by Colin Wilson
CHAPTER 25
The Chambre Ardente Affair
In France, as in England and America, the witchcraft craze blew itself out in a storm of extraordinary violence. In England it was the hysteria instigated by Matthew Hopkins, in America, the affair of the Salem witches. In France, it was the Chambre Ardente scandal.
In 1673, during the reign of Louis the Fourteenth, two priests informed the police in Paris that a number of penitents had asked absolution for murdering their spouses. No names were mentioned, because of the secrecy of the confessional, but it alerted the Chief of Police, Nicholas de la Reynie. What was happening, it seemed, was that a ring of fortune tellers and ‘sorcerers’ were supplying ‘succession powders’—a euphemism for poisons—to wealthy men and women who preferred lovers to matrimonial entanglements.
De la Reynie could only keep his ear to the ground. It took him four years to fit together the clues that led him to the recognition that there was an international ‘poisons ring’—much as there are now drugs rings—headed by men of influence. A remark of a fortune teller, Marie Bosse, about being about to retire when she had arranged three more poisonings, provided the lead he had been waiting for. A disguised policewoman consulted Marie Bosse on how she could get rid of her husband, and made an arrest when she was sold poison. Many poisons were found in Marie Bosse’s house. She and her husband and two sons were arrested; also, another fortune teller known as La Vigoreux, who shared a communal bed with the family.
Interrogations began to reveal the names of their customers, and the revelation shocked the King. It seemed that half the aristocracy were trying to poison one another, and that two ladies had even approached another fortune teller for means of getting rid of one of his own mistresses Louise de la Vallière.
But this was not simply a matter of murder or attempted murder. The customers were also convinced that the fortune tellers could produce charms and magic potions to secure the affections of their admirers, and apparently had no objection if the Devil was involved.
Stern and decisive action was called for—after all, the king might be the next victim ... He created a special commission, a kind of star chamber, which sat in a room draped in black curtains and lit with candles—hence the Chambre Ardente—lighted (or burning) chamber.
What made it so frightening was that the methods of poisoning were so subtle. A Madame de Poulaillon, who wanted to kill her aged husband so she could marry her young lover, had been impregnating his shirts with arsenic, which would cause symptoms similar to those of syphilis; she would then rub the sores with a ‘healing ointment’ that would kill him in ten weeks—and there would be no suspicion.
The chief defendants were Marie Bosse, La Vigoreux, an abortionist known as La Lepère, and a well known fortune teller called Catherine Deshayes, known as La Voisin. La Vigoreux and Marie Bosse were quickly condemned—on May 6,1678—to be burnt alive and one son, Francois Bosse, hanged. La Voisin was horribly tortured, and, when she refused to confess to poisoning, burnt alive in an iron chair—Mme de Sevigné described in a letter how the old woman cursed violently and threw off the straw half a dozen times, until the flames became too strong and she disappeared in them.
All this was kept secret; one reason being that the king’s mistress Mme de Montespan was deeply involved. And more investigation revealed that various priests had performed Black Masses and even sacrificed babies to the Devil. A hunchback, the Abbé Guibourg used as an altar the naked body of a woman, placing the chalice on her belly; Mme de Montespan had often served as the altar. A baby would then be sacrificed by having its throat cut, and the body thrown into an oven. La Voisin confessed at her trial that she had disposed of two thousand five hundred babies like this. On another occasion, Mme des Oillets came to make a charm for the king, accompanied by a man. The priest said that sperm from both was necessary, but since Mme des Oillets was menstruating, he accepted a few drops of menstrual blood from her, while the man masturbated into the chalice.
Many other priests proved to be involved, and it became clear that an alarming number of churchmen had no objections to dealings with the Devil. One had consecrated a stone altar in a brothel, another strangled a baby after baptising it with oil reserved for Extreme Unction, another copulated with the girl who was serving as an altar in full view of his audience; another fortune teller described how she had sacrificed her own new born baby at a black mass.
By 1680, it had struck the king that a full-scale scandal could lead to unforeseen results, since so many nobles were involved. He decided to suspend the Chambre Ardente. No noblemen—or women—were sentenced, but de la Reynie continued to arrest and torture fortune tellers. A hundred and four people were sentenced: thirty six to death, others to slavery in the galleys or banishment. The chief result of the case was that fortune tellers were banned by law, and witchcraft was declared to be a superstition. After that, people accused of witchcraft were sent to a madhouse, the Salpêtrière. In fact, a man was executed in Bordeaux in 1718 for causing a man to become impotent and his wife barren; but then, working ‘fancied acts of magic’ was still a hanging offence.
Louis attempted to suppress all the evidence for the affair in 1709 by ordering all papers to be destroyed; but the official transcripts were overlooked.
It seems ironical that the last major witchcraft trial in France—virtually in Europe—should have been a case in which there seems to be abundant evidence of genuine ‘black magic’ practices. It inevitably raises the suspicion that in at least a percentage of early witchcraft trials, the evidence about Sabbats and black masses may have been less imaginary than we now assume.
CHAPTER 26
The Birth of Spiritualism
‘Modern Spiritism is merely Witchcraft revived’ says the Revd. Montague Summers severely. He intended it as a condemnation; yet in another sense it may be taken simply as a statement of fact.
‘Spiritualism’ began on March 31, 1848, in the house of the Fox family of Hydesville, New York. The family had been disturbed by rapping noises, and on this evening, the two daughters asked the invisible knocker to repeat noises made by snapping their fingers; it obliged. Later it answered with a code of one knock for yes, two for no. The case caused a widespread sensation. Other people found that they could produce rapping noises by addressing a request to ‘spirits’. Others discovered that if they went into a trance, ‘spirits’ would speak through their mouths. The movement swept across America, and quickly spread to Europe. It was assumed that the the spirits of the dead were communicating, and that this proved that the soul survives after death; as a result, ‘spiritualism’ was soon established as a church.
It is clear that what happened in the home of the Fox sisters is what would now be called poltergeist manifestations. It is true that the ‘spirit’ declared itself (through a code of raps) to be the ghost of a murdered peddler; but he was never traced. In general, poltergeists seem to have little in common with the spirits that manifest themselves at seances, and which claim to be spirits of the dead. Sceptics insist that this is self deception, or at best, unconscious telepathy on the part of the ‘medium’; and in many cases, this is probably so. There remain a small residue of cases that do not seem to admit of this explanation.
But what is clear is that ‘spiritualism’ is basically a revival of the shamanism of our remote ancestors—in which the shaman went into a trance and ‘communicated’ with the spirit world—and that the ‘spirits’ that cause poltergeist effects are the ‘demons’ that witches invoked with their spells and rituals. It makes no difference whether we regard poltergeists as a manifestation of the unconscious mind, or as some kind of ‘low-grade spirit’ with a taste for mischief; their antics bear a strong family resemblance to those of the imps and demons of the witchcraft trials. So in a basic sense, Summers was correct. Spiritualism was a rediscovery of certain ‘forces’ that had been regarded as ‘demonic’ in the days when all good Christians believed in demons and malign spirits.
In whi
ch case, the ‘commonsense’ view of witchcraft taken by nearly all modern writers on the subject—Rossell Hope Robbins in the Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, Trevor-Roper in The European Witch Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries, Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic is quite simply unacceptable. The Dominican Inquisitors may have been superstitious bigots; but at least they recognised that our universe is pervaded by unknown forces.
The Fox sisters.
CHAPTER 27
Madam Blavatsky
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, was condemned in her own time as a fraud; yet she undoubtedly possessed powers that would have caused her to be classified as a witch in earlier times. A young disciple, Charles Johnston, quotes a typical example. Madame Blavatsky was sitting at a card table, playing patience, Johnston sitting opposite. Growing tired of her game, she began to drum idly on the table with her fingertips; then ‘drawing her hand back a foot or so from the table, she continued the tapping movements in the air. The taps, however, were still perfectly audible—on the table, a foot from her hand. I could both feel and hear them. It was something like taking sparks from the prime conductor of an electric machine, then she changed her direction again and began to bring the taps to bear on the top of my head. They were quite audible and, needless to say, I felt them quite distinctly. I was at the opposite side of the table, some five or six feet away, all through this little experiment in the unexplained laws of nature, and the psychical powers latent in man.’
The first time Madame Blavatsky met her disciple Sinnett, he remarked that he had tried spiritualism, but could not even get a rap. ‘Oh, raps are the easiest to get’ said Madame Blavatsky, and the room suddenly resounded with them.
She also apparently possessed one of the traditional of powers of ‘witches’, second sight. At Simla, in India, she placed a sealed letter against her forehead and was able to state the name of the writer correctly. She asked her hostess, a Mrs Hume, if she wanted anything ‘materialised’. Mrs Hume mentioned an old family brooch which she had lost some years before. Madame Blavatsky stared intently at Mrs Hume then said that it would not be in the house but in the garden—was there in the garden a flowerbed shaped like a star? There was. They all trooped into the garden with lanterns, uprooted several flowers, and found the brooch wrapped in paper. Madame Blavatsky wanted her hosts to understand that her mysterious ‘Brothers’ had materialised it; but it seems more likely that she used some form of ‘second sight’—many dowsers have the same ability—to locate it.
During discussion with some pandits (scholars), Madame Blavatsky got impatient with a German who remarked that the yogis of old had remarkable powers—they could make roses fall from the air. ‘Oh, they say that, do they?’ said Madame Blavatsky irritably. She muttered certain words under her breath and swept her hand through the air; roses fell on the heads of the company.
Later, as they were all about to leave, Colonel Olcott noticed on Madame Blavatsky’s face ‘that strange look of power which almost always preceded a phenomenon’. She took the lamp in one hand, pointed her other finger at the flame and said: ‘Go up’. It rose to the top of the chimney. ‘Go down’. The flame sank again. (The story would have been even more impressive if Madame Blavatsky had not been holding the lamp.)
So Madame Blavatsky was certainly a ‘witch’—one who happened to be born with certain odd powers, which she took the trouble to develop. (That she possessed such powers does not mean of course, that we must take Theosophy seriously—this must depend on the individual reader’s assessment of books like Isis Unveiled.) What is worth bearing in mind is that Madame Blavatsky was a very powerful personality, and her biographies (such as the excellent one by John Symonds) give the impression that her ‘powers’ were in some respect an overflow of sheer vitality.
But it should also be noted that she herself always insisted that her ‘effects’ were produced with the aid of the ‘secret masters’ or Brothers—reminding us that the majority of witches believe their powers derive from ‘spirits’. Study of the life of Madame Blavatsky could provide an insight into what really happened in remote country villages in the days of what Rossell Hope Robbins insists on calling ‘the witchcraft delusion’.
Madame Blavatsky manifesting roses from thin air.
CHAPTER 28
The Golden Dawn
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn belongs to the tradition of cabbalistic magic (discussed in the chapter on Magic and Magicians) and so is only indirectly related to the subject of this book. Witchcraft seems to be a more—or—less natural faculty—like 'second sight’—which is based upon the assumption that there are invisible powers or spirits that can be persuaded to carry out simple tasks. Magic depends on the assumption that there is another order of reality that lies beyond our senses, and that the magician can, by careful preparation, gain a certain limited access to this reality.
According to its original members, the Golden Dawn originated in 1885 when a clergyman named Woodford found a dusty handwritten manuscript on a secondhand bookstall in Farringdon Street, London. It proved to be written in code, and to contain five magical rituals for initiating members into a secret society. There was also a letter declaring that anyone interested in these rituals should contact a certain Fraülein Sprengel in Stuttgart. It was Fraülein Sprengel who gave Dr Wynn Wescott, another student of the Kabbalah, permission to found a magical society, which was at first called the Isis-Urania Temple of the Golden Dawn.
Unfortunately, this tale is almost certainly an invention, as Elite Howe reveals in his book on the Golden Dawn. It was intended simply to endow the newly formed society with a certain mystique. Equally dubious was the character of the most important founder member of the Order, Samuel Liddell Mathers, son of a commercial clerk from Hackney, who liked to call himself MacGregor Mathers or the Comte de Glenstrae, and whose passion for dominating his fellow members finally led to the break up of the Order. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss the Golden Dawn as a mixture of chicanery and wishful thinking. For all his eccentricity and capacity for grandiose self-deception, Mathers was a genuine scholar, whose knowledge of Kabbalism was enormous. The hermetic tradition (magic is supposed to derive from its mysterious founder, Hermes Trismegistos) is based upon the notion that magic makes use of certain forces in the universe, and that this can be done by a total amateur and unbeliever if he follows the correct procedures, just as an unbeliever could make a magnet by following the correct procedures. The ‘forces’ involved are basically the natural forces exerted by the heavenly bodies on the earth. Magic also assumes that the ‘unconscious’ powers of the human psyche are far greater than we realise. And these are, in fact, the assumptions of modern primitive shamans, and it seems probable that they were held by our Stone Age ancestors.
The poet W.B. Yeats was one of the early members of the Golden Dawn—coming to it after an interest in Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy. In an important essay on magic, Yeats describes a ‘magical operation’ by Mathers and his wife in which Mathers was able to induce curious visions, which were seen by all present.
The poet W. B. Yeats was one of the early members of the Golden Dawn—coming to it after an interest in Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy. In an important essay on magic, Yeats describes a ‘magical operation’ by Mathers and his wife in which Mathers was able to induce curious visions, which were seen by all present.
Magic, as practised in the Golden Dawn, depended upon the assumption that the human will can be trained and concentrated until it can exert ‘paranormal’ effects, and that this will must be directed and stimulated by imagination. The members of the Order accepted that the various ‘realms’—orders of reality—described in the Kabbalah are real, and that these can also be explored by a process of inner-vision, what might be regarded as a kind of controlled dreaming while awake. (It is worth noting that many exponents of ‘astral projection’—in which the spirit is supposed to leave the body—believe that it can be achieved by
realising you are asleep and dreaming.) Mathers’ magic almost certainly worked because he was a humourless obsessive with delusions of grandeur. Yeats, with his wider intelligence, lacked the single-mindedness to become a good magician.
Another basic notion of the Golden Dawn was that certain symbols or ideas have a deep—and objective—meaning for all human beings—that, for example, if someone places a piece of cardboard containing a water symbol against his forehead and allows the imagination to work, he will see water in various forms—but by no conceivable accident, fire or earth. In the 20th century, this theory has been given a certain intellectual respectability by the theories of Jung about archetypes and universal symbols.
By 1898, the Golden Dawn was already being torn apart by a power struggle. Westcott regarded himself as the leader; but Mathers felt the position should be rightfully his. He claimed to be in touch with ‘secret chiefs’ (rather like Madame Blavatsky’s secret brotherhood) who dictated new rituals through the mediumship of his wife. But even though Westcott resigned (when his employer, the London County Council, intimated that magic was not a respectable hobby for a coroner), the wrangles continued, and Golden Dawn broke up thirteen years after it was founded. Offshoots continued to exist, one run by a learned American, A. E. Waite who wrote a number of unreadable books on such subjects as the Kabbalah and the Holy Grail, another by the actress Florence Farr and the novelist Arthur Machen, while in the 1920s, a young occultist named Dion Fortune used Golden Dawn rituals obtained from Mrs Mathers after the death of her husband (in the flu epidemic of 1918) to found an order called the Society of the Inner Light. She later lived in Glastonbury—where Margaret Murray had stumbled upon her theory that witches are members of an old fertility religion; so that the town once identified with King Arthur also has its historical links with witchcraft and with traditional magic. In 1934, Israel Regardie an ex-member of yet another offshoot of the Golden Dawn, the Stella Matutina, published all its ‘secret rituals’, enraging members and effectively destroying the Order, yet earning the gratitude of historians and students of magic, whose number has continued to increase.