Witchcraft E-Book

Charles Williams

• Herausgeber: Reading Essentials
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

This book is perhaps the best introduction to the subject of witchcraft that is neither hysterical nor Wiccan propaganda. Thus it is a rare read on the subject. Charles Williams provides an esoteric and intellectually provocative history of witchcraft and magic in the Christian era. As readable as a thriller but full of profound theological insight, Williams' book explores the sombre and lurid history of the reaction to witchcraft as well as its most famous cases.

Leseprobe

Witchcraft 

by Charles Williams

First published in 1941

This edition published by Reading Essentials

Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany

[email protected]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Witchcraft 

 by Charles Williams

To the immortal memory of ALONZO SALAZAR DE FRIAS NICHOLAS DE LA REYNIE ANDREW ELIOT

9

PREFACE

These pages must stand for what they are—a brief account of the history in Christian times of that perverted way of the soul which we call magic, or (on a lower level) witchcraft, and with the reaction against it. That they tend to deal more with the lower level than with any nobler dream is inevitable. The nobler idea of virtue mingled with power either worked itself out eventually as experimental science (but the extent to which experimental science was at any time denounced has probably been exaggerated), or it was kept carefully secluded in its own Rites (and to know these one would have had to share them), or it did in fact degenerate into base and disgusting evils (as I have here and there tried to suggest). No-one will derive any knowledge of initiation from this book; if he wishes to meet ‘the tall, black man’ or to find the proper method of using the Reversed Pentagram, he must rely on his own heart, which will, no doubt, be one way or other sufficient. I have not wished to titillate or to thrill; so far as I can manage it, this is history, and (again as far as I can manage it) accurate history. I have tried to make no statement that was not justified by reputable editions of original documents, and neither to exaggerate nor minimize events or contemporary opinion on events.

10

There are two authors who have laid the most casual student of the subject under heavy debt—Dr. Montague Summers and the late Dr. Henry Charles Lea; the first chiefly by his various translations, especially of the Malleus Maleficarum, the second by the great collection which was edited (after his death) by Professor A. C. Howland and published as Materials towards a History of Witchcraft. The relevant chapters in his History of the Inquisition and History of the Inquisition in Spain also illuminate the subject.

Both Dr. Summers and Dr. Lea express fixed views; those views, it is true, are in absolute opposition. I am not myself convinced either by Dr. Summers’s belief or by Dr. Lea’s contempt. But they express the views of two sincere and learned men, neither of whom would willingly alter a single fact in order to support his own view.

The double acknowledgement is the chief purpose of this preface. I have given other references in their proper place. The whole subject, however remote it may seem, is not without value at the present time. It is one exhibition among many—and more flagrant than some—of a prolonged desire of the human heart; few studies of the past can present that heart more terribly—whether on one side or on the other—in its original and helpless corruption.

11

Chapter OneTHE BACKGROUND

In the years of the Divine Tiberius Christendom had already come into being. There existed, scattered over Southern Europe and the Near East, companies of united disciples. They were known by certain beliefs and certain rites; they were also known by a certain mode of life which aimed at a particular and, it was thought, eccentric strictness. The centre of those beliefs, rites, and manner of life was asserted to be their peculiar and intense individual relationship to a historic (though almost contemporary) being. It was this, and one other thing, which distinguished them from the followers of the many mystery-religions and the many philosophies of the time. There were other groups which depended on rites, and there were many others which aimed at a strict moral life. The conflict of man’s worse desires with his better was not confined to Christians. It was a commonplace of the Roman world as it had been a commonplace of others. Conflict and division were obvious to all moral thinkers.

What distinguished Christendom was (i) its relation 14 to the Crucified Jew, and (ii) its assertion of a supernatural Will. The use of the word supernatural has been rebuked, and indeed it is a little unfortunate. It did not imply then, nor should it ever have implied since, any derogation from the natural order. But it did imply that that order was part of and reposed on a substance which was invisible and which operated by laws greater than, if not in opposition to, those which were apparent in the visible world. Substance was love, and love was substance. And that substance of love was disposed by conscious and controlling Will, which had yet so limited itself, by its own choice, as to leave the wills of men and women free to assent or not to assent to its own. The nature of that final and supernatural Will was not at all clearly imagined or defined by the passionate thinkers and orators of the early Church, except in two or three points. It was absolute; it had created all things; and in that historic being Jesus it had set itself in a special relationship of love to mankind. It had, by a sacrifice of what was more and more beginning to seem itself, operated to restore to men a state of goodness and glory of which they had miserably deprived themselves. It intensely and individually desired the salvation of all men. The one thing necessary, besides its own sacrifice, was the will of the creature to accept and unite itself with that sacrifice. And the death of Jesus, called Christ, had been that sacrifice.

Such ideas were in no sense repugnant to the age. The introduction of the supernatural was common enough. What was not so common was the single absolute Will, the historic personality, and the intensely exclusive demands which the new bodies of believers promulgated. 15 It was not the mysteries of Christendom but its definitions that were alien to contemporary thought and feeling. The supernatural was allowed, was even welcomed, so long as it was not intellectually and dogmatically defined. The half-allegorical gods of Rome, the symbolical and feverish divinities of the East, were very ready to welcome another god. It was the new god who refused to welcome them. On the whole the Roman world might accept myth, but it refused metaphysic as part of a religious creed, and dogma, in its repelling and formulated sense, was utterly alien to it. There was therefore at best a symbolism, at worst a cloudiness, about its divine beings; whether those beings were the lords of Eastern rituals or the even less credible gods of Roman public tradition. They could almost be believed to be idealizations of man’s desires and emotions. The highly sceptical section of the great world found no difficulty in that interpretation. It was content to allow the mass of men to believe as they chose—always assuming that the safety of the Empire was preserved.

There was therefore, in our sense of the words, hardly any ‘good’ or ‘evil’ about the world of divinities. Myths of evil supernatural beings might exist. The Furies might, in Virgil’s poem, chastise the souls of sinners. The mysteries might supply means by which the devotee entered into ‘blessedness’—of one kind or another. There were rites of a dangerous nature, invocations of awful and appalling deities. There were ghosts and curses, night-travellers and night-pestilences. But all these came rather under the head of Power than of Will. And if that were true even of the more respectable gods, it was much 16 more true of the less respectable. Charms and amulets, necromancy and divination, were popular, and their makers and professors were many. Popular also, though perhaps chiefly among a different and smaller class, were the literary reflections of such things; to the incredulous an amusement for their leisure, to the credulous a thrill of delicious fear.

In the very great poem in which, some fifty years earlier, Virgil had celebrated the restoration of the Julian line and the re-foundation of Rome, there is much of the supernatural. There indeed the Will of Jupiter might almost seem to approach the Christian idea of omnipotence; especially in the noble passage where the vocation of the Roman Empire in the world is related to the necessity of the Jovian commands. But perhaps the final resolution is never made. Or if it is, then it is made precisely in terms of justice here and not of supernatural substance nor of love. Piety and propriety Virgil understood; he pushed both very far; the very feel of his verse seems to hover on some greater mystery. But, could he have heard of Christianity, there seems little doubt that he would have recoiled from it, and would have relegated it to the train of obscene evils which attend on the traitor Antony and his Egyptian paramour.

But he knew much—at least he knew much poetically and for his literary purpose—about the darker power of enchantments. The beautiful, dangerous and fatal Queen of Carthage who nearly captivated Aeneas and prevented Rome knew about it. In her distress she had recourse to a woman of occult power. ‘I have found’, the queen said to her sister Anna, ‘a priestess who was the guardian 17 of the Hesperides, who can use spells to free minds from love or to bring them into slavery to love. She can stop flowing streams and turn the stars back in their courses. She can call up those spirits who wander by night; she can cause the earth to shake and trees to fall from the mountains. Be witness, gods, and you, sister, how unwillingly I turn to these sorceries.’

And now (the sacred altars placed around)

The priestess enters, with her hair unbound,

And thrice evokes the powers below the ground.

Night, Erebus and Chaos she proclaims,

And threefold Hecate, with her hundred names,

And three Dianas; next, she sprinkles round

With feigned Avernian drops, the hallowed ground;

Culls hoary simples, found by Phoebe’s light,

With brazen sickles reaped at noon of night;

Then mixes baleful juices in the bowl,

And cuts the forehead of a new-born foal,

Robbing the mother’s love. The destined queen

Observes, assisting at the rites obscene:

A leavened cake in her devoted hands

She holds; and next the highest altar stands;

One tender foot was shod, her other bare;

Girt was her gathered gown, and loose her hair.

Thus dressed, she summoned with her dying breath

The heavens and planets conscious of her death,

And every power, if any rules above,

Who minds or who revenges injured love.[1]

This example is from literature, and literature does 18 not always directly and accurately reflect the social or moral content of a culture. In fact, however, the activities represented in that image, whether or not they existed, were certainly feared in the public life of the time. The newly established Empire took measures against invisible as well as visible dangers. The invasion of Rome by religions and superstitions from the East was still regarded, as it always had been, as undesirable and improper, and the Aeneid itself had with great power denounced the rallying of the East at Actium. The imperial government, as much as was possible, barred its door against the intrusion, though it could not prevent the oriental myths and rituals drifting in not so much by the back door as by a thousand windows. The Emperors, with some reluctance, allowed themselves to be deified, at first in eastern cities, presently in Rome; and the deification, which had been so reluctant, presently became the very test of every Roman’s fidelity to the State. But this ceremonial godhead, however it might conflict with the Christian Faith, did not much involve the idea of supernatural power or supernatural knowledge. It was indeed the practice of supernatural knowledge against which the government set itself, from motives of public policy. The insatiable curiosity of the Divine Julius might examine, with a detached mind, all matters of the intellect with which he came in contact. His successors were compelled to guard their interests more carefully. The enemy, for them, was divination, the foretelling of the future, by whatever means. It was highly undesirable that recourse should be had to diviners, whether by groups or individuals. Such diviners 19 might too easily become centres of disaffection. Inquiries concerning the probable length of life of the Emperor, for example, whether made of the heavenly bodies or of the souls of the dead, might obviously become dangerous to the stability of the State; much more might inquiries concerning the immediate future of the Empire. The great Maecenas, cautious of the newly instituted peace, advised his master Augustus to forbid all kinds of divination and sorcery. Augustus consented to the decree. He rebuilt the ancient Roman temples; he restored the ancestral rites; and at the same time he caused all books of divination to be burned—to the number, it is said, of some two thousand. All consultation of sorcerers and diviners was prohibited on pain of death. Neither the Emperor nor any of his subjects were to be harried by any power or knowledge derived from another world. His successors from time to time renewed the decrees and put them into action.

Nevertheless, it was the political result and not the religious with which the government was concerned, whether public or private; the maleficium, the evil acts done against life or property. In principle the government had no objection to anyone studying the stars any more than to his studying the Greek poets, just as in principle it had no objection to the Christian worshipping Jesus instead of Jupiter. As things worked out, it had to take measures to suppress both Christians and diviners, and for the same reason—the political danger they were thought to involve. An example is given in Tacitus’s account of the conspiracy of Libo Drusus. This youth was deliberately inveigled by a friend Firnicus 20 Catus into dangerous paths. Catus talked to him of the greatness of his family; he urged him to magnificent living; and he encouraged him to turn to sorcery and divination—astrologers’ promises, magicians’ rites, and interpreters of dreams. Libo at last went so far as to approach a certain Junius, ‘for the purpose of evoking by incantations spirits of the dead’—perhaps Libo’s own great-grandfather Pompey, his aunt Teribonia, who had been married to Augustus, or other great ones of his house. The necromancer betrayed him to another informer, who went to the consuls. Libo was summoned before the Senate and invited to explain. The prosecution, amid other evidence of his dealing with diviners, with inquiries whether he would be so wealthy that he would cover the Appian Way to Brindisium with gold, produced a paper on which had been written the names of Caesars and of Senators, and against them signs of dreadful and mysterious significance. Order was given that his slaves should be formally sold, in order that they might be put to the torture, which could not legally be done otherwise in any case affecting a man’s life. The case was adjourned; and that evening the unhappy young fool killed himself. As a result fresh decrees were passed against all practitioners of magic. Some were seized; one was flung from the Tarpeian Rock; one was put to death by the consuls, to the ceremonial sound of trumpets, outside the Esquiline Gate. Yet the official consultation of omens continued, and even the official consultation of magians. Astrologers were frequently found in the imperial train and even in the close imperial circle. There they were harmless and even useful, since the 21 occult dealing of the Emperor was, by definition, no treason, being part of his dutiful care of the State. And when even darker things were rumoured to have happened, the same excuse was invoked. In the reign of the Emperor Hadrian the young favourite Antinous died mysteriously in Egypt. It was whispered that his death had not been accidental; the master of Antinous was learned in the arts of magic, and his best-loved servant had been lawfully sacrificed to ensure the good estate of the Emperor himself.

In the second century both the literary and social aspects of sorcery were represented in the career of Lucius Apuleius, a Roman and an African; he was born in Numidia, about A.D. 125. He had travelled in the Near East, and had been initiated into the mysteries of Isis and of Osiris. He had written one of the most famous novels of the world, the Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, which (as a modern novel might do) dealt both with religious initiations and with black magic.

It is a romance in the best style; it not only demands the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, but also defeats it. The first description of a witch is after the earlier Virgilian manner—‘She can call down the sky, hang earth in heaven, freeze fountains, melt mountains, raise the spirits of the dead, send gods to hell, put out the stars, and give light to Tartarus itself.’ But this is not to be taken seriously; the examples of her art which follow are meant for laughter. ‘She turned a neighbouring innkeeper, whose competition damaged her trade, into a frog: and now the poor old fellow swims about in a vat of his own wine and, squatting deep in the lees, 22 summons his former customers with hoarse importunate croak.’ The next example is wilder yet. ‘She turned another—a lawyer—into a ram because he had spoken against her, and now he pleads in the shape of a ram.’ It is a world where such things can happen, a world of every-day shot with fantastic twirls of metamorphosis. That, however, does not prevent the world from being at times terrible; the very style hints at the reality of those awful powers, and the laughter, even when apparently whole-hearted, is found to be half a defence against the energies which, were they once believed in, would be effectual. The ninth book holds what is perhaps the best example. There a certain adulterous wife, driven from her husband’s house, plots with a witch against his life. It is the means which are frightful. A dead woman, herself murdered, is evoked and sent to the house. ‘About midday a woman suddenly appeared in the mill. She was clad in the garb of mourning worn by persons accused of some crime; her face was strangely disfigured by grief, while her raiment hardly covered her and consisted of deplorable shreds and patches. Her feet were naked and unshod, her countenance hideously thin and pale as boxwood, and her grizzled hair was torn and foully besprinkled with ashes, and hung over her forehead so as to cover the greater part of her face. She laid her hand upon the miller as though she would speak to him in private and led him to his chamber.’ When, at last, the slaves break into the room where the two are supposed to be, they find their master hanging dead from a beam and the woman gone.

Such a passage might certainly be paralleled by many 23 modern ‘ghost’ stories. In these, however, the victim is usually himself a sinner; a supernatural propriety exercises itself through the apparition, and ‘the manner of the death’, in the words of Apuleius, ‘that sends him as a ghost to dwell in the world below’ is justified by the nature of the original sin. Here, however, there is no such justice; there is only malevolence made powerful by rare control of secret means. In the mill, to the slaves grinding the corn and the honest miller, ‘an excellent fellow of a very modest disposition’, the evoked phantasm of the unfortunate dead appears, and, like the later vampires whose bite drew their victims without their will into their own company, works on the living, in ways which Apuleius will not describe, till the dead body hangs strangled from the beam. Against such malevolence, in that world, it seems there is to be imagined no protection, except perhaps in the end for those who, like Apuleius himself, have been able to concern themselves with the other mysteries, the sacred ritual of the supreme goddess—Isis, who among all her divine manifestations is also Proserpine, ‘to whom men render shuddering reverence with howls by night, whose three-fold visage awes the wild rages of the goblin-dead, and holds fast the gates of hell, who wanders in many a diverse grove and is propitiated with varied rites.’ It is this goddess who frees Apuleius at the end from his own metamorphosis, reminding him that when he at his proper term descends to the world below, he shall see her ‘shining in the darkness of Acheron and reigning in the inmost halls of Styx’.

The solemn conclusion, coming so to a tale which had 24 played with every kind of emotion, bestows on them all an additional seriousness. The three-fold visage overlooking the goblin-dead accentuates the earlier terror of the dead woman. There is, certainly, no reconsideration; there is no suggestion that the miller is blessed among the dead, and we have no right to ask for it. Apuleius was writing a romance, not a philosophy. But the dead are made more real by that great office of Isis, and therefore, as it were upon the edge of her divine operations, the loathly operations of witchcraft are made more credible. And this, in that particular age, was one of the books the world enjoyed.

It would be easy to dismiss the book as a mere literary tour de force, a metaphysical holiday, if there had not fortunately been preserved to us another work by the same Apuleius, his Apologia. His literature, it seems from this, was then too much like life, and what was fearful fun in the study might be a serious danger in the law-courts. Apuleius, at a later period of his life, came to Tripoli, and there married one Pudentilla, a wealthy widow. An action was brought against him by her relatives, accusing him of immorality and sorcery, of having used magical arts to ensnare Pudentilla, and of having married her for her money. The case was tried at Sabrata, which is now called Zowara, in the ordinary courts, before the proconsul Claudius Maximus, somewhere between A.D. 155 and 161. The defence remains.

As far as the sorcery charge went, he began by arguing that it could not necessarily be said that the magic was harmful. A magician was nothing but a priest, for the word (he said) was the Persian word for priest, and 25 meant therefore one skilled in ceremonial law and the sacrificial practice of religion—‘an art acceptable to the immortal gods, full of all knowledge of worship and prayer, full of piety and wisdom in things divine, full of honour and glory since the day when Zoroaster and Oromazes established it, high-priestess of the powers of heaven’. The common herd, he said, thought that a magician was one who by ‘communion of speech’ with the immortals, had power to do such marvels as he would. The ‘communion of speech’ is noteworthy. It is the sense which is at the bottom of all incantation, of all ‘words of power’, the power which powers acknowledge, the right utterance of sounds whose energy drives supernatural things to obedience. Apuleius himself pointed out, in defence, what was afterwards to be so widely and dreadfully felt, the fear that must lie on all who dare to attack a magician of such a kind. The man, he said, who really believed in the charge he brought should be the last to bring it; ‘no escort or care or guard can save him from unforeseen and inevitable disaster’.

But in fact his enemies did not accuse Apuleius of such tremendous energies. Their complaints and their evidence dealt with lesser images and practices. They declared that he had procured certain curious fish for his spells. Apuleius retaliated by declaring that fish were not mentioned in the magical authorities as having any value. The second charge, that he had bewitched a boy with a magical incantation, was more dangerous; the boy, it was said, had gone mad. Apart from the facts of his own action Apuleius was less certain about the principle. He held that there were certain divine 26 powers, midway between gods and men, from whom all divination and magic came; also he held that a child or young lad—healthy, beautiful, intelligent—might be cast into a trance, or what we should no doubt call the hypnotic sleep, ‘and be reduced to its primal nature, which is in truth immortal and divine’; and thus, as it were in a kind of slumber, it might predict the future. But it was not such a solemn rite that had here happened; and if it had belonged to the other kind of magic, that long since forbidden in the Twelve Tables, ‘mysterious, loathsome, horrible, needing night-watches and darkness, solitude and murmured incantations’—would he, as his accusers declared, have allowed fifteen slaves to be present? On another charge of the same kind the evidence was only that there were reported in a certain room to have been walls blackened by smoke and feathers of birds sacrificed in evil rites. For such purposes also he was said to have fashioned from rare wood by secret means a seal in the form of an eviscerated body, and adored it and called it basileus, king.

On all these things, and others, Apuleius had little difficulty in showing his innocence. The accusations were false and factitious. But they were brought in a court of law in one of the chief cities of the Empire, before the proconsul Claudius Maximus, under the Emperor Antoninus Pius. They were therefore possible and even plausible charges. He was accused of having used magical influence to cause his wife to marry him and to give him her property. In similar cases of a not dissimilar kind concerning wills, the modern English phrase is ‘undue influence’. The difference between 27 ‘undue’ and ‘magical’ is the difference between two kinds of imagination.

This then was the air which, in that intellectual world, the young Church breathed; these were the sounds she heard, the sights—in spite of the fact that her eyes were fixed on her own Divine Hero—she half-saw, ceremonial initiations, magic thought of as a high art, ‘high-priestess of the powers of heaven’, but also magic as a secret and loathsome ritual, dangerously communing with other deities by means of horrid sacrifices and barbarous chants. Apuleius, in his own eyes, was a humble student of an art known to Zoroaster and Plato, of the ‘communion of speech’ which set men in touch with divine things. His enemies saw him in different attitudes—bribing fishermen to bring him coarse fish as charms for gross purposes, or secretly honouring in his own room the image of a skeleton-like corpse worked on a seal and calling it his king. This was the world of Rome.

But there was another tradition of which the Church was aware, and one closer to her. The Gentiles to whom the Apostolic missionaries went in the second place had their divinations and art-magic. But the Jews, who might often be ignorant or scornful of this, had no less their own. Deep in the Law itself lay the Divine command—‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’—‘Maleficos non patieris vivere’ (Exodus xxii. 18), and others followed—denunciations of those who sought after the Magi, those who observed trances and auguries, those who consulted ‘pythonesses’ or diviners, those who sought truth from the dead. The curse is directed mostly 28 against two classes—diviners as such, and malefici—workers of evil, but evil here not in the ordinary human sense but by supernatural means. The prophets of the Lord were sent out by Him alone; for the rest—‘regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God.’

There had not then been developed, in that old Jewish tradition, the full-fledged figure of the Devil himself. It would not be true to say that evil came late into the Jewish inheritance, but the metaphysical formulation was late, the myth was late. Diviners and wizards had existed, relics of the world from which the Jews had morally extricated themselves—the world that was around them in Egypt and Assyria and Rome. But the spiritual world in which that learning worked was not so clearly known. The canonical books of the Old Testament are practically silent on the subject; nowhere there does the Devil appear, and even in the story of the Witch of Endor, though there is necromancy, there is, as such, no diabolism. The allusion in Job is unique, and that allusion does not necessarily imply spiritual malignancy. The earliest myth of the origin of evil and of apostate spiritual beings was that given in the story in Genesis vi. It declared how ‘the universal sinfulness with which mankind appeared to be infected flowed like a dark turbid river from a single fount, namely, the unholy unions of angelic and human beings, and the commixture of mortal and immortal essences effected thereby’.[2]

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‘The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair’; there, and not in the Adam and Eve story, was the attribution of the Fall to a sexual origin, and that derives its real force—its horrible force—from the conception of angelic beings plunging into an alien and separate mode of existence. The whole point of an angel was that he was not a man, and in that sense no man ever could or can be an angel, as the whole point of Christ was that he was Man. The union of angel and woman was an outrage on their natures. Others might have legends of gods and goddesses loving mortals, but the Olympians, when they were not abstractions, were human. It might (in our view or in the view of the great sceptics) be absurd or immoral to conceive of gods acting so, but it was not, primarily, impossible. But it was impossible that angels should, and yet it happened, or was supposed to have happened. The celestial beings who continually watched the Throne had eyes and sense deflected. The Watchers turned aside, ten-score of them, and descended. From that mystery sprang the giants who ‘devoured mankind’; and from that mystery also sprang artistic knowledge and occult knowledge. The secrets of the making of weapons and armour, of magic and divination, passed into man’s keeping. One writer ‘ingeniously adds the art of writing with ink and paper as one of the chief causes of human corruption for which the apostate Watchers were responsible’.[3]

The Church had, very early, felt within itself the reverberations of magical arts. In the very tales of the 30 Nativity itself it was said that ‘there came wise men from the East to Jerusalem’. There was nothing said then about kings; the strange travellers who finally adored in the house at Bethlehem were of another kind. They were learned in astrology; they foretold destiny by the stars; and the star that slid through the sky to guide them was itself a destiny, a portent of judgement or of joy. ‘The god, an angel, a familiar spirit, a star, seem to be interchangeable terms.’[4] In an Egyptian magical papyrus it had been written that ‘a shining star shall descend and place itself in the midst of the chamber and when the star has descended before thine eyes thou shalt see the angel whom thou hast invoked, and immediately shalt know the counsels of the gods’. The practitioners of the high art in the Gospel narrative saw a similar thing happen; they saw a route traced in heaven; they took on earth a similar way; and though they delay a little, mistaking their guide, in Jerusalem itself, they emerge from the city and go on until the star hovers in the air over the place of destiny. They go in and contemplate the adorable God; they offer sacred and symbolic gifts. But whether consciously or not, the young Church saw the Magians there as, in effect, abandoning their art. The wise men belonged to the class described by Apuleius; their wisdom was ‘high priestess to the powers of heaven’. Nevertheless, for good or for evil, that office of astrology and divination was taken now to be for ever ended. There could be no more foretelling, and that for two reasons at least. The 31 first was that the future should not be foretold, since it depended on the Will of God and the free will of men. God might know what would happen, but even if He did He knew it as much because it was already present to Him as because He merely foresaw it. But no-one else should; the future had to be treated as unknown if man was to be treated as free. But secondly the future, apart from man’s moral choice, could not matter. ‘All luck was good’; whatever happened was fortunate. Knowledge was not so much immoral as irrelevant to the reality of Love loving and being loved at every moment. That was what did matter.

The Magians were the first conquest of the Child-God. ‘They departed’, wrote Justin Martyr afterwards, ‘from that power which had taken them as spoil.’[5] It was, one might say, the first intellectual victory of the Faith. The first victory, however, did not settle the campaign. Our Lord did not greatly deign to concern himself directly with magical opponents after that victory. The apostles, however, passing out into the Graeco-Oriental world of the Empire, found themselves confronted on all sides by such opponents.

Of the tales of their conflicts the one which achieved most popularity was that of Simon Magus. He appears in various documents of the second and third Christian centuries, and by the fourth the tale had taken its shaped form. It was then properly romantic, involving shipwrecks, family separations, recognitions, and (a new thing in romance) arguments on doctrine. The Apuleian tradition in literature is being converted to edification 32 more thoroughly than even the serious conclusion to the Golden Ass had allowed. This is partly due to the fact that the Simon story has one great magical figure, whereas the Ass has various disconnected magical incidents. But this again is partly due to the fact that there is now a recognized universal supernatural Will against which the ‘villain’ can set himself. Isis could never be, for all the earlier cultured readers, quite so universal a figure as Christ was for the later Christian readers, and she was quite certainly not so historical. Simon is therefore much more of a depraved magian than of an elevated sorcerer. The magians, as such, were already being thrust into opposition to the Redeemer, and as that happened there was necessarily attributed to them a deliberate egotism. They were caused to desire to rival God.

Simon, the romance began, ‘wished to be thought an exalted power, which is above God the Creator, and to be thought to be the Christ, and to be called the Standing One’. ‘God the Creator’ here is the old Gnostic deity which was so unwisely responsible for the creation of the worlds. Above it and remote from it the high and passionless Godhead of the true nature existed, to which Christ was to draw the elect. It was this nature, and nothing lower, to which Simon professed he belonged, though he was compelled to profess that his body was also ‘composed of divinity’. He, as he was, could endure for ever. He began, however, in a small way, by joining the band of disciples of a teacher called Dositheus. There were thirty adepts of the inner circle, as it were representing the time of the passage of 33 the moon, and one woman with them who was herself called Luna, or according to some accounts Helena. Besides this inner circle of lunar symbols were other followers waiting and hoping for advancement into it. Simon succeeded, after the death of an adept, in being made a member, and he followed this up by drawing a party to himself and proposing to set up relations with Luna. He presently succeeded in evicting Dositheus and being recognized through the sect as the ‘Standing One’, the blessed and incorruptible in every man (he called it) which stood, stands, and shall stand. Of Luna he taught that she had ‘been brought down from the highest heavens, and that she was wisdom, the mother of all things, of whom the Greeks and barbarians, contending, were able in some measure to see an image; but of herself, as she is, the dweller with the first and only God, they were wholly ignorant’.

The accounts we have are, of course, opposed to Simon, and they are very late. But it is clear what they suggest: that Simon, taking over the headship from Dositheus, who afterwards died, formed a symbolical school of adepts, he himself being the pillar transfused, body and soul, with compact divinity, the woman being the moon and visible wisdom of that source, and the circle of the order of time in terms of the month. He himself knew all arts—he could become invisible, ascend into air or descend through rock, control matter, direct fertility, and make and unmake kings. He was a master of necromancy also, and for this purpose he had once ‘turned air into water, and water into blood, and solidifying it into flesh, had formed a new human 34 creature—a boy’. He made an image of this boy, to stand in his own bedchamber, and then killed him, because the mortal soul, once free from the body, acquires prescience, and that is why it can be invoked for necromancy and all divination. ‘He made use’, says the romance, ‘of the soul of the boy, after he had been slain by violence, for those services which he required’. Thus he imposed necessity upon heavenly places, and not even the angels could prevent that soul from coming down at his command.

The conflict with Peter followed. Simon at one point turned the face of another man, by magic, into the likeness of his own in order to evade his pursuers, but eventually both he and Peter came to Rome and were brought before Nero. Simon reached the city by moving in a cloud of dust, ‘like a smoke shining with rays stretching far from it’; it vanished, and there suddenly was Simon standing among the people. Peter, however, came from Jerusalem by sea. Peter and Simon contend by signs and wonders; a great dog and a sucking child bear witness against Simon. Eventually Simon promises to fly; he begins to do so. Peter prays; Simon’s power deserts him, and he falls to the ground.

The conclusion is uninteresting. Simon Magus degenerates from a symbolic master of adepts into a vulgar worker of marvels, and Peter is not much better. His strong point, of course, is doctrine, of which Simon by now is empty. It is, intrinsically, this which is significant.

The doctrine of the single Supernatural Will, and of the Incarnation, had launched itself on a world in which 35 supernatural powers were believed to exist. It was believed that men could, if they wished, operate by means of those powers. The executants were in the main of four kinds: (i) there were the merely vile kind, the night-hags, the potion and poison makers, malefical wizards of the lower sort; (ii) there were the grander kind, such as the priestess in Virgil, learned in conjurations, who by knowing, as it were, the mathematical pattern of the universe, the proper balance of sound and movement, could control the heights and depths of things, change kingdoms, and even terrify the gods; (iii) there were the diviners and astrologers, those who forecast the future and read the purposes of the stars; (iv) and besides all these there were, it seems, some few to whom the magical art was indeed ‘high-priestess of heaven’, who, pushed on by a pure learning, followed in honour and chastity towards a sublime union with the final absolute power; there was a means of doing this, but it was very secret.

Finally, from one source and another, but largely from the myth of the angelic Watchers who turned their watch on the daughters of men, there was a tradition of a great and awful blasphemy—of the sexual union of alien and opposed natures. Yet it was this tradition which resembled most closely the central dogma of the Church, where something (neither alien nor opposed, but utter spirit) entered into the womb of a woman.

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Chapter TwoTHE ARRIVAL OF THE DEVIL

It has been recorded by Saint Luke that Christ, on the return of the seventy disciples, cried to them: ‘I beheld Satan as lightning fall from Heaven.’ If the word heaven there might be taken to mean the kingdom of Heaven which Immanuel so constantly proclaimed, then there was already present to Him that state of things from which evil had vanished, and indeed it is asserted that He followed up that cry with a promise that nothing should hurt those blessed ones who were with Him. Some such consciousness seems to have been present in the early Church; they knew by direct experience what their inheritors mostly knew only by faith. A kind of complete freedom leapt into being. Saint Ignatius, at the end of the first century, speaking of the conversion of the Magians, or Magicians, at Bethlehem, said: ‘From that time forth every sorcery and every spell was dissolved.’ The foretellers could bind no more, nor the grand controllers of conjurations shake the earth and the hearts of men at will, nor the creeping haunters of cemeteries. In the new state such things could not be, 37 and there was no such great need to make war on them. Satan had dropped, like lightning, from that Heaven.

It is true there were other phrases. Immanuel had also spoken of Satan desiring to sift Peter like wheat, but He had not then encouraged the Apostle to believe that he himself could do much. ‘I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not, and thou, when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.’ Peter was rather to confirm than to curse, to build rather than to fight. Saint Paul had, it is true, spoken of wrestling with principalities and powers, and after Saint Paul the notion of a grand spiritual conflict became (not, in the circumstances, unnaturally) even more vivid to the Church than the renewed and perfectly achieved glory. At the end of the second century it seemed clear that every sorcery and every spell had not been dissolved. Irenaeus, thinking of Antichrist, wrote: ‘Let no-one imagine that he performs these wonders by divine power; it is by the power of magic.’ Some simplicity of triumph had passed away; some complexity of trouble endured. Heaven was beginning to look more like the skies and less like the soul; if Satan had fallen like lightning, it had been to earth, and his effects had been precisely like lightning, he had burnt and blasted and more, for he ran up and down the world, ‘seeking whom he might devour’.

The Church, in fact, had begun to need an opponent whom it could divinely hate. It might spiritually oppose, but it certainly was not allowed to hate, its persecutors. The crosses went up; the torches flared; the wild beasts were loosed. In a world full of strange sects, wild legends, and horrible ceremonies, in a world full of 38 indistinguished invisible power, the Church began, rather in detail than in principle, to define the nature of that power as being a conflict of powers. Apocalypses, including the canonical, began to exist. Maleficium—evil work against the Empire or evil work against a neighbour—was already abroad in the world. Divination was abroad; and there was also, of course, a certain amount of ‘white magic’, healing spells, charms of protection, jewels and amulets worn against disease and the evil eye. But it was not held seemly for the Church to use such methods; besides, her power for healing was within herself; her charismatic ministry had been given by Christ. The power of the Holy Ghost moved among the faithful, and where it did not choose to protect, a rejoicing submission was the only—and a most blessed—alternative. ‘White magic’ could be neglected. But the other things were not so easily neglected.

The new energy was hostile both to divination and sorcery. They would have been, for reasons already given, discouraged separately. But in fact they tended to be regarded as one, and to be discouraged together. The romance of Simon Magus shows the process at work. Maleficium was expanded to cover more than a neighbour, more even than the Empire itself. Love could love and could be loved; that was a great discovery—say, a revelation. But the revelation was at least accompanied by another discovery—more energetic in its exploration than perhaps the Revealer had altogether approved. If Love could be loved, Love could be hated. If a single supernatural Will existed, then there could undoubtedly be an extension of maleficium against that single Will. 39 It must, technically, exist in all unbelievers. ‘He that is not with me is against me.’ It might not always be deliberate or even conscious. But it might. The maleficium, in fact, might be actuated by malice. Whose malice? Primarily, the Church more and more tended to feel, the malice of that flash which had fallen from Heaven and of those in whom still living that fatal lightning burned.