CHAPTER FIVE Pacts, Possession and Seance Rooms
While on the whole it was poor uneducated women rather than rich learned men who fell foul of the witch hunters, history abounds with tales - many of them near-apocryphal - about scholarly male sorcerers who sought to traffic with the Devil. But like the illiterate women, many of these men were caught up in a hysteria that engulfed the guilty and innocent alike, and with a dire inevitability they paid the ultimate price.
Undoubtedly, however, there were also serious seekers after all knowledge - most of it being forbidden by the authorities - whose craving for information took them into the murkiest of spiritual byways. These were often solitary men with a reputation for magic who were not above summoning the Devil himself in order to sign a pact in their own blood, one of the more colourful aspects of witchcraft and sorcery.
The pedigree of the pact is perhaps not as old as one might imagine, dating back to two stories that circulated among Christendom as late as the fifth and sixth centuries. The hugely influential Church Father, Saint Jerome, was responsible for the first, the story of Saint Basil, retold by Hincmar of Reims in the ninth century,' which goes like this: a man lusting after an attractive girl visits a sorcerer who arranges for him to make a pact with Satan - basically, the girl is his if he sells his soul. Emissaries of the Evil One duly appear and take him into the Presence. Satan asks in a blasphemous parody of the Christian baptism: `Do you believe in me?' Raging testosterone clearly obliterating common sense, the man responds eagerly: `Yes, I do believe.' He is then asked: `Do you renounce Christ?' He acquiesces: `I do renounce him'. But the Devil refuses to be duped, saying: `You Christians always come to me when you need help but then try to repent later, presuming on the mercy of Christ. I want you to sign up in writing.'
The deal is done and the girl falls helplessly for the newly fledged Satanist, seeking permission to marry him from her father. Unfortunately, as he has ambitions for her to enter a convent, he refuses. Before they embark upon a sinful liaison the young man comes to his senses and the story of the pact leaks out. In the nick of time, Saint Basil intervenes and the girl's honour remains unsullied.
The other influential pact story - which reached a huge audience across Europe over the course of 1,000 years, `fathering the Faust legend and indirectly influencing the Renaissance witch craze" - was that of Theophilus, a priest from Asia Minor who refused a bishopric only to suffer demotion at the hands of the incoming bishop. Furious at this unfair twist of fate, he consulted a Jewish sorcerer, who took him to a remote spot to meet the Devil. Theophilus agreed to enter Satan's service in return for his former position in the Church, signing a pact and kissing him as a token of his obeisance. Theophilus duly became rich and powerful, but ...
As everyone but the pact-signers themselves always seem to know, the deal can only ever end in the bitterest of tears. As agreed, demons turned up on the dot to claim the man's soul, although they were trounced. His terrified prayers had produced none other than the Virgin Mary, who fearlessly marched into Hell itself to retrieve the contract and return it to the sinner to be destroyed. The Virgin begged God for forgiveness for Theophilus, which was granted, and once again the Devil came out of the deal empty-handed.
However, while we would all no doubt congratulate the sinner on his lucky escape, the thought still occurs that it was the man, and not Satan, who proved himself a slippery customer - pact, what pact? Also, if the Devil is so cunning, why is he so often outsmarted by unremarkable mortals? It seems the trick is to sign the pact, enjoy all the advantages and then at the last moment appeal to the Virgin for help. And if Satan is so desperate for human souls, one would imagine he would at least create the illusion of a fabulously enticing end to the pact-signers' lives, instead of having the newcomers to Hell being seized by foul imps from the Pit.
As the tale of Theophilus spread, as Jeffrey Burton Russell notes, `it promoted anti-Semitism and the cult of Mary. More significant, it initiated the idea of the pact.'3 Similar legends did the rounds: such as the story of a student at St Andrews in Scotland who met a `minister' who assisted him in his academic work in return for a deal signed in blood. Even Sir Francis Drake was said to have used similar means with which to defeat the Spanish Armada. In discussing the farcical element in many of these tales, Russell tells the story of a knight
who promised to give the Devil his soul if ever he came to a town called Mouffle. The knight, confident that no such town existed, felt perfectly secure. The knight turned to the religious life, became a monk, and finally rose to the position of archbishop of Reims. Eventually he visited his home town, Ghent. There he became seriously ill and to his honor the devil appeared at his bedside to claim him - on the ground that the real, secret name of Ghent is Mouffle 4
The concept of a devilish pact became intimately involved in the demonization of Muslims, Jews and heretics - all of whom were seen as conscious agents of the Evil One. One Saracen figure was even known as Abisme, or `Hell'. The Muslims were accused of worshipping thousands of demons or idols - which is, of course, ludicrous for the most rigidly monotheistic religion in existence. Nevertheless, the ignorant slurs continued to take hold, seriously affecting the treatment of Muslims, Jews and `witches', all of whom were accused of killing and usually eating Christian babies. One myth, which was to prove very useful to Chief Inquisitor Torquemada, centred on the `Santo Niflo', the `Holy Child' allegedly ritually killed and disembowelled by Jews in order to cast a spell that would exterminate all Christians. It must have been true: after all, most Jews admitted it - under torture, that is.' A variation of witches-as-baby-slaughterers fable was to resurface horrifically in the Satanic ritual abuse hysteria that rampaged among fundamentalist social workers in the late twentieth century, doing untold damage to countless innocent families. (As in the case of the medieval accusations, the fact that no babies were actually missing and no pregnancies unaccounted for made not the tiniest dent in the zealots' mania.)
The most famous demonic pact of all is of course that of Faust, or Dr Faustus, although fiction has long since largely obscured the little fact that might have been attached to the legend. However, it seems that there was a real Dr Faust, a rather unimpressive selfpublicist and charlatan, who - like the Simon Magus of legend - boasted he could out-perform the miracles of Christ. Among his `wonders' was the ability to produce edible game out of season, and even simply threatening a group of monks with the attentions of a poltergeist for serving him sour wine. (The latter was probably on an off-day.) A pathological braggart, he cheerfully spread rumours of his pact with the Devil, bolstering his reputation for the dark arts by announcing to a well-known local man,' `I surely thought you were my brother-in-law and therefore I looked at your feet to see whether long, curved claws projected from them.' Either supremely arrogant or possessed of a death wish, nevertheless all this satanic posturing merely succeeded in getting him expelled from the city of Ingostadt. He was lucky. He died, `scandalously" in 1537, although probably not as the result of being torn to shreds by demons.
In the play by roistering Jacobean playwright Christopher Marlowe, The Tragicall History of Dr Faustus (1604), the eponymous anti-hero notoriously becomes an addict of arcane power, declaring "Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me'.
Undoubtedly, just as feeble-minded old women who lived on their own with a pet cat would invite mutterings of witchcraft - especially if in their senility they had become none too pleasant to their neighbours - similarly solitary men with a penchant for dusty books and scientific experiment would be seen as sorcerers. Given the popularity of the pact fables and the Faust dramas, the idea of having a real Satanist on the outskirts of your village would no doubt really be quite thrilling. Although it is impossible to know how many of these solo scholars were simply bookish and antisocial old men and what proportion were actually concerned with ritual magic, certain famous names were known to be involved with some very dark arts.
Marlowe's Faustus was described as `... falling to a devilish exercise/And glutted more with learning's golden gifts/He surfeits upon cursed necromancy'. Necromancy (from the Greek nekos, `dead' and manteria, 'divination')' or the conjuration of the dead in order to discover the secrets of past, present and - particularly - future, was a grisly business involving horrible and illegal rituals centred on the exhumation of corpses, in which many seekers after knowledge were said to indulge (although given the practical problems involved, not to mention the traumatic modus operandi, probably not many actually did).
Known as `the Black Art', necromancy can be either divination via ghosts - and, like it or not, some forms of Spiritualism did come within that category - or divination using actual corpses, which obviously involves desecrating graves. As a knowledgeable website notes, as a
universal practice of great antiquity, only the profoundly initiated, brave and single-minded magician has any chance of success in such a venture, always considered to be extremely dangerous, for not only is a pact with the Devil necessary, but it is thought that the "astral corpse" has an intense desire to live again and could, by absorbing life-energy from living creatures, prolong its life indefinitely, thus, unless he has taken adequate precautions, the magician might be in great danger.'
The mage and his assistant set up their magic circle in an appropriately emotive location such as a graveyard or blasted heath, on an astrologically propitious night, and call forth the dead, using the most powerful names of God. Woe betide them if they step from the protective circle, for then the temporarily animated corpse could tear them to pieces and destroy their souls. Even within the hallowed circle they have to be proof against nightmarish screaming and gibbering figures, decked out in rags of putrid skin, eye sockets flickering with a dim and hellish light.
Utterly abominated and proscribed in the Bible, as was all forms of communication with the dead - the classic case is the Witch of Endor10 - necromancy has had a long and chequered history, according to the differences in attitude of various cultures and generations.
As I have suggested, it is even possible that Jesus' own movement engaged in a variation of necromancy, if indeed, as the evidence may suggest, they seized the head of the Baptist in order to enslave his soul for purposes of divination. It may not be how the modern mind works, but such necromantic practices have a long pedigree.
Wooed, showered with all the glittering prizes of material and intellectual life, the anti-hero of Dr Faustus is of course doomed to be ultimately betrayed by the Evil One. But the story of his flight from all that is good and holy was also a colourful morality tale guaranteed to give the groundlings rip-roaring, not to say occasionally terrifying, entertainment.
The Faust of the great German poet and philosopher (and onetime sorcerer) Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) is somewhat subtler. He has to battle to maintain his place centre stage against the wit and charm of a particularly charismatic Mephistopheles, who says to God:
The last line merely makes explicit what churchgoers must have long suspected, however guiltily: judging from the dour and pompous Old Testament, Yahweh does appear to have lost his sense of humour, if indeed he ever had one to lose. The wryly amusing Mephistopheles possesses an instant appeal particularly to a modern, Anglo-Saxon audience to whom a talent to amuse and the expectation to be amused is almost everything. A sense of humour - more particularly a sense of the absurd - is now seen as the epitome of civilization, the antidote to fanaticism and bigotry, the gift that marks humans out from the beasts, and often the one light in a grim and bleak life. Yahweh smacks rather too much of a boring head teacher pontificating about rules and regulations while the whole school sniggers over a private joke: to use a Dickensian analogy he is the ramrod straight, and downright sinister, coldhearted Mr Murdstone against the mercurial, funny and irreverent Sam Weller.
Goethe's Mephistopheles - although he has his dark moments - is a brilliant member of the irreverent tradition that had already produced a long line of capering anti-Establishment court jesters and had yet to include the likes of Mel Brooks, the Monty Pythons and Eddie Izzard. With God apparently choosing to present himself as a sort of unsmiling and ranting Taliban, who can blame those who prefer to be entertained and even informed by masters of the subversive art of humour? Surely of all human activities and talents, humour is the most truly Luciferan, with intellectual enquiry - particularly science - a close second, as we shall see.
The dynamic between the truly Satanic and the Luciferan can be see in the horrifying story of the woman arrested for witchcraft, having sex with the Devil and all manner of puerile nonsense, who laughed.'2 She could hardly imagine anything more ludicrous than her being a practising Satanist: but very soon she had been `persuaded' to `confess' to anything and everything the truly Satanic Inquisitors demanded of her. She had been a breath of fresh air in the foetid witch-dungeon until devoured by the Terror, and although we do not know her name, we can still sing her praises.
Like Milton's Satan, Goethe's representative of Evil is also sexy, roguish and attractive: as women have long known and nice guys suspected, bad boys possess a powerful but elusive allure. With a casual and flippant air Mephistopheles announces that he merely observes `the plaguey state of men', finding `it boring to torment them', but nevertheless actively seeks out the rather priggish and unappealing Faust. In a brilliantly astute line, Mephistopheles notes that the human, desperate to attain knowledge and assuage his craving for he knows not what, already `serves me in a bewildered way'. Satan's emissary seeks to make Faust lick up dust, `Just like the snake, my celebrated cousin'. (Mephistopheles also murmurs `Omniscient? No, not I; but well-informed.')
Faust, it seems, was already halfway to Hell, being maddened with the frustrations of academic life that promises so much and delivers so little. Like many another solitary thinker and lost soul, he cries: `Who is my guide? What shall I shun?/Or what imperious urge obey? . . .' Desperate to attain and achieve intellectually and spiritually he muses on where exactly any progress would take him, asking tormentedly: `Shall I then rank with gods?'
Sorcerers sought to command gods to do their bidding or fought to achieve a sort of illusory godhood for themselves, only maintained by the toughest of personal battles and doomed to an ignominious end. On the other hand, Gnostics and mystics realized that every individual is already potentially divine, believing that this inner deity will only truly blossom with profound spiritual honesty, dedication to the true ideals of divinity, and the harnessing of ecstasy. Faust overlooked the fact of his own godhood in seeking to exert power over the gods; a true recipe for disaster.
Yet Faust was only half of the story: in a literal sense he was `possessed' by Mephistopheles - but only when he was ready for the pact. In other words, like many examples of apparent demonic possession, Faust is flooded with evil only when he invites it in. In the world of the occult it is said that `like attracts like', and this is the true meaning of the satanic pact. Give yourself up to a harsh and unforgiving god or bigoted mores and that is what will possess you to the neglect of everything that is brighter and better: your mind and soul will be as narrowly confined and implosively consuming as the source you have espoused. Let in the bright spark of the Luciferan principle, and it will know no bounds, for it is essentially about enhancing, expanding and making sense of human potential.
While enjoying the fruits of his new highly-charged intellect, like all Renaissance anti-heroes, Faust suffers from a fatal flaw - in his case a monumental egotism, surely the besetting sin of all dedicated sorcerers. Inevitably there will be a dreadful reckoning, as Mephistopheles rather honourably points out:
He does, however, add famously, `While there's life, there's hope', although there may not be much hope, one suspects, ultimately for Faust. In fact, his soul is redeemed, largely through the pure love of a good woman, and instead of a hellish climax, there is the sweet sound of hymns of the mystical chorus and a prayer to `Virgin, Queen of Motherhood' to `Keep us, Goddess, in thy grace'.
Goethe's intelligent and often humorous work nevertheless contributed to the widespread idea of the reality of the pact, which fuelled countless witch trials. Ironically, many cases of devilworship, both real and imagined, were born in the heady hot-house atmosphere of religious houses.
In the medieval and Renaissance world few who entered convents or monasteries had a true vocation for the religious life. Often there was simply nothing else for them to do: girls especially would be forced to take the veil if their families failed to provide the requisite dowry for them to marry, or if they were too independent - too much of a handful - to be accepted in the outside world. But living an enclosed, sexless life all too often induced acedia, or the particular sort of `abysmal apathy"3 common to the monk or nun's sequestered existence, and out of such fertile soil grew some spectacular episodes of mass hysteria, particularly centring on a belief in possession by demons. Little wonder that single-sex religious houses were veritable hot-beds of the wildest fantasies - which spelt very bad news for some ...
One infamous case of apparent mass demonic possession took place at Loudun, Vienne, in France in 1634, which became known to a wider twentieth-century audience, first through Aldous Huxley's book The Devils of Loudun (1952) and then through Ken Russell's brilliant but astonishingly graphic film, The Devils (1971)14, which showed torture and death at the stake in unflinching detail.
In this alarming story of dark human potential, erotomania took fast hold among the nuns of Loudun, resulting in fits of screamed blasphemies and obscenities together with much abandoned rolling around on the floor and displaying of genitalia. In the great release this afforded the repressed women under their wimples, frustrations of all kinds emerged into the light of day.
The confession of the real-life Sister Jeanne des Anges reveals a profound abhorrence of her religious life, normally hidden beneath the modest submissiveness expected of a nun, besides illustrating the contemporary belief that all such hysteria was the work of possessing demons:
My mind was often filled with blasphemies, and sometimes I uttered them without being able to take any thought to stop myself. I felt for God a continual aversion . . . The demon beclouded me in such a way that I hardly distinguished his desires from mine; he gave me moreover a strong aversion for my religious calling, so that sometimes when he was in my head I used to tear all my veils and such of my sisters' as I might lay hands on; I trampled them underfoot, I chewed them, cursing the hour when I took the vows ... More often than not I saw quite well that I was the prime cause of my troubles and that the demon acted only according to the openings I gave him . . . As I presented myself at Communion, the devil took possession of my head, and after I had received the blessed host and half moistened it the devil threw it in the priest's face.15
The Mother Superior herself claimed to be possessed by the demons Balan, Iscaron, Leviathan and Behemoth, while the nuns under her care exploded into a mass of writhing, screaming frustrated female flesh. Their exorcist, Father Urbain Grandier, found that with each successive attempt to rid the women of the possessing devils the outbreak became stronger. In the end, Grandier himself was seized by the Inquisition and subjected to the abominable agonies of the Boot, and then his mangled but still living body was committed to the pyre. Somehow, despite his suffering, he managed to maintain his innocence and refused to name any accomplices, but a forged pact with Satan was produced that sealed his fate. It read:
My Lord and Master, I owe you for my God; I promise to serve you while I live, and from this hour I renounce all other gods and Jesus Christ and Mary and all the Saints of Heaven and the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church, and all the goodwill thereof and the prayers which might be made for me. I promise to adore you and do you homage at least three times a day and to do the most evil that I can and to lead into evil as many persons as shall be possible to me, and heartily I renounce the Chrism, Baptism, and all the merits of Jesus Christ; and in case I should desire to change, I give you my body and soul, and my life as holding it from you, having dedicated it forever without any will to repent.
Signed URBAIN GRANDIER in his blood.16
It never seem to dawn on his persecutors that since the possessions continued after he was burnt to death he was effectively exonerated - perhaps they argued that once possessed, always possessed. Or perhaps they simply ignored the inconvenient fact of Grandier's passing.
(Montague Summers solemnly recounts how Grandier tested positive for a `Witch Mark': `two marks were discovered, one upon the shoulder-blade and the other upon the thigh, both of which proved insensible even when pierced with a sharp silver pin'." Summers fully believed that `the discovery of the devil mark' was nigh to `infallible proof' of Devil worship, the mark being an indelible brand of `Satan's own sign manual'.)"
The nuns' lewd performances rocketed from strength to strength, drawing large and appreciative audiences. Sister Claire
... fell on the ground, blaspheming, in convulsions, displaying her privy parts without any shame, and uttering filthy words. Her gestures became so indecent that the audience averted its eyes. She cried out again and again, abusing herself with her hands, `Come on then, fuck me j 19
(Had the observers really wanted to avert their eyes, they would hardly have travelled miles to be part of the audience.)
Yet one must exercise caution in layering on modern scepticism too thickly. Father Surin, who arrived at Loudun as an exorcist was himself possessed, and, like Jeanne, described the curious sensation of watching and listening to himself, unable to stop uttering obscenities and blasphemies, in a kind of unholy out-of-the-bodyexperience. The hysteria may have originated in the most intense sexual frustration and monastic acedia, but it soon took on a life of its own.
Another father confessor who suffered for his charges' hysteria was Louis Gaufridi, a priest of Accoules, near Marseilles, who was jailed in 1611 for `foulest sorcery' and condemned largely because he, too, was discovered by local surgeons to bear the devil's mark 20 His accuser was the teenager Madeleine de la Palud, who admitted in court that her allegations were `all imaginings, illusions, without a word of truth in them' and that she had merely `swooned for the love of Gaufridi'. As Colin Wilson notes, `She then began to quiver with erotic frenzy, her hips moving up and down with the movements of copulation."' Gaufridi was also convicted of trafficking with Satan, and condemned to a heretic's death. Once again latent sexual problems had become magnified at the hands of an institutionally celibate and sex-hating organization.
Despite Madeleine's confession, Gaufridi was `persuaded' to reveal the formula of his Devil's pact, which read:
I, Louis Gaufridi, renounce all good, both spiritual as well as temporal, which may be bestowed upon me by God, the Blessed Virgin Mary, all the Saints of Heaven, particularly my patron S. John-Baptist, as also S. Peter, S. Paul, and S. Francis, and I give myself body and soul to Lucifer, before whom I stand, together with every good that I may ever possess (save always the benefit of the sacraments touching those who receive them). And according to the tenor of these terms have I signed and sealed 22
Gaufridi's alleged victim, Madeleine, signed an even more blood-curdlingly blasphemous pact:
With all my heart and most unfeignedly and with all my will most deliberately do I wholly renounce God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; the most Holy Mother of God; all the Angels and especially my Guardian Angel, the passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, His Precious Blood and the merits thereof, my lot in Paradise, all the good inspirations which God may give me in the future, all prayers which are made or may be made for me.23
If nothing else, these pacts reveal a real talent on the part of the local officers of the Inquisition for imaginative Devil worship. They also underline the central point that without the Church there could be no Devil worship and even no Devil. The one feeds off the other.
Gaufridi and Grandier were almost certainly innocent of the Satanism of which they were accused and for which they died so horribly, although they may have encouraged the women of the convent to flirt - perhaps a little more than that. However, others, like Faust, were not necessarily so blameless, although the extent to which one apportions sin will depend on one's own spiritual background.
Jeffrey Burton Russell explains that the earliest idea of the pact - originally a deal between two more or less equal parties - changed dramatically in medieval times:
It was now assumed that the person making the pact did so as a grovelling slave, renouncing Christ, trampling the cross, worshipping Satan ... offering the obscene kiss ... Heretics and other evildoers had put themselves under Lucifer's command whether or not they had made a conscious and deliberate submission.21
Certain elements in that list echo the alleged blasphemies of the Knights Templar - specifically trampling the cross and renouncing Christ. Almost all historians reject the reality of these accusations, and one can understand why, given the prevalence of confessionby-torture: basically this is inadmissible evidence. But in this case, is it really worthless? As we have seen, the fact of the existence of the `Church of John in the East', the Mandaeans, who encountered the knights in what is now Turkey, adds an ironic twist to the tale. If the inner circle, or at any rate a high-ranking group, within the Templars did indeed become enthused with (most would say, with Summers, `infected by') the Johannite heresy, then no doubt they really did spit and trample on the cross and renounce Jesus, seeing him as an impostor, usurper and possibly even accomplice or accessory to the fact of murder. But to many of the initiates, steeped as they were in that time with a fervent belief in the conventions of Christianity - after all, most Templars joined the Order because they were devoted to Christ - such actions must still have seemed blasphemous, even diabolic. Perhaps in their heart of hearts they truly believed themselves to have gone over to the other side, to be Devil worshippers. This echoes the Cathars' concept of the Baptist as a devil: this would make sense if they knew that the two men had been bitter rivals, for assuming (and who wouldn't?) that Christ is without question always and for ever Goodness personified - the cowboy in the white hat as it were, intent on cleaning up the town - John must therefore be Evil, the scowling bar-brawler in the black hat. But as the song says, `It ain't necessarily so'.
While the Templars' contribution to humanity may not be great - although they did give us the monetary cheque and some stunning Gothic cathedrals - other heretics and Luciferans gave us much more that has proved of lasting value. Indeed, it is true to say that without their intellectual striving, we may well still be in the Dark Ages. Although the true flowering of both these official and unknowing Luciferans was to come much later, in the Age of Enlightenment, its roots were already thrusting through the tentatively promising soil of the Renaissance, nourished in the dark on Mephistophelean magic.
When Leonardo da Vinci mused on the painter's power exalting him to the status of the `Grandson of God',25 it was both a curious and extraordinarily bold statement, for its implications are nothing if not outrageously heretical. To most people, both then and now, it was and is an unwritten article of faith that Jesus was a lifelong, pure celibate, with no children - so to talk of God possessing a grandson, however metaphorically, is astonishing blasphemy. It may be countered that it was merely a clever turn of phrase, virtually meaningless, implying a vague grandeur, nothing more - and that it is pointless trying to analyse it. After all, writers have routinely called themselves the likes of `children of Nature': in his 1914 Immanuel Kant Houston Stewart Chamberlain declared that `All arts, all sciences, all Thought are "daughters of the Eye"', adding `and so it is that the painter is "nipote a Dio", "the grandson of God"'. But he completely misses the point. Being a child of Nature is one thing, but even daring to imply, however poetically or metaphorically that Jesus had children was nothing short of extreme heresy. But in any case, this is Leonardo da Vinci, a viciously antiChurch heretic: indeed, as a sort of Anti-Christ himself, when he made any remark about the Deity it is surely worth noting.
So what drove Leonardo to make such a dangerously controversial statement, even in the privacy of his own notebooks? What did he really mean by aligning himself with the `Grandson of God'? Was he claiming kinship with the historical figure of Christ? (Although, judging by his anti-Jesus, wickedly Johannite symbolism, that seems rather unlikely.) Was he perhaps even implying that he knew Jesus had a son? Or was he not referring, however indirectly, to Jesus at all - but to John? Clearly he saw the Baptist, as least figuratively, as Son of God, and few Johannites would qualify more in their devotion to the cause to be his `son' than Leonardo da Vinci. Whatever his motive, likening himself to the grandson of God would not have been the chosen metaphor of a God-fearing, devout Renaissance Catholic - quite the reverse.
In any case, few more Luciferan individuals than Leonardo da Vinci have ever walked the earth, in his audacity, his refusal to set limits on his own potential or imagination, and his constant challenge to received wisdom, especially to the religious establishment of his day.
In Turin Shroud: In Whose Image?26 Clive Prince and I argued that the `Holy Shroud of Turin' - long believed to bear the miraculously imprinted image of Jesus himself, complete with horrific marks of crucifixion - was a brilliant fake by Leonardo, who not only used his own face for that of Jesus', but created the image using a technique that we now know as photography. In fact, we argue, the Shroud is nothing less than a 500-year-old photograph of Leonardo da Vinci ...
And, with supreme Luciferan genius (although many would call it somewhat warped), he used this pioneering and `devilish' technique to create the ultimate Christian relic, thus ensuring that the priests of the organization he abhorred kept it safe for posterity. That particular example of Luciferan guile - the ultimate practical joke aimed at undermining the very Church that kept the Shroud alive for believers for centuries - shows real inspiration. How he must have laughed. And the Da Vinci `Holy Shroud' contains its very own code.
The Shroud of Turin was quite clearly a substitute for an earlier alleged relic, an embarrassingly obvious painted daub on display in France in the second half of the fourteenth century, which even the local bishop disowned and named the artist involved.27 On the other hand, no one could accuse Leonardo's later version of being a blatant painted fake: a projected, photographic image had no need of paint.
Even if, as Clive and I believe, the Renaissance Maestro had been commissioned to create this crowd-pulling relic by the Vatican itself," the task he had set himself was not without its dangers. Leonardo had to approach this project with even greater than usual secrecy (although by nature an intensely private man): it would not have been wise to make public the method he used to create a non-painted image, thought by many to be sorcery. In fact it seems he employed a camera obscura or pinhole camera - which he called the oculus artificialis, the artificial eye - described in his notebooks in the following terms:
If the facade of a building, or a place, or a landscape is illuminated by the sun and a small hole drilled in a building facing this, which is not directly lighted by the sun, then all objects illuminated by the sun will send their images through this aperture and will appear, upside down, on the wall facing the hole.29
Leonardo was constantly in danger even experimenting with a simple pinhole camera: the Church reserved a special antipathy towards what we would recognize as the early experiments in photography, perhaps because it saw the capturing of a lifelike image without brushes and paint as demonic. It must have seemed like magic: it was not merely the `primitive' peoples who believed that to take someone's photograph was bad luck, for it stole the soul. To the medieval and Renaissance authorities it really did seem as if the new science threatened to `catch' every nuance of the living being, as if a vital essence had been waylaid by the sorcerer/photographer. As demons notoriously stole souls, why were photographers any different? A lifelike photograph was indeed a magical image, even a sort of graphic version of the demonic pact - the soul frozen in time, captured and possessed.
Even a generation after Leonardo, his fellow countryman Giovanni Battista della Porta was arrested for sorcery after demonstrating a magic lantern by projecting the images of actors onto a wall."0 However, in della Porta's case, the evidence was already stacked against him: he was a known Hermeticist and alchemist, and founder of the Academy of Secrets, which was disbanded by the Vatican. He managed to extricate himself from jail, but only with the greatest effort - it was a near thing.
To the photographer/alchemist himself the very concept of capturing living images must have seemed magical, and the actual process even more so. In discussing the `Picatrix' or Ghayat al Hikam, The Aim of the Wise, the Arabic book of astrological and magical aphorisms dating from around 1000 CE, Tobias Churton writes:
Picatrix maintains that the whole art of magic consists in `capturing' and guiding the influence of spiritus (something like the souls of the celestial world, below intellectus, or the Greek nous) into materia. The method consisted in making talismans: images associated with the stars, inscribed on the correct materials at the most propitious times (astrology played a part), and in the right state of mind.* The practice demanded a deep knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, music and metaphysics, and formed a kind of mirror to the practice of alchemy. Talismanic magic aimed to get spiritus into material form, while alchemy aimed at extracting spiritus from matter in order to change the matter and the mind of the operator.31
Churton also adds as a note (to * above): `Perhaps the conceptual origin of Photography: `light-writing', from the Greek photos=light and graphe=writing; making an impression.'32 Is the Shroud of Turin actually a magical talisman, imbued with the DNA, not of the Son of God, but of the pretender to the rank of Grandson of God? There is real blood on the Shroud, after all, although it may be a mixture of Leonardo's and of certain chosen others. (There is even a suggestion of female DNA33 on the image, which would be in keeping with the artist-photographer's obsession with the Gnostic/alchemical androgyne. This can also be seen in Leonardo's sketch `Witch with a Magic Mirror', which at first glance simply shows a young woman admiring herself in a hand mirror. But look carefully and you will see that the back of her head takes the shape of an old bearded man - presumably Leonardo himself: not only the opposite gender, but also the end of the age scale of which she represents the beginning.)34
Leonardo's experiments into the workings of the camera obscuras gave rise to his own increasingly dark reputation. As biographer Maurice Rowden writes:
In Pavia he worked on his camera obscura, to demonstrate his theory that all vision is determined by the angle at which light falls on the eye: the upside-down image thrown on the wall from the camera's pinpoint of light was a more graphic argument than words, and it was little wonder that he got the reputation of being a sorcerer and alchemist 35
Of course Leonardo's penchant for dissecting cadavers, some of which he had specially exhumed, would hardly help - nor would his friendship with Giovan Francesco Rustici, a known necromancer, with whom he was shut away for months creating their joint sculpture, John the Baptist, which now offers target practice for pigeons outside the Baptistery in Florence. (And which, of course, flourishes the `John gesture'.)
Apart from his extreme reverence for the Baptist, Leonardo evinced a sort of worship not only for nature but also number - `let no one read my works who is not a mathematician', he wrote sternly - none of which would endear him to the ecclesiastical authorities, which sought total control over mind and spirit. The whole idea of the universe being controlled by a system other than that approved by the Vatican was naturally anathema. No one could control Leonardo's spirit. Irreverent, as we have seen, to the point of blasphemy, Leonardo would have been delighted by the commission to create the Holy Shroud Mark Two - secretly, of course - both the egregious heretic and naughty schoolboy in him would have been absolutely tickled to be asked to make the holiest of Christian relics.
Yet there were always more serious and usually considerably more profound and even darker aspects to Leonardo's brilliant jokes, as we have seen with his paintings. In this, he was encapsulating a major principle of the secret Rosicrucian movement, officially still in the future when he died in 1519, but which he seems to have known and approved of. Certainly, occult historian Dame Frances Yates had no doubts that Leonardo exhibited `a Rosicrucian frame of mind',36 meaning he encompassed a heretical raft of intellectual pursuits that challenged orthodoxy head-on. Dr Yates also muses, courageously for an academic: `Might it not have been within the outlook of a Magus that a personality like Leonardo was able to co-ordinate his mathematical and mechanical studies with his work as an artist?'37
It was in the early seventeenth century that documents began to circulate among would-be free-thinking intelligentsia. These were the `Rosicrucian Manifestos' issued from Germany, which described the existence of a secret brotherhood of Magi3s closely associated with alchemy (and which, it is claimed, would assist the rise of Freemasonry). The Order, consisting largely of alchemists, magicians, Hermeticists and Cabalists, claimed it originated with Christian Rosenkreutz, who had allegedly died at the vast age of 106 and been buried in a fabled tomb kept lit by an eternal but mysterious source of light. As `Rosenkreutz' means `Rosy Cross' - which owes little or nothing to the Christian symbol" - it seems his story was a metaphor for the continuation of the Rosicrucian `light' in secret places. If such an organization had existed in Leonardo's day, he might have been an enthusiastic member, but as it was, he probably was not an unknown face at more informal, but basically similar groups of magi and alchemists who wished to preserve secret knowledge away from the eyes of the Inquisition. He also shared another quality with the ideal Rosicrucian - a playfulness and sense of trickery and illusion. In his Foreword to Tobias Churton's The Gnostic Philosophy (2003), Dr Christopher McIntosh writes:
The Dutch historian Huizinga, in his classic book Homo Ludens [Playful Man], deals with playfulness and its importance in human culture throughout history. This spirit of playfulness is, I believe, an important vein running through the Gnostic tradition ... Churton mentions an early example in the figure of ... Simon Magus 40
Acknowledging that Churton's previous book, The Golden Builders,
skilfully placed the Rosicrucians within the context of the emerging gulf between science and religion, a gulf which they wished to prevent by creating a universal system of knowledge, linking religion, science philosophy and art. The Rosicrucians embodied this vision in a brilliantly created mythology with a strong element of playfulness."
Therefore Leonardo would have been in every way the perfect Rosicrucian: his scientific, artistic and `religious' (i.e. Johannite) sensibilities being enriched and enhanced by his essential understanding of jokes and playfulness. This creates a mind that sees immense and often apparently contradictory possibilities in everything, that espies a unifying force beneath all nature - and that particular God is one of laughter, just like Goethe's Mephistopheles, but infinitely more powerful, hopeful and full of light. And it may be significant that a nineteenth-century poster advertising a Rosicrucian salon in Paris depicted Leonardo as Keeper of the Grail ...
Cracking the Da Vinci Shroud Code requires the same sort of off-beat perception - which has absolutely no connection with academic standing or an intimate knowledge of Leonardo's brushwork - that will see for itself the giant phallus made of rocks towering above Mary's head in the Virgin of the Rocks, the femininity of the young `St John' or the disembodied hand clutching a dagger in the Last Supper.
To those who eagerly quote the latest desperate outpourings from the usually rather acidulous pens of the remaining `Shroudies' (those who, despite all the evidence to the contrary, insist on believing that the alleged relic is genuine), let me point out certain key factors about the image on the shroud that prove, even to a child - indeed, especially to a child" - that it cannot be anything but a fake. First, the height of the man is literally impossible. As it is supposed to be Jesus' winding cloth, there is a front and a back image, roughly joined at the crown of the head - yet the man is two inches shorter at the back than he is at the front, which would indeed be a miracle. Shroudman is actually 6ft 10in at the front and 6ft Bin at the back, although nowhere in the New Testament does it remark about Christ's astonishing height (and uniquely sloping head). Although it is true that the Christian Bible is not much concerned with physical appearance, if Jesus were a giant surely some sort of remark would have crept in, especially in an era when great height was associated with kingship 43
There is absolutely no doubt about this: in my capacity as a consultant for the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television's exhibition, `The Unexplained', in 1999 I, along with Clive Prince had the golden opportunity to put our theory about Shroudman's height to the test. (Previously we had simply done the calculations.) The museum had made the full-length photographic reproduction of the Shroud the focus of a huge, otherwise completely bare room, displaying it on a massive, specially built light-box no more than two feet from the ground. This enabled the visitor to look down at the image, besides being able to stand back at a distance and see it from all angles - much more telling than being crammed shoulder to shoulder in a long line of pilgrims and shuffling along to see no more than a couple of inches of the real thing at roughly eye-height. Conveniently Clive is exactly six foot tall, so we were able to measure the height of Shroudman with some precision, by laying him on the ground beside it, aligned with the top of the head. We also had assistance from the museum staff. And yes, Shroudman is enormously, impossibly tall ... Of course as a projected image he could be any height at all from tiny to gigantic, although in that case one has to wonder why a genius like Leonardo failed to correct such a blunder. But then, was it actually a mistake - could the ludicrous height actually have been left there deliberately?
Remember this is the man who set a giant phallus on the Virgin Mary's head and got away with it for 500 years; the artist whose `St John' is a woman and whose Last Supper contains a disembodied hand clutching a dagger that virtually no one ever notices. Leonardo was the ultimate psychologist, knowing - even relying on - the fact that people only ever see what they expect or want to see. If that were not true, he would have been in serious trouble virtually before the paint dried on many of his masterpieces. He seems to be creating `errors' of a particular sort, but not for the masses to notice, because he had no intention for them to do so and was confident that they would miss them anyway, but perhaps to speak profoundly to `those with eyes to see'.
Here he has created not only an impossibly tall Jesus, but the man's head is apparently severed. Indeed, there is a distinct demarcation line at the base of the neck, which can be seen perfectly, like many of the other details, when viewed in photographic negative. Once again, this is beyond reasonable doubt: we had the image run through a computer programme that turned it into a species of contour map," making the discovery that the image does indeed suddenly stop completely at the exact position of the line, picking up again at the upper chest. Why should this be?
One reason was no doubt simply practical. It is obvious that the image of the head at the front was created at a different time from the rest of the front and the whole of the back. The face is actually a different size and scale from the body,45 being also narrower and proportionately smaller than the head at the back (which is also at a completely different angle) 46 The ears are missing, replaced by curious blank strips between the face and the hair, which gives an oddly neat frame to the face (unlikely were the body supine) 47
In fact, we discovered very quickly during our experiments that this peculiar foreshortening is simply a sideeffect of using a lens in the camera obscura, a sort of fish-eye effect. Leonardo is known to have ground his own lenses, even making himself a rather `cool' pair of dark blue spectacles. (But again, one wonders why? Why did he need to protect his eyes from intense light and heat? Did he make the glasses specially for his Shroud work, in which - as we discovered for ourselves48 - when creating similar images, both heat and light must be kept at a maximum for over 24 hours?)49 The question of a lens led us to make a particularly exciting discovery: we know Leonardo used one at least in his manufacture of the face of the Shroud of Turin because it can clearly be seen in the dead centre of the face - the bridge of the nose - as a dark circle on the negative and a light circle on the positive image. This is a photograph of the lens itself.50
However, this being Leonardo, one layer of explanation will never be enough. Multi-faceted himself, he demands that we engage our brains, hearts and souls (not to mention our sense of the absurd): his unsettling representations striking at the core of the psyche, and sometimes giving a curious twist to the heart. As in his uncompromising satire on Marian virginity, The Virgin of the Rocks, his work may often be curiously dark in the literal, artistic sense, but it is also white-hot with anger - and that anger communicates itself loud and clear after 500 years to `those with eyes to see'.
Considering all the bold and outrageous Johannite symbolism in Leonardo's paintings, was he also saying in his depiction of a very obviously separate head on the Shroud of Turin, that `one who was beheaded is "over" - morally and spiritually - one who was crucified'? Certainly that would be the neatest and ultimate symbol of the real `Da Vinci code' .. .
It is almost certainly Leonardo's own face (see illustrations). He loved putting himself in his works - such as in the bottom righthand corner of The Adoration of the Magi or as Saint Thaddeus/Saint Jude in the Last Supper: the joke no doubt being that Saint Jude is patron saint of lost causes. It is even possible to see that Saint Jude's face is very similar to that of Shroudman, from the distinctive hairline to the large, knobbly nose.
Various other devotees to the idea that Leonardo faked the Shroud" have suggested that he used his own face out of reverence for Jesus, literally in imitation of Christ. However, even leaving his personal heretical beliefs aside for the moment, from the viewpoint of his time and place that is simply inconceivable. He has represented himself splattered with Christ's holy blood, believed to be sacred and redemptive: to fake it would be absolute sacrilege. It would have been impossible for a believer, a true son of the Church, to have taken such a far-reaching liberty with the face and body of the Redeemer. To have faked Christ's broken and bloody body was neither for the squeamish nor anyone who entertained any hope of ever seeing Heaven. On the other hand, a passionate dyed-in-thewool `anti-Christ' would have welcomed the chance to render Jesus not only mortal, but also made in his own image - and Leonardo was quick to take such an opportunity. Not only did he think of himself as Grandson of God, but clearly had ambitions to be his own father! (For the illegitimate artist who suffered at the hands of his half siblings, especially over vexed problems of inheritance, presenting himself as the alleged Son of God would have had an extra piquancy. Unfortunately, this particular association passed Sigmund Freud by.)
Of course, from an objective viewpoint, with the Turin Shroud Leonardo succeeded brilliantly, even though he could never have known that in the late nineteenth century his `magic' image would suddenly leap into incredible detail when it was photographed for the first time and seen in negative 52 (Although it seems unlikely, did Leonardo himself have some means of seeing Shroudman in negative? Did he know that he had created such a work of Luciferan genius - or was it merely a shot in the dark, a species of message in a bottle thrown into the seas of posterity with the hope that one day it would be recognized for what it is?)
As for the image of the terribly beaten and nailed body, that presumably came from unholy tinkerings with scourge, hammer and nails behind closed doors with one of the many corpses Leonardo used for anatomical research. This is an actual body that really had been subjected to the great abuses of beating, scourging and the dreadful piercing of hands, side and feet. (The head bears the marks of the Crown of Thorns, but perfectionist Leonardo would have endured the pain for the sake of his heretical art. In fact, the face itself is remarkably free from wounds and certainly far too composed for a man who had allegedly been tortured to death.) The body had truly been nailed upright, for the nail wounds are in the wrists and not the palms, showing a grim practicality. (Incredibly, some Shroudies have even suggested that no one could have known how to recreate the wounds of the crucifixion. Yet surely all one has to do is read the New Testament, which describes what happened to Jesus - and boldly set about some grisly experimentation.) And, although Leonardo never painted a crucifixion, there is an intriguing reference in a note that has long puzzled biographers, dating from c. 1489 that refers to a specimen that he had borrowed: .. the bone that Gian de Bellinzona pierced and from which he easily extracted the nail ...'S3 It seems that Leonardo was experimenting with crucifixion for some nefarious purpose of his own.
It is significant that while there is no paint to speak of54 on the Shroud, there is real blood around the sites of the wounds. A painstaking - not to say nit-picking - genius, Leonardo was unlikely to spoil his masterpiece by splodging it with crude daubs of paint instead of blood. (Similarly, of all fakers a perfectionist of his genius would hardly have used linen straight from the loom for a relic that was supposed to be 1,500 years old.) So it might be said, albeit perhaps melodramatically, that in one sense at least he did sign away his soul to Lucifer in blood.
Faking the `Shroud' of Turin was, arguably, Da Vinci's greatest hour - certainly as a Luciferan, whether one takes that to mean an agent of the Devil, as would most Catholics and all Shroudies, or merely as a daring experimental scientist. The fake is an astonishing joke - truly a commedia, a profoundly serious comment - but in this case, also a brutal nose-thumbing at the Church, even at its founder. As his first biographer, Giorgio Vasari, wrote: `Leonardo formed . .. a doctrine so heretical that he depended no more on ... any religion', although perhaps prudently this passage was removed from subsequent editions, being replaced by a brief and unconvincing note about Leonardo's death-bed repentance."
Never officially endorsed by the Vatican, although it has come close once or twice, the Shroud for the most part is kept locked away from prying eyes and the depredations of modern life and the polluting air. From time to time it is displayed in the cathedral at Turin, where no doubt the shade of the old master enjoys the religious raptures of the pilgrims crossing themselves and murmuring devout prayers over a photograph of a sixteenthcentury Johannite heretic.
Even to a non-Christian, the sheer chutzpah involved is breathtaking, almost shocking in both the literal and figurative sense. The image of the Shroud, particularly in minutely detailed negative, induces that peculiar abrupt lurching in the pit of the stomach that marks an encounter with something truly outrageous - as in suddenly seeing for oneself what he did with the dark rocks looming above the Virgin's head. Coming face-to-face with Leonardo's wilful, brilliant and intentionally blasphemous masterpiece is a moment of truth that many would rather not experience.
Nor could Leonardo have guessed at another extraordinary sideeffect of using his own face as the model for Christ on the Shroud - although no doubt he would have exploded with laughter if he had. Although there had been depictions of Jesus as bearded before the Turin Shroud went on display in the late fifteenth century, after that watershed Christ's appearance in popular art changed specifically to resemble it. Suddenly the divine look was standardized into a very tall (although never quite so tall as Shroudman, for obvious reasons), broad-shouldered man with reddish hair parted in the middle, a long nose and hauntingly beautiful, regular features. In other words, our general cultural perception of what Jesus looked like is none other than Leonardo - another shocking triumph for the inspiration of The Da Vinci Code. Just think of all those plaster statues, the countless stained-glass windows and twisted bodies on crucifixes not as images of a first-century Jewish teacher and mage at all, but a fourteenth-fifteenth-century Italian homosexual heretic who hated Christ with all his Johannite heart. Again, there is that disturbing shift in the pit of the stomach, as yet again the foundation of our collective unconscious lifts - and shudders slightly.
One day the `Shroud' may be prominently displayed where it belongs - in a museum of photography or science and technology, where the fruits of the Da Vinci heresy can be freely appreciated for what they are, far away from pilgrims, priests, candles and incense. The Shroud does not deserve to be prayed over, but then perhaps nothing does.
Although the authorities' suppression of scientific experiment and intellectual enquiry from the early days of Christianity to the Age of Enlightenment was patchily inconsistent - depending largely on the attitude to learning of each individual pope - it is true to say that in general the Church frowned on too much knowledge, debate and thinking. And it surely is no coincidence that the Latin and Greek for `knowledge' - respectively scientia and gnosis - represent the two aspects of learning that it most abhorred. As a blend of much that was anathematized, being a left-handed-gay-vegetarian- Johannite-photographer-aviator-anatomist, Leonardo got away with an enormous amount, due mostly to friends in high places, but even he often thought it prudent to move from place to place quite quickly from time to time. (It was only at the end of his life, in 1513, when Pope Leo X began to express his distaste for Leonardo's anatomical work that he ceased his obsessive dissection in hospitals, charnel houses and graveyards.)
However, although in many ways his contribution to human knowledge and to the annals of heresy was unique, Leonardo was merely the bright blossoming of an ancient tradition of working behind closed doors, away from misunderstanding, the rack and the stake. Usually these secretive scholars were known as `alchemists', a sort of convenient umbrella term for what we would acknowledge simply as research scientists. Alchemy proper, however, was a complex business, often involving mystical and spiritual exercises, with a strong sexual content: once again, we discuss that sacred sexuality is the background to an eminent esoteric tradition 56
True alchemists often positively welcomed their bad reputation as idiotic charlatans who insanely wasted their lives attempting to turn base metal such as lead into pure gold. To be dismissed as one of these empty-headed materialistic `puffers' could mean being left alone to concentrate on much weightier matters such as searching for the fabled Philosopher's Stone, an elixir that would bestow not only near-immortality, but also supreme spiritual knowledge and wisdom. Every child the world over today knows that one Nicholas Flamel is rumoured to have found this magical substance, thanks to J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, but few realize that he really existed. Flamel lived and worked in fourteenth-century Paris with his beloved wife Perrenelle, with whom it is said he achieved the `Great Work' on 17 January 1382. As a result, rumours still abound that they lived for hundreds of years.
While it is untrue that all popes were equally anti-learning as far as the laity was concerned, the activities of most alchemists were deemed to be inherently beyond the pale. Many sought not only to transmute base metal - be it their own souls or a heap of uninspiring lead - into something purer and finer, but some attempted to blast through all restrictions and enter the truly Luciferan world of creating life in the laboratory. Stories circulated about the original `test-tube babies', said to be unholy little homunculi, created without the usual procreation specifically to scurry around to do their master's bidding as occult servitors. Needless to say, the homunculi were, at least in the vast majority of alleged cases, the product of over-heated imaginations, but it does reveal that scientists condemned for trying to `play God' are not unique to the twenty-first century.
However, the great physician and alchemist/sorcerer Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim - otherwise known simply as Paracelsus (1493-1541) - declared boldly `It is necessary to know evil things as well as good; for who can know what is good without also knowing what is evil?'s' An active Luciferan in this sense, he claimed to have actually made several such little monsters using a process he described as follows:
Let the semen of a man putrefy by itself in a sealed cucurbite with the highest putrefaction of venter equinus for forty days, or until it begins at last to live, move, and be agitated, which can easily be seen. At this time it will be in some degree like a human being, but, nevertheless, transparent and without a body. If now, after this, it be every day nourished and fed cautiously with the arcanum of human blood, and kept for forty weeks in the perpetual and equal heat of venter equinus, it becomes thencefold a true living human infant, having all the members of a child that is born from a woman, but much smaller. This we call a homunculus; and it should be afterwards educated with the greatest care and zeal, until it grows up and starts to display intelligence."
(Sceptics would no doubt point out that some movement was virtually guaranteed in putrefying matter after a certain time - but from nothing more occult than maggots.)
In 1658, Gian Battista della Porta, the sorcerer who was arrested for projecting images using a magic lantern (see above), proposed to show `how living Creatures of divers kinds, may be mingled and coupled together, and that from them, new, and yet profitable kinds of living Creatures may be generated.'S9 Della Porta aimed to produce through magical means all sorts of animate gimmicks, writing instructions on `how to generate pretty little dogs to play with'.60 However, Paracelsus saw a greater practical potential in the little homunculi, writing:
Now, this is one of the greatest secrets which God has revealed to mortal and fallible man. It is a miracle and a marvel of God, an arcanum above all arcana, and deserves to be kept secret until the last of times, when there shall be nothing hidden, but all things shall be manifest. And although up to this time it has not been known to men, it was, nevertheless, known to the woodsprites and nymphs and giants long ago, because they themselves were sprung from this source; since from such homunculi when they come to manhood are produced giants, pygmies and other marvellous people, who get great victories over their enemies, and know all secrets and hidden matters 61
Even the great Paracelsus clearly had areas of his imagination that were still marked, as on the old maps, `Here there be Dragons'. It was said that he willed that when he became old, he would be cut into small pieces and buried in horse manure in order to resurrect as a virile young man. Unfortunately, his servant dug him up too soon, and ruined the marvellous plan.
As the self-styled `Christ of Medicine"' - he also gave one of his names to the word `bombastic', because of his overbearing manner. Paracelsus studied alchemy and chemistry at Basle University before researching minerals, metals and the occupational diseases of miners. Because he believed that `like acts on like' in minute doses, he is credited with the discovery of homeopathy, as well as inventing `ether as an anaesthetic and laudanum as a tranquillizer' [and] he was the first to describe silicosis, and `traced goitre to minerals found in drinking water'.63 Announcing `If the spirit suffers, the body suffers also', he was also clearly a pioneer of what we would call holistic medicine. A major influence on subsequent generations of physicians, even his ideas about homunculi were taken seriously.
In 1638 Laurens de Castelan made the point in his `Rare et Curieux Discours de ]a Plante Appelee Mandragore' that although most people rejected Paracelsus' theories his homunculus could still have been `a bit of diabolical magic' - in other words, it may have been real, but created by devilish means. In 1672 the scientist Christian Friedrich Garmann wrote of the evolution of the human egg, musing about the possibility that conception could take place outside the womb, in an article about `the chemical homunculus of Paracelsus' M And in 1679 Scottish doctor William Maxwell wrote in his De Medicina Magnetica that `just as salts of herbs can reproduce the likeness of the herb in the test tube, so the salt of human blood can show the image of a man - "the true homunculus of Paracelsus".'65
It may be significant that it was also claimed to be possible to grow magical, sentient entities inside the wombs of cows. Leonardo's drawing of a perfectly formed human baby curled up inside a cow's uterus has always been dismissed as a typical Da Vinci joke - presumably at the expense of women. Perhaps it was a sly dig at the sanctity of motherhood, but perhaps it was also a comment, satirical or even admiring, on the magical concept of homunculi. Leonardo's own lifelike creations - at least those we know about - took the less creepy form of a robot, a true working humanoid automaton, which he built c. 1495.11 Dressed in a full suit of armour, it was designed to open and close its mouth, move its head, sit up and wave its arms, and `may have made sounds to the accompaniment of automated drums' 67 Leonardo's pioneering work with robots directly inspired Mark Rosheim's `mechanical men' or `anthrobots', and whose work `has culminated in the electric 43-axis Robotic Surrogate built for NASA Johnson Space Center and intended to service Space Station Freedom. Thus, Leonardo's vision reaches beyond the confines of our planet to explore the universe.'6'
While making moving machines in the humanoid shape may not have been considered very devilish by sophisticated men of his day, the Church predictably disliked any such object (see below). But as for the notion of attempting to fly off into space it had no place in their learning, as did any real astronomical research. It is as well that Leonardo kept his notebooks to himself, for one bears the scribbled note, perhaps a reminder, to `make glasses to see Moon up close', anticipating the astronomical daring of Galileo and Copernicus by a generation, neither of whom were exactly revered by the Inquisition.
England's most famous mage, Dr John Dee (1527-1606), also received a reputation for sorcery because he designed and built a robot - a mechanical beetle for a play. By then, however, he had established himself as something of an academic prodigy - having gone up to Cambridge University when just fifteen, becoming Greek Under-reader and a fellow of its newest college, Trinity, where he was already rumoured to be engaged in the dark arts.
As visiting scholar to all the great European seats of learning, Dee seized every opportunity to debate the finer points of astrology, mathematics, navigation, theology, even ritual magic - but as always, concentrating on his first love, astrology.69 It was his astrological work that was to put him in great personal danger.
In 1553 the future Queen Elizabeth I was under house arrest on the orders of her fanatical Catholic sister, Queen Mary (who tortured and burnt her way to earn the title of `Bloody Mary').70 Princess Elizabeth summoned Dee to cast her regal sister's horoscope in order to know when Mary might die, but the Queen retaliated by throwing the astrologer in jail for trying to kill her through sorcery. Strangely, at such a time and in the reign of such a monarch, even one who was believed to traffic with devils for purposes of treason survived: he was released in 1555 after having been freed then re-arrested for heresy, over which he also miraculously triumphed. Dee's apparently charmed life was to last - but certainly not for ever.
When Mary died" and Elizabeth took the throne in 1558, she appointed Dr Dee as her court astrologer, and - judging by the secrecy that surrounded his many foreign trips as `agent 007' - perhaps even a major spy, although as ever where the intelligence agencies are concerned, hard evidence remains elusive. With royal favour, Dee's career flourished. He also dedicated his tract on alchemy, The Hieroglyphic Mind (1564), to the Hungarian Emperor Maximilian II, thus ensuring his celebrity spread across Europe. In the guise of Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest, he says happily: `Now does my project gather to a head: My charms crack not; my spirits obey; and time/Goes upright with his carriage.''' It was during this golden time that he began to work with mediums, although the first proved useless for his purposes. The second, however, was to change his life completely over the course of a long and bizarre occult partnership ...
In 1581 he met Edward Kelley (or 'Kelly'),7" an occultist, alchemist, magus and necromancer - exactly what any selfrespecting magician wanted, although Kelley always seemed reluctant to exploit his gift for mediumship. Ironically, although Dee himself had a raw talent for divination, he found it impossible to open up completely to the invisible world. Kelley may have been the answer to Dee's prayers as magical colleague, but perhaps his reputation for petty crime had not penetrated as far south as the astrologer's home in Mortlake, Surrey, although his cropped ears, mutilated as punishment for passing forged coins, would inevitably be spotted no matter how closely he pulled his black cap close over them. Kelley had a murky background as rogue lawyer, when he was convicted of forging land deals, and other semi-professional crimes. When he first presented himself to Dee, Kelley used the alias `Talbot', which he maintained from March to November 1582, while he ingratiated himself with the erudite court astrologer. Suddenly Talbot disappears from Dee's diary to be replaced by `E.K'. Dee's fourth Book of Mysteries begins `after the reconciliation with Kelley"' - perhaps the first of the rows and upsets that were to plague their partnership.
However, in 1570 Kelley had acquired an old alchemical document concerning the transmutation of metals, and the story goes that eight years later he successfully turned 1lb of lead into pure gold. Although this would always be a potent prize to dangle before the greedy eyes of kings and princes, it was gold of another sort that he offered to Dee, who coveted intellectual and spiritual wealth far more. The twenty-seven-year-old entered the Dee household as a Mephistopheles to a Faust: charming, persuasive, and corrupting, another snake in Eden.
Kelley used a variety of techniques with which to operate clairvoyantly, including a `shewstone', something akin to a crystal ball. As Samuel Butler (1612-80) wrote scathingly in his Hudibras:75 `Kelly did all his feats upon/the Devil's looking-glass, a stone/ Where, playing with him at bo-peep,/He solv'd all problems ne'er so deep'. Kelley was clearly adept at `scrying' - using a polished surface, in his case a convex mirror of obsidian76 to see far-off places or times, or as a medium through which to communicate with non-human entities - such as the Archangel Uriel.
(As the Baptist's traditional guardian, perhaps Uriel represented the idea that John's skull would be used for purposes of divination. It may also be significant that young boys who were used as clairvoyants in the early Common Era often had `Uriel' written on their foreheads.)
The archangel gave him instructions for forging a protective talisman, an essential tool for those who engage in the perilous business of working with entities that might not be all they claim to be. In later years Dee developed the `Monas Hieroglyphica', which he believed to be the ultimate occult symbol.
During the next seven years, Dee and Kelley worked together obsessively. The mage recorded his angelic conversations, in which he was taught the `ancient Enochian language' - believed to be spoken in Eden before the Fall - besides completely new magical rituals. While many of his notes are perhaps deliberately obscure, and others are simply concerned with the finer points of Enochian grammar, others detail what appear to be authentic predictions. For example, on 5 May 1583 Uriel gave Kelley a disturbing vision of a horizon darkened with a huge fleet of ships, later presumed to be the Spanish Armada of 1588, which perhaps prompted Dee to hex the enemy vessels. Significantly, the medals struck to commemorate England's escape from the Armada echo the idea of a miracle, bearing the words: `God blew his wind and they were scattered'. Uriel also bestowed another major vision, of a woman being beheaded by `a black man' - almost certainly Mary Queen of Scots at the hands of the black-hooded executioner.
Although their `workings' were quintessentially magical, underlying them was Dee's fervent desire to return the Christian religion to a potent unity - but as all he could see all around him were dissent and schisms, persecution and bigotry, this reunification would have to be achieved in heterodox ways. Uriel told him: `These are the days wherein the prophet said, No faith should be found on the earth. This faith must be restored again, and men must glorify God in his works. I am the light of God' [My emphasis]." The strongly Gnostic tone is repeated, for example, in the angel Madimi's words to Dee:
And lo, the issue which he giveth thee is wisdom. But to, the mother of it is not yet delivered. For, if a woman know her times and seasons of deliverance: Much more doth he [God], who is the Mother of all things ..."
Much of the angelic material was colourfully and repetitively apocalyptic in nature, and rarely wasted the opportunity to emphasize the fact that the two men were called and chosen, as in `You are becoming prophets, and are sanctified for the coming of the Lord.' But the spirits that appeared in the shewstone were not always rigidly dour. Kelley saw a luminous figure declare: `There is a God, let us be merry. E. K. [Kelley] He danceth still. There is a heaven. Let us be merry. E. K. Now he taketh off his clothes again.'79
The angels took over Dee's life. He and Kelley, together with their respective families, travelled widely in Europe on the suggestions/orders of the communicators, finally arriving at Cracow, Poland, in 1587. It was there that the angelic idyll turned terminally sour. On 17 April the angels urged the men to indulge in wife-swapping, which horrified Dr Dee - who worried that the angels might have become demons - but as the injunction was something of a command, they reluctantly complied. Perhaps in all senses, that broke the spell. Although nearly thirty years older than his wife Jane, Dee was devoted to her, often scribbling caring diary notes about her moods and health. Both of them had always been faithful to each other, and this new injunction - which they reluctantly obeyed - proved traumatic. Although still on speaking terms with Kelley, the Dees left him on the continent and fled back to England, where it is said Dr Dee renounced magic for ever, dying an outcast and a pauper in 1608.
(Many sorcerers have died in obscurity and poverty, providing an inevitable and facile cautionary tale for moralists and fundamentalists, but one wonders if the unfortunate magi had simply been too addicted to the delights and challenges of the other-world ultimately to bother to forge much of a life in this one.80 To be ravished by even the least spectacular magic often means ignoring bills - and the necessity to find the means to pay them81-and maintaining social ties. However, many scholars in disciplines other than the occult have also succumbed to the enchanted addiction of learning, but the moralists ignore the inconvenient fact that they, too, died of starvation and destitution, also utterly alone and without even the excuse of soul-devouring demons at hand.)
Even though receiving the equivalent of a knighthood from the King of Bohemia, Kelley's good fortune came to an abrupt end, although - as with much about his life - the precise circumstances are not known. Perhaps he had returned to his previous career as a forger, or the monarch simply tired of his empty promises to produce gold. Kelley was repeatedly thrown in jail, from where he wrote - full of indignation and self-righteousness - to the king, hinting once more that he could create gold for him from base metal. The tone may be seen from the opening passage:
Though I have already twice suffered chains and imprisonment in Bohemia, an indignity which has been offered to me in no other part of the world, yet my mind, remaining unbound, has all this time exercised itself in the study of that philosophy which is despised by the wicked and foolish, but is praised by the wise. Nay, the saying that none but fools and lawyers hate and despise Alchemy has passed into proverb. Furthermore, as during the preceding three years I have used great labour, expense, and acre in order to discover for your Majesty that which might afford you much profit and pleasure, so during my imprisonment - a calamity which has befallen me through the action of your Majesty - I am utterly incapable of remaining idle. Hence I have written a treatize ... But if my teaching displease you, know that you are still altogether wandering astray from the true scope and aim of this matter, and are utterly wasting your money, time, labour, and hope .. sz
This mixture of indignation, barely veiled accusation and bombast was not well advised. Kelley ended his days trying to escape from jail in 1595.83
As for Dee, he seemed increasingly a broken man. Money was a serious problem, although Queen Elizabeth constantly reassured him that one day he would be granted a profitable living. It never came. Then came absolute disaster for such a dedicated scholar: his precious library and laboratory were razed to the ground by a mob who believed him to be in league with the Devil, and despite his royal patronage, it was with such an unenviable reputation that he eked out his last years. Then a double blow: the Queen's great councillor, Lord Burleigh (William Cecil), and Dee's friend and patron, died in 1598, and then the regal Gloriana herself passed on in 1603. For his last three years Dee entered not a single thought in his diary. The sad old man seemed to be living out Prospero's decline:
A trite and contrived end for a great magician. He went to join his Queen - and possibly Edward Kelley - on 26 March 1609.
It is easy for twenty-first-century readers to dismiss the angelic dealings of the Dee-Kelley team as foolishness, illusion, the product of suggestibility - even afolie a deux - or simply the result of some nifty stage-management from the unscrupulous croppedeared mountebank. Indeed, unsurprisingly, the first of the angelic messages urged Dee to pay Kelley the then considerable sum of £30 a year as a pension, together with the plain statement `none shall enter into the knowledge of these mysteries but this worker': similarly, the order to exchange wives coincided neatly with the climax of Kelley's lust for Mrs Dee. But as with many cases of the paranormal, bald scepticism rarely provides the complete answer.s5
As set down in Dee's Liber Logaeth, Enochian (communicated via Kelley from an angel called Nalvage) seems to be a valid language, complete with its own vocabulary, grammar and syntax - difficult, if not impossible for a non-academic such as Kelley to have invented, at least consciously. The problem is that even in the twenty-first century we have little idea about the capabilities of the human unconscious, although the annals of abnormal psychology offer a glimpse of a dark, Luciferan world of immense and labyrinthine possibilities.
Dr Dee was by no means the only person to have received a completely new language under what might be termed paranormal circumstances. In the late nineteenth century, Catherine Elise Muller, a Spiritualist medium from Geneva, Switzerland, proved that while in trance she would produce automatic writing in Arabic, or - through a spirit `control' called Leopold - speak what she claimed to be Martian. She even drew crude sketches of life on Mars, complete with streets, houses and the latest Martian fashions.
As her fame spread, the renowned Swiss Professor of psychology, Theodore Flournoy, took an intense interest in Catherine - now operating under the pseudonym of Helene Smith - spending five years sitting in on her seances and recording her `Martian' outpourings. Applying psychoanalytical techniques, he concluded that she was abnormally imaginative, her fantasies emerging as highly coloured fact during the dissociative state of trance. She may not have been consciously cheating, but her unconscious mind was. However, Flournoy added that Catherine's exceptional gift for fabrication was probably augmented by real psychokinesis (mind over matter) and a certain amount of telepathy - a conclusion that would be far too brave and subtle for today's media-hungry alleged `parapsychologists', eager to make their names as professional debunkers, a species of televangelists for a particularly aggressive and bigoted form of rationalism.
Moreover, although a Sanskrit expert declared that 98 per cent of Catherine's `Martian' words could be traced to known languages, he claimed that her outpourings behaved like a real tongue, with authentic grammatical constructions. If a relatively uneducated young woman in the nineteenth century could unconsciously invent a passable language, it is possible that in the heightened atmosphere of a sixteenthcentury sorcerer's laboratory, so could Edward Kelley.
As we will see when discussing The Book of the Law, produced by ritual magician Aleister Crowley in 1904, inspired or `channelled' writings usually appear to have originated with another personality or mind entirely, which is why they are so compelling in the first place. Of course these days we know all about dissociation in principle - the apparent splitting of an individual's consciousness to reveal seemingly discrete personalities. The most obvious example of this is multiple personality, where a single person can exhibit such entirely different modes of thinking and expression that other people appear to be trapped, as it were, inside the `host' body. Although this is understood to be classic dissociation pure and simple, certain related phenomena take multiple personality into the category of `extreme possibilities' (as The X-Files' Fox Mulder would say): for example, while six of the seven personalities obediently slumber after the host takes a strong sleeping pill, the last one refuses to succumb and stays awake. But how? In other cases one particular personality might claim to suffer from diabetes - which is confirmed by a blood test, although none of the other personalities test positive when it is their turn to take over ...
We may label yesterday's magical activity either as fraud or `abnormal psychology' but that does not mean that by the simple but satisfying act of categorization it is actually tamed or even explained. By their very nature paranormal events are impossible to pin down, even often difficult to interpret.
Were Dee's magical operations actually demonic, as the mob of arsonists that destroyed his library and laboratory believed? It must be remembered that although he may have thought differently from most of today's mainstream academics,R" Dee was by nobody's standards a fool. Frances Yates in her book, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972), claimed that he was one of the founders of the Rosicrucian movement and that it was essentially English, although Tobias Churton disagrees, saying `Germany and Bohemia had sufficient Magi (if not so universally brilliant as Dee) of their own to initiate their own movement', although he does admit that the time Dee and Kelley spent abroad `was a significant influence on the alchemico-magico-apocalyptic reforming philosophy', especially through his Monas Hieroglyphica (1564), `which laid out a complex theory of cosmic unity whose aim was to integrate all knowledge in a cosmic spiritual/mathematical system: an aim implicit in the Rosicrucian endeavour.'R' Churton could have been describing Leonardo.
Even Dee's non-esoteric achievements are astounding enough: coining the word `Britannia', he tried to ensure she ruled the waves by drawing up the first comprehensive, long-term plan for the British Navy. The first scholar to apply Euclidian geometry to navigation, he built the necessary instruments to do so, trained several of the greatest navigators of the Age of Discovery, and charted the Northeast and Northwest Passages accurately, without leaving his Surrey home.
Even where his magical work was concerned, Dee was ever on his guard for `illuders', or low-level (mischievous or time-wasting) spirits that masqueraded as angels. He took command of any ambivalent situations, on one occasion compelling an illuder to confess, and then consigning it to the flames, saying `Master Kelley, is your doubt of the spirit taken away?'g8
Yet whenever spirits are involved in any human endeavour, there must remain some questions about both their authenticity and their motives, even if they claim to be angels. In effect, the modus operandi of the Kelley-Dee team was closer to Spiritualism - Kelley is often referred to as `the first medium' - than much previous occult work, which is not without its problems, although perhaps less obviously so than the `cursed necromancy' itself. Indeed, Kelley (together with a magician called Waring)" is said to have successfully raised a corpse from its grave in the churchyard at Walton-le-Dale in Lancashire to command it to predict the future.
Montague Summers is, of course, swift to condemn trafficking with any kind of spirits as diabolism pure and simple. He notes apropos of allegations that witches `flew' to their Sabbats, that `.. . outside the lives of the Saints, spiritistic [sic] seances afford us examples of this supernormal phenomenon.'90 More in character, he declares forthrightly: `Camouflage it how you will ... this "New Religion" [of] Spiritualism and its kindred superstitions ... is but the old Witchcraft' 91
Today when Spiritualists follow their own version of the Christian religion, and many famous mediums proved their astounding abilities repeatedly under strict conditions, besides giving untold comfort and hope to thousands, it is difficult to conceive of the movement having any possible association with anything devilish. However, even leaving the preconceptions of Summers aside, in the old heyday of `physical mediums', theirs was a considerably more ambiguous activity, often carrying a distinct whiff of sulphur.
In 1911 twenty-three-year-old Brazilian Carmine Mirabelli was sacked from his job in a shoe shop because the shoes insisted on flying around by themselves. Duly confined to a lunatic asylum for nineteen days, two doctors watched him closely. They concluded that he possessed an extraordinary excess of nervous forces - remarkably similar to the modern idea that poltergeist attacks usually centre on teenagers undergoing particularly tumultuous puberties. Mirabelli's mere presence caused some extraordinary phenomena: inanimate objects moved about and even apparently liquefied. He also produced reams of automatic writing92 in 30 languages, exhibited extraordinary powers of telepathy and clairvoyance - and was frequently reported to travel instantaneously, by teleportation (basically similar to the mode of transport celebrated in Star Trek's famous line: `Beam me up, Scottie').
Mirabelli's achievements allegedly included levitating himself nearly seven feet off the ground, an event that was photographed. However, there is some dispute about this: it is now claimed that the photograph has been tampered with to show the medium apparently in mid-air, whereas in fact he was simply standing on the top of a step-ladder - later erased in the finished picture - to indicate how high he had levitated.
A leading light of the Brazilian Spiritist movement (devotees of the French medium Alan Kardec), on one occasion, it is said, Mirabelli not only levitated while handcuffed, but as he rose into the air he dematerialized, the handcuffs clattering to the floor. He was discovered behind a locked door. But his most controversial feat was to materialize the dead - apparently more successfully and dramatically than even the practised necromancer Edward Kelley.
At Mirabelli's seances, sometimes held in brightly lit rooms, skeletons would gradually form in the air, clothed horrendously with ragged flesh - and stinking of decay . . . At his most successful, he is said to have eventually materialized solid human beings. In one case the man he apparently conjured out of thin air was clearly of African origin, while on another occasion a dead poet materialized between Mirabelli and a sitter - who not unnaturally is rigid with fear, the whites of his eyes showing like a terrified horse. This poses the important question: Mirabelli's mediumship may have been genuine - but was it nice? Was his laudable attempt to present evidence for an afterlife merely conjuring up dark forces? Like many cases from the annals of materialization (or `physical') mediums, the sheer horror involved surely rendered that form of continued existence akin to the obscene undead, vampires and ghouls. No one would like to think of their loved ones returning for an hour or so to stink of the grave, or indeed, to look forward with any enthusiasm to the prospect of doing so themselves.
Once, when a skull that Mirabelli had merely looked at began to move, the eminent psychiatrist Dr Franco da Rocha noted:
When I picked up the skull, I felt something strange in my hands, something fluid, as if a globular liquid were touching my palm. When I concentrated my attention further, I saw something similar to an irradiation pass over the skull when you rapidly expose a mirror to luminous rays 93
(It should be noted that Spiritualists describe necromancy as pretended communication with the dead, for they believe that the dead cannot be forced, under the normal `rules', to have any contact with the living. Spiritualists themselves believe they merely invite the dead to communicate.)
Mirabelli died in 1951 after being hit by a car. But although few researchers took an interest in him during his lifetime, in 1973 the Brazilian Institute for Psychobiophysical Research (BPP) appointed a team to compile a dossier on his extraordinary phenomena. Its members included the British writer-researcher Guy Lyon Playfair, who spread the word in Britain.
Mirabelli's sons, although sometimes highly sceptical of Spiritism, were adamant that their father had made astonishing things happen `almost every day, any time and any place' .9' His family were united in denying that he had cheated - or, indeed, that he had any motive for doing so.
Yet Theodore Besterman of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) had no hesitation in denouncing Mirabelli as a fraud, even though he had himself witnessed examples of apparent psychokinesis (mind over matter) in his presence, and seen the medium write a 1,700-word automatic script in under an hour in French - a language he did not know. (He also produced intelligible automatic writing in Hebrew, Japanese and Arabic, just like 'Hel'en Smith' and her alleged Martian, and Kelley and Enochian.)
The mysterious movement of objects Besterman ascribed to the use of `hidden threads', although neither he nor the other members of the research team managed to explain how they could have produced such a variety of phenomena. Despite Besterman's scepticism, however, Professor Hans Driesch of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and May C. Walker of the American SPR found Mirabelli `most impressive',95 while Guy Lyon Playfair also discovered no evidence of cheating.
Perhaps the last word should be given to Dr Felipe Ache, who hazarded that Mirabelli's strange gifts were `the result of the radiation of nervous forces that we all have but that Mirabelli has in extraordinary excess.' In other words, perhaps we all have such astounding abilities in latent form, but only certain rare people, with a distinct psychological and perhaps even physiological make-up, will ever possess the weird talent to activate it. If it means conjuring up putrefying corpses, perhaps we should be grateful for that.
Another major case from the annals of the Golden Age of physical mediumship reveals the difficulty in separating apparently genuine phenomena from fraud, at least on a conscious level as far as the medium was concerned. And it shows how dramatic, but often unpleasant, the world of the seance room once was.
Eusapia Palladino remains the most thoroughly investigated medium in the history of psychical research, certainly over a protracted and chronological period. A Neapolitan, she was studied for more than twenty years by at least fifty scientists - many of them internationally acclaimed - from Italy, France, Poland, Russia, England and the US.
Eusapia's life began inauspiciously. Her mother died shortly after the future medium was born in 1854, and her father was murdered when she was twelve. Perhaps this trauma was in some way the cause of the phenomena that surrounded her first attendance at a seance the following year, at which the furniture moved towards her and rose into the air.
Then in 1872 the English wife of one Damiani, an Italian psychical researcher, attended a seance in London at which a spirit calling itself `John King' came through and informed her that there was a very powerful medium in Naples who was the reincarnation of his daughter Katie King, already a well known haunter of seance rooms herself. The ghostly John King then gave the complete address of the house where this reincarnation could be found. In due course, Damiani followed this up, finding the house - and Eusapia Palladino. Much impressed, as well he might be, Damiani helped to foster the Neapolitan's powers.
Soon she was a sensation in the neighbourhood, but it took twenty years for her talents to reach the notice of local academic, Professor Ercole Chiaia - and thence of the waiting world. In 1888 he appealed for scientists to investigate her gifts in a letter to the eminent criminologist - and extreme sceptic - Professor Cesare Lombroso. This was a critical moment in Eusapia's career, after which nothing was ever the same for her.
In 1892 Professor Lombroso, together with five scientific colleagues put the medium through her paces at a series of sittings, finally pronouncing himself satisfied that her phenomena were genuine. This was only a start: the following year a seven-man commission of distinguished academics from several fields was set up under Professor Schiaparelli, director of the University of Milan. After a full seventeen sittings, they pronounced her genuine.
Their published report included this pronouncement:
`It is impossible to count the number of times that a hand appeared and was touched by one of us. Suffice it to say that doubt was no longer possible. It was indeed a living human hand which we saw and touched, while at the same time the bust and the arms of the medium remained visible, and her hands were held by those on either side of her.'vb
Professor Enrico Morselli, who studied Eusapia closely over a long period in his laboratory in Genoa, drew up a list of thirty-nine varieties of phenomena he observed her produce at close quarters and under rigorous test conditions.
Before long, the obscure Neapolitan had become a psychic superstar, famous across the western world. Scientists from as far away as Russia's St Petersburg flocked to Naples to witness her phenomena for themselves - not all credulous fools by any means. Most put her through her paces in a highly critical frame of mind, having searched both her and the premises beforehand very thoroughly. She also visited Rome, Genoa, Palermo, Turin, Paris, Warsaw - and Cambridge, where she was the guest of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), never known for its credulity.
It was at this point that criticism began to sour Eusapia's career. One of the witnesses was Dr Richard Hodgson, who suspected she was an incorrigible cheat. Although during the experiment he was supposed to control her movements, in fact he relaxed his guard - and Eusapia immediately seized the opportunity to fake the phenomena. As a result, the SPR branded her a fraud, but this created a rift among the international community of psychical researchers: many across Europe declared that they were aware she would fake it if she could, but if denied the opportunity, her phenomena were genuine.
Perhaps tellingly, Camille Flammarion, the leading French astronomer, who also tested Eusapia, noted that as the medium became increasingly tense the phenomena became nastier and more destructive. He wrote:
The sofa came forward when she looked at it, then recoiled before her breath; all the instruments were thrown pell mell upon the table; the tambourine rose almost to the height of the ceiling; the cushions took part in the sport, overturning everything on the table; [one participant] was thrown from his chair. This chair - a heavy dining-room chair of black walnut, with stuffed seat - rose into the air, came up on the table with a great clatter, then pushed off .. 97
Because reports continued to be positive about Eusapia, the SPR examined her again, sending the very sceptical team of Everard Feilding, Hereward Carrington and W. W. Baggally out to Naples. But after holding seances at the Hotel Victoria, even they were compelled to admit defeat, concluding that phenomena including the movement of objects, mysterious lights, raps and materializations were due to an agency `wholly different from mere physical dexterity on her part.' Feilding was moved to write:
For the first time I have the absolute conviction that our observation is not mistaken. I realize as an appreciable fact of life that, from an empty curtain, I have seen hands and heads come forth, and that behind the empty curtain I have been seized by living fingers, the existence and position of the nails of which were perceptible. I have seen this extraordinary woman, sitting outside the curtain, held hand and foot, visible to myself, by my colleagues, immobile, except for the occasional straining of a limb while some entity within the curtain has over and over again pressed my hand in a position clearly beyond her reach 9s
However, despite this glowing endorsement - and from such a very unlikely source - Eusapia went on to cheat again, and was caught once more. This was during her seven-month tour of the US in 1909, when an investigator managed to get under the cabinet curtain and saw that `she had simply freed her foot from her shoe and with an athletic backward movement of the leg was reaching out and fishing with her toes for the guitar and the table in the cabinet.'99
Yet the contradictions multiplied. Even Herbert Thurston, the great conjuror and scourge of fake mediums (and contributor to Samri Frikell's classic sceptics' guide, Spirit Mediums Exposed) had to admit that table levitations in her presence: were not due to fraud and were not performed by the aid of her feet, knees or hands.' °°
Levitation is a particularly interesting phenomenon. Montague Summers fully believed that while saints reveal their holiness by rising unaided into thin air - the seventeenth-century monk Joseph of Cupertino, later canonized, regularly flew some distance, to the high altar or the tops of trees101 - anyone else who exhibited similar phenomena must be acting under Satanic power. However, this seems unlikely. Even Summers would have been most perplexed when, some years ago, there was a playground craze for levitation in which groups of schoolchildren would levitate one of their number using a simple, invented pseudo-magical ritual. There is no doubt that it works, and that real people have floated over the heads of their friends without benefit of special effects, trickery or even a safety net. The ability to flout even the law of gravity by just about anyone in the right frame of mind (whatever that might be) removes the phenomenon of levitation from the exclusivity of either the annals of the saints or the history of witches.
However, another of Eusapia Palladino's rare talents takes us back to the unpleasant aspects of physical mediumship, almost to necromancy.
Interestingly, Eusapia herself admitted that she sometimes cheated, explaining - perhaps ingeniously - that sceptics could will her to do so when she was in the highly susceptible state of deep trance. However, many of her admirers suggested that some of the accusations of cheating could be the result of an error - that as the 'ectoplasm' that exuded from her often took the shape of hands and feet, perhaps that is what her accusers saw moving suspiciously.
Ectoplasm was a greyish-white substance, often similar to mucus, that allegedly oozed from all the orifices of the entranced medium, like something that might be more successfully banished by penicillin than an exorcist. The ectoplasm would gradually take the shape of human faces or figures, which sitters often recognized as their deceased loved ones. However, the phenomenon appears to be a thing of the past: sceptics say it no longer appears in seances because fake mediums are afraid modem infra-red photography would reveal their grubby secrets to the world. The eminent astrophysicist and active psychical researcher, Glasgow's Professor Archie Roy, told me many years ago that when he managed to come close to some ectoplasm it `smelt like B.O.' By no means a sceptic, Professor Roy added, `Which wasn't surprising, because of where it was kept .. 1102
Most known ectoplasm turned out to be nothing more than lengths of cheesecloth, regurgitated, or expelled from other orifices, which says more for the mediums' powers of muscle control than for evidence of the afterlife. However, some photographs of alleged ectoplasm show some other kind of substance - unknown or at least unidentified - at work as a moving and growing hand or face. It seems quite horrible and proves nothing, certainly not the existence of an afterlife, but it could just as easily be paranormal as suspiciously normal.
In the case of Eusapia Palladino, her ectoplasm turned itself into useful rods and levers, known as `pseudopods', which were seen under conditions of infra-red photography, to raise objects and tilt tables. (And significantly, not even Herbert Thurston suggested that these were real rods and levers, somehow secreted about the medium's person.)
At many of Eusapia's seances, humanoid phantoms materialized, apparently created out of ectoplasm, and were seen and felt by investigators. Professor Morselli and fellow researchers witnessed an astonishing example of this on 1 March 1902 in Genoa. The professor examined the medium closely for smuggled aids, then tied her to a camp bed very thoroughly. She remained tied up although in `fairly good light' six ghostly figures appeared.
Professor Charles Richet, a world-renowned physiologist and Nobel Laureate joined in the general endorsement of her gifts, saying: `More than 30 very sceptical scientific men were convinced, after long testing, that there proceeded from her body material forms having the appearance of life.' 103 Dr Joseph Venzano would agree: at a seance he held on 16 June 1901, several ghostly hands materialized and stroked the dumbfounded sitters. Then the disembodied hands took hold of Venzano's:
When my hand, guided by another hand, and lifted upwards, met the materialized form, I had immediately the impression of touching a broad forehead, on the upper part of which was a quantity of rather long, thick, and very fine hair. Then, as my hand was gradually led upwards, it came in contact with a slightly aquiline nose, and, lower still, with moustaches and a chin with a peaked beard.
From the chin, the hand was then raised somewhat, until, coming in front of the open mouth, it was gently pushed forward, and my forefinger, still directed by the guiding hand, entered the cavity of the mouth, where it was caused to rub against the margin of the upper dental arch, which, towards the right extremity, was wanting in four molar teeth.104
The astounded Dr Venzano recognized the face he had just felt as that of a deceased relative. Unsure of which teeth the man had missing, he checked his dental records - and discovered they were four molars ...
However, it was only in Italy that Eusapia continued to be praised. After her exposure as a cheat in the US, her fate was sealed in the Anglo-Saxon world. She died in 1918, an enigma to the end, her apparent triumphs still debated today. But despite her cheating and the weirdness of her phenomena, Eusapia represented what may be seen as a typical Luciferan raft of miracle: always ambiguous, equivocal, perhaps shifting rapidly from positive to negative and back again. Professor Richet wrote tellingly:
... we are now dealing with observed facts which are nevertheless absurd; which are in contradiction with facts of daily observation; which are denied not by science only, but by the whole of humanity - facts which are rapid and fugitive, which take place in semi-darkness, and almost by surprise; with no proof except the testimony of our senses, which we know to be often fallible. After we have witnessed such facts, everything concurs to make us doubt them. Now, at the moment when these facts take place they seem to us certain, and we are willing to proclaim them openly; but when we return to ourself, when we feel the irresistible influence of our environment, when our friends all laugh at our credulity - then we are most disarmed, and we begin to doubt.105 May it not all have been an illusion? May I not have been grossly deceived? ... And then, as the moment of the experiment becomes more remote, that experiment which once seemed so conclusive gets to seem more and more uncertain, and we end by letting ourselves be persuaded that we have been the victims of a trick.106
It may be apt at this point to quote Dr Margaret Mead, who declared to the American Association for the Advancement of Science: `The whole history of scientific advancement is full of scientists investigating phenomena the Establishment did not believe were there.' 107
To dare to boldly go where man has never even considered being is the mark of the fearless Luciferan, seeker and maker, quester in both triumph and despair. And with the coming of the Enlightenment, a new kind of mage arose and courageously saluted God - but this time made in his own image.
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги