For his initiation into the order, the novice was dressed in a white linen robe, and at the tolling of the bell, he was led to the chapel and made to knock on the closed wooden door. When it opened, to the sound of low, solemn music, the initiate walked to the communion rail. There, while the other members knelt around the altar, he was asked to declare his most profoundly held principles (or, to be more accurate, his lack of them) and to abjure the faith by mocking its language and intent. If he did this with sufficient gusto and wit, he was admitted into the order by participating in further sacrilegious rites, followed by a banquet in his honor.
At this feast, as described by Charles Johnstone in his contemporary account Chrysal, "nothing that the most refined luxury, the most lascivious imagination could suggest to kindle loose desire, and provoke and gratify appetite, was wanting, both the superiors and the inferiours [of whom there were also twelve] vying with each other in loose songs and dissertations of such gross lewdness, and daring impiety, as despair may be supposed to dictate to the damn’d.”
But by some accounts, this wanton conduct was nothing compared to the more unholy aims of the group; its motto, inscribed above a doorway, was Fay ce que voudras ("Do what you will"). In an aspidal sanctuary of the chapel, the eucharist of Hell was celebrated, and the chapel itself was formally dedicated one night to Satan. What exactly went on in this inner sanctum of the abbey was never known for sure; no one but members of the order were ever allowed inside, and they were all bound to secrecy, and for good reason: if their vile rituals had become common knowledge, their lives and careers would have been ruined.
As it is, their professional lives were what brought the order down in the end. Though the members were united in their decadence, many of them rose to prominence in the government—Bute became prime minister, Bubb Dodington joined the cabinet, Dashwood himself became chancellor of the exchequer—and they often came to sit on opposite sides of the fence: in the House of Lords, Lord Sandwich at one point impeached John Wilkes for blasphemy.
At their last meeting, in the early summer of 1762, only half a dozen of the members convened. With rumors circulating about the evil practices of the Monks of Medmenham, and so much now at stake, it was decided to end the order. The diabolical and pornographic accoutrements of the abbey were spirited away, and the abbey was shuttered once more. By the time Horace Walpole came to see it in 1763, he found it to be “very ruinous and bad.” Sold by Francis Duffield in 1777, its later caretakers charged a small admission price to picnickers and sightseers who came to see the cloisters and chapel where the monks had run riot and Satan had been invoked.
The Devil forces a pact upon those who have conjured him up. Guaccius, Compendium Maleficarum.**
ELIPHAS LÉVI
Although he was better known as a theoretician than an actual maker of magic, Eliphas Lévi did indeed conjure up one important soul and left a full record of the experience in one of his many books, Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual.
In 1854, Lévi, a large man with a great forked beard, and much noted for his mastery of magic, was approached in London by a young woman, an adept who was dressed all in black. Claiming to be a friend of Sir Bulwer Lytton (the English author who was himself a student of the occult), she asked Lévi if he could summon the spirit of Apollonius of Tyana, a pagan philosopher, and ask of it two questions. Lévi, a man who could no more resist a young woman than he could a lavish dinner, decided to abandon his books and take on the assignment; though there’s no record of it, the impoverished French magician might also have been tempted by a tidy commission.
Satan rebaptizing young sorcerers. From R. P. Guaccius’ Compendium Maleficarum, Milan, 1626.*
In any event, to prepare for the big night, Lévi put aside his usual appetities and practiced fasting and abstinence for twenty-one days. (He had arrived at twenty-one by multiplying 3 and 7, two numbers with powerful occult reputations.) What food he ate was strictly vegetarian, and for the last seven days before the ceremony he claims to have eaten nothing at all. All the while, he meditated deeply upon the life and writings of the ancient philosopher Apollonius, even going so far as to hold imaginary chats with him, in order to create a strong mental bond between the two of them.
Then, on July 24, Lévi outfitted himself in a white robe (to signify the purity of his aims) and put a vervain wreath, entwined with gold, around his brow (vervain purportedly kept demons at bay); with a brand-new sword in one hand and a manuscript of the ritual in the other, he was ready at last to enter, alone, the magical “cabinet” which the mysterious woman had obligingly prepared for the ceremony.
This cabinet consisted of a single room, high in a turret; four concave mirrors were on the walls, a new white lambskin on the floor. The altar was made of white marble, and carved in its top was a pentagram; a copper chafing dish, filled with charred alder and laurel wood, was placed atop the altar, and another chafing dish was placed on a tripod to one side. Around it all was a magic circle, formed from a chain of magnetized iron, to ward off any hostile spirits.
With some trepidation, Lévi lit the two chafing dishes, in order to get a pall of smoke going, which the spirit of Apollonius could use to give itself some definition. For hours he recited, in low, sonorous tones, the necessary invocations to the dead: “In unity the demons chant the praises of God,” he intoned, “they lose their malice and fury . . . Cerberus opens his triple jaw, and fire chants the praises of God with the three tongues of the lightning . . . the soul revisits the tombs, the magical lamps are lighted.”
Gradually, as the smoke swirled in the air around him, Lévi thought he could discern a shape. He tossed more twigs into the chafing dishes and recited his prayers more loudly. In the mirror opposite, he saw a vague figure, approaching him as if from a great distance. He closed his eyes and summoned the spirit, three times, to appear before him. When he opened his eyes again, “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.”
Terrified at his own success, Lévi found himself almost unable to speak; he felt chilled to the bone and slapped one hand down on the pentagram to reassure himself. Then, making his first mistake, he tried to order the ghost to obey him by pointing the sword at it. The ghost, not pleased, promptly disappeared.
Lévi ordered it to come back, but instead he felt something touch the arm holding the sword; instantly, the arm went numb, from the elbow to the hand, and the point of the sword drifted downward. The figure then reappeared, and though it never spoke, answers to the two questions Lévi had planned to ask came to his mind. One answer was “death,” the other was “dead.” Weakened with fear, no doubt intensified by his weeks of fasting, Lévi apparently fell to the floor in a faint.
For days afterward, the arm remained sore. “Something of another world had passed into me,” Lévi wrote, “I was no longer either sad or cheerful, but I felt a singular attraction towards death, unaccompanied, however, by any suicidal tendency.” On two subsequent occasions, he claimed to have raised the spirit again, each time learning a great secret of the Cabbala. But he could never be certain exactly how, or why, the operation worked: “I do not explain the physical laws by which I saw and touched; I affirm solely that I did see and that I did touch, that I saw clearly and distinctly, apart from dreaming, and this is sufficient to establish the real efficacy of magical ceremonies.” He did add one caveat: “I commend the greatest caution to those who propose devoting themselves to similar experiences; their result is intense exhaustion, and frequently a shock sufficient to occasion illness.”
LA VOISIN
Although her married name was actually Catherine Monvoisin, to the nobles of the French court of Louis XIV, who flocked to her for poisons, love philters, and necromantic rites, she was simply known as La Voisin—the purveyor of magic and skilled practitioner of the Black Mass.
Her husband was an unsuccessful jeweler, and La Voisin first turned
her hand to magic as a means of making ends meet. She began with the usual parlor tricks, reading palms and faces, telling fortunes with coffee grounds, and gazing into crystal balls. When that went well, she broadened her horizons, moving on to such feats as the raising of specters and invocation of demons. In her Paris home, she kept a small, secret chapel, its walls hung with black drapes; the altar was covered with black cloth and a mattress, on top of which rested thick black candles. These candles were made from human fat, which La Voisin procured with the help of two hangmen. They brought her the bodies of the executed felons, and whatever she didn’t need of them was burned in the chapel furnace.
But her true calling became the manufacture of love potions and, even more pointedly, poisons. Men and women of rank, caught up in the eternal intrigues of the French court, came to her for elixirs, powders, and spells; what they wanted, in nearly every case, was to better their position or social standing, and if that meant getting someone to fall in love with them, fine; if it meant killing someone who stood in their way, that was fine, too. If they needed a baby to be born in secret, La Voisin would act as midwife; if they wanted an abortion, she could perform the operation. She was sorcerer and physician, apothecary and poisoner, and she grew quite rich as a result.
But her most loyal customer was the marquise de Montespan, a beautiful young woman who had come to the court as a lady-in-waiting to the queen. It wasn’t long before the marquise had caught the roving eye of the king, and not long after that, in 1667, she showed up on La Voisin’s doorstep, looking for a way to replace both the queen and the duchesse de La Vallière, the king’s current mistress, in the royal affections.
To get the job done. La Voisin brought in a priest, Father Mariette, who said a special Mass designed to get the marquise what she wanted; he prayed not only that the queen would be barren but that the king would lose all interest in the duchesse and fall madly in love with the marquise instead—to the point of asking her, in the end, to become his new queen. The ritual was repeated twice, the last time in a church where the hearts of two doves (a bird of amatory reputation, sacred to Venus and to Christ) were consecrated on the altar in the names of the king and the marquise. Whether it was due to the ceremony or not, things did begin to go her way, for by July of that year the marquise de Montespan had become the king’s most prized mistress.
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 dire
ction, 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.”
Raising Hell: A Concise History of the Black Arts and Those Who Dared to Practice Them Page 9