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

by Robert Masello

  As his career caught fire, he abandoned his own name and took on that of his godmother, the Countess Cagliostro. Married to a beautiful young woman he’d met in Rome, Cagliostro traveled through the capitals of Europe, reading minds, telling fortunes, healing through the laying on of hands. It was reported that he had conjured up the archangel Michael; that he had predicted the winning numbers in a lottery three times in a row; that he dined at night with the shades of deceased statesmen and royalty. Wherever he went—Strasbourg, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, Lisbon—he attracted the notice of the local nobility and, of course, anyone with a hankering for knowledge of otherworldly things.

  But it was on his second visit to London in 1776 that Cagliostro claimed to have come across the means by which he was to achieve his greatest fame and fortune. At a bookstall, he found an obscure manuscript by one George Gaston, in which were described the mystical rites of Egyptian Masonry. (No other record of this book seems to have surfaced, and it’s more than possible that Cagliostro made up its existence altogether.) But according to Cagliostro, there was this order of Freemasons even older and more powerful than its modern-day counterpart, an order founded by the prophet Elijah and by Enoch, who was also known as the Grand Copt; before long, Cagliostro was using that title himself. Members of this ancient order never died, but were bodily removed, like Elijah himself, straight from earth to Heaven. It was around this time that Cagliostro started circulating the story that he himself was actually several thousand years old.

  Armed with these newfound rites, and under the aegis of the Esperance Lodge of Freemasons to which he’d been admitted on April 12, 1777, in rooms at the King’s Head in London, Cagliostro embarked on an ambitious tour of other Freemason lodges, to promote his Egyptian program. In each city—Venice, Berlin, Nuremberg, St. Petersburg—he was welcomed with a sumptuous banquet, after which he lectured and offered demonstrations of his occult abilities. Using his five-year-old son as medium, he conjured up angels who left audible kisses on the child’s cheeks; he read minds and foretold the future; and he indefatigably pushed his Egyptian rites, telling an audience in Leipzig that if they refused to accept and practice them, the master of the lodge would suffer dire consequences by the end of the month. When the master took his own life a short time later, this was considered confirmation of Cagliostro’s claim, and the lodge immediately signed on to Cagliostro’s program.

  With monies pouring in from the Egyptian lodges, and his fame increasing hourly, Cagliostro was at the peak of his career. When Johann Lavater, the Swiss theologian and friend of Goethe, requested a meeting, Cagliostro answered, “If your science is greater than mine, you have no need of my acquaintance; if mine is the greater, I have no need of yours.” But Lavater was not so easily dissuaded, and after the two men met, he became one of Cagliostro’s most ardent proponents.

  Not everyone was. Cagliostro had many enemies, including high-ranking clergy of the Catholic Church; in the count’s purported “miracles,” they saw a challenge to their own divine authority. And there were many others who simply thought he was a fraud and a trickster. The baron de Gleichen touched on both points of view in his own description of the man: “Cagliostro was small, but he had a very fine head which could have served as the model for the face of an inspired poet. It is true that his tone, his gestures and his manners were those of a charlatan, boastful, pretentious and arrogant, but it must be remembered that he was an Italian, a physician giving consultations, self-styled Masonic grand master, and a professor of occult sciences. Otherwise his ordinary conversation was agreeable and instructive, his actions noble and charitable, and his healing treatments never unsuccessful and sometimes admirable: he never took a penny from his patients.” Indeed, in keeping with the higher tenets of the Masonic code, Cagliostro gave away money, in great quantities, to the poor and the needy.

  But the seeds of his downfall were sown when he became involved, if unjustly, in the Affair of the Queen’s Necklace in France. Marie-Antoinette had long coveted a diamond necklace that was too expensive even for her to purchase. Aware of the queen’s desire, however, and knowing that the jeweler who owned the necklace was aware of it, too, the comtesse de La Motte concocted an elaborate scheme to convince the jeweler that the queen was secretly buying it, unbeknownst to the king, Louis XVI; to that end, she forged letters signed by Cardinal de Rohan, a man who had long been seeking preferment from the queen.

  The jeweler, figuring he was dealing with the queen’s own emissaries, let the necklace go without being paid for it up front. But when the bill continued to go unpaid, he secured an audience with the unsuspecting king to make his complaint. The king, naturally, took a long look at the letter purportedly written by the cardinal—who, as it happened, was also one of Cagliostro’s closest confidants and friends. The scheming comtesse de La Motte claimed that it was Cagliostro who had made off with the now missing necklace. Thrown into the Bastille, he languished there for almost a year, before offering his testimony and being exonerated. Still, for a man whose reputation rested on his ability to see the future, read minds, and outwit anyone, this was a public relations disaster.

  And it was one from which he never fully recovered.

  In the remaining years of his life, Cagliostro and his wife continued their travels, but under an increasing cloud. He was hounded out of several countries, his erstwhile adherents and confederates turned on him, and when he finally turned up in Rome, with the intention of practicing his Freemasonry in the papal city itself, he made his fatal mistake. Arrested by the Inquisition on charges of heresy in 1789, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. His wife was immured in a convent (where she subsequently died). And though Cagliostro’s sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment in the fortress of San Leo, he had made his last escape. Confined in almost total darkness, in a dismal cell carved from solid rock, he survived until 1795, when, rumor had it, he was strangled by his jailer.

  THE ORDER OF THE GOLDEN DAWN

  It isn’t often that a magical society has as brilliant a chronicler, and convert, as William Butler Yeats, but the Order of the Golden Dawn did. A poet with a strong religious sensibility and metaphysical yearnings, Yeats was attracted to the mysticism and ritual of the Golden Dawn—and much impressed by MacGregor Mathers, the Scotsman who’d founded the order in 1887.

  “At the British Museum Reading Room,” Yeats wrote, “I often saw a man of thirty-six or thirty-seven, in a brown velveteen coat, with a gaunt resolute face, and an athletic body, who seemed, before I heard his name, or knew the nature of his studies, a figure of romance. . . . He had copied many manuscripts on magical ceremonial and doctrine in the British Museum, and was to copy many more in Continental libraries, and it was through him mainly that I began certain studies and experiences, that were to convince me that images well up before the mind’s eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious memory.” For Yeats, this source was the anima mundi, a kind of collective memory shared by all the members of the human race. Although colored and detailed by our individual lives and experiences, this common memory bank could be accessed by those who properly pursued the mystical course.

  The road map, as it were, was provided in the sacred texts that MacGregor Mathers had personally translated and interpreted. Among these texts were such magical standards as the Key of Solomon, the Cabbala, and the elaborate Enochian system devised by the Elizabethan astrologer Dr. John Dee. MacGregor Mathers drew from them all, and from another lesser known source, too—an antique manuscript, written in code, that was first discovered in a London bookstall. Mathers, with the help of a couple of other men who were, like himself, Masons, took on the job of deciphering the London text, which turned out to contain instructions for various occult rituals along with general notes on Cabbalistic wisdom and practice. It was this manuscript that was to provide the springboard to the founding of the Order of the Golden Dawn.

  Mathers made a good start, attracting to his new order over a hundred intelligent and
influential people; besides Yeats, he recruited the writers Arthur Machen, A. E. Waite, and Algernon Blackwood. Lodges were founded in many cities, including Paris, Bradford, and Edinburgh. But what began as a quasi-religious society (one text declared that the establishment “of closer and more personal relations with the Lord Jesus, the Master of Masters, is and ever must be the ultimate object of all the teachings of our Order") gradually changed, as did its leader. The emphasis on magic increased—black magic, in particular—and Mathers, who had never been exactly shy and retiring, became more autocratic and irritable than ever.

  In Paris, he claimed to have had a transforming experience. Out walking one night in the Bois de Boulogne, he was suddenly surrounded by spirits, whom he later characterized as “the Secret Chiefs of the Third Order.” To him alone would they now confide the secrets of “the Great Work,” to him alone would they entrust such arcane knowledge as the true meaning of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and only he would serve in perpetuity as head of the order.

  On this and subsequent occasions, these Secret Chiefs revealed themselves to him in mortal guise, and Mathers wrote that he believed them “to be human and living upon this earth; but possessing terrible superhuman powers.” In private, they wore long robes and magical paraphernalia, while in public they looked and dressed like ordinary people, with but one exception—"the appearance and sensation of transcendent health and physical vigour (whether they seem persons in youth or age).” Mathers attributed this physical luster to the elixir of life.

  The order also became more and more hierarchical, with eleven grades or degrees, broken down into three categories. Adepts studied geomancy and alchemy, astrology and astral travel. (It was on the “astral plane” that Mathers claimed to conduct most of his sessions with the Secret Chiefs.) Adepts were also taught how to prepare their own magical equipment, which included a cup, dagger, wand, and consecrated sword. The color of the robe they wore indicated what grade they had achieved in the order.

  But with Mathers’s increasingly authoritarian attitude, coupled with the admission of some unruly members (Aleister Crowley, most notably), the order gradually lost its strength and its original sense of mission. In Yeats’s opinion, it was the feud with Crowley (who once claimed to have unleashed forty-nine demons against Mathers) that brought about the ultimate dissolution. Yeats believed that Crowley had been directing a steady, magical current against Mathers for years, sapping his strength, unhinging his wits, and leading finally to his death in 1918.

  THE GREAT BEAST

  The Order of the Golden Dawn had no more celebrated convert—or, in the end, destructive renegade—than Aleister Crowley, the man who styled himself the Great Beast, after the fearsome, horned creature described as arising from the sea in the Bible’s book of Revelation.

  To make matters even worse, Crowley claimed it was his mother who first gave him the nickname.

  It’s not hard to see where she came by it.

  Raised in a wealthy and pious family (after making a fortune in the ale business, his father had become a preacher for the Plymouth Brethren), Crowley turned against organized religion—and Christianity in particular—at an early age. And he did it with a vengeance. His father died in 1886, when Crowley was eleven, and this seems to have put the nail in the coffin of his faith, as it were. Young Aleister, who’d been subject to daily Bible readings at home, turned toward the dark figures of Christian lore, toward Satan, “the Scarlet Woman,” and the beast whose number is 666. And his unholy devotion never again wavered.

  After a more traditional education at Trinity College, Cambridge, Crowley turned to the Order of the Golden Dawn for the information he really sought. In 1898, he formally joined up, and dubbed himself Perdurabo, a title that meant “I will endure to the end.” Over the course of his life, Crowley would take on many more names and aliases—Count Vladimir Svareff, Prince Chioa Khan, Lord Boleskin—and use each one until he became bored with it or until it no longer proved of use. What all these titles were designed to do was make him sound more impressive, moneyed, and mysterious than he actually was.

  At first, his membership in the order went reasonably well. He professed to be bowled over by an ancient text that the leader of the order, MacGregor Mathers, claimed to have translated. Entitled The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, "as delivered by Abraham the Jew unto his son Lamech, A.D. 1458,” it impressed Crowley as a manual of magic unlike any of the others he’d already perused and, generally, scorned. Among other things it suggested that a long period of purification must be undergone, in a far-off and secluded place, before the Holy Guardian Angel could be summoned and seen. Crowley scoured the Lake District and Scotland, looking for just the right place, before alighting on Boleskin House, on the shores of Loch Ness.

  There, he went about the elaborate rituals the book prescribed, but no matter how many times he tried to invoke the Guardian Angel, he was unsuccessful. By his own account, however, he did manage to conjure up a horde of demons. The entire house, Crowley complained, began to be haunted by strange, dark shapes, and his workroom, where he would spend hours writing down magical formulas, grew so dark, even in the middle of the sunniest day, that he had to keep the lights on around the clock. The groundskeeper lost his mind and tried to murder his own family. When all of this became too much even for Crowley, he took off for Mexico, where, in the hot, dry air, he concentrated on performing such feats of magic as making his own image disappear from a mirror.

  Perhaps it was his failure to conjure the Guardian Angel that started his disenchantment, and later feud, with Mathers, but more than likely the break would have come, anyway. Crowley, a big man with a colossal ego and insatiable appetites for everything from drugs to sex, could never last long in anyone else’s organization. He charged Mathers with having lied to the members of the order and mocked him for his story of having met the Secret Chiefs in the Bois de Boulogne. What he met there, Crowley claimed, was nothing but a bunch of evil, mischievous spirits, who’d pulled the wool over his eyes. Crowley packed up his things, and his pretty but unbalanced wife, Rose (daughter of the vicar of Camberwell), and set off on a world tour of mountain climbing and spiritual seeking. (In his spare time, he wrote pornography, including one book for his wife, entitled Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden.)

  In 1904, he stopped in Cairo, where he adopted a strange getup, including a bejeweled turban and silken robes, and traveled through the crowded streets with “two gorgeous runners to clear the way for my carriage.” But it was on a visit to Boulak (now the National) Museum that he claimed something very curious had occurred.

  His wife, who knew nothing of Egyptian mythology, was wandering through the museum halls in a daze, muttering the name “Horus.” When Crowley asked what she was talking about, she pointed at an ancient stele and said, “There—there he is.” It was an image of the falcon-headed Horus, the Egyptian sun god, and when Crowley examined it more closely, he saw to his astonishment that it also bore a number—666. The Number of the Beast. He knew then that he was nearing his mystical revelation.

  And it came a short time later. At noon one day, his Holy Guardian Angel, which introduced itself as Aiwass, appeared in his Cairo flat. Ordering Crowley to sit and take down every word it spoke, it held forth in a musical voice for the next hour, dictating what would become the opening chapter of Crowley’s The Book of the Law. Twice more it appeared to him, explaining that it came as a “messenger from the forces ruling the earth at present,” and when it was done dictating, Crowley had in his hands the central text in which his philosophy was expressed. Its single most important tenet, the concept around which Crowley’s life was to thereafter revolve, was this: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

  In brief, The Book of the Law argued that up until that time the history of the world had been divided into two eons—the eon of Isis, in which woman dominated, and the eon of Osiris, in which man held sway. But now, in 1904, Crowley declared that the age
of Horus, the child, had begun, and that this would be the age of the will (thelema), the age in which man was finally able to express his innermost self, unrestrained by the dictates of the church and secular state. “Be strong, O man!” he rhapsodized, “lust, enjoy all things of sense and rapture; fear not that any god shall deny thee for this.” Crowley certainly had no fear.

  He embarked upon a notorious career of magic and sexual sadism, first in Europe and then, with the outbreak of World War I, in America. He shaved his large head and filed his two canine teeth to a sharp point; when he met his female disciples, he would bite them on the wrist or neck, bestowing what he called the serpent’s kiss. He also founded what he called the Argenteum Astrum (Silver Star), which he said was the Inner Order of the Great White Brotherhood; the Outer Order was the Golden Dawn he’d left behind.

  In 1916, he took upon himself the grade of magus, or master magician. As he was to declare in his autobiography, success in magic “depends upon one’s ability to awaken the creative genius which is the inalienable heirloom of every son of man, but which few indeed are able to assimilate to their conscious existence, or even, in ninety nine cases out of a hundred, to detect . . . even the crudest Magick eludes consciousness altogether, so that when one is able to do it, one does it without conscious comprehension, very much as one makes a good stroke at cricket or billiards. One cannot give an intellectual explanation of the rough working involved. . . . Magick in this sense is an art rather than a science.” And it was an art, in short, that required its practitioners to suspend rational thought and replace it with a kind of unfettered will.