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

by Robert Masello

  But why all this trouble? Because, according to the Cabbala, the soul of the Messiah is not about to budge until all these other souls have gone down to earth, then come back up again, reentering the bosom of the Infinite. When all souls are present and accounted for, then the soul of the Messiah will descend itself, and the great Jubilee will begin. At that point, all sin, temptation, and suffering will have been eradicated; life will become an unending Sabbath, a great feast, with all souls incorporated into the one and only Highest Soul. Even Satan will be returned to the angelic nature he once possessed. With an end result like this, all the trouble and delay seem more than worthwhile.

  DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH

  Although most mystical and religious orders were content to teach and to dwell upon questions of faith, there was one, known as the Order of Knights Templar, that took upon itself a militaristic role.

  The order was founded in 1119, and its mission was to protect from Arab attack the legions of Christians who made pilgrimages to the Holy Land. The Templars’ first headquarters was a part of the palace belonging to Baldwin I, king of Jerusalem, and was situated next to the former mosque of al-Aksa, thought by some to be the original site of the Temple of Solomon; it was from this that the knights took the name Templars.

  The first recruits were an interesting assortment; some were men with a sense of divine mission, devoted to the promulgation of the faith and defending its adherents, but many others seemed to come to the order after lives of war and rapine. In fact, the order actively sought out and embraced any knight or soldier who had been excommunicated from the church; this was their chance to use their fighting skills, the one area in which they were truly proficient, to hack their way back to Heaven.

  The order also proved to be fantastically successful builders, merchants, and bankers: from the mighty fortresses they built, most notably their headquarters on Cyprus, they gradually amassed great wealth and extraordinary power—this despite the fact that members of the order were required to take vows of poverty and lead lives of abstemiousness and celibacy. If a member happened to have already been married, and was bound by that lifelong vow, he wore a brown or black robe with the order’s insignia, a red cross, on it; unmarried members wore white robes emblazoned in the same way.

  For generations, the order grew and prospered, until its very size and might began to nettle the pope and other more temporal rulers. Rumors had begun to circulate that the order had turned away from its Christian purposes and that it had in fact embraced the dark side. Initiates, it was said, were made to spit and trample upon the cross while crying out three times that they renounced Jesus; they were stripped naked by the other knights and forced to submit to unnatural acts. And in the secrecy of their fortified castles and temples, the knights were said to worship a pagan god known as Baphomet, a creature with the head and the hooves of a goat, a pentagram on its forehead, and a green belly covered with fishlike scales.

  In the early years of the fourteenth century, Philippe IV, king of France, saw in these terrible stories a great opportunity. In dire financial straits and running out of options—he had already expelled the Jews and the Lombard bankers from his kingdom after stealing all their property; he had debased the national coinage—he decided it was time to make a raid on the Templars’ treasury. First, he relayed to Pope Clement V all the reports he’d heard of the knights’ blasphemies, and then, after receiving papal permission to take steps against the order, he organized his plot.

  In Paris, the knights inhabited a massive castle, which was governed, as were all the order’s castles and manors, by the grand master, Jacques de Molay. The king, on October 13, 1307, arranged for an extravagant evening of entertainment, and he invited de Molay and all of his knights to attend. When they arrived, they were summarily arrested, and then, over the following years, interrogated and tortured until they confessed to the most heinous crimes. Those who did so were burned at the stake; fifty-four who tried to take back their confessions were taken to a windmill in St.-Antoine and burned, all the same. Condemned as heretics, their bones could not be buried in consecrated ground.

  Even Jacques de Molay, while he indignantly denied all charges of immoral conduct with the other Templars, finally confessed to having renounced Christ and spitting on the cross; he was sentenced to life imprisonment. But on March 14, 1314, when it came time for him to publicly admit to his crimes from a scaffold erected in front of Notre Dame Cathedral, de Molay flew into a sudden rage, recanted his entire confession, and declared that he was innocent of all the charges brought against him. That got him a new sentence, on the spot; he was tied to a stake on a little island in the Seine, and from the flames rising around him he challenged the king and pope to appear with him before the heavenly bar. (When both of them died within the next couple of years, many people assumed that they had been called to account.)

  Bouc de la goétie Baphomet, the goat incarnation of the Devil. After Eliphas Lévi, from a pen drawing in a French occult manuscript La Magie Noire (Black Magic), nineteenth century.*

  The persecution of the Templars, directed by papal decree, continued, spreading throughout Christendom; the knights were rounded up in city after city, tortured, and executed. And their vast riches were appropriated by the kings and clergy. But according to some legends, the order never completely disappeared; its members merely went underground, as it were, forming an ultrasecret society whose goal it was to destroy the papacy and the ruling houses of Europe. Later societies, such as the Illuminati (a German order founded in 1776) and the Freemasons, were said to be its descendants.

  THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSY CROSS

  Although the earliest documentation dates from 1614, this mysterious brotherhood, which claimed to be in possession of the elixir of life (among other great secrets of the universe), traced its own origins to the fourteenth century and a wandering magus (almost certainly fictitious) named Christian Rosencreutz.

  Rosencreutz—whose last name translated as “rosy cross"—followed in the footsteps of many great seekers and magicians before him, from Apollonius of Tyana to Cyprian, who traveled from the West to the East, in the hope of uncovering occult wisdom and teachings. According to the lore, Rosencreutz began his studies at the age of five, in a convent school in Germany, where he learned the traditional humanities. But at fifteen, his education took a decided turn when he embarked, under the wing of a monk, on a trip to the Holy Land.

  No sooner had they arrived in Cyprus than the monk took ill and died. But the young Rosencreutz, thirsty for knowledge he could not find in his own homeland, set out alone for Arabia, where he was told some great adepts lived. When he finally found them, they welcomed him with open arms, saying his coming had been foretold. They taught him all that they knew of the occult sciences (he picked up the Arabic language on his own), and three years later they sent him on to Egypt, where the master magicians of Fez showed him how to invoke the elemental spirits.

  But that was where his good fortune ended. Rosencreutz’s next stop was Spain, where the adepts offered him no respect, or help, whatever. In fact, the Spanish magicians claimed that they’d learned the secrets of the Black Arts from the master himself—Satan—who’d taught them the finer points of necromancy in a lecture hall at the University of Salamanca. Rosencreutz moved on to other countries, but getting no better reception there, he returned to his native Germany, where he spent the next five years in solitude, writing down the secrets he had learned on his travels.

  When that was done, he slowly and methodically began to gather around him the assistants and pupils who would form the nucleus of what came to be called the Rosicrucian fraternity. They created a magical language which they spoke only among themselves, an equally cryptic written language designed for magical incantations, and a dictionary containing all the occult wisdom they’d accumulated to date. They also started to put their knowledge into practice, using it, or so they claimed, to heal the sick. And they built their House of the Holy Ghost, a headquar
ters that no one has ever found, to serve as the repository of all their records and wisdom; Robert Fludd, an English Rosicrucian, asserted that this sanctuary was located at the world’s end, surrounded by banks of clouds, where the brothers breathed only the purified air of true wisdom.

  When Rosencreutz died, he was buried in a secret vault, the walls of which were inscribed with magical figures. When all the other original Rosicrucians had died out, the location of the vault was lost. But 120 years later, when one of the brotherhood’s lodges was being rebuilt, the door to the tomb was found, hidden behind a bronze tablet, and reopened. Inside the seven-sided vault, they found not only the perfectly preserved body of their founder but various remarkable things—magical mirrors, small bells, the Vocabularium of Paracelsus—buried along with it. After debating among themselves, the brothers decided the time had come to make their order, and its miraculous discoveries, available to other worthy initiates in a more public fashion than ever before.

  Thus, we have The Fama of the Fraternity of the Meritorious Order of the Rosy Cross Addressed to the Learned in General and the Governors of Europe. It was a kind of open letter, published in 1614 in the town of Cassel, Germany, and it called for a reformation in science equivalent to that which had already occurred in religion. It was time, the pamphlet insisted, that men of science stopped relying on the authorities handed down from antiquity and looked instead to a new synthesis, based on moral renewal and the mysteries of the Grand Orient, which the children of light, the illuminated ones, the Rosicrucians, had obtained. Their symbol became a rose crucified on a cross.

  As might have been expected, the pamphlet created quite a stir: some were anxious to know what this mysterious order had to offer, others (who already considered themselves adepts in magical practice) were offended at the suggestion that their own skills were somehow lacking. By the following year, The Fama had gone into three more printings, and two additional editions in Dutch. Capitalizing on their initial success, the brotherhood put out another pamphlet, Confession of the Rosicrucian Fraternity, which advertised for new members; selected applicants, it said, would be gradually initiated into the mysteries, and into the ranks, of the secret brotherhood. But there was nowhere to apply. All you could do was publicly state your interest and desire, perhaps by printing an ad or pamphlet of your own, and wait to be tapped for membership. It got to be a very frustrating process.

  But the rewards were so tantalizing that scholars, magicians, and philosophers continued to line up. After all, the Rosicrucians professed to know the secret of making gold (for which they professed, however, no great zeal) and for the eternal renewal of life (for which they did). Their members were required to go about their business—in large measure, the healing of the sick—dressed in no special garments, but wearing the clothing of the local population; for their medical skills, they were forbidden to accept any payment. And at all times they were to maintain absolute anonymity, never announcing themselves as members of the secret fraternity. (As a result, it’s difficult to know for sure who was ever actually a member, but among others the signs point toward Roger Bacon, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Descartes, Thomas Vaughan, and Francis Bacon.)

  In Dr. Cohausen’s Hermippus Redivivus: or The Sage’s Triumph over Old Age and Death, translated from German into English by John Campbell in 1744, the case for keeping this low profile was succinctly made:

  . . . the adepts are obliged to conceal themselves for the sake of safety, and . . . having power not only of prolonging their lives, but also of renovating their bodies, they take care to use it with the utmost discretion, and instead of making a display of this prerogative, they manage it with the highest secrecy . . . the true cause of the world’s being so much in doubt about this matter. Hence it comes to pass, that though an adept is possessed of greater wealth than is contained in the mines of Peru, yet he always lives in so moderate a manner, as to avoid all suspicion, and so as never to be discovered, unless by some unforeseen accident.

  THE FREEMASONS

  A mystical order, which for many years became a sort of haven for astrologers, alchemists, and the like, the Freemasons have had a long and ultimately mysterious history. Though scattered records exist, and legends abound, its origins seem to lie in the Middle Ages, in the freemasons—the itinerant stoneworkers—who raised the great cathedrals and other edifices of western Europe. As each huge project was built, it attracted a cadre of skilled builders, the architects of their day, who spoke the language of stone and structure, who formed close bonds with each other over the many years—and sometimes lifetimes—that it took to complete each building.

  But what began as an operative guild, an association of men trained in the arts and science of building, over time became a more speculative order, one that embraced all religious faiths in a quest for universal brotherhood. The instruments of the stone-worker’s trade—gauges and tool aprons, compasses and chisels—became symbols of more arcane practices and wisdom. A complex mythology evolved, claiming that the Masons had existed for millennia, that members of their order had been instrumental in the erection of everything from the Pyramid of Cheops (an assertion strongly promoted by Count Cagliostro) to the Temple of Solomon in Israel. “If history be no ancient fable,” went an English poem published in 1723, “Free Masons came from Tower of Babel.”

  The Freemasons flourished in the British Isles, in particular, where the Grand Lodge, which was founded in London in 1717, served as the society’s powerful, central hub. It was here that the fundamental tenets of the society were drawn together, codified, and promulgated to other lodges far and wide. New applicants underwent an elaborate initiation ceremony, which gained them the status of Apprentice; later, they would move on to Fellow Craft, before eventually graduating to Master Mason. Often, in France and Germany, for instance, these ceremonies took on a decidedly occult cast.

  In an eighteenth-century French rite, the initiate was held aloft, then slowly lowered to the floor, by several members; this was to symbolize his being lowered into his grave. Then, while he lay on the floor, a bloody cloth was thrown over his face; the members stood around him, swords pointing at his body. Finally, the grand master of the lodge would clasp the new apprentice by the hand, using the Mason’s grip, and raise him up from the floor. The Masonic grip, a handshake with the thumb cocked, was a way for Masons everywhere to recognize each other without having to say a word.

  As a Mason progressed through the different levels of the lodge, he was allowed to share more and more of the secret knowledge and powers that the order was reputed to possess. According to “The Muses Threnodie,” published in Edinburgh in 1638, “We have the Mason Word and second sight, Things for to come we can fortell aright.” The lodges grew and prospered, making great inroads into colonial America, too; Benjamin Franklin, an initiate of the Philadelphia Lodge, printed and published the society’s Book of Constitutions in 1734, and George Washington, when he was elected president, was serving as master mason of his lodge in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

  But with its claims of extraordinary knowledge, coupled with the great shroud of mystery that the society purposely drew about itself, the Masons drew the suspicion, and later the outright hostility, of many other institutions, ranging from governments (the Russian minister of the interior closed down all the Masonic lodges in 1822) to the Catholic Church (the pope issued an 1884 encyclical condemning the organization). Still, the Masons survived all of the assaults and continued to instruct their apprentices in the hidden mysteries and secret signs that had purportedly been preserved and handed down by the members of their order from time immemorial.

  THE GRAND COPT

  The secret society of the Freemasons acquired no more enterprising member than the self-styled Count Cagliostro, who found in its elaborate rituals and high-flown philosophy the perfect venue for his talents. Both the society and the count prospered mightily from the alliance.

  Born in 1743 to an impoverished but reputedly noble Sicilian family, Giuseppe Ba
lsamo, as he was then known, showed much early promise. He was a quick study, with a knack for chemistry and medicine. But he also showed a rebellious streak, an impatience with authority, which caused him to be thrown out of one school or seminary after another. (Reciting from a sacred text in one such institution, he substituted the names of well-known prostitutes for those of the saints. He was, as he had no doubt intended, tossed out on his ear.) Making his way to Rome at the age of seventeen, he managed to scrape together a living using his skills as a draftsman (and forger) while drifting inexorably toward the region of his real interests—alchemy and the occult. A Greek named Altotas, who professed to be a master of these matters, became Balsamo’s first and most influential mentor.

  Together, they traveled through Africa and Asia, stopping for protracted stays in Egypt, where Balsamo claimed to have acquired an ancient papyrus explaining the secrets of clairvoyance, and Malta, where Altotas gained them an introduction to the grand master of the Order of the Knights of Malta. Here, as everywhere else Balsamo landed during his peripatetic career, he gleaned all that there was to learn, added to his vast mental inventory of science, astrology, and philosophy, and then moved on to his next stop, where he could market what he’d just found out. The supreme salesman, Balsamo was never without a willing clientele. And by all accounts, his most marketable commodity was himself.

  “While not actually handsome, his face was the most remarkable I have ever seen. His eyes above all,” wrote the baroness d’Oberkirch, an early supporter. “They were indescribable, with supernatural depths—all fire and yet all ice . . . he at once attracted and repelled you; he frightened you and at the same time inspired you with insurmountable curiosity.” In summary, she asserted that he was “possessed of a demonic power; he enthralled the mind, paralyzed the will.”