THE REALITY OF SORCERY
I have often been asked by folk who were perfectly serious in their
inquiry if there “was anything in” latter-day sorcery, and whether
the practice actually existed outside the realm of fiction. It is a
difficult question to answer, for the average man mixes up witchcraft,
sorcery and necromancy, and one cannot be certain whether he is
alluding to the dark ceremony of the Black Sabbath, to the use of
occult knowledge for malevolent purposes, or whether he is thinking of
wax images and pine, incantations and night rides astride a broomstick.
Put in a simpler form, the question comes to this: Can experienced
occultists utilize spirit or unknown natural forces for malevolent
uses? The answer is an unhesitating affirmative. Under certain
conditions, it can be done.
Magic has always been divided into white or good magic, and black or
bad magic. Both have been liberally endowed with ritual observance, but
shorn of non-essentials the determining factor that decides whether
magic is black or white is the secret intent of the operating magician.
In the past the great popular attribute of the magician was his
knowledge of healing. He was not only a seer of the future and a finder
of lost things, but also a healer. On the reverse side may be set
against his capacity for healing his power for casting spells or doing
harm; against his draughts of beneficent medicine, his vials of poison.
The doctor who uses hypnotic treatment, practises suggestion or acts as
a psychotherapeutist, is to-day the direct twentieth-century descendant
of the magicians of the past. Apollonius of Tyana is his patron; Merlin
worked his wonders by the same rules.
It is to the modern studies in psychic science that we must turn
to find the underlying mechanisms of magic practices, for a full
three-quarters of art magic is due to the little-known effects of
hypnotism or suggestion, and but a shadowy balance to the powers of
discarnate intelligences of evil.
The discoveries of the existence of “animal magnetism” by Mesmer was
the first step which brought the psychic phenomena of will domination
out of the realm of the occult into the domain of medical knowledge.
For a century Mesmer’s theory has been discredited, but to-day modern
students of psychic science are beginning to pay attention to it again.
It fell into discredit owing to the discoveries of Braid, the
Manchester physician, who discovered that Mesmer’s phenomena could be
produced independently of the theory of “animal magnetism” by plain
hypnosis.
Braid’s theories were followed out by Chercot and the Paris School of
Hypnotists, and their theories were in turn demolished by Liébault
and Bernheim of the Nancy School, who held that all the phenomena of
hypnotism in their turn were produced by suggestion.
In point of actual fact, advanced thinkers of to-day hold that the same
effect may be produced by all three methods of practice. In the same
way we may produce a given electrical phenomenon such as the lighting
of an incandescent lamp by the action of chemical solutions on metals
in a battery, or by the rotation of a coil of wire between magnetic
poles in a dynamo. The methods are different, but the forces evolved
and the effect obtained are identical.
The lay mind will follow my argument better if I use the loose terms of
hypnotism and hypnosis than if I attempt a more scientific terminology.
The first point that must be grasped is that the sorcerer or wizard
possesses psychic gifts or qualities of an entirely different order to
those claimed by Spiritualists.
The sorcerer is a hypnotist--that is to say, he is an individual who
possesses the power of emitting or radiating an unknown psychic force.
Most people are neutral, they neither radiate this force nor do they
oppose or resist its passage, but the individuals who are susceptible
to its action seem to possess the faculty of arresting this radiation
and converting it to mental energy within themselves. These are the
people who are what is known as good hypnotic subjects.
In the histories of the great sorcerers of the past the _assistant_,
that is to say the subject, plays as important a rôle as does the mage
himself, for the subject is the instrument of the master.
The average person who possesses mediumistic or psychic qualities in
the Spiritualistic sense, is in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred in a
greater or lesser degree a sensitive hypnotic subject.
The odd few who do not come in the above category may be classed as
hermaphroditic or doubly gifted individuals who possess both radiating
power and subjectivity. One or two noted materializing mediums of the
past have been thus endowed.
In the usual circle there is the medium and the sitters. Some of these
may be neutral, but in an average circle there are one or more who
possess unknown to themselves a certain amount of radiant force. It is
this which passes along the chain of hands to the medium where it is
arrested and condensed to play its mysterious part in the liberation
of psychic elements that can be utilized by the unseen spirit workers.
If there is present in the circle an individual who is greatly endowed
with this force--and whose mental desires approximate to black rather
than white magic, we have an instance of those dread dangers that beset
those who unwittingly pass beyond the threshold of the known.
The trance state of the medium is akin to light hypnosis and the
subject or medium of a well-meaning little circle of Spiritualists may,
unknown to him or herself, become the slave of one or other of the
members of the circle.
It is an asseveration with hypnotists that they have no power without
the _consent_ of the individual. But once they have won the entry
of the mind that entry is theirs for ever, and even the bodily presence
of the operator is not required to achieve this domination of the mind
of the subject.[25]
The common instances where this kind of thing occurs cannot be classed
as true sorcery, for in most cases the operator is unconscious of how
or why the fulfilment of his desires comes about. The true sorcery only
comes in when an individual possessing the required psychic faculty,
and in addition, occult knowledge, exerts these of set purpose in order
to gratify his desires.
Vengeance of an enemy, the subjugation of another’s will, the
satisfaction of a sex passion, all these are motives for sorcery. The
witch-doctor of West Africa, the voodoo priestesses of Cuba and Hayti
practise these accomplishments no less than their white brethren in
black magic. Sorcery lives to-day no less than it lived centuries ago.
There are several roads to its portals--but not a track leading back to
the regions of light for those that pass its gates.
The first aim of the sorcerer is to get the victim in a state of
suggestibility. This can be accomplished in a dozen different ways well
known to the practised student.
In the first, fumes of a special sort of incense played no
inconsiderable part in the rôle of sorcery. According to ritual
they are to propitiate the spirits--in actual practice they induce
relaxation on the part of the subject and assist in building up that
necessary atmosphere which is essential to suggestibility.
The effect of darkness, of points of light gleaming amid surrounding
dark, the magic mirror or the crystal globe; all these were more than
stage properties--they are the mechanical implements of suggestion.
Let us suppose that some weak and curious woman visits a sorcerer to
obtain his help in some affair of heart. The man of mystery seats her
in a comfortable chair; the lights are lowered and he tells her to gaze
at the crystal ball upon the table before her.
Fumes of incense hang in the heavy air. The man’s voice is clear,
dominant, and sonorous; slowly it becomes soothingly monotonous.
Gradually the client feels languor stealing over her. The crystal
becomes cloudy and in the globe appears something that she knows and
recognizes.
Probably the crystal tells her nothing that means anything to her.
Certainly she has seen in it nothing but what she has known at some
time before,[26] or something that the magician has seen before. But
the net result is that she is convinced of the occult powers possessed
by him.
This is the prelude to other visits and little by little her will
yields to that of the sorcerer and the suggestions that he has
implanted in her subconscious mind begin to take effect. If he is a
daring scoundrel, his domination may take any form. Unconscious that
she is not acting of her own free will, she may yet be brought to place
at his disposal everything and anything that he may require of her.
He has invoked no spirit aids, but has caused the powers of hypnotism
and suggestion, taking advantage of the light condition of hypnosis
induced by the crystal-gazing. Police and press persecutions of the
Seers of Bond Street are not altogether unjustified in many cases. The
real facts may not be brought out at the court, owing to the shame that
publicity would inflict upon the dupes, but the prosecution is, in nine
cases out of ten, justifiable.
The class of petty criminals above mentioned are again not true
sorcerers, in that they only use occult natural forces, summoning to
their aid no spirit attributes. In the lowest grade of the sorcerers we
find the necromancers.
There are still a few of these in Paris and latterly there was one in
the West Country. It depends on the individual operator how much of his
ceremonial is for the purpose of inducing suggestibility or partial
hypnosis and how much is for the direct evocation of evil spirits. Very
often the necromancer himself is deluded enough to confuse natural with
supernatural power.
There is a certain class of spirits to whom the ancients gave the name
of Lemures. These can be semi-materialized, made visible, and bound to
service by a comparatively simple ritual, for in place of needing the
material vehicle of ectoplasm, extended by a materializing medium, they
can take shape from the emanations of warm blood.
This vital fluid plays an important part in all magical ceremony. We
find mention of it from the days when Ulysses poured blood and wine
into a trench to call up the spirits before he went down into hell.
In the dark history of Gilles de Retz[27] the blood ritual is seen in
all its ghostliest fluorescence. The calabash of blood of the “white
goat” is essential in obi and voodoo magic, and blood, fresh blood, not
necessarily but preferably human, is used by the necromancer of to-day.
Those learned in occult matters will readily perceive the precious
function that blood emanations exercise, but on the contrary, the man
of science and the psychologist will not be able to understand the part
that blood plays in this peculiar alchemy.
It must be clearly understood that experiment of this nature is
extraordinarily perilous and that any attempt at necromancy by
students whose knowledge is insufficient can have none but disastrous
results.[28]
The elemental forces evoked by this ceremony may be compared to
gunpowder. Any fool can blow himself up with powder by setting a match
to it, but it takes a skilled artillerist to harness the forces and
make them propel a projectile to a given target. Experiment with
elemental forces is analogous and the greater part of the ritual deals
with the protection of the operator or sorcerer himself from those
dread spirits who obey his summons.
In 1912 I attended the course of lectures on psychic science given at a
sub-school of the University of Jena. A fellow-student there gave me a
letter of introduction to Gottlieb Bentlemeyer, a professor of law at
one of the Hanover Hochschulen and an ardent student of black magic.
At that time he had rooms in the Wiesenstrasse and had in his charge
one or two private pupils whom he was cramming for their necessary
examinations. One of these lads, a youngster from Stettin, in North
Prussia, was his assistant in the necromantic art, and was a most
highly gifted sensitive or hypnotic subject.
It was not until we had had several ordinary séances and he had shown
me some astounding experiments in the externalization of sensibility
and clairvoyance under hypnosis that I deemed it fit to mention the
subject of necromancy.
We were at that time in the Hanover Museum and had been examining
an exhibit of “Qualapparat”--racks, winches, and torturing-irons of
various descriptions. It was our discussion of the possible sending
of the spirit of his assistant, Walther Kraus, under hypnosis to
psychometrize these vile memorials of a brutal past that raised the
subject. We came to the conclusion that the experiment would be
extremely hazardous, but Bentlemeyer kindly offered to attempt to call
up the spirit of one or more of the men who had used these things.
“It will not be an easy task to find them,” he said, “but being men of
blood it may be possible to find them by means of the blood elementals.”
It took us three days to make our preparations, for although
Bentlemeyer had an excellent and systematically arranged cabinet of
magical requisites, one or two things had to be procured.
His association with the Hochschule enabled him to obtain fresh blood
through the agency of one of his medical colleagues.
We rehearsed the ritual carefully, in order that there should be no
fault, and I must confess that I prepared myself for the ordeal with
considerable trepidation. His ceremonial of evocation was slightly at
variance with accepted French practice, but the discrepancies were
not material and appeared to have crept in during the time of King
Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia. Bentlemeyer informed me that the original
MS. in German and Hebrew had been in the possession of the celebrated
Steinert.[29]
It was a clear autumn night with a perfect moon; the air had a touch of
frost in it and the great town of Hanover was quiet and still.
Bentlemeyer was already in his robes when one of the pupils admitted
me. I changed into the necessary garments, took the rod and girdle
which he had lent me, and placed the snake-hilted poniard in its belt
sheath.
The circle of evocation had been marked out in chalk on the floor. The
prepared candles burnt in the angles of the pentacle and the saucers of
salt and the elements were in their appropriate places. The sorcerer
stood within his circle of protection facing the small tripod brazier
in which was a brazen plate glowing over the frame of a small spirit
lamp.
I took my place within the _enceinte_ of a similar diagram, and
on a couch, lying between us, was Walther, the assistant. The candle
lights burnt in the draughtless atmosphere, the dull yellowish flames
standing up without a flicker, sending their faint tail of black smoke
toward the ceiling. Beyond the confines of our protective circles was a
grotesque bronze bowl or shallow basin. Bentlemeyer removed the black
velvet hood that covered it and the filmy crimson surface of fresh
blood gleamed in the light.
At a sign we began the chanting of the preliminary invocations to the
guardians of the gates. The room was sonorous with the great Hebrew
names, and from time to time a fresh pinch of incense on the brazier
would send a wreath of pungent fume across the room.
The boy on the couch breathed heavily, loosened the restriction of his
garments, and soon subsided into a definite state of trance.
From invocation we changed to the ritual of evocation. And before the
echoes of the first summons had died down, a cold wind seemed to burst
out in the very heart of the room itself, making the candles flicker
and the shadows flit and dance in arabesques across the low ceiling.
I felt for the poniard at my belt and drawing it from its sheath held
the naked blade ready.[30]
The second and third utterances of the words of power intensified the
effect and the boy moaned pitifully.
Bentlemeyer signed to me with his rod to look toward the blood bowl.
The surface of the liquid was being slowly agitated, strong swirls
and broken wave motions appeared on the surface, sluggish, iridescent
bubbles floated for a while and burst, and at last the whole body of
fluid within the bowl was in a state of violent agitation.
The sorcerer bent to a vessel on the ground and threw upon the brazier
some new essence--not an incense. The smoke wreathed itself above the
brazier, then seemed to take shape like a pillar and curve toward the
blood bowl.
Slowly yet distinctly the vapours clustered above the blood and slowly
took semi-human shape. Incessantly they changed and melted--now
limb-like, here betraying the outline of a demon face, there a
pillared, smoothly working trunk.
From the bowl came a noise like cats’ tongues lapping and now and then
the bowl itself would tilt and move a fraction of an inch or so about
the floor. For a moment we watched this monstrous manifestation in
silence. Then the sorcerer resumed his ritual and bound the spirits
present to do his bidding to the spell of the Three Known and One
Unknown elements.
“What are your names?” he asked, and the elemental demons or spirits
speaking through the trance-bound boy gave them.
“Who is your leader?” There was a momentary hesitation, and then a
spirit answering to the name of Amalik assumed the leadership.
“Have you been a mortal?”
“No, I was never mortal. I was an earth-spirit, serving the priests of
Odin till the Cross came.”
“What brought you here to-night?”
“The Blood Libation and the summons. What do you want of us? We wish to
depart.”
“You are bound to do my bidding by the words of Might. You may not go.
I want you to find for me the spirit of one of the men of blood who
used the torture instruments in the Museum.”
“I do not know the men.”
“I command you to seek them. I command all of you by the powers that
are mine to seek and bring them.”
For a moment there was silence, broken only by the laboured breathing
of the boy. Then he spoke again.
“I have found one, O Masters.”
“What is his name?”
“Kurt Ettethurm.”
“He is to answer my questions himself. Where did you live?”
A new and harsher voice issued from the boy’s lips.
“By Sachsenhausen, near Augsburg.”
“When?”
“In the time of Charles the Fifth of Spain.”
“Were you one of his torturers?”
“No, I served Count Anton of Tornen.”
“Who were your victims?”
“Criminals, bandits, and Lutherans.”
“When did you die?”
“At Muhlberg.”
“When--not where?”
“At Muhlberg--killed in the battle of Muhlberg.”
“Where are you now?”
“Why ask? I am in a lower state.”
“Do you revisit this sphere unless summoned?”
“I am always here, but you cannot see me.”
“Where are you usually?”
“By the slaughter houses.”
“Do you move from place to place?”
“Yes, I follow the Scharfrichter (headsman).”[31]
“Why?”
“To watch.”
“Are you bound to?”
“No, I like it.”
“Can you show yourself to us?”
“I do not think so. Help me and I will try.”
“How can we help you?”
“Place that bowl of blood at the northern corner of the pentacle.”
I must have started to move forward, for Bentlemeyer shouted at me to
keep still, and I realized in a flash that I had nearly been trapped
into going beyond the protection of my circle.
The boy began to chuckle horribly and then suddenly choked. Before our
eyes his face became empurpled, his eyes seemed to start from his head,
and the tongue protruded. His legs kicked and his hands beat feebly at
something solid--impenetrable--but invisible, that poised in the empty
air above him.
“Stop it, for God’s sake!” I cried to Bentlemeyer.
My voice awoke him from the creeping paralysis of terror that was
mastering him, and raising the scroll of the ritual he recovered
himself by an effort of will, and uttered the words of the spell of
release.
A swirl of icy cold wind seemed to sweep about us, and I stabbed at the
invisible grasp that seemed to be plucking at my garments. Two of the
candles went out and the windows rattled violently in their frames.
Then with frightening suddenness the manifestations ceased.
The boy was gasping for breath once more and the terror had passed.
Not until the last of the valedictory phrases of the ritual had been
said did either of us dare leave our stations. Then both of us, shocked
and terrified by what we had seen, went over to the boy Walther.
He was deeply entranced yet, breathing heavily; the colour had not
yet ebbed from his face and on his brow were beads and runnels of
perspiration.
Bentlemeyer made a few passes, breathed on his eyelids, and brought him
round. But there on his uncollared neck was the dark, bruised imprint
of strangling fingers.
* * * * *
This experience was phenomenal. We examined the room carefully
afterwards and came to the conclusion that the couch on which Walther
was lying projected at one corner over the circuit of the diagram
that should have protected it. The identity of the spirit we could
not determine. Whether it was really the spirit of the executioner or
torturer, whether it was merely an impersonation by a demon elemental,
or what particular denizen of the realm of evil it was that came to the
summons and the blood bowl I cannot say.
I learnt later that Bentlemeyer was, despite his learning and his
professional standing, a man of notoriously evil and depraved life.
There is no doubt that our experiences that evening thoroughly startled
him. A brother student of proven reliability told me later that
Bentlemeyer had assured him that he could and did evoke evil spirits,
and evoke them to execute malicious tricks upon his confrères in the
professional world.
In this connection it is interesting to note that when looking
through his cabinet of magical instruments I saw two small nude waxen
models, male and female. I asked at the time the purpose of these and
he explained that they were used by him in a hypnotic experiment
with Walther. This was the phenomenon known as externalization of
sensibility.
Under hypnosis Walther’s feeling of sensation could be transferred by
the operator to any object, such as a glass of water or a waxen doll. A
pin-prick on the surface of the water would be felt by him as an acute
pricking sensation all over the body. When the doll was used, pain was
felt by Walther in the precise place where the doll was pricked.[32]
The hypothesis is that the sorcerer and wizard of the Middle Ages made
use of this phenomenon and that their victims were the unconscious
victims of hypnosis. Before this hypothesis can be dismissed by the
sceptic it should be remembered that sorcery flourished best in ages of
faith and superstition. An active belief in the powers of sorcery or
witchcraft facilitates not only direct suggestion, but also suggestion
on self-hypnosis.
A point of interest is that the effects of sorcery or evil suggestion
are capable of being remedied by people who understand the subject.
Exorcism is valuable and is as real as sorcery, and it is by no means
a lost art among those occultists who have studied the dark side of
spirit phenomena in order to know all that we are allowed to know of
this dangerous subject.
Above all things, the Spiritualist who has certain healing qualities in
connection with mediumistic gifts should avoid any attempt at exorcism.
Cases have been known when the attempt was successful, but only in
so far that the evil was transferred from the original victim to the
would-be healer. As a rule, the results are bad for both parties. The
mental and consequently physical dangers of this kind of thing are far
too serious to be lightly meddled with. One cannot insist on this too
strongly.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] Chapter X of Professor Boirac’s _Psychic Science_ “Experimental
Researches in Sleep Provoked at a Distance.”
[26] See Proceedings of La Société Universelle d’Etudes Psychiques and
_Proceedings S.P.R._, V and VIII.
[27] See “Gilles de Rais, dit Barbe Bleu.” Bonsard et Maulde, _History
of Magic_, Chapter VI: “Eliphas Levi.” In fiction, Huysman’s _La-Bas_.
[28] For obvious reasons I have suppressed the detail of ritual.
[29] Steinert was the chief adept in the Society of the Illuminati. See
_Essai sur la Secte des Illuminés_, Marquis de Lachet.
[30] Elementals cannot face pointed steel. Probably because the latter
concentrates radiations of psychic force from the human body which are
destructive to them.
[31] In Germany capital punishment is still carried out by the
headsman, who beheads with a sword.
[32] Chapter II, _Psychical and Supernormal Phenomena_, by Dr. Paul
Joire; Chapter XV, _Psychic Science_, by Emile Boirac, and numerous
other works give details of this phenomenon.