But no one who could make gold from lead could languish long. A Moravian chemist named Michael Sendivogius had a little influence with some friends at the elector’s court, and using it he was able to pay a visit to the imprisoned Seton. That’s when they struck a deal. If Sendivogius would help him escape, Seton would tell him the secrets of his art. Sendivogius sold all his property and took up residence near the prison. With the money he’d raised, he bribed several of the guards, and on the night of the planned escape he paid for a huge feast for all the other soldiers; while they were sleeping off the effects of the lavish food and drink, Sendivogius broke into Seton’s cell. To his consternation, he found that the master alchemist could barely walk anymore.
Still, Sendivogius was able to carry him out of the tower and into a waiting carriage. They took off together, stopping only long enough to pick up Seton’s wife and the remaining quantity of the secret powder, and didn’t stop again until they’d reached the safer environs of Cracow. There, they settled down, to rest and recover.
But Sendivogius, having done his part, now demanded the other half of the bargain; he insisted that Seton keep his promise and tell him the secrets of transmutation. But Seton refused, claiming that it was too terrible a burden for him, as an adept, to pass on to his pupil. Within two years, still suffering from the tortures he had undergone at the elector’s court, Seton died—leaving only the remaining powder, but no formula, to Sendivogius. Desperate and frustrated, Sendivogius turned to Seton’s widow; he courted and later married her, in the hope that she would hand on to him her dead husband’s secret knowledge. But there again, he was in for a disappointment. She hadn’t a clue.
The most important thing Sendivogius discovered among Seton’s effects was a manuscript called “The New Light of Alchymy,” which he seems to have decided to put his own name on. Using some of the instructions in the book, he tried to produce more of the magical powder, but all he wound up doing was squandering the small amount he used in the experiments. Carefully preserving what was left, he took off on a Continental tour of his own, claiming he possessed the secrets of the great art and sparingly using the last of Seton’s powder. According to one French witness, a dose of the powder was introduced into a glass of wine; then a crown piece was dipped into the mixture. The part of the coin that had been immersed turned to gold—and showed no signs of having been soldered or fraudulently made.
Sendivogius managed to scrape along on his reputation for many years, bilking potential investors out of substantial sums, even acquiring a country estate from King Sigismund of Poland, until in 1646, aged eighty-four, he died in Parma, no closer to the actual secrets of the great art than ever.
THE SCOURGE OF MILAN
Despite their reputations as everything from sorcerers to charlatans, alchemists were seldom accused of committing acts of great and purposeful evil. But in seventeenth-century Milan, one such alchemist was—and a column was erected on the site of his razed home to remind posterity of the terrible deeds he confessed to having done there.
His name was Pietro Mora, and he lived in one of the oldest houses in a remote quarter of the city. Though no one could say exactly where his fortune came from, he was a very wealthy and mysterious man; rumor had it that he had concocted a red powder which he used to transmute base metals into the gold that every alchemist sought.
Other rumors circulated, too. Mora was said, for instance, to be able to effect miraculous cures—and lethal curses. He could make pomanders—and poisons. Under cover of darkness, many people were thought to have knocked on the door of his forbidding house. Some were ambitious young noblemen who had tired of waiting for the present lords to pass away and bequeath to them the titles they were due; others were jealous husbands who suspected their wives had been unfaithful. Some were merchants who felt they’d been cheated; others were soldiers anxious for promotion. What all of them sought was immediate gain, and in many cases revenge, and they turned to Mora to get what they wanted. By all accounts, he provided it.
Among the many goods and services Mora offered were bouquets of artificial flowers whose scent could bring on apoplexy; bottles of Cyprus wine spiked with lethal ingredients; baskets of apricots impregnated with a slow-acting poison. He was also reputed to be a master of the spirits, someone who was capable of calling up Hell itself to do his bidding. He even went so far as to compile a book of his incantations and magical practices; commonly known as the Zekerboni, it was replete with Cabbalistic words and designs, conjurations in Greek and Hebrew, elaborately patterned pentagrams, and explicit instructions on how to summon up a demon so that he appears “in a pleasing form, without any horror of shape or size, without any loud or thunderous noise or alarum, without seeking to harm him who summons thee, and without hurting any who are of his company.”
The book was equally explicit in its instructions on how to get rid of the demon once your business was done with him. (Demons were notoriously hard to shake.) The Zekerboni advised the conjurer to take a fairly warm and conciliatory tone: “Depart then, gracious and kindly spirit, return in peace unto thy dwelling-place and unto thine own habitation, but yet do thou hold thyself ready to attend and appear before me whensoever I call upon thee and summon thee in the name of the Great Alpha, the Lord. Amen, Amen, Amen.”
Mora might have continued to prosper in his backstreet bastion had not the Great Plague swept into Milan in 1630. As the disease spread and the bodies accumulated, the panic-stricken officials of the town began to suspect black magic and witchcraft. In a surprise attack, they burst into Mora’s house one night. Inside, they found all the paraphernalia of the alchemist’s trade—the vials and retorts, aludels and astrolabes, chemicals and charts. On the bookshelves they discovered planetary tables and manuals of the art, by such officially sanctioned authors as Porta, Cardan, and Bernard Trevisan.
As for Mora, he was vehemently denouncing the raid and declaring his innocence when one of the magistrates happened to knock on a wall, which gave off a hollow sound. Careful inspection revealed a secret door, hidden by trick carpentry; behind the door there were extensive cellars, where the magistrate and his men found what they’d been looking for. Besides the High Altar of Satan, they discovered a padlocked chest containing silver-tipped wands, magic crystals, and amulets engraved with the names and sigils of various devils. In a cupboard they found an array of poisons and other loathsome substances, arranged just as more wholesome ingredients might be in an apothecary’s shop. Mora was carted off for further interrogation.
Before long, he had confessed to being the grand master of a secret group of Satanists, whose aim was to decimate the whole city of Milan. To that end, he and his confederates had smeared their deadly potions on door knockers and gates; they had poured poison into the springs that fed the town; they’d mixed ergot with the baker’s flour; they’d even polluted the stoups of holy water in the cathedral with oil of vitriol. But none of this was so deadly as the work they’d done under the guise of charity; according to Mora, they’d taken clothing and bed linens from the dead and dying, then distributed them among the living and so-far-uninfected people in the poorer quarters of the city.
Mora and his confederates were summarily sentenced to death for their crimes. Mora’s house was then burned to the ground, and a tall column, inlaid with a bronze tablet detailing the evils he had brought on Milan, was raised above the cinders.
THE MAN WHO COULD NOT DIE
Though everything about him, including his name, often changed, he was known for most of his life as the comte de St.-Germain, and he claimed to have discovered, among other things, the elixir of life. In the royal courts of eighteenth-century Europe, he was sometimes hailed as a hero and genius—Frederick the Great of Prussia called him “the man who cannot die"—and sometimes persecuted as a charlatan and fraud.
What is probably true is that he was born in the town of San Germano, Italy, the son of a tax collector, around the year 1710. But he drew such a veil over his actual past that
little more is known of his origins. (He was possibly of Portuguese Jewish extraction.) A lively, dark-haired man who often wore clothes encrusted with valuable jewels, he first made a name for himself some thirty years later, in Vienna, where he became a friend of various Austrian and French aristocrats; in fact, it was one of these French noblemen, Charles de Belle-Isle, marshal of France, who brought him to France and introduced him into the circle of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour.
There, he endeared himself by bestowing on the king a diamond worth ten thousand livres and by assuring the other members of the court that he had a miraculous, secret method for removing the flaws from any stone. He was by all accounts a magnificent conversationalist (fluent in as many as eleven languages), a talented musician (playing the violin and harpsichord), a historian, scholar, and chemist. Wherever he went—and he seems to have spent his entire life traveling from one patron to another—he set up a laboratory and was reputedly quite skilled in ways of dyeing silk and leather goods.
But his greatest claim was that he had discovered the elixir that granted eternal life. When asked his age, he would merely smile enigmatically and change the subject. But if the conversation turned to historical events, he was known to chime in with anecdotes and purportedly firsthand observations on events from the most distant past and far-off lands. He claimed, for instance, to have had conversations with the queen of Sheba, Christ, and Cleopatra. He also made it known that he had shared his miraculous elixir with his valet; as a result, his valet was once asked if he, too, had been present at these ancient events. “No,” the valet replied, “but you forget—I’ve only been in the count’s employ for one century.” For court ladies, he provided an emollient, free of charge, that he claimed would make wrinkles disappear.
At table, the count was known not only for his wit but for his abstinence. Even when seated at the most elaborately prepared banquets, he would eat and drink nothing, declaring that he lived, instead, on a magical food of his own preparation.
He was extraordinarily popular and might have remained so had he not become entangled in some political and diplomatic intrigue involving a peace between France and England. Having worn out his welcome with Louis XV, he set out for London, then Holland, where he established himself as Count Surmont. There, he spent a decade or so, making a fortune and building factories for dyeing fabrics and for the “ennobling of metals,” before taking off again (under some kind of cloud) for Russia.
Once more, he managed to make friends in high places, and after the Russian army defeated the Turks, he was made a general—General Welldone, he called himself—for the services he had rendered.
The Comte de Saint-Germain, an Eighteenth-century Alchemist. Portrait engraved by Thomas.**
Still, he couldn’t stay put, but traveled on, to Nuremberg, Paris, Leipzig, before finding his last patron in the landgrave Charles of Hesse, in Schleswig-Holstein. Charles, too, happened to be an ardent alchemist, and together they pursued their occult experiments. But St.-Germain began to suffer from bouts of depression and chronic rheumatism, and after four or five years, he died, cradled in the arms of two chambermaids. Or, at least, that was the official account.
According to other accounts, however, St.-Germain didn’t die at all; there were reports that he was seen in Paris many years later and that he had in fact sent a letter to Marie-Antoinette after the fall of the Bastille: “No more maneuvers,” he warned her. “Destroy the rebels’ pretext by isolating yourself from people whom you do not love any longer. Abandon Polignac and his kind. They are all vowed to death and assigned to the assassins who have just killed the officers of the Bastille.” After the queen’s execution, some people reported that they had seen the count lingering around the Place de la Grève, where the guillotine was still doing its deadly work.
Another story was perhaps even more outlandish. This one claimed that St.-Germain had journeyed to Tibet, where he had become one of the Hidden Masters who later guided the hand of Madame Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy.
FATE AND THE
FUTURE
For the gods perceive what lies in the future, and men what is going on before them, and wise men what is approaching.
Apollonius of Tyana
THE DIVINATORY ARTS
It’s not hard at all to see where the arts of divination came from. For as long as man has wondered whether the battle would be won or lost, whether the crops would fail or flourish, whether his love would be requited or spurned, he has looked for ways to divine—or foresee—the future.
But even if the urge to see into the future is unsurprising, what is surprising—even astonishing—is the number of ways that have been invented to do it. In some respects, the history of man is a long catalog of ingenious methods devised to ascertain just what was around the corner, starting with the ancient study of sacrificial animal bones and continuing today with psychic hot lines on late night TV. The methods have differed, but the purpose has always been the same: to know today what’s going to happen tomorrow.
In general, these divinatory arts have fallen into several broad categories. First, there were omens and auguries, signs of what was to come that were drawn from the observation of natural phenomena. In the ancient world, the shape of a cloud, the scuttling of an insect, the cry of a bird, were all considered predictors of or clues to future events. (Plutarch even had faith in fishes, arguing that because they were mute and so far removed from the heavens, they must have developed some extraordinary skills of reason and intelligence.)
A second category might be called invited guidance—throwing dice or knucklebones, reading playing cards or tea leaves, drawing lots. The ancient Chaldeans, and later Greeks and Arabians, used arrows as divinatory tools, throwing a quiverful into the air, then remarking on the direction and manner in which they fell. (The practice was known as belomancy.)
The third form of divination, one in vogue even today, is the most personal and intuitive of them all. It relies upon self-induced visions, dream analysis, crystal gazing, and/or, with the help of a psychic or reader of some kind, clairvoyance. In an antique version, the Pythian priestess of Delphi, whose oracles were thought to be divinely inspired, first chewed on a hallucinatory herb, then, while sitting on a tripod above a fuming crevice in the rock, made her cryptic pronouncements; her words were taken down by male priests, who later pored over them to extract the true meaning. (Interpretation, truly, was all: When Croesus, king of Lydia from 564 to 546 B.C., asked what would happen if he declared war on the Persians, the oracle said that he would destroy a great empire. Croesus took her words as encouragement, went to war, and succeeded in destroying a great empire, after all—his own.)
Today no one travels to consult with the Delphic oracle anymore, but many people do rely upon the advice and counsel of their astrologer or psychic to guide them in everything from their romantic liaisons to their investment decisions. Even the occupants of the White House have turned to the divinatory trade from time to time; Nancy Reagan reportedly consulted a San Francisco astrologer named Joan Quigley for advice on everything from the scheduling of the president’s diplomatic meetings to the takeoff times for Air Force One. Nor have the advances of science and reason—the proliferation of computers and the many forms of instant information retrieval—put a stop to the reliance upon these age-old methods of prediction.
Why haven’t they?
Because for all of our purported enlightenment and technological advancement, one thing—human nature—has remained essentially unchanged. The things we want to know—how will things turn out? does she really love me? should I take the job or not?—are as perplexing as they ever were, and all of the computer programs in the world can’t predict with certainty the outcome or tell us what to do. Indeed, in a world where so many decisions have to be made every day, where the pace of life has increased and the time to ponder has declined, perhaps it’s not surprising that people turn to less rational, more mysterious methods.
What the divinatory a
rts also promise us, in a way, is a measure of control—if we can foresee events or their outcome, we can make our plans accordingly. And in an age plagued with dreaded specters ranging from nuclear warfare to AIDS, the search for answers, for an understanding of the greater forces affecting our lives, becomes even more urgent. With so much spinning out of control, it’s important, even vital, to feel that there is still some power we can exert—even if it is only predictive—over our affairs and fortunes.
In that quest, a whole host of divinatory arts has been created over the centuries; in addition to the better-known variations, such as chiromancy (palm reading), cartomancy (tarot and other cards), and astrology, scores of even more baffling methods have emerged over the ages and found, at one time or another, widespread acceptance and use. Some of the more interesting and commonly employed include the following.
Gyromancy used a sacred circle to receive messages and portents from the unseen world.
To begin with, a circle was made on the ground, and its border was marked with letters of the alphabet or other, more mystical symbols. The practitioner then entered the circle and began to march around and around inside the circle, making himself progressively dizzier. Each time he stumbled, the letter or symbol that he landed on was duly noted; once he couldn’t get up and go around anymore, the message was considered complete.
There were two reasons why the dizziness was thought absolutely essential. For one, it was thought to rule out any premeditated or intentional selection of the letters. He was falling down at random. And for another, the very act of turning around, of spinning in place until all balance was lost, was a staple of spells and enchantment since time immemorial. Many sacred dances used the same method to induce a kind of prophetic trance. In fact, it was long thought that fanatics and lunatics, whose movements involved wild spinning and turning with arms extended, were themselves possessed by invisible elements of the spirit world. They weren’t spinning so much as they were being spun.
Raising Hell: A Concise History of the Black Arts and Those Who Dared to Practice Them Page 16