by John Crowley
Who summons you? God, or an angel, or the Devil?
A man. Just a man. He is from Cologne, a big, bearded man; he leaves his body in his bed, and comes to summon me. I leave my bed and follow.
A big dark man comes at night and summons you to join the witches. What are the names of the other witches that you see?
I cannot say. I would be beaten. We have all agreed not to tell the names of those who go to fight, not our names or the names of the witches.
You will say. You will say or you will be made to say …
An invisible army, its captains and soldiers known only to one another; a sect, meeting not openly in the daylight as Christians do but secretly at night. A foreign nation to which the witch and the sorcerer gave their whole allegiance, where every common human act and feeling was reversed and made into its opposite: where the Savior of mankind was despised and His Cross trampled and shat upon, and the Devil’s fundament worshipped; where persons surrendered their natural dominion over the animals and instead took on animal form themselves; where coupling was done openly in groups and not in the dark alone; where children were not nurtured but aborted and slain, not fed but eaten.
Children killed and eaten: not in fable, not released unharmed from the wolf’s belly or resurrected from their own boiled bones, but truly killed and eaten like fowl by our neighbors in secret. The ultimate crime, the crime the Roman magistrates once charged the first Christians with, and the Christians their Gnostic rivals and later the Jews who lived among them. When we hear of children killed and eaten we have entered the counterworld, Hell on earth, and it is usual for some, or many, to be hunted down and slain before it is closed and forgotten again.
Madimi had said it: all Christ’s churches joined in warring against them. Doctrinaire Dominicans demanded they be burned, but so did Genevan Calvinists and French Huguenots and sensible Dutch Reformers. In 1588 in the lands of the Elector-Archbishop of Trier, more than a hundred witches were burned, including an eighty-year-old blind woman and an eight-year-old boy. The judge of the secular court, deputy governor of the city of Trier, tried to stop the burnings, but after a number of convicted witches revealed that they had seen him himself among the worshippers of Satan at the Devil’s ball, he was arrested. Under torture he remembered, or confessed to, appalling obscenities, and went to the stake forgiven.
Burning to death is an awful spectacle, but not as painful as it seems it must be: not the ultimate earthly pain its employers hope and suppose it to be. Many who have been severely burned say that the pain comes largely afterward; while the fire is at work there is horror, or dread, or an unearthly peace worse than either, but not pain. This was not apparent to the shrieking laughing crowds watching the skin blister away, beards and hair catch fire like straw, eyeballs coagulate; but the angels who met those souls on the other, cooler shore and asked in pity Are you all right, are you all right? were often answered Yes, yes I think: for they had escaped while the body was still overwhelmed and unable to tell of its anguish. And all all right now. In Paradisum deducant te Angeli.
Practiced executioners who suspected that their subjects were escaping the full measure of punishment liked to damp down the fires when half the work was done, when legs and bound hands were so burned as to be unrecognizable but eyes could still see and throat still scream (could, unless the tongue was tied or cut or a metal brace was strapped to the face to keep the jaw jammed shut, so that the witch could not shriek out the name of her demon protector, or the heretic blaspheme). Knowledge is the goal of the torturer, as of the moral instructor: unconsciousness is failure. So let the crowds come right up to the barriers, where they can see and hear, let them hold their children up, let the burghers and the civil authorities have high seats, and let them lean forward, the better to see, to hear, to know: they are here to be made intimate with the sinner, to be made momentarily one with her, they must learn all they can. The eye is the mouth of the heart.
In that year 1588, a certain Peter Stumpf of Bedburg, near Cologne, was met in the woods by hunters who had just seen a wolf and given chase; he was out for a stroll, he said; the hunters found this suspicious, and Stumpf was arrested and imprisoned. Subjected only to the territio realis—the showing of the tools of torture—he immediately confessed that he was a werewolf, had killed and eaten sixteen people, yes, that his wife yes and his daughters yes and his mistress were all witches. So he was condemned; bound to a cartwheel, his legs and arms broken, his flesh pulled off with white-hot pincers, and his head “strooke from his body and stuck upon a hye pole,” said the vividly illustrated English broadside account published soon after, and was then burned with his women: “Thus he lived and dyed in the likeness of a woolf, and shape of a man.”
—And may God have mercy on them that did it, said John Dee. For it was a great wrong and wickedness.
—He had murdered sixteen, said the Emperor of the Romans. Why should he not die the death?
—If they were murdered, John Dee said, bowing low to soften his disagreement with the Emperor, they were murdered by a wolf, or wolves.
—He was the wolf!
—So it is said. Your Majesty will I hope pardon me if I do not believe it.
—He confessed. He confessed all. He confessed murders that had not before been known of.
—Under the threat of torture. Your Majesty, if all your subjects have not confessed such things it is only because we have not all been tortured.
They went spiralling steadily downward, the Emperor, Doctor Dee, the Emperor’s physician and his chaplain, a secretary, four clanking guards, all following the servingmen and their wavering torches. The stone steps of the tower were slick with damp; the Emperor leaned upon his chaplain.
—You do not, the Emperor’s physician asked Doctor Dee, believe in the transvection of witches.
—I do not, said John Dee. I do not believe that God would grant to the Devil such powers, which then the Devil could grant to his worshippers. God’s care for us does not admit of it. Whatever the poor deluded women believe. Or are led to believe. Read Wierus, de prestigiis dæmonum, of devilish tricks.
—Jean Bodin says otherwise, said the chaplain testily, and with as good citations.
—The man, or woman, who believes himself to be a wolf, said Doctor Dee, suffers from a species of melancholy. A very deep dreadful melancholy. The wolf he believes himself to be is only the inward form or picture of that melancholy. Hear how often they say: my wolf’s skin is on the inside.
At that the Emperor, beside him on the narrow stair, made a small sound, a whimper like a puppy’s or a child’s: one only, and his face did not change. Only John Dee heard. The Emperor had suffered lifelong from melancholy.
—All the ancient writers agree, said Dee. The physical signs are well known: the dry mouth and eye, the unslakable thirst, the insomnia by night. Thoughts fixed on cemeteries, and corpses.
—Witches cannot weep, said the Emperor’s physician. That too is well known.
—Morbus lupinus, said Dee. The stars being conjoined, and the spirit properly formed. Or better say improperly formed. They will believe themselves turned into beasts, and behave accordingly.
—How is it then, the chaplain asked, that those who see a werewolf see, not a man who believes himself a wolf, but a wolf indeed?
—The question is, the physician said, whether the witches can transform themselves into the forms of animals—wolves, mice, flies, all are attested—and go about doing harm; or whether what is seen is only a phantasticum or projection of the spirit, sent out as the witch lies asleep.
—How could the witch be guilty of the wolf’s crimes if the witch lies asleep and only dreams them? asked the chaplain in a rising voice. Shall we pardon them all then and give them their freedom?
The Emperor stilled them with a lift of one hand. They continued downward. From within the dungeons there came as they passed the rattle of manacles, and sounds that might have been a man’s breathing, or a dying man’s entreating. J
ohn Dee had heard, without believing, that it was here in the tiny chambers of the White Tower that fraudulent or careless alchemists were imprisoned who failed to produce what they promised to the Emperor. The way had grown damper, for now they had gone down beneath the surface of the earth, and the only light that reached them fell from above through tall chimneys. The guards stopped before a door, the sweating black nailheads on it showing how thick it was; an opening in it was too small to admit anything but a man’s hand, yet was barred anyway.
—Look in, said the Emperor.
John Dee came close to the little window. He had, the day before, received a special summons from the Emperor, passed to him by Sir Edward (that was Kelley) to appear quickly at the castle, to advise the Emperor on a matter beyond the skills of his physicians. Edward Kelley had told the Bohemians that nothing was beyond the skills of Jan Devus, doctor sapientissimus, and when Kelley spoke now everyone listened, and so John Dee had been brought down into this place of terror: and if he could do nothing in the case, here he might well remain.
In the little stone space on a stone bed a young man sat in the near darkness. He was drawn into a shivering bundle, as tight as he could draw himself given the black shackles on his wrists and neck. By a trick of the small light in the cell, his eyes shone visibly, white and wide and afraid, though his face was dark.
—Taken in his bed in a village of the Giant Mountains twenty nights ago, said the physician. Imperial huntsmen followed a spatter of blood from a wolf trap, not long after a wolf attacked sheep nearby and killed a lamb. The blood led toward his village. He was found in bed amid bloody sheets.
—Naked, said the chaplain. The blood still on his mouth.
—May we open the door?
—Open the door, said the Emperor.
For only the briefest moment—it was over before the Emperor noticed it—no one did anything; then the guards took up positions at the door’s side, and the turnkey was put forward, and a torch held up.
The door opened.
No ravening wolf. He drew back, and his chains dragged against the stones: the dreariest of all sounds. Dark hair matted, with blood maybe; a rug or mantle thrown around his nakedness. John Dee thought not of wolves but of a lamed fox kit he once found the boys of Mortlake tormenting: of its big eyes and panting mouth. So still and weak. Reynard. They let the dogs have it.
—Does he speak?
—He has not.
—Is he hurt? He is.
Dee came to the lad (perhaps he was fifteen years old, perhaps not so old) and drawing up the skirts of his robe knelt on the stone floor beside him. The werewolf’s left ankle and foot were bound in cloths, a great clout that the blood had nevertheless seeped through. The naked foot extending from the bandage was blue. The wound stank.
—How did he come by this hurt?
—The trap, said the physician. The force of its closing broke the astragalus. The bone coming through. So this was no spirit. No phantom or phantasticum.
—But, said the chaplain, have not werewolves been wounded by hunters, and the same wound later discovered on the body of the guilty one?
—How could a wound given to a projection redound upon the living body?
—Repercussio, said the chaplain. We are told of the man out hunting, comes upon a clowder of cats, they mock him; he strikes at them with his sword, and cuts off the right paw of the leader. Later returns home, finds his own wife nursing a handless right arm by the fire. Well attested.
The Emperor, wearied with listening to their Latin—a language invented only to worry problems with—asked John Dee:
—Will he die? Can he die?
—He can and will.
—Can he be treated?
—I do not know, Your Majesty, if the wound to his ankle and foot can be treated now. Your physicians can tell better than I.
—If the wound is God’s justice on him, said the chaplain, and shrugged.
—He must not die, said the Emperor. He is the only one ever to have come here alive.
The boy, who had evidently understood nothing either of the Latin nor of the German they spoke, only stared; John Dee wondered what he thought he saw. And why, firstly, had the Emperor brought the boy here? Why had he called an English doctor to this place to see to him? The wound was a dreadful one, and the boy must be in great pain; almost John Dee could see the heart within him beating.
—Of his melancholy, John Dee said: of that too he might die. Here in this place, without sun.
—But that, said the chaplain, that that …
—That is an affection that can be treated.
—A melancholy so deep, said the Emperor. Only the Stone itself could cure such a melancholy.
John Dee arose from where he knelt on the stone floor. He understood now why he had been brought here. He had at his first meeting with this strange king promised that he, John Dee, could make the Stone, cure for all sorrows, philosopher’s son, living fountain, plate of divine victuals, splendor of God on earth, the only thing the Emperor wanted. That was what the angels had told him to say. He would not unsay it; not now, not here.
—I can cure him, he said.
The others there—guards, physician, chaplain, turnkey, wolf-boy, Emperor of the Romans with his hurt eyes—all looked at him, and went on looking; and John Dee thought that from the pressure of their eyes’ lights upon his heart he might himself momentarily transvect, become a dragon, a flambeau, something that would startle and chasten their foolish faces.
—Yes I, he said. Give him into my care and in twenty days I will cure him.
There is no Stone: not in this age. What the angels had told him to promise to the Emperor they could not get: John Dee knew that now. If it had been made in the past, by men wiser than any in this our time, in Ægypt, Athens, or the Lord knows where, then they who made it were not able to pass it down to us, or what they passed down has lost its splendor; and we can no longer follow their instructions, or understand their fables. What the Emperor wanted from John Dee and the hundred other doctors, smokesellers, cinder-bitten cucurbites, Paracelsian iatrochemists and gold-eating Chinamen he supported, he would not get: the age was too cold, too old.
But there are ways to treat a melancholy: a melancholia fumosa, a choler adust, a dry or a moist melancholy, black as Hell though it be. Nothing that John Dee had wanted with all his heart was to be given to him, no more than to the Emperor; perhaps he had sinned against God’s goodness in asking for it, and perhaps he was damned now. But he could still treat a melancholy.
He chose a tower from among the many that rose above the castle, a remote high one with a broad top open to the sky. He was given an apartment just below, a dusty chamber where armor and weapons rusted; these were cleared, and beds and tables laid, and the tools and materials he needed brought in. Through the narrow windows the sun, moving into Libra, shone strongly in; the nights, though, were sharp already, and there was not much time.
From Tebo, where his family remained in the castle of Duke Romberk, he summoned his boy John Carpio. John knew the Bohemian tongue, and was accustomed to wonders. When Dee and Kelley had sought the Stone it was John who had sat up with them and watched with them over the athenor, wherein for the first time they had made new gold from what was not gold. John brought from Tebo a cart of necessary things; from the Emperor’s own workshops came other workmen skilled in several crafts.
When all was ready the wolf was brought up from his dungeon in the White Tower. The Emperor’s physicians had been tending to his hurt foot, closely watched by armed men, and with an iron mask fitted over the werewolf’s face, in case he should transvect and try to bite. Now he was brought out, shut up in a cage like a menagerie beast, carried upward by a gang of strong men, and lifted the last fifty feet to the tower’s top by block and tackle: Dee saw him squeeze shut his eyes in terror and grip his cage’s bars as he arose by jerks. Far off (Dee was sure) the Emperor himself observed from another tower. It was near nightfall. John Dee ordered th
e cage (it would not be needed long, was in all likelihood not needed now, but Dee was under strict orders not to free him uncured) to be placed on a low wheeled table or cart he had had built there on the tower’s top. And the guards were sent below.
—Come, John, he said, summoning his boy. Come. Speak to him.
—What shall I say? asked reluctant John.
—You shall say How do you do, said Doctor Dee.
He could see that the boy’s left foot was mending, though it had been so badly hurt and gone so long untreated that he would never walk without a limp or a stick now. He was thin, lean and summerbrown in the light clothes they had given him: a peasant, a farmer’s boy. His eye liquid and large, afraid and watchful but not a melancholic’s suspicious eye with yellowish white and dull apple: that was good. They said his urine was copious, clear and golden, pale as Bohemian ale: also good.
Dee drew up a stool to the cage and sat. He put his hand within the cage and took the boy’s thin wrist in his.
—Come, Sir Wolf, he said. We shall make a man of you again, if you be willing.
Of all the causes of melancholy the remotest are the stars: the nativity and its conjunctions, the houses where the planets are disposed, the signs ascendant and regnant. All other causes—diet, accident, lovemadness, evil demons, brooding on wrongs, the black humour rising to dry the tender tissues of the brain—all depend on the stars at first.
So the stars must be cure too.
There on the tower’s top the Emperor’s excellent workmen had constructed frames for three large circular mirrors, mounted on gemel rings so that Dee could turn them by geared wheels to face any quarter of the sky. The mirrors were not flat silvered surfaces but catoptric: they were like great shallow dishes, their incurving calculated according to geometries John Dee had worked out more than thirty years before. Catoptrics, or the knowledge and use of such curved mirrors, was in his estimation the central mystery of astrology; only by catoptrically gathering and directing the rays of the planets could a worker achieve anything beyond mere passive description of the state and prospects (fortunate or unfortunate) of the affected party.