything from orgies to Satanic rites and commonly drew their members from the gentry and aristocracy of the country.

  Indeed, the founder of the Monks of Medmenham was Sir Francis Dashwood, who, at the age of sixteen, inherited vast estates and great wealth. On his obligatory grand tour of the European continent, he was reputedly trained by a master Cabbalist in Venice, and on his return to England he brought back with him a collection of magical and pornograph
ic texts and engravings. He squandered even more money—huge sums of it—turning his ancestral manse into a palace unrivaled in its luxury and extravagance.

  But by 1752, when all of that had palled, he turned his eye on the abandoned Medmenham Abbey, situated nearby on a neighbor’s property.

  After getting to know the landlord of the abbey, a young man named Francis Duffield, Dashwood negotiated a long-term lease and immediately began an expensive but secret process of renovation. His aim was to convert the holy ruins into a private retreat for the most depraved and sacrilegious activities, and to that end he had the chapel walls painted with indecent murals, the upstairs “cells” outfitted as boudoirs, the cellars filled with fine wines and the library with forbidden, lubricious books. And then he went about enlisting his fellow members.

  In emulation of Christ’s twelve disciples, he chose twelve men to join him as members of the Superior Order, and each one was rebaptized with the name of a disciple. (Conveniently, this number, plus Dashwood himself, also made up a witch’s coven.) Among the original “monks,” or “friars” as they also sometimes called themselves, were several powerful and influential men of their time, including the earl of Sandwich, the marquis of Bute, Charles Churchill, John Wilkes, George Bubb Dodington, and Thomas Potter, son of the archbishop of Canterbury.