FOR ANCIENT ROME, THE LAST OF THE GREAT EARLY WESTERN CIVILIZAtions, the problem had always been Germany. The barbarian hordes beyond the Rhine had sometimes been subdued, sometimes temporarily pacified, but never fully conquered. In the later years of the empire, the Romans began to realize they had disturbed a hornet’s nest. The Germanic tribes were no longer content to defend their own territory but set their sights increasingly on lands ruled by Rome. For years, the seasoned Roman army held them off. Then in the third century CE Roman soldiers pulled back from the Rhine-Danube frontier to fight a civil war in Italy, leaving the borderlands largely undefended. Gradually the northern tribes began to overrun the former Roman territories in Greece and Gaul. Eventually the invaders penetrated Italy and a ragtag army was soon camped outside the gates of Rome itself. In 476 CE that army moved and the German general Odovacar overthrew the last of the Roman emperors, Augustulus Romulus.
Germanic rule proved less than effective. The great engineering works of ancient Rome were left to fall into disrepair. Without the disciplined legions for protection, travel became unsafe. A cultural malaise set in so that farmers no longer tilled their fields. Without goods from the farms, trade and business began to disappear. The once mighty Roman Empire was visibly crumbling. In an almost unimaginably brief period of time, it disappeared altogether. The Dark Ages had begun.
But while hardly evident in conventional histories, widespread spirit influence survived the fall of classical civilization. The prologue to a first-century CE treatise on astrological botany, attributed to the Greek physician Thessalos of Tralles, gives an account of evocation indicating that the use of professional intermediaries was still the norm.
In the final years of his medical studies in Alexandria, Thessalos stumbled on a treatise attributed to an obscure Egyptian pharaoh, Nechepso, that detailed twenty-four cures for various diseases based on the signs of the zodiac. Impressed by the antiquity of the work, Thessalos boasted about his amazing discovery to friends, family, and colleagues in Alexandria, only to discover that the cures did not actually work. The discovery almost drove him to suicide. In desperation, he decided to look for divine revelation.1 To this end, he traveled to Thebes where he found a priest willing to summon up Asclepios, the god of medicine.
The priest led him into a darkened room and chanted an incantation that caused the god to appear as a vision in a bowl of water. Thessalos was able to converse with the apparition, which explained in detail why King Nechepso’s approach had failed, then dictated the genuine secret to Thessalos on the condition that he would never reveal it to the profane.2 Ian Moyer comments that the description penned by Thessalos “reveals an awareness of similar narratives current in literature of the period.”3 Most of these typically involved the input of a professional who stood between the spirit and his client, acting to pass on messages and interpret their content. The intermediary was a priest in the case of Thessalos, among the last few of his profession to act openly as an intercessor with the spirit world. But by the time Thessalos discovered his mysterious book, Saint Paul was busily preaching to the Athenians and sending open letters to the Corinthians and Ephesians in an ultimately successful attempt to convert the pagan Greeks. Only a century or so later, Coptic Christianity had become the majority religion in Egypt. Soon the creed of the crucified god spread out of the Mediterranean and North Africa to conquer Europe. The Church of Rome was swiftly established as a major player—then the major player—in the politics and cultural life of the Continent. And the Church of Rome did not approve of spirit communications.
There were several biblical authorities for this stance, beginning with Saint John’s comparatively mild admonition, “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.”4 John suggested a simple test. If the spirit professed belief in Jesus it was good; if not, it was a minion of the Antichrist. The Church paid scant attention to such a gentle approach, but concentrated instead on harsher passages:
Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them: I am the LORD your God.5
And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and after wizards, to go a whoring after them, I will even set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people.6
And he made his son pass through the fire, and observed times, and used enchantments, and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards: he wrought much wickedness in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger.7
Moreover the workers with familiar spirits, and the wizards, and the images, and the idols, and all the abominations that were spied in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem, did Josiah put away, that he might perform the words of the law.8
And pounding like a leaden drumbeat across the Middle Ages:
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.9
A witch, as was made clear in the Old Testament story of the Witch of Endor,10 was someone with the ability to contact spirits.
Christianity was never very happy about spirits, despite the Annunciation, the voice at Jesus’s baptism, and Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus. Christ, his immediate disciples, and many early saints encountered them, but the entities are almost invariably described as “unclean” or “evil.” When the Lord granted his disciples the power to command spirits, the gift came with a warning: “Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.”11 As it grew in strength, the Church moved away from its initial position of caution to a decision that anyone who dealt with spirits was guilty of heresy. Since there was no apparent distinction between good and evil spirits, cynical historians might be tempted to see the move as an attempt to defend ecclesiastical power from possible competition. Certainly the heresy was vigorously pursued. In 1231, Pope Gregory IX set up the Papal Inquisition. His initial targets were the Waldensians and Cathars, two sects that shamed the Church by leading lives of Christlike simplicity, but eventually the Inquisition’s remit was extended to take in a long list of heresies, including sodomy, polygamy, blasphemy, and usury.
While later institutionalized, the Inquisition was at first little more than a legal method. The old ecclesiastical court system was replaced by single officials (Inquisitors) with the authority to demand information from anyone they believed to possess it and, if necessary, take action on any heresy revealed. The Inquisitor’s work was governed by strict, complex guidelines that limited the maximum punishment he could impose; in these early years, a simple penance was often the most that was imposed. But Gregory IX died in 1241 and just twenty-one years after the establishment of the Inquisition, a new pope, Innocent IV, authorized the use of torture.
Within 150 years, there were Inquisitors assigned throughout Europe, with brutally extended powers. Now they could impose prison sentences, up to and including life. Some enthusiastic Canon lawyer had even discovered a loophole to get around the ban on the Church taking life. Those condemned to death by an Inquisitor—the apostate who retracted his confession, the stubborn heretic who refused to confess at all—were simply handed over to the civil authorities who happily carried out the sentence. A favorite form of execution was burning alive. It reminded heretics of their fate in the afterlife and encouraged last-minute repentance. It was, in short, an act of mercy.
On August 22, 1320, a papal bull was issued specifically authorizing a French Inquisitor to investigate all those who used images or sacred objects to make magic and those who worshipped or made pacts with demons. Since by this time the Church tended to define all spirit communications as demonic, every mediumistic intermediary with the spirit realms was immediately at risk. Nor was the risk merely hypothetical. The first sorcery trial was held in Carcassonne just a decade after the bull. Five years later, Inquisitor Bernardus Guidonis condemned eight defendants to the stake, one on the basis of her confession that she had learned the secrets of evil from a goat. By 1350, the Inquisition had tried over one thousand French citizens for sorcery and burned more than half of them. For some, this hideous form of death may have been a blessed relief.
Typical of Inquisitorial justice was the case of Pierre Vallin. By the time the Inquisition caught up with him, Vallin was an old man and understandably frightened. He confessed at once to having sold his soul to the Devil some sixty-three years earlier, then gave the court an imaginative account of everything he thought the Inquisitor might want to hear, detailing a life of evil that included raising tempests, flying on a broomstick, and having sex with a succubus. When asked about his accomplices in this nefarious existence, he gave the names of four “witches” whose death had placed them beyond the reach of the Inquisition forever. Unfortunately, his Inquisitor suspected he was holding something back and ordered that Vallin be “put to the Question,” a euphemism for interrogation under torture.
In the Dark Ages, those suspected of spirit contact frequently found themselves in the torture chambers of the Inquisition.
By the time of Vallin’s trial, the Inquisition had refined its approach to torture. There were now several stages to the process. For the first, often recorded as “without torture,” he was stripped, bound, flogged, stretched on the rack until his bones cracked, then crushed with thumbscrews until his fingers burst. This treatment persuaded Vallin to give five more names—not, unfortunately, enough to satisfy his Inquisitor, who ordered him taken to the kitchens of the Castle of Quinezonasium where he underwent three sessions of strappado, a procedure during which his hands were tied behind his back, then fastened to a rope fed through a pulley high above in the roof. He was then slowly hoisted upward some fifteen or twenty feet and left dangling in agony for several hours. Five further names were extracted. Vallin was lucky his Inquisitor left it at that. The strappado sessions were recorded as “ordinary torture.” A further level of persuasion by pain, “extraordinary torture” typically left victims permanently crippled or dead. One favored practice was to burn off a victim’s foot, then present him with the charred bones in a bag as a souvenir.
Against this background, it is easy to appreciate why the professional intermediary—priest, medium, oracle, shaman—disappeared so quickly from the public eye in medieval Europe. But this is not to say that spirit contact ceased. Advice from the Beyond was so useful, or perhaps just so alluring, that there remained those prepared to risk torture and death in order to receive it. Such individuals were wizards and witches, magical practitioners who sometimes used herbal drugs like thorn apple12 to stimulate visionary experiences, and participated in rituals designed to conjure spirits. From the eighth to the eleventh centuries CE, Qabalistic texts like the Sepher Yetzirah made their way into European Jewish circles and, based as they were on the experiences of the Merkava mystics, promised spirit contact at the highest level. Even though Talmudic doctrine warned about the dangers of esoteric practice, several mystical fraternities were established in France, Spain, and Germany. But medieval forms of contact generally differed from those of the classical world in one important respect. Throughout the Dark Ages, belief in the Devil and his minions as living, breathing, and, above all, intervening, entities was strongly fostered by the Church and all but universal. But while the doctrine inspired fear in the many, for a certain minority mind-set, it was a short step from trying to avoid Satan to attempting to enslave his minions. Church disapproval ensured that the day of the openly practicing intermediary was gone, so the onus of spirit contact was thrown, for the first time in centuries, on the individual who sought their aid. The question was how to do it. The answer was provided by an increasing proliferation of grimoires, the notorious “black books” of magic. Specialist authority, Sir Keith Thomas writes:
Since classical times, it had been believed that, by following the appropriate ritual, it was possible to get in touch with supernatural beings … Many such rituals were extant during the Middle Ages … Usually they circulated in manuscript and were guarded with the utmost secrecy by their owners: which was hardly surprising, since for much of the period, the conjuration of spirits was a capital offence … These works opened up to the reader the possibility of invoking the whole hierarchy of angels and demons, each with their own names and attributes. The rituals for such spirit-raising varied, but usually involved such procedures as drawing chalk circles on the ground, pronouncing incantations, observing ritual conditions of fasting and prayer, and employing such apparatus as holy water, candles, sceptres, swords, wands and metal lamina. There is no doubt whatsoever that these rituals were extensively practiced, both by contemporary intellectuals and by less educated would-be magicians. The so-called “Books of Magic” … contain quite explicit formulae for invoking spirits and there is no shortage of evidence for such séances in the manuscript “Books of Experiments” which have survived.13
A study of the grimoires indicates a distinct change in attitude toward spirit entities during this period, possibly occasioned by an unconscious acceptance of Church doctrines. Where the spirits of ancient shamanism were treated with respect and the speaking statuary of Jaynes’s investigations approached with awe, medieval conjurers viewed communicating entities as servants or slaves to be commanded, cajoled, threatened, or bullied into submission. The following extract from one of the most popular grimoires, Clavicula Salomonis or “Key of Solomon,” gives a flavor of the new approach. In it, the wizard is instructed on what to do if the spirits prove recalcitrant in the face of milder conjurations:
If they then immediately appear, it is well; if not, let the master uncover the consecrated pentacles which he should have made to constrain and command the spirits, and which he should wear fastened round his neck, holding the medals (or pentacles) in his left hand, and the consecrated knife in his right; and encouraging his companions, he shall say with a loud voice:—
Here be the symbols of secret things, the standards, the ensigns, and the banners, of God the conqueror; and the arms of the almighty One, to compel the aerial potencies. I command ye absolutely by their power and virtue that ye come near unto us, into our presence, from whatsoever part of the world ye may be in, and that ye delay not to obey us in all things wherein we shall command ye by the virtue of God the mighty One. Come ye promptly, and delay not to appear, and answer us with humility.
If they appear at this time, show them the pentacles, and receive them with kindness, gentleness, and courtesy; reason and speak with them, question them, and ask from them all things which thou hast proposed to demand.
But if, on the contrary, they do not yet make their appearance, holding the consecrated knife in the right hand, and the pentacles being uncovered by the removal of their consecrated covering, strike and beat the air with the knife as if wishing to commence a combat, comfort and exhort thy companions, and then in a loud and stern voice repeat the following conjuration:—
Here again I conjure ye and most urgently command ye; I force, constrain, and exhort ye to the utmost, by the most mighty and powerful name of God EL, strong and wonderful, and by God the just and upright, I exorcise ye and command ye that ye in no way delay, but that ye come immediately and upon the instant hither before us, without noise, deformity, or hideousness, but with all manner of gentleness and mildness.
I exorcise ye anew, and powerfully conjure ye, commanding ye with strength and violence by him who spake and it was done; and by all these names: EL SHADDAI, ELOHIM, ELOHI, TZABAOTH, ELIM, ASHER EHEIEH, YAH, TETRAGRAMMATON, SHADDAI, which signify God the high and almighty, the God of Israel, through whom undertaking all our operations we shall prosper in all the works of our hands, seeing that the Lord is now, always, and for ever with us, in our heart and in our lips; and by his holy names, and by the virtue of the sovereign God, we shall accomplish all our work …
But if ye be still contumacious, we, by the authority of a sovereign and potent God, deprive ye of all quality, condition, degree, and place which ye now enjoy, and precipitate ye into and relegate ye unto the Kingdom of Fire and of sulphur, to be there eternally tormented. Come ye then from all parts of the earth, wheresoever ye may be, and behold the symbols and names of that triumphant sovereign whom all creatures obey, otherwise we shall bind ye and conduct ye in spite of yourselves, into our presence bound with chains of fire, because those effects which proceed and issue from our science and operation, are ardent with a fire which shall consume and burn ye eternally, for by these the whole Universe trembleth, the earth is moved, the stones thereof rush together, all creatures obey, and the rebellious spirits are tormented by the power of the sovereign creator.14
It is worth noting the second major change in spirit communication during this period—the overwhelming reliance on Judeo-Christian imagery in the evocation rituals. Claims to speak with the authority of God and Jesus Christ seem to be a universal feature of the grimoires, despite the Church’s stance on the practice of evocation. Reading the “black books,” one is left with the distinct impression that their authors were highly religious men, or at least absolute believers in the sovereignty of Jehovah and/or his Christian Son. Hand in hand with this conviction was the assumption that enslaving demons was a legitimate activity, since it gave them an opportunity to do some honest work for a change. Calling on the angels, for which instructions are given in some of the grimoires, usually produced a change of tone. The heavenly messengers were begged rather than commanded to appear, although even in supplication the arrogance of the conjurer was never far from the surface. But the practice of evocation was not confined to infernal and celestial spirits. The medieval scholar Michael Scot (c. 1175–c. 1234) wrote that contemporary occult practice included necromancy, the conjuration of the spirits of the dead.15
With few exceptions, conventional historians see spirit communications as a hidden (and unimportant) influence on society throughout the Middle Ages, largely ignoring the fact that the Church’s vigorous attempts to stamp it out suggest a serious problem. But even the most conventional cannot entirely ignore two striking examples of spirit contact of glaringly obvious historical import—and twenty-first-century implications.