Raising Hell (4 page)

On the ninth day, you’d find that the beans were germinating. To see if they were now able to confer invisibility, all you had to do was put one in your mouth and look in the mirror—if you saw nothing there, you’d succeeded. You could try out each bean in the same way, using your own mouth or that of a child, and the ones that didn’t work you were advised to bury again with the head.

If it wasn’t invisibility, but riches, you were after, there was another formula to follow. To acquire gold or silver, you were instructed to find a mare in heat, then pull out a handful of its hair by the roots. (Then run for it.) Next, you were to tie the hairs into a knot and place them in a brand-new earthenware pot, filled almost to the brim with spring water. After putting the lid back on the pot, “place it where neither you nor anyone else can see it, for there is danger in this.”

Nine days later, when you lift the lid, you will find a small, snakelike creature inside, which will leap up. Say to it, “I accept the pact.” Without actually touching the creature, transfer it to a new box bought expressly for this purpose and feed it with wheat husks every day.

To get the gold and silver you require, you must put an equivalent amount into the box first. Put the box by the side of
your bed, sleep a few hours, and when you open the box again, you’ll find double what you put in. Take out the newly minted stuff, but leave the original gold or silver inside.

Even so, according to the
True Grimoire,
there were limits you should observe. If the snake was fairly ordinary, you shouldn’t ask for more than one hundred francs at a throw. If, however, the snake had a human face, it would be able to produce one thousand francs each time.

If you ever wanted to kill the creature off (though it’s hard to imagine why you would), you had only to change its diet. Stop feeding it the wheat husks and feed it, instead, “some of the flour which has been used for the consecration in the first mass said by a priest.” This will prove fatal every time.

Suppose it was love you sought. The
True Grimoire
included a spell “To Make a Girl come to You, however Modest she may Be.” Whether it worked in reverse, on boys, is uncertain.

In any event, the first thing to do was to wait for the crescent moon and make sure you’d spotted a star between the hours of eleven and midnight. Taking a piece of virgin parchment, cut in a roughly circular shape, you were to write on one side of it the name of the person you wanted to come to you, and on the other side the words
Melchiael, Bareschas.
Place the parchment on the ground, with the name of the love object facing down, and put your right foot on it. Bend your left knee to the ground, and while looking up at the highest star in the sky and holding a candle of white wax (big enough to burn for a full hour), recite the spell written in the grimoire.

Although, like most spells, this one began with a fairly lengthy invocation to angels and planets and stars, it got down to business soon enough:

I conjure you again, by all the Holy Names of God, so that you may send down power to oppress, torture and harass the body and soul and the five senses of [girl’s name], she whose name is written here, so that she shall come unto me, and agree to my desires,
liking nobody in the world . . . for so long as she shall remain unmoved by me. Let her then be tortured, made to suffer. Go, then, at once! Go, Melchidael, Bareschas, Zazel, Firiel, Malcha, and all those who are with thee! I conjure you by the great Living God to obey my will, and I [your name here] promise to satisfy you.

After this tender and loving plea had been recited three times in its entirety, the candle was to be used to set fire to the parchment. The ashes were to be put in the conjurer’s left shoe and kept there “until the person whom you have called comes to seek you out. In the Conjuration, you must say the date that she is to come, and she will not be absent.”

The long-term prospects for such a relationship remain unclear.

If revenge against an enemy was your goal, your first stop was a cemetery, where you were instructed to remove the nails from an old coffin. As you did so, you were to say, “Nails, I take you, so that you may serve to turn aside and cause evil to all persons whom I will.”

Nails in hand, your next stop was the road or street where your intended victim was known to walk. Once you’d seen him leave a footprint, you were ready to go: drawing in the dirt the figures of the three spirits Guland, Surgat, and Morail, you were to place the nail smack-dab in the center of the footprint, saying,
"Pater noster upto in terra.”
Then, while driving the nail into the ground with a stone, utter the words “Cause evil to [X], until I remove thee.”

After making a careful notation of where you’d hammered in the nail (because the only way to undo the spell, should you wish to, was to find and remove it), you were to conceal the spot with some dirt and dust. If all went as planned, you’d see your enemy start to suffer from one thing or another in short order.

If, after a while, you felt he’d been punished enough, you
could always cancel the curse by plucking the nail out, saying, “I remove thee, so that the evil which thou hast caused to [X] shall cease.” Using whichever hand had not drawn them in the first place, you were then to rub away the characters of the three spirits you’d made in the dust. That done, the spell would be at an end.

After conducting many of these rituals, all that remained was to dismiss the infernal spirits who might still be hanging around, wondering what to do next. As they were known to be of a prickly nature, it was wise to dismiss them with care and solicitude. The
True Grimoire
advised the sorcerer to disperse them with the following formula: “Go in peace to your own place, and peace be with you, until I shall invoke you again. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

THE
LIBER SPIRITUUM

Besides his grimoire, the sorcerer had another, handmade volume in his occult library, and this was called the
liber spirituum
(the book of spirits).

As would be expected, it was to be made only of virgin parchment, and the sorcerer was instructed to fashion it himself. On each left-hand page, he inscribed the name and seal of one of the spirits he was planning to conjure. On the right-hand page, he wrote the words of the incantation that would summon, and control, that same spirit. This information included the spirit’s full name, its ranking in the spirit world, the particular areas over which the spirit held sway, and the times and places at which it could be most successfully invoked.

The object was to get each spirit first to manifest itself and then to autograph the book, as it were. Once a spirit had done that, it could be recalled whenever the magician wanted it. In
The Magus,
Francis Barrett included a specimen from a book of spirits, showing the demon Cassiel Macoton riding a dragon on
the left-hand page and the magician’s invocation on the right: “I conjure thee, Cassiel, by all the names of the Most High Creator . . . that thou shalt hearken instantly unto my words and shalt obey them inviolably as the Judgments of the Last Day. . . .”

Once the magician had compiled his personal book of spirits, he had to consecrate it with a powerful, all-inclusive conjuration. In the
Grimoire of Honorius,
this conjuration was followed by a command, which began, “I conjure and I command you, O Spirits, however many of you may be, to agree to this Book with alacrity, in order that when we may read it, since it is acknowledged to be in order and potentised, you will be compelled to appear when you are commanded, in a proper and human shape, as the reader of the Book shall desire.”

It went on to warn the spirits not to interfere with the body or soul of the magician, or to stir up any unnecessary storms or trouble. And if the spirits weren’t able to fulfill their obligations for some reason—a prior commitment, possibly—then they were required to “send other spirits, who have been empowered to act for you, and they, too, shall swear equally to perform everything that the reader of the Book may command: you are all thus now compelled by the Holiest Names of the All-Puissant and Living God: Eloym, Jah, El, Eloy, Tetragrammaton!” There was even a final clause that threatened the spirits with “torture for a millennium” for any recalcitrance or unwillingnesss to perform the magician’s will.

When all of this was done, the signs written, the conjurations made, the book was sealed, and only opened again when the magician was standing inside a pentagram or magic circle and protected from the demons the book would invoke. It was then that he recited the Conjuration of the Spirits, in which he called upon “all the Spirits of the Hells” to appear before him, place their marks upon the book, and do his bidding forever more.

THE UNHOLY PACT

Without a doubt, the sorcerer’s trade was a dangerous one; dealing with demons was like juggling hand grenades that could explode any moment. But the most dangerous element of all was the black, or unholy, pact that many demons insisted the sorcerer sign before they would do his bidding. Although the terms and wording varied, the general agreement was that the demon would deliver the goods—riches, women, forbidden knowledge—for a period of time (usually twenty years) but that at the end of that period the demon would claim, in return, the soul of the sorcerer for all eternity. Hard as that bargain seems, many a wizard apparently agreed to it.

In a grimoire known as
Le Dragon rouge
(which was largely based on the two Keys of Solomon), the contract was offered in the following form:

Emperor Lucifer, master of all the rebellious spirits, I beseech thee be favorable to me in the calling which I make upon thy great minister Lucifuge Rofocale, having desire to make a pact with him. I pray thee also, Prince Beelzebub, to protect me in my undertaking. O Count Ashtoreth! be propitious to me, and cause that this night the great Lucifuge appear unto me in human form and without any evil smell, and that he grant me, by means of the pact which I shall deliver to him, all the riches of which I have need. O great Lucifuge, I beseech thee leave thy dwelling, in whatever part of the world it may be, to come and speak with me; if not, I will thereto compel thee by the power of the mighty words of the great Clavicule of Solomon, whereof he made use to force the rebellious spirits to accept his pact. Appear, then,
instantly, or I will continually torment thee by the mighty words of the Clavicule.

Done right, this will bring the demon calling. But he will assent to the sorcerer’s demands only “on condition thou give me thyself at the end of twenty years, so that I do with thee, body and soul, what shall please me.”

Now, you’d think that this would be the moment the sorcerer would rethink the whole deal. Twenty years of great living in exchange for an eternity of pain? But many sorcerers believed they could have their cake and eat it, too—that they could sign the bargain, then wriggle out of it later. Assuming he was thinking this way, the sorcerer would scrawl on a piece of virgin parchment, in his own blood, the words “I promise great Lucifuge to repay him in twenty years for all he shall give me. In witness whereof I have signed,” followed by the sorcerer’s name.

The sorcerer, still enclosed in the magic circle or pentagram, would then toss the parchment to the waiting demon, who’d look it over for loopholes. If he was satisfied with it, he’d take it back with him to Hell and file it in the archives. It’s for this reason that so few of these actual documents have ever been found—that, and the fact that if such a written pact had ever been discovered by the church authorities, the sorcerer who’d signed it would have been in for some very big trouble right here on earth. Making deals with the Devil was heresy at its worst, a renunciation of God, the Virgin Mary, the saints, the church, the whole shebang. This was not the kind of contract you ever left lying around the house.

One of the few such documents that do exist, now housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale of France, claims to be the pact that Urbain Grandier made with the Devil in 1634. Grandier, a powerful priest known for his oratory, arrogance, and vanity, was accused of having bewitched the Convent of the Ursulines in Loudun; the nuns showed harrowing signs of demonic possession, and in court twelve of them gave the names of the
demons by whom they claimed to be possessed. Their testimony was corroborated by a sheet of parchment on which Grandier had supposedly written his vow in a clear hand:

My Lord and Master, I own 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 good will 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 for ever without any will to repent. Signed Urbain Grandier in his blood.

After a good deal of torture, Grandier was taken on a stretcher to the public square—his legs had been broken by his inquisitors—and burned at the stake. According to a monk who was present at the execution, a big black fly buzzed around and around Grandier’s head. In the monk’s opinion, this droning insect was in actuality the devil Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, there to make sure the pact was observed and to carry Grandier’s soul off to Hell.

From the moment a deal with the Devil was signed, both participants kept a close eye on each other—the Devil knew that the sorcerer would be trying to renege on the deal somehow, and the sorcerer knew that the Devil would be hovering nearby to make sure his prey didn’t escape. By one account, the two black dogs who accompanied the magician Agrippa von Nettesheim everywhere he went were in fact demons, keeping track of his whereabouts. The French historian Palma Cayet
had purportedly signed a pact that guaranteed he would emerge victorious in all his disputes with Protestants; the contract was reportedly found after he died, and although there was a public funeral, rumor had it that the coffin had been filled with rocks. Demons, it was believed, had already made off with his body.