BOOK V

THE ADEPTS AND THE PRIESTHOOD
π—HE

CHAPTER I

PRIESTS AND POPES ACCUSED OF MAGIC

WE have explained that owing to the profanations and impieties of Gnostics the Church proscribed Magic. The condemnation of the Knights Templar completed the rupture, and from this time forward, compelled to seek concealment and plan revenge in the shadows, Magic ostracised the Church in turn. More prudent than those arch-heretics who opposed altar to altar in public day, and thus entailed denunciation and the headsman's axe on themselves, the adepts dissimulated their resentment as well as their doctrines. They bound themselves together by dreadful oaths and, realising the importance of first securing a favourable view at the tribunal of public opinion, they turned back on their accusers and judges the sinister rumours by which they were pursued themselves and denounced the priesthood to the people as a school of Black Magic.

So long as his convictions and beliefs are not rooted in the irremovable foundations of reason, man ardently and indifferently desires both truth and falsehood; on either side he finds that there are cruel reactions. Who shall put an end to this warfare? Only the spirit of Him who has said: “Render not evil for evil, but overcome evil by good.”

The Catholic priesthood has been charged with the spirit of persecution, though its mission is that of the good Samaritan, for which reason it superseded the unpitying Levites, who continued their way without extending compassion to him who had fallen among thieves. It is in the exercise of humanity that priests prove their Divine consecration. Hence it is a supreme injustice to cast upon sacerdotalism at large the crimes of certain men who are unfortunately sealed with the priesthood. For a man, as such, it is always possible to be wicked; but a true priest is, on the contrary, always charitable. Now, the false adept did not look at the question from this standpoint;1 for them the Christian priesthood was made void and was hence an usurping power since the proscription of the Gnostics. What, said they, is a hierarchy whose degrees are no longer regulated by conscience? The same ignorance of the Mysteries and the same blind faith drive into the same fanaticism or the same hypocrisy the prime leaders and lowest ministers of the sanctuary. The blind are leaders of the blind. The supremacy between equals is no longer anything but the result of intrigue and chance. The pastors consecrate the sacred elements with a gross and disordered faith; they are jugglers in bread and eaters of human flesh; they are no longer thaumaturgists, but sorcerers. Such was the sectarian verdict. To support the calumny they invented fables, affirming, for example, that the popes had been given over to the spirit of darkness ever since the tenth century. The learned Gerbert, who was crowned as Sylvester II, made confession—as it is said—to this effect on his deathbed. Honorius III, being he who confirmed the Order of St. Dominic and preached the Crusades, was himself an abominable necromancer, author of a Grimoire which still bears his name and is reserved exclusively to priests. The same false adepts paraded and commented on this Grimoire, seeking in such manner to turn against the Holy See the most terrible of all popular prejudices at that period—the mortal hatred of those who, wrongly or rightly, passed publicly for sorcerers.

Some malevolent or credulous historians have favoured these lying inventions. Thus Platina, a scandalous chronicler of the papacy, reproduces from Martinus Polonius the calumnies against Sylvester II. According to this fable, Gerbert, who was proficient in mathematical science and the Kabalah, performed an evocation of the devil and required his assistance to attain the pontificate. The fulfilment of his ambition was not only promised by the demon but it was affirmed further that he should not die except at Jerusalem, to which place it will be understood readily that the magician determined inwardly that he would never go. He became pope as promised, but on a certain day, when he was saying Mass in a church at Rome, he felt seriously ill, and remembering suddenly that the chapel wherein he was officiating was dedicated to the Holy Cross of Jerusalem, he realised what had come to pass. He caused a bed to be put up in the chapel and, summoning his cardinals, confessed publicly that he had engaged in commerce with demons. He ordained further that his dead body should be placed upon a chariot of green wood and should be drawn by two virgin horses, one black and the other white; that they should be started on their course but neither led nor driven; and that his remains should be interred wherever a halt was made. The chariot proceeded in this manner across Rome and stopped in front of the Lateran. Loud cries and groans were heard for a few moments, after which there was silence and the burial took place. So ends a legend the proper place of which is in the hawker's chap-books.

Martinus Polonus, on the faith of whom Platina repeats such reveries, had borrowed them on his own part (a) from a certain Galfridus and (b) from Gervaise, a maker of chronicles, whom Naudé terms “the greatest forger of fables and the most notorious liar that ever took pen in hand”. From sources of similar value the protestants have derived a scandalous and obviously apocryphal story concerning a pretended Pope Joan, who was also a sorceress, as we have all heard: indeed she is one to whom books on Black Magic are still attributed. We have glanced at a memoir of this female pope by a protestant historian and have taken note of two very curious engravings contained therein. They are assumed to be portraits of the heroine but are in reality ancient Tarots, representing Isis crowned with a tiara. It is well known that the hieroglyphic figure on the second Tarot card is still called the female pope, being a woman wearing a tiara on which are the points of the crescent moon, or the horns of Isis. One example in the protestant book is even more remarkable: the hair of the figure is long and scanty; there is a solar cross on the breast; she is seated between the two pillars of Hercules; and behind her flows the ocean, with lotus-flowers blooming on the surface of the water. The second portrait represents the same divinity, with attributes of the sovereign priesthood and holding her son Horus in her arms. As Kabalistic documents the two pictures are of singular value, but they are little to the purpose of those who are concerned with Pope Joan.

To dispose of the accusation of sorcery in respect of Gerbert, supposing that it could be taken seriously, it would be enough to mention that he was the most learned man of his century, and having been preceptor of two sovereigns he owed his election to the gratitude of one of his august pupils. He had extraordinary proficiency in mathematics, and his knowledge of physics may have exceeded that of his epoch;—in a word, he was a man of universal erudition and great ability, as the letters which he left bear witness, though he was not a denouncer of kings like the terrible Hildebrand. He chose to instruct princes rather than excommunicate them, and enjoying the favour of two French kings and three emperors, he had no need, as Naudé has judiciously pointed out, to sell himself to the devil for the archbishoprics of Rheims and Ravenna, or for the papacy in succession to these. It is tiue that he attained the successive positions, to some extent in spite of his merit; it was an age when able politicians were taken for possessed people and those who were learned for enchanters. Gerbert was not only a great mathematician, as we have said, and a distinguished astronomer, but he excelled also in mechanics, and—according to William of Malmesbury—he erected at Rheims such wonderful hydraulic machines that the water itself executed symphonies and played most enchanting airs. Moreover, according to Ditmare, he adorned the town of Magdebourg with a clock which registered all the motions of heaven and the times when the stars rose and set. Finally, by the evidence of Naudé,1 whom we cite once again with pleasure, he made “that test of brass which was devised so ingeniously that the before-mentioned William of Malmesbury was himself deceived thereby and referred it to Magic. Further, Onuphrius states that he saw in the Farnese library a learned book on geometry composed by this same Gerbert; and for myself I estimate that, without adjudicating on the opinion expressed by Ertor-diensis and some others, who regard him as the maker of timepieces and of arithmetic as these exist now among us, all these evidences are sufficiently valid to warrant the conclusion that those who had never heard of cube, parallelogram, dodecahedron, almicantar, valsagora, almagrippa, cathalzem and other names, familiar enough in these days to such as understand mathematics, conceived that they were those of the spirits invoked by Gerbert and that such a multitude of things so rare could not emanate from a single personality in the absence of extraordinary advantages, from the possession of which it followed therefore that he must have been a magician.”

To indicate the lengths oí impertinence and bad taith reached by makers of chronicles, it remains to say that Platina1—that maliciously naïve echo of all Roman pasquinades—affirms that the tomb of Sylvester II itself turned sorcerer, weeping prophetically at the approaching downfall of each pope and that the reprobate bones of Gerbert shook and rattled together when one of them was about to die. An epitaph engraved on the tomb lends colour to these wonders—so adds unblushingly the librarian of Sixtus IV. Such are the proofs which pass among historians as sufficient to certify the existence of a curious historical document. Platina was librarian of the Vatican; he wrote his history of the popes by order of Sixtus IV; he wrote also at Rome, where nothing could be easier than to verify the truth or falsehood of such an assertion, which, not withstanding the pretended epitaph, never existed outside the imagination of the authors from whom Platina borrowed with incredible lack of caution²—a circumstance which moves justly the indignation of honest Naudé, whose further remarks shall follow: “It is a pure imposture and manifest falsehood, both in respect of the experience—being the pretended prodigies at the tomb of Sylvester II—the same having never been witnessed by anyone—and of the alleged inscription on the tomb, that inscription—as it exists really—having been composed by Sergius IV and so far from supporting the supposed magical fables, is, on the contrary, one of the most excellent testimonies that could be desired to the good life and integrity of Sylvester. It is truly a shameful thing that so many catholics should be abettors of a slander concerning which Marianus Scotus, Glaber, Ditmare, Helgandus, Lambert and Herman Contract, who were his contemporaries, make no mention.”

Proceeding now to the Grimoire of Honorius, it is to the third bearer of that name, or to one of the most zealous pontiffs of the 13th century, that this impious book is attributed. Assuredly Honorius III was eminently likely to be hated by sectarians and necromancers, and well might they seek to dishonour him by representing him as their accomplice. Censius Savelli, crowned pope in 1216, confirmed that Order of Saint Dominic which proved so formidable to Albigensians and Vaudois—those children of Manicheans and sorcerers. He established also the Franciscans and Carmelites, preached a crusade, governed the Church wisely and left many decretals. To charge with Black Magic a pope so eminently catholic1 is to cast similar suspicion on the great religious orders which he instituted, and the devil thereby could scarcely fail to profit.

Occult Seals and Primitive Egyptian Tarots

Some old copies of the Grimoire of Honorius bear, however, the name of Honorius II, but it is impossible to make a sorcerer of that elegant Cardinal Lambert who, after his promotion to the sovereign pontificate, surrounded himself either with poets, to whom he gave bishoprics for elegies—as in the case of Hildebert, Bishop of Mans—or with learned theologians, like Hugh de Saint-Victor. But it so happens that the name of Honorius II is for us a ray of light pointing to the true author of the frightful Grimoire in question.2 In 1061, when the empire began to take umbrage against the papacy and sought to usurp the sacerdotal influence by fomenting troubles and divisions in the sacred college, the bishops of Lombardy, impelled by Gilbert of Parma, protested against the election of Anselm, Bishop of Lucca, who had been raised to the papal chair as Alexander II. The Emperor Henry IV took the part of the dissentients and authorised them to elect another pope, promising to support them. They chose Cadulus, or Cadalus, an intriguing Bishop of Parma, a man capable of all crimes and a public scandal in respect of simony and concubinage. He assumed the name of Honorius II and marched at the head of an army against Rome. He was defeated and condemned by all the prelates of Germany and Italy. Returning to the charge, he gained possession of part of the Holy City and entered St. Peter's; he was expelled and took refuge in the Castle of St. Angelo, whence he obtained leave to retire only on the payment of a heavy ransom. It was then that Otho, Archbishop of Cologne, the Emperor's envoy, dared to reproach Alexander II in public for having usurped the Holy See; but a monk named Hildebrand took up the cause of the lawful pontiff with such force of eloquence that the Emperor drew back in confusion and asked pardon for his own criminal attempts. The Hildebrand in question was already in the sight of providence that fulminating Gregory VII who was to come and who thus inaugurated the work of his life. The antipope was deposed by the Council of Mantua and Henry IV obtained his pardon. Cadalus returned into obscurity, and it is then probably that he decided to become the high priest of sorcerers and apostates, in which capacity, and under the name of Honorius II, he composed the Grimoire that passes under this name.1

What is known of the anti-pope's character lends colour to an accusation of the kind; he was daring in the presence of the weak, grovelling in that of the strong, debauched and intriguing, devoid of faith and morals, seeing nothing in religion but an engine of impunity and rapine. For such a person the Christian virtues were obstacles, and faith in the clergy was a difficulty which had to be overcome; he would therefore make priests after his own heart, or capable, that is to say, of all crimes and sacrileges. Now, this would seem to have been the purpose in chief of the Grimoire called that of Honorius.

The work in question is not without importance for those who are curious in the science. It appears at first sight to be a mere tissue of revolting absurdities,² but for those who are initiated in the signs and secrets of the Kabalah, it is literally a monument of human perversity, for the devil appears therein as an instrument of power.

To utilise human credulity and to turn the bugbear which dominates it to the account of the adept and his caprices—such is the secret of the work. It aspires to make darkness darker before the eyes of the multitude by usurping the torch of science, which at need, and in bold hands, may become that of butchers and incendiaries. To identify faith with servitude, reserving power and liberty for oneself, is indeed to imagine the reign of Satan on earth, and it should not be surprising if the authors of such a conspiracy against public good sense and religion should hope to manifest and, in a sense, to incarnate on earth the fantastic sovereign of the evil empire.

The doctrine of this Grimoire is the same as that of Simon and the majority of the Gnostics: it is the substitution³ of the passive for the active principle. A pantacle which forms a frontispiece to the work gives expression to this doctrine, being passion as predominant over reason, sensualism deified and the woman in priority to the man, a tendency which recurs in all antichristian mystic systems. The crescent moon of Isis occupies the centre of the figure and it is encompassed by three triangles, one within another. The triangle is surmounted by a crux ansata with double cross-bar. It is inscribed within a circle and within the space formed by the three segments of the circle there is on one side the sign of the spirit and the Kabalistic seal of Solomon, on the others the magic knife and the initial letter of the binary, below a reversed cross forming the figure of the lingam, and the name of God also reversed. About the circle is written: “Obey your superiors and be subject unto them, for they will .see that you do.”1

Rendered into a symbol or profession of faith, this pantacle is therefore textually as follows:—Fatality reigns by virtue of mathematics, and there is no other God than Nature. Dogmas are aids to sacerdotal power and are imposed on the multitude to justify sacrifices. The initiate is above any religion and makes use of all, but that which he says is the antithesis of that which he believes. The law of obedience prescribes and does not explain; initiates are made to command and those who are profane to obey.

All who have studied the occult sciences know that the old magicians never expressed their doctrine in writing but formulated it by the symbolical characters of pantacles. On the second page of the book there are two circular magical seals. In the first is the square of the Tetragram with an inversion and substitution of names. Instead of JEHOVAH; the four sacred words signifying:² The Absolute Being is Jehovah, the Lord in Three Persons, God and the hierarchy of the Church, the author of the Grimoire has substituted which signifies: Jehovah, the Lord, is none other than the fatal principle of eternal rebirth, personified by this same rebirth in the Absolute Being.

About the square within the circle is the name of Jehovah in its proper form, but also reversed; on the left is that of Adonai and on the right are the three letters ACHV, followed by two points, the whole meaning: Heaven and hell are each the reflection of each; that which is above is as that which is below; God is humanity—humanity being expressed by the letters ACHV, which are the initials of Adam and Eve.³

On the second seal is the name ARARITA, and below it is RASH, encircling twenty-six Kabalistic characters. Below the seal are ten Hebrew letters, given in the following order: The whole is a formula of materialism and fatality, which is too long, and, it may be, too perilous for explanation in this place. The prologue of the Grimoire comes next in order and may be given at full length.⁴

“The Holy Apostolic Chair, unto which the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven are given by those words that Christ Jesus addressed to St. Peter: I give unto thee the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and unto thee alone the power of commanding the Prince of Darkness and his angels, who, as slaves to their master, do owe him honour, glory and obedience, by virtue of those other words of Christ Jesus, addressed to Satan himself: Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve—hence by the power of these Keys the Head of the Church has been made the Lord of hell. But seeing that until this present the Sovereign Pontiffs have alone had the charge of evoking and commanding spirits. His Holiness Honorius II, being moved by his pastoral care, has desired benignly to communicate the science and power of evocations and of empire over spirits to his venerable Brethren in Jesus Christ, with the conjurations which must be used in such case; now therefore the whole is contained in the Bull which here follows.”

Here in all truth is the pontificate of hell, that sacrilegious priesthood of antipopes which Dante seems to stigmatise in the raucous cry uttered by one of his princes of perdition: Pope Satan, Pope Satan; Aleppe. Let the legitimate pontiff continue as prince of heaven; it is enough for the anti-pope Cadalus to be the sovereign of hell. “Be He the God of good, for god of evil am I; we are divided, but my power is equal.”

The Bull of the infernal pontiff follows,1 and the mystery of darksome evocations is expounded therein with a terrific knowledge concealed under superstitious and sacrilegious forms. Fastings, watchings, profanation of mysteries, allegorical ceremonies and bloody sacrifices are combined with artful malice. The evocations are not deficient in poetry or in enthusiasm, mingled with horror. For example, the author ordains that an operator should rise at midnight on the Thursday in the first week of evocations, should sprinkle his room with holy water and light a taper of yellow wax—prepared on the previous day and pierced in the form of a cross. By the uncertain light of this candle he must enter a church alone and read the Office of the Dead in a low voice, substituting in place of the ninth lesson at Matins the following rhythmic invocation which is here translated from the Latin, preserving its strange form and its refrains, which recall the monotonous incantations of old-world sorcerers:

O Lord, deliver me from the infernal terrors.

Exempt my spirit from sepulchral larvae;

To seek them out I shall go down to their hell unaffrighted:

I shall impose my will for a law upon them.

I will call upon night and its darkness to bring forth splendour:

Rise up, O Sun; and. Moon, be thou white and brilliant;

To the shades of hell I will speak and confess no terror:

I shall impose my will for a law upon them.

Dreadful in aspect are they, their forms in appearance fantastic:

I will that the demons shall once again become angels.

Whence to their nameless distortion I speak, never fearing:

I shall impose my will for a law upon them.

These shades are illusions evoked by the eye affrighted;

I and I only can heal their loveliness blasted,

And into the deeps of hell I plunge unaffrighted:

I shall impose my will for a law upon them.1

After many other ceremonies there comes the night of evocation. In a sinister place, in the light of a fire kindled with broken crosses, a circle is traced with the embers of a cross, reciting while so doing a magical hymn containing versicles of several psalms. It may be rendered as follows:²

“O Lord, the king rejoices in Thy power; let me finish the work of my birth. May shadows of evil and spectres of night be as dust blown before the wind.…O Lord, hell is enlightened and shines in Thy presence; by Thee do all things end and all begin by Thee: JEHOVAH, TSABAOTH, ELOHIM, ELOI, HELION, HELIOS, JODHEVAH, SHADDAI. The Lion of Judah rises in His glory; He comes to complete the victory of King David. I open the seven seals of the dread book. Satan falls from heaven, like summer lightning. Thou hast said to me: Be far from thee hell and its tortures; they shall not draw to thy pure bodies. Thine eyes shall withstand the gaze of the basilisk; thy feet shall walk fearlessly on the sap; thou shalt take up serpents, and they shall be conquered by thy smile; thou shalt drink poisons, and they shall in nowise hurt thee. ELOHIM, ELOHAB, TSABAOTH, HELIOS, EHYEH, EIEAZEREIE, O THEOS, TSEHYROS. The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof; He hath established it over the gaping abyss. Who shall go up unto the mountain of the Lord? The innocent of hands and clean of heart; he who hath not held truth in captivity, noi hath received it to let it remain idle; he who hath conceived the height in his soul and hath not sworn by a lying word. The same shall receive strength for his domain, and hereof is the infinite of human birth, generation by earth and fire, the divine bringing forth of those who seek God. Princes of Nature, enlarge your doors; yoke of heaven, I lift thee. Come to me, ye holy cohorts: behold the King of glory. He hath earned his name; he holds in his hand the seal of Solomon. The master hath broken the black bondage of Satan and hath led captivity captive. The Lord alone is God, and He only is King. To Thee only be glory, O Lord; glory and glory to Thee.”1

One seems to hear the sombre puritans of Walter Scott or Victor Hugo accompanying, with fanatic psalmody, the nameless work of sorcerers in Faust or Macbeth.

In a conjuration addressed to the shade of the giant Nimrod, the wild huntsman who began the Tower of Babel, the adept of Honorius menaces that ancient reprobate with the riveting of his chains and with torture increased daily, should he fail in immediate obedience to the will of the operator. It is the sublimity of pride in delirium, and this anti-pope, who could only understand a high priest as a ruler of hell, seems to yearn after the usurped and mournful right of tormenting the dead eternally, as if in revenge for the contempt and rejection of the living.

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¹ The reader should understand that Éliphas Lévi is only giving expression to a point of view; it must not be supposed that there were adepts—either true or false—who said or thought the things which are here set down at the period in question, or indeed at any other period.

1 See Gabriel Naudé: Apologie pour; les Grands Hommes faussement accusés de la Magie.

¹ Bartholemaeus Piatina was assistant librarian of the Vatican, and his Opus in Vitas Summorum Pontificum appeared at Venice in 1479, two years before his death

² “Let the popes see to it,” he remarks, according to a Note of Lévi; “it is they who are concerned in the question.”

¹ Éliphas Lévi, in his defence of the Catholic Religion, by which he means that of Rome, reminds one of Talleyrand proceeding to consecrate and entreating his familiars about him not to make him laugh: in the symbolic language of the man in the street, his tongue is so evidently in his cheek. An open enemy of Rome would think twice before saying that the pope who authorised the instruments which were used in the execrable massacres of Albigensians and Vaudois was “so eminently catholic”.

² I refer the readers of this section to my Book of Ceremonial Magic, where the content and history of this Grimoire are considered with special reference to the criticism of Éliphas Lévi.

¹ I have mentioned in the Book of Ceremonial Magic that the first edition of the Grimoire of Honorius is referred to 1629, being about 900 years after the death of its alleged author. I have also referred it to its proper source in the Sworn Book of Honorius, which belongs to the fourteenth century. The Honorius here in question was the spokesman of magicians assembled at a mythical place. He is described as the son of Euclid and Master of the Thebans.

² This is another way of stating that it is precisely of the same character as the Key of Solomon the King, the Keys of Rabbi Solomon and the Magical Elements of Peter de Abano, which correspond to the description given.

³ The Grimoire is, on the contrary, a Ritual for the evocation of evil spirits, and, granting only the legality of this operation, it is conformable in all respects to the doctrine of the Latin Church. Now, it is idle to say that this Church substitutes the passive for the active principle, the cultus of the Blessed Virgin notwithstanding.

¹ I am not acquainted with this frontispiece, but I have seen a copy having a design on the title-page representing the sun within an inverted triangle.

² This exegesis is personal to Éliphas Lévi and has no authority in Kabalism, as there is no need to say, seeing that the Secret Tradition in Jewry did not maintain the hierarchy of the Latin Church. In the Zohar, Adonai is a title of Shekinah, as already stated.

³ On the assumption of course that the letter Aleph stands for Adam, while Cheth and Vau are the first letters in the name of Eve. The interpretation throughout is of the same value and Éliphas Lévi was not more serious in expressing it than I am in translating it. The Grimoire of Honorius is no such abyss of decorative philosophical iniquity.

⁴ I have used the translation made from the Grimoire itself, published in my Book of Ceremonial Magic, p. 107.

¹ It affirms that the power to command demons is resident in the Seat of Peter and then proceeds to communicate that power by dispensation to “venerable brethren and dear sons in Jesus Christ”, being those comprised in the ranks of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

¹ It must be explained that the oration in the Grimoire is not rhythmic, but the “when I shall impose my will upon them” recurs several times, literally or in substance In this manner Éliphas Lévi gets the refrain of his verses: Je leur imposterai ma volonté pour loi. His metrical rendering is well conceived and executed.

² I have rendered in prose that which is given by Lévi in verse, which is anything but in the words of the Ritual. Compare my translation of the prayer taken from the Grimoire in the Book of Ceremonial Magic, pp. 280-282.

¹ The Ritual proceeds to the conjuration of the Kings presiding in the lorn quarters of heaven and the evil angels who rule over the days of the week.