“I conjure thee, paper (or parchment), thou which servest the needs of humanity, servest as the depository of God’s wonderful deeds and holy laws, as also according to divine command the marriage contract between Tobias and Sarah was written upon thee, the Scriptures saying: They took paper and signed their marriage covenant. Through thee, O paper, hath also the devil been conquered by the angel. I adjure thee by God, the Lord of the universe (sign of the cross!), the Son (sign of the cross!), and the Holy Ghost (sign of the cross!), who spreads out the heavens as a parchment on which he describes as with divine characters his magnificence. Bless (sign of the cross!), O God, sanctify (sign of the cross!) this paper that so it may frustrate the work of the Devil!“He who upon his person carries this paper written with holy words, or affixes it to a house, shall be freed from the visitations of Satan through him who cometh to judge the quick and dead.“Let us pray.“Mighty and resistless God, the God of vengeance, God of our fathers, who hast revealed through Moses and the prophets the books of thy ancient covenantand many secrets of thy kindness, and didst cause the Gospel of thy Son to be written by the evangelists and apostles, bless (sign of the cross!) and sanctify (sign of the cross!) this paper that thy mercy may be made known unto whatsoever soul shall bear with him this sacred thing and these holy letters; and that all persecutions against him from the devil and by the storms of Satanic witchcraft may be frustrated through Christ our Lord. Amen.“(The paper to be sprinkled with holy water.)”
“I conjure thee, paper (or parchment), thou which servest the needs of humanity, servest as the depository of God’s wonderful deeds and holy laws, as also according to divine command the marriage contract between Tobias and Sarah was written upon thee, the Scriptures saying: They took paper and signed their marriage covenant. Through thee, O paper, hath also the devil been conquered by the angel. I adjure thee by God, the Lord of the universe (sign of the cross!), the Son (sign of the cross!), and the Holy Ghost (sign of the cross!), who spreads out the heavens as a parchment on which he describes as with divine characters his magnificence. Bless (sign of the cross!), O God, sanctify (sign of the cross!) this paper that so it may frustrate the work of the Devil!
“He who upon his person carries this paper written with holy words, or affixes it to a house, shall be freed from the visitations of Satan through him who cometh to judge the quick and dead.
“Let us pray.
“Mighty and resistless God, the God of vengeance, God of our fathers, who hast revealed through Moses and the prophets the books of thy ancient covenantand many secrets of thy kindness, and didst cause the Gospel of thy Son to be written by the evangelists and apostles, bless (sign of the cross!) and sanctify (sign of the cross!) this paper that thy mercy may be made known unto whatsoever soul shall bear with him this sacred thing and these holy letters; and that all persecutions against him from the devil and by the storms of Satanic witchcraft may be frustrated through Christ our Lord. Amen.
“(The paper to be sprinkled with holy water.)”
With the amulets and these conception-billets belong also in the armory of the Church, the wonder-working relics, and images of the saints. God has ordained graciously that the Church shall not give up its battle against the powers of sin for want of weapons. Its offensive and defensive appliances are manifold. Its warriors, the priests, are like knights encased in mail from head to foot, and armed with lance, sword, dagger and morning star. Almost every district has its treasure of relics, which, preserved in shrines and exhibited on solemn occasions to the pious people, constitutes its palladium, impedes or prevents the attack of hostile forces, and assuages or avertsthe ravages of plagues. Not only corporeal relics of saints and martyrs, but also every thing they may have touched during their lifetime, yea, even the very dew-drops upon their graves, are a terror to the fiends and a means of spiritual and bodily strength unto the faithful. The miraculous properties of the images are recounted in a hundred legends. By the direct agency of divine power, there exists uninterruptedly between them and the persons they represent a mystical relation. Upon this St. Hieronymus throws some light when he exclaims against Vigilantius, who had blindly opposed the worship of images: “You dare prescribe laws to God! You presume to put the apostles in chains so that they are kept even to the Day of Judgment in their prison, and are denied the privilege of being with their Lord, although it is written that they shall be with Him wherever they go! If the Lamb is omnipresent, we must believe that those who are with the Lamb are omnipresent also. If the devils and the demons rove through the world andby their inconceivable rapidity of motion are present everywhere, should then the martyrs, after shedding their blood, remain confined in their coffins and never be able to leave them!”
As old age and death are consequences of Adam’s fall, so are almost all ailments produced by that power over man’s corporeal nature conceded to Satan, when God pronounced his curse upon the race. So also are the remaining diseases and infirmities of man, called either rightly or wrongly natural, cured with greatest certainty by invoking the help of God. Therefore the mediator between God and men, the Church, through its servants is the only sure and only legitimate physician. [“Operatio sanandi est in ecclesia per verba, ritus, exorcismos, aquam, salem, herbas, idque nedum contra diabolos et effectus magicos, sed et morbos omnes.”] The priest effects cures in behalf of the Church and in the name of God by means of prayer, the laying on of hands, exorcism, relics and consecrated natural means, especially water, salt and oil. In doing this he acts as the visible delegate of anunseen higher physician, the saint ordained of God to be the healer of the sickness. For every affliction has its physician among the ranks of the saints. St. Valentine cures epilepsy, St. Gervasius rheumatic pains, St. Michael de Sanatis cancer and tumors, St. Judas coughs, St. Ovidius deafness, St. Sebastian contagious fevers and poisonous bites, St. Apollonia toothache, St. Clara and St. Lucia rheum in the eyes, and so on. The legends relate wonderful effects of the healing powers possessed by St. Damianus, St. Patrick and St. Hubert. The terrible disease of hydrophobia was cured by the last named. In the cloisters in Luxembourg named after this saint, hydrophobia was cured many years after his death by bringing the afflicted into the church during the progress of the service, and pressing a hair from the saint’s mantle into a slight incision made for the occasion in his forehead. For the benefit of those who lived far from the cloister, the so-called “Hubertus-bands” and “Hubertus-keys” were consecrated; these were applied, heatedwhite-hot, to the wound.[22]Similar curative agencies might be mentioned by hundreds.
Among all afflictions, the state of being possessed by devils occupies the most remarkable place in the annals of the Church, and is seen to have required the most powerful exorcisms for its cure. The ecclesiastical pathology declares that in this disease the devil is unhidden, while in all others he is concealed. The exorciser who is to expel the fiend appears in full priestly vesture; incense and consecrated wax tapers are lighted, all the objects surrounding the demoniac are sprinkled with holy water, the air around is purified by the pronunciation of certain formulas; then follow fervent prayers and finally the desperate and awful struggle between the demon, now convulsively distorting the limbs of his victim and uttering by his lips the most harrowing blasphemies, and the priest, who employs moreand more powerful adjurations until the victory finally is his.
The secular medical art—that relying upon natural means—as either superfluous, or as strongly tainted with heresy, must be despised. Dissection, in order to investigate the structure of the human body, is presumption; it can even be asked with reason if it does not argue contempt for the doctrine of the final resurrection. The secular art of healing was consequently for a long time confined to the infidel Jews. But when princes and the opulent, weakly apprehending the insufficiency of the word, the relics and the consecrated remedies, had begun to keep physicians, the profane art of medicine became a lucrative profession, and schools for its cultivation were established under royal protection. Such is that of Salerno, which the warders of Zion can not regard without suspicion. It is a school which prescribes pedantic rules for diet, as if one’s diet could protect against the attacks of the devil! The Greek pagan Hippocrates, who for a longtime wandered about with Jews and Arabs, thus finds at last a settled abode within its walls,—Hippocrates who had to assert of demonianism (morbus sacer) itself that it is “nowise more divine, nowise more infernal, than any other disease!” When the teacher is such, what must the disciples be? The Church will not forbid absolutely the practice of medicine, since it may do some good in the case of external injury, or in time of pestilence; but she must keep strict watch over the orthodoxy of those who cultivate this art. At several councils (as at Rheims in 1131, the second Lateran in 1139, and at Tours, 1163) she has strenuously prohibited her servants from having any thing to do with this suspected profession. Experience has taught, however, not to exaggerate the dangers attending it. The secular physicians must frequently concede that such and such a sickness is caused by witchcraft, and consequently is of supernatural origin. Slanderers might allege that such a declaration is more convenient than an investigation intothe causes of the disease in the natural way, and less unpleasant than acknowledging one’s ignorance. But be this as it may: the concession implies a recognition of the supernaturalism of the Church, and may therefore be rather recommended than reprehended.
“It is,” says Thomas Aquinas, “a dogma of faith that the demons can produce wind, storms, and rain of fire from heaven. The atmosphere is a battle-field between angels and devils. The latter work the constant injury of man, the former his melioration; and the consequence is that changeableness of weather which threatens to frustrate the hopes of husbandry. And when Lucifer is able to bestow even upon man—on sorcerers and wizards—the power to destroy the fields, the vineyards and dwellings of man by rain, hail and lightning, is it to be wondered at if the Church, which is man’s protection against the devil, and whose especial calling it is to fight him, should in this sphere also be his counterpoise, and should seek from the treasury of its divine power, means adequate tofrustrate his atmospheric mischiefs? To these means belong the church bells, provided they have been duly consecrated and baptized. The aspiring steeples around which cluster the low dwellings of men, are to be likened, when the bells in them are ringing, to the hen spreading its protecting wings over its chickens; for the tones of the consecrated metal repel the demons and avert storm and lightning” (“Vivos voco, mortuos plango,SULPHURA FRANGO,” a common inscription on church bells). Tillers of the soil who desire especial protection from the Church for their harvests, pay it tithes for a blessing. During protracted drought the priests make intercession and inaugurate rain-processions, in which images of the Virgin are borne into the fields, which are sprinkled with holy water while the weather-collect is chanted.[23]If the fields are visited by hurtful insects, the Church has remedies against them also. It commands them in the name of God to depart, and if they do not obey, a regular process is instituted against them, which ends in their exemplary punishment; for they are excommunicated by the Church. Such processes were very frequently resorted to in the Middle Ages, and a couple of such instances will be cited.
In the year 1474, the may-bug committed great depredations in the neighborhood of Berne. When the authorities of the city had sought relief from the bishop of Lausanne, Benoit de Montferrand, against this scourge, he determined to issue a letter of excommunication, which was solemnly read by a priest in the churchyard of Berne. “Thou irrational, imperfect creature, thou may-bug,” thus the letter commenced, “thou whose kind was never enclosed in Noah’s ark! in thename of my gracious lord, the bishop of Lausanne, by the power of the glorified Trinity through the merits of Jesus Christ, and by the obedience you owe the Holy Church, I command you may-bugs, all in common and each one in particular, to depart from all places where nourishment for men and cattle germinates and grows.” The letter ends with a summons to the insects, to present themselves on the sixth day thereafter, if they do not disappear before that time, at one o’clock,P. M., at Wivelsburg, and assume the responsibility before the court of the gracious lord of Lausanne. This letter was likewise read from the pulpit while the congregation, kneeling, repeated “three Paternosters and three Ave Marias.” Arrangements were made beforehand for a legal trial with strict attention to all professional forms. Among these was of course that the accused should have a lawyer. But when no advocate in Berne would consent to appear in behalf of the insects, the bishop devised the plan of summoning from hell the shade of aninfamous lawyer named Perrodet, who had died a few years previously, and of directing him to plead the cause of the may-bugs with the same diligence he had so often displayed in his lifetime in defence of vile clients. But in spite of many summons, neither Perrodet nor his clients deigned to appear. After the expiration of the time fixed for beginning the defence, and when certain doubts concerning the proper form of procedure had been removed, the episcopal tribunal finally gave its verdict, which was excommunication in the name of the Holy Trinity, “to you, accursed vermin, that are called may-bugs, and which can not even be counted among the animals.” The government ordered the authorities of the afflicted district to report concerning the good effects of the excommunication; “But,” a chronicle of the time complains, “no effect was observed, because of our sins.”
Since any neglect of legal forms was thought to deprive a judgment of its magical as well as legal power, the most scrupulous care was exercised in the conduct of these frequentlyrecurring processes against may-bugs, grasshoppers, cabbage-worms, field-rats and other noxious vermin. There is yet extant a detailed and luminous document by the learned Bartholomeus Chassanæus (born 1480), in which the question if, and how, such pests should be proceeded against in the courts is carefully considered: whether they should appear personally or by deputy; whether they are subject to a spiritual or a secular tribunal, and if the penalty of excommunication can be applied to them. He proves on many grounds that the jurisdiction to which they are accountable is the spiritual, and that they may properly be excommunicated. Still the question of jurisdiction remained unsettled, and a civil prosecution of the field-rats in Tyrol, 1519-20, proves among other things that a secular tribunal sometimes considered itself justified in deciding such suits. The peasant Simon Fliss appeared before William of Hasslingen, judge in Glurns and Mals (Ober-In-valley), as plaintiff against the field-rats which were committing greatdepredations in his parish. The court then appointed Hans Grinebner, a citizen of Glurns, to be the advocate of the accused, and furnished him, before witnesses, with the requisite commission. Thereupon the plaintiff chose as his advocate Schwarz Minig, and obtained from the tribunal upon demand a warrant of authority for him likewise. On the day of trial, the Wednesday after St. Philip’s and St. James’s day, many witnesses were examined, establishing that the rats had caused great destruction. Schwarz Minig then made his final plea that the noxious animals should be charged to withdraw from mischief, as otherwise the people of Stilf could not pay the annual tithes to their high patron. Grinebner, counsel for the defence, could not and would not make exception to the testimony, but tried to convince the court that his clients “enjoyed a certain right of usufruct which could hardly be denied them.” If the court were of another opinion and considered it best to eject them, he yet hoped they would first be granted another placewhere they could support themselves. Besides there should be given them at their departure a sufficient escort to protect them against their enemies, whether cat, dog, or other adversaries; and he also hoped that, if any of the rats were pregnant, time might be allowed them to be delivered and afterwards depart in safety with their progeny. The decision was rendered in the following terms: “After accusation and defence, after statement and contradiction, and after due consideration of all that pertains to justice, it is by this sentence determined that those noxious animals which are called field-rats must, within two weeks after the promulgation of this judgment, depart and forever remain far aloof from the fields and the meadows of Stilf. But if one or several of the animals are pregnant, or unable on account of their youth to follow, then shall they enjoy during further two weeks safety and protection from every body, and after these two weeks depart.”
We can form some impression of the immense power of prayer and exorcism whenwe consider that the influence of the will and the idea expressed in the word co-operate in them with the power of the word itself as a mere form. For the material word, the sound caught by the ear, the formula, as such, exercises a magical effect without one’s knowing its meaning. The mass of the people with their ignorance of the official language of the Church and of learning, would be badly off if those “Paternosters” and “Ave Marias,” committed to memory without understanding them, should be spiritually ineffectual,—if the Latin mass to which the congregation listens should be wanting in edifying and sanctifying power because it is not comprehended. The formularies of the Church established at different times and for various purposes are for this reason of high importance and must be followed conscientiously.[24]A single proof oftheir extraordinary power may be instanced here. In the year 1532 the devil brought into the heavens a huge comet, which threatenedearth and man with drought and pestilence; but the pope solemnly banished the forbidding omen,—and behold! in a short time it disappeared, having day by day diminished through the power of the papal anathema. What a holy word may avail by virtue of its sound (flatus vocis) alone, is indicated in the legend of the tame starling, which was saved from the claws of the hawk just at the moment its death-agony had forced from it the words it had learned to repeat “Ave Maria.”
Upon the power of the word as its foundation, rests the papal custom of consecrating bread, wine, oil, salt, tapers, water, bells, fields, meadows, houses, standards and weapons. “With such abuses, such superstition, and diabolical arts was the priesthood filled during papal ascendency”—thus complains an old Protestant theologian who had an eye to that surplus of magic which the Catholic Church possessed over and above that of the Lutheran, but who was blind to the common welfare—“and therefore such things are in vogue even among common men.What was the chief thing in the mass if not the wonder-working words of blessing, when the priest pronounced the four words or the six syllables ‘Hoc est corpus meum’ (this is my body) over the bread, breathed upon it, and made the sign of the cross three times over it, pretending that the bread was thereby converted into the flesh of Christ? In the same way he transformed the wine in the chalice into the blood of Christ, though no such power is given to syllables and words. He bound the Holy Ghost in the water, the salt, the oil, the tapers, the spices, the stone, wood or earth, when he consecrated churches, altars, churchyards, when he blessed the meat, the eggs, and the like, and when on Easter Eve he consecrated the fire that it should do no damage (though I, God save me, have found out that our village was utterly consumed four days after such consecration), when he baptized and sanctified bells that their ringing might dispel evil influences, quiet tempests, and the like.”
The organization of monasteries is to be regarded as the defensive system of the Church, guarding and protecting the territory it has conquered from the devil. As the Mongolian on his irruption into Europe found innumerable steeps crowned with strongly fortified castles, the very number of which deterred from any attempt at siege, so Satan and his hosts find the Christian world strewn with spiritual strongholds, each of which encloses an arsenal filled with mighty weapons for offensive as well as defensive warfare. Every monastery has its master magician, who sellsagni Dei, conception-billets, magic incense, salt and tapers which have been consecrated on Candlemas Day, palms consecrated on Palm Sunday, flowers besprinkled with holy water on Ascension Day, and many other appliances belonging to the great magical apparatus of the Church.
This consecrated enginery being so various and complete, it might have been expected that the people would be content,and seek no further expedients than these constantly at hand. But, alas! a people’s magic of infernal origin is abroad, and rampant by the side of the holy magic of the Church; and by it Satan tempts the careless, the curious and the irresolute. Even many priests are tainted with it. The holy Boniface, and many popes and monkish chroniclers after him, bitterly lament that the lower clergy compound love-potions and practice divinatory arts, using even the holy appurtenances of the Church, as the host, to fortify the efficacy of their diabolical charms.
Since the Church tries to reduce all conditions of life to harmony with itself, it naturally follows that it sets its seal also to human jurisprudence. The ordeals which it has found employed by some of the nations it has converted, exactly suit its system. It receives them, consequently, as resting on a right idea,[25]makes them what they were not before, a common practice, and givesdetailed rules concerning the chants, prayers, conjurations and masses with which they should be accompanied. When a person under accusation or suspicion is to undergo the ordeal by water, for example, the priest is to lead him to the church, and cause him kneeling to pronounce three formulas in which God is implored for protection. Then follow mass and the holy communion. When the accused receives the wafer the priest says: “Be this flesh of our Lord thy test to-day.” Then in solemn procession the throng of witnesses repair to the spot where the test is to take place. The priest conjures the water, expelling the demons common to this element, and commands it to be an obedient instrument of God for revealing innocence or crime. The accused is dressed in clean garments, kisses the cross and the gospel, recites a Paternoster and makes the sign of the cross. Then (in the ordeal by hot water) his hand is held in a boiling cauldron: or he is thrown with his hands pinioned and a rope about his waist, into a river. If hedoes not then sink, his guilt is proved. The ordeal by fire consists in walking over glowing coals, or carrying red-hot iron, or in being dragged through flames clad in a shirt saturated with wax. By the test of fire the genuineness of relics is also sometimes tested. When inA. D.1010 some monks who had returned from Jerusalem exhibited the towel with which the disciples had wiped the feet of Christ, some doubts of its genuine character were raised, but were all removed by this test. One of the most common of all ordeals is the duel.
God, invoked by the servants of the Church, keeps his protecting hand over innocence. Every doubt of this truth argues faint-heartedness bordering on atheism. This thought lies at the foundation not only of the different kinds of ordeals, but also of the torture, which, constantly extended and intensified under the auspices of the Church, was a form of trial sparing the judge much labor, and leading to the goal more surely than the collation of testimony, which, besides beingirksome, hardly ever brings full assurance. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego felt no pain in the fiery furnace. God gives to innocence upon the rack, if not insensibility to pain, at least strength to endure it. But even the arch-fiend, to a certain extent, can protect his subjects. In the case of heretics and witches it is therefore needful to resort to the intensest torture; to exhaust, so to speak, to the last drop, the springs of pain in human nerves, under the hand of skilled tormentors. If then the instruments of torture are previously conjured and sanctified by the priest, and if he stands at the side of the accused ready to interrupt with constant question the diabolic formulas of alleviation which undoubtedly the sufferer murmurs inwardly, then a candid and reliable confession may reasonably be expected, in spite of all efforts to the contrary by the devil. In the “Witch-hammer” (Malleus Malificarum) the ecclesiastical and magical plan of justice celebrates its triumph. This work, bearing the sanction of the pope, contains full directionsfor the judge presiding in witch-trials. It is, in fact, a hammer which crushes whatever it falls upon. The judge who carefully follows these directions may be confident that Satan himself can not save any one who is under accusation; only God and his holy angels can rescue him, by direct miracle, from death in the flames.[26]
He who finds a judicial system which appeals constantly to the intercession of God of questionable value, may consider that the history of the Church, the experiences of its saints and servants are a succession of divine miracles. God is not chary of his miracles when recognized, and the servants of the Church are in possession of the apostolic power and mandate to perform them.
Another question is, how are the divine miracles to be distinguished from the infernal? All attempts of the acutest scholasticsto establish a rule of definite separation for these two kinds of miracles have failed. They are revealed under identical forms, and even the moral perceptions can detect no difference, since Satan is able to transform himself into an angel of light. Reason must also acknowledge its incapacity even in this respect, and rely on the Holy Ghost ever active in the Church and especially in its head. The power of divine truth and inspiration which was poured out upon the apostles on the day of Pentecost, has been transmitted like a magnetic stream from Peter, the first bishop of Rome, to his successors by the laying on of hands, and is in a certain measure imparted, by the sacrament of ordination, to every member of the clerical hierarchy.
The survey of the magic of the Church which has been presented above, ought perhaps to be completed, not by pursuing the tedious path which lies before us throughcontinued description of ecclesiastical customs and opinion, but by simply formulating the general truth:Every symbol, every external token, to which is attributed an independent power for sanctification and an immediate moral influence, is Magic.May the Protestant reader, for whom we are here writing, examine with this maxim in how far the Reformation, which aims to restore to internal authority—the reason and free-will of the individual—its rights, has succeeded in its task. Luther and Calvin assailed many magical usages, and pruned many branches from the tree of dualism, but still allowed its vigorous trunk to remain unscathed. But a dualistic religious system must, on account of the unreasonable cosmical theory on which it rests, sooner or later attack again the inner authority and make itself the sole and absolute external one. It must of necessity degenerate to a statuary fetichism or fall before a complete unitarian reformation. Our day witnesses the conflict between these opposite ideas. On the one side, the belief in a personal spiritual adversaryof mankind, preached to the masses from a thousand pulpits, hangs suspended like a sword of Damocles over the head of civilization; on the other side, philosophy and the science of nature diffuse a rational and unitarian theory of the universe and human existence through a constantly enlarging circle. To him who wishes to take part in this all-important struggle, we would commend these words of the noble Bunsen:[27]“Wherever in religion, or state, or civilization, in art or science, the inner is developed more strenuously, and the spiritual earnestly sought after, be it with more or less transformation of what is existing, there progress is at hand; for from the inner, life comes to the external, from the centre to the circumference. There is also the way which leads to life. There new paths are opened to the soul, and genius lifts its wings with divine assurance. If this is true, the contrary must take place wherever the external life is more and more exalted, where the token supersedes more and more the essence, the symbol and the external work the inner act and conscience, where the superficies is taken for the content, the outer monotony for life’s uniformity, and appearances for truth. There a luckless future is in waiting, whatever be the aspect of the present.”
THE MAGIC OF THE LEARNED.
We find ourselves in a dismal labyrinth of narrow, winding streets, now and then issuing into some open space before a guild-hall or a church. The objects which meet our gaze in this strange city do not solicit pause or reflection; for we have seen essentially the same type of homes and humanity in many another city which we have wandered through in our search for the stone of wisdom. We therefore continue on our way. The buildings of the university are said to be in the neighborhood, and we turn the corner to the right, and again to the left, until we come upon it. The lecture-hour approaches. Professors draped in stiff mantles and wearing the scholastic cap on their supremely wise foreheads, wend their way to the temples of knowledgeat the portals of which flocks of students wait. We recognize their various and familiar types: the new-matriculated look as usual, their cheeks still retaining the glow of early youth, their hearts still humble, perhaps still held captive by the sweet delusion that the walls by which they wait are the propylæa to all the secrets of earth and heaven. Just as readily recognized are the parchment-worms, destined one day to shine as lights in the Church and in the domain of science, whether they now toil themselves pale and melancholic over theircatenæ, theirsummæandsententiæ, or bear with unfeigned self-satisfaction the precious weight oftermswhich lifts them so conspicuously above the ignorant mass of mortals. And among the throng of the first named still fresh with youth, and these already dried pedants, we find also the far-famed third class of students, adventurers assembled from all quarters under the protection of university-privileges,—those gentlemen with bearded cheek, and faces swelled by drinking and scarred by combat, with terribly long andbroad swords dangling at their side,—the heroes of that never ending Iliad which the apprentices of learning and the guilds enact nightly in the darkness of the lanes, who may yet turn out some day the most pious of conventical priors, the gravest doctors and the very severest burgomasters in Christendom, unless before that time they meet their fate upon the gallows, or on the field of battle, or asscholares vagantesin the ditch or by the roadside.
Shall we enter and listen to some of these lectures which are about to be delivered? Our letter of academic membership will open the doors to us, if we desire. To the left in the vaulted hall the professor of medicine has commenced his lecture. With astonishing subtlety and penetration he discusses the highly important question, before propounded by Petrus de Abano, but not as yet fully solved,—“an caput sit factum propter cerebrum vel oculos” (whether the head was formed for the sake of the brain or the eyes). To the right the professor of theology leads us intoone of the dim mysteries of the Church by ventilating the question what Peter would have done with the bread and wine, had he distributed the elements while the body of Christ in unchanged reality was yet hanging on the cross.[28]A little farther on in this mouldy vault we find the workshop of philosophy, where a master in the art of abstract reasoning deduces the distinction betweenuniversalia ante remanduniversalia in re. In yonder furthest room a jurisconsult expounds a passage in the pandects.—Or perhaps you would rather not choose at all? You smile sadly. Alas! like myself you have good reason for complaining with Faust:—
I have, alas! Philosophy,Med’cine, and Jurisprudence too,And to my cost Theology,With ardent labor studied through.And here I stand, with all my lore,Poor fool, no wiser than before.
and if you add like him,
Hence have I now applied myself to magic,
we shall bring back to our minds the object of our burning desires, the hope which cheers us that finally the veil will be torn from the face of the Isis-image, and that we shall behold the unspeakable face to face, even though her looks burn us to ashes. Let us turn our back upon this tragi-comic seat of learning, where, as everywhere else, hoary-headed fools are teaching young chicken-heads to admire nonsense, and young eagle-souls to despair of knowledge. It is not far hence direct—as direct as the winding lanes permit—to that great magician who has taken up his abode in this city. At the feet of that master let us seat ourselves. We shall there slake our burning thirst with at least a few drops of that knowledge which through by-gone ages has been flowing in a subterranean channel, though from the same sources as the streams of Paradise. And if we are disappointed there,—well, thenyou, if you so choose, can quench your longing for truth in the whirlpool of pleasure and adventure.Ishall go into a monastery,seek the narrowest of its cells, watch, pray, scourge forth my blood in streams; or I shall go to India, sit down upon the ground and stare at the tip of my nose,—stare at it and never cease, year out and year in, until all consciousness is extinguished. Agreed, then, is it not?....
We are arrived in the very loneliest quarter of the town, and the most dreary limits of the quarter, where old crumbling houses group themselves in inextricable confusion along the city wall, and from their gable windows fix their vacant, hypochondriacal looks upon the open fields beyond. A tower, crowning the wall of the fort upon this side, now serves the great scientist as an observatory and dwelling, given him by the burgomaster and the council of the city. He was for a long time private physician to the Queen of France, but has now retired to this lonely place from the pleasures, the distinctions, and the dangers of life at court, in order to devote himself quietly to research and study. He has a protector in theprince-archbishop resident in the city; and as the professor of theology has certified at the request of this same prince-bishop to his strict orthodoxy, the city authorities thought to persuade him to receive the honorable and lucrative position of town-astrologer, not heeding the assertion of the monks that he was a wizard, and that his black spaniel was in reality none other than the devil himself.
A magician never suffers himself to be interrupted in his labors, whether engaged in contemplating the nature of spirits, in watching the heavens, or in the elaboration of thequinta essentia, the final essence, with his crucibles. Oh! what world-wide hopes, what solemn emotions, what inexpressible tension of soul must accompany these investigations! Gold, which rules the world, here falls from the tree of knowledge as a fruit over-ripe into the bosom of the master. And what is gold with all the power it possesses, and all the enjoyment it commands, compared with the ability to control heaven and earth and thespirits of hell, compared with the capacity to summon by the means of lustrations, seals, characters and exorcisms the angels hovering in the higher spheres, or tame to obedience the demons which fill the immensity of space? And what again is this power compared with the pure celestial knowledge to which magic delivers the key? a knowledge as much transcending the wisdom of angels as the son’s place in his father’s house is superior to a servant’s! Perchance the magician at this very moment is deeply absorbed in some investigation, and within a hair’s breadth of the revelation of some new and dazzling truth. Let us consider before we venture to ask admittance. Let us pause a moment before this iron-bound door, and recover our breath.
Ye men of science in this nineteenth century, how miserable you would be had you not once for all determined to limit your hopes to a minimum! To die when you have gleaned and contributed but a single straw to the harvest of science, is the fate to whichyou subject yourselves. The one among you who has brought to notice a hitherto unknown snail or flower, deems himself not to have lived in vain. To have discovered a formula under which a group of phenomena can be arranged, is already a triumph. This resignation which makes each one among you, even the greatest, only an insignificant detail-worker upon the immense labor whose completion you contemplate at an infinite remove, and the very outlines of which you ignore,—this resignation is sublime, though supremely painful to the aspiring soul. The individual laborer for his part abstains from all hope of seeing the whole truth, and works for his generation and futurity. Even the philosopher who undertakes to explain the framework of the macrocosm, does not see in his system a final solution of the “problem of cosmical explanation,” but only a link in the long chain of development. He foresees the fall of his theories, satisfied, perhaps, if the traces of his error keep his successor on a straighter path. It is the race and not the individual whichworks in your work; which continues it when you have grown weary and been forgotten. It is a collective activity like that of ants and bees. But the magician stands alone! To be sure he receives what the past may offer,—but only to enclose himself with this treasure, and improve it by the immense wealth of his own mind. He believes in this immensity. He believes that the powers of all the generations are stored up in the bosom of the individual, and he hopes to accomplish alone what you faint-heartedly leave to the multitude of incalculable centuries!
We knocked upon the door ponderous with its bolts of iron. It opened as by an unseen hand. No servant interposed either welcome or remonstrance as we mounted the dark spiral stairs. Unannounced we entered the hall of the great magician. Along the arched ceiling of the rooms whose green lead-fastened window panes admitted but a scanty light, floated a fragrant vapor from the cell in the extreme background, where we couldsee the magician himself clad in a snow-white mantle reaching to his feet, and standing solemnly beside an incense-altar. Upon his head he wore a diadem on which was engraved the unspeakable name,Tetragrammaton, and in his hand he held a metallic plate which, as we soon learned, was made of electrum and signed with the signatures of coming centuries.
We paused and stammered a word of excuse for the interruption we had caused him. A smile of satisfaction broke upon his face when he had momentarily surveyed us, and he bade us welcome.
“You are the very persons whose arrival I have been expecting, and whom it has cost me much trouble to summon,” he said. “You are the spirits of the nineteenth century, conjured to appear before a man of the fifteenth. You are called from the ante-chambers where the souls of the unborn await their entrance upon earth. But the images of the century to which your future mortal life belongs dwell in the depths of your consciousness.These images you shall show me. It is for this that I have summoned you, for I wish to cast a glance into the future.”
I was seized with a strange, almost horrid feeling. I now remembered that I and my companions had transported ourselves, by the use of means which stirs up the entire reproductive forces of the imagination, from the actual nineteenth century, back to the long-past fifteenth, that we might see it live before our eyes, not in dissevered traits as a past age is wont to be preserved in books, but in the completeness of its own multi-formity. Who was right, the magician or myself? Which was the one only seemingly living, he or I? At what hour did the hand on the clock of time point at that moment? Granted that time is absolutely nothing but a conceptual form without independent reality; as long as I live in time I believe in its ordered course, and do not wish to see its golden thread entangled. I did not wish that the spirit which I had summoned should be my master and degrade me to a productof his own imagination. I summoned courage and exclaimed:—
“We have wandered through many cities, great magician, to find you. We finally stand in this your sanctuary. We see these gloomy Gothic arches over our heads; we see your venerable figure before us; we behold these folios and strange instruments which surround you; we look out through these windows and behold on one side towers and house-tops, on the other fields, meadows and the huts of serfs, and yonder in the distance the castle of a knight who is suspected of night-attacks upon the trains of the merchants as they approach the city. All these things stand real and present before our eyes: but, nevertheless, great magician, it is all, yourself included, a product ofourmagic, of the power of our own imagination, not ofyourmagic. It is in order to make some acquaintance with the latter that we are come. It is not we who are to answer your questions, but you ours.”
The magician smiled. He persisted in hisview, and I in mine. The contested question could not be decided, and it was laid aside. But along with my consciousness of belonging to a period of critical activity, my doubts had awakened—my vivid hope a moment ago of finding in magic the key of all secrets, was fast fading away.
I looked around in this home of the magician. On his writing-desk lay a parchment on which he had commenced to write down the horoscope of the following year. Beside the desk was a celestial globe with figures painted in various colors. In a window looking towards the south hung an astrolabe, to whose alidade a long telescope (of course without lenses) was attached. The book-case contained a not inconsiderable number of folios: Versio Vulgata, some volumes of the fathers, Virgil, Dionysius Areopagita, Ptolemy, the hymns of Orpheus, Hermes Trismegistus, Jamblichus, Pliny’s Natural History, a large number of works partly in Arabic upon astrology and alchemy, also a few Hebrew manuscripts, and so on.These and other such things were to be found in his observatory, which was also his studio and sleeping-room. Next to the observatory was the alchemical laboratory with a strangely appointed oven filled with singular instruments reminding me again of Faust’s complaint:—
Ihr Instrumente freilich spottet mein,Mit Rad und Kämmen, Walz und Bügel.Ich stand am Thor, ihr solltet Schlüssel sein;Zwar euer Bart ist kraus, doch hebt Ihr nicht die Riegel.
While we lingered here our host informed us that for the present he had suspended his experiments in alchemy. He hoped to find hisquinta essentiaby a shorter process than the combination of substances and distillation, which had exhausted already so many investigators and led so few to success. He acknowledged that he had himself advanced no farther in the art of the adepts than the extraction from “philosophic earth” mixed with “philosophic water” of just so much, and no more, gold than he had employed at the beginning ofthe experiment.[29]In spite of this, however, he worked daily before his oven, melting and purifying such metals as he needed for his planet-medallions, amulets and magical rings, and above all in preparing that effective alloy which is called electrum.
From his laboratory our host conducted us into two other apartments with arched ceilings, forming a sort of museum of most extraordinary curiosities,—skeletons and dried limbs of various animals: fishes, birds, lizards, frogs, snakes, etc.; herbs and differently colored stones; whole and broken swords; nails extracted from coffins and gallows; flasks containing I know not what,—all arranged in groups under the signs of the different planets. We beheld before us the wonderful and rich apparatus of practical magic arranged according to rules of which we were entirely ignorant,—rules which we had vainly sought in all the treatises ofmodern times upon the occult sciences of the Middle Ages, rules which might perhaps contain the simple principles underlying their confusion.
Evening was drawing on. The sun was sinking behind the western hills. It was beginning to grow dark among the arches where the great magician had imprisoned himself among dead and withered relics,—fragments broken from the great and living world without. We returned to his observatory. He opened a window and contemplated with dreamy glances the stars which were kindling one after another in the heavens. The twilight is a favorable time for conversation of the kind for which we had been preparing ourselves. We were soon settled in comfortable, roomy arm-chairs and discoursing earnestly,—we, the man of the fifteenth century, and the unborn souls of the nineteenth, whom he had summoned that he might look into the future, and who now used him to look back into the past. He spoke to us of his science....
“My knowledge is not of myself. Far, far away behind these hills, behind the snowy summits of the Alps, behind the mountains of the ‘farthest-dwelling Garamantes,’ on nameless heights which disappear among the clouds, the temple of truth was built long ago over the fountain from which life flows. That this temple is demolished we well know; only the first human pair has wandered through its sacred halls. But he who desires, who yearns and has patience, can sit down by the margin of the stream of Time and grasp and draw ashore some of the cedar-beams from the ruined temple drifting upon the billows, and from the form of the fragments may determine the structure of the whole. All wisdom has its roots in the past, and the farther we penetrate antiquity, the richer the remains we find of a highest human wisdom. What is Albertus Magnus with his profound knowledge in comparison with the angelic wisdom of Dionysius Areopagita, and what is the latter compared with that of the prophetwho denounced his woes over Nineveh and Babylon? And yet these divinely commissioned men would gladly have been taught by the seventy elders who were allowed with Moses to approach the mountain where God chose to reveal himself, there receiving the mystic knowledge of the Cabala. On Sinai, however, God’s secret was veiled in clouds, lightnings and terror; Moses himself was permitted to see him only ‘from behind’—did not obtain a morning-knowledge (a knowledgea priori, an analogy-seeking pupil of Schelling would have called it), but an evening-knowledge (knowledgea posteriori, he would have added). The morning-knowledge was shown only to the man of the dawn of time and was extinguished at the first sin. From that time every successive generation has deteriorated from its predecessor:
“‘Aetas parentum, pejor avis, tulitNos nequiores, mox daturosProgeniem vitiosiorem,’
and with the darkness of sin reason is plungedinto constantly blacker depths. The individual seeker after truth may gain enlightenment, but for himself alone, not for humanity. Therefore a magician confines the wisdom he acquires to his own bosom, or imparts it to a single pupil, or buries it under obscure expressions which he commits to parchment; but he neither can nor will impart it without reserve to humanity whose path appears to lead downward into a constantly deeper night.
“Even the theologians speak of the pristine wisdom,—the theologians with whom we, who practice the occult science, agree far more than the simple and suspicious among them think. What remained, in the time of Noah, of pristine wisdom was saved with him in the ark. His first-born obtained as his portion the fairest wisdom. Prophecy, the Cabala, and the Gospel belong to the sons of Shem, the Jews. But even Ham and Japhet were not left destitute. It was the priest of the sons of Ham that guarded the secrets of Isis,—secrets before which evenwe Christians must bow in the dust; for the Old Testament does not hesitate to exalt the wisdom of the Egyptians and recognize Moses as a pupil from their school. Hermes Trismegistus was an Egyptian, and we magicians who know that he transmuted whatever he chose into gold and precious stones, are not astonished when the apostle Paul speaks of the treasures of Egypt, or at what travellers relate of its pyramids and other giant works, or when Pliny estimates the number of its cities at twenty thousand, or when Marcellinus is amazed at the immense treasures which Cambyses carried away from it, for all this was a creation of the art of Hermes Trismegistus.[30]Even the portion of the children of Japhet was not insignificant. It was divided between the treasury of Zoroaster and that of the Eleusinian mysteries. Some coins of this treasure fell into thehands of Plato and Aristotle and have from them come into the possession of Porphyrius, Jamblichus, and the theosophists and scholastics. It is this diffused illumination—that of the Bible (its inner, secret meaning) the Cabala and fragments of Egyptian, Persian and Grecian wisdom—which are collected and united in the magic of learning. These are the ancestors of my science. Has it not a pedigree more noble than that of any royal family?
“I heard you mention something about the necessity for a science of investigation without presupposition. Would you then really presume to be the judge of all that past generations have thought, believed and transmitted as a sacred inheritance to those that follow? Do you not shrink before the idea that human hunger for truth must have been satisfied from Adam to our own days by nothing but illusions? that you are the children and children’s children of mere idiots who have fixed their hopes, their faith, and their convictions on baseless falsehoods? Putyour godless plan of investigation to the test! Do it openly, and the theologians will burn you! Do it in secret, and you will finally crave the stake as a liberator from the terrible void such a science would leave in your own soul! No, the magician believes just as devoutly as the theologian. Only in the mellow twilight of faith can he undertake those operations whose success is a confirmation of the truth of his faith. Or do you require stronger corroboration of the genuineness of his tenets than what I find when I read in these stars which wander silently past my window, the fates of men, and see these fates accomplished; when, with the potency of magical means, I summon angels, and demons, and the souls of dead and unborn men to reveal themselves before my eyes, and they appear?
“I confess that our science, if it is looked at only on the surface, resembles a variegated carpet with artfully interwoven threads; but as only a limited number of manipulations is required to produce the mostremarkable texture, so it is also but a few simple thoughts which support all the doctrines and products of magic.
“That the universe is a triple harmony, as the Godhead is a Trinity, you are aware. We live in the elemental world; over our head the celestial space, with its various spheres, revolves; and above this, finally, God is enthroned in the purely spiritual world of ideas. The unhappy scientists of your century have in their narrow prejudice separated these worlds from one another (but by crowding together the celestial and the elementary). Your so-called students of nature investigate only the elementary world, and your so-called philosophers only the ideal; but the former with all their delving in the various forms of matter, never reach the realm of the spiritual, but are rather led to disavow its existence; and the latter can never from the dim world of ideas summon up the concrete wealth of nature. In vain your students of nature imagine that in physiology, or your philosophers that inanthropology, they shall find the transition from one world to the other. We magicians, on the contrary, study these worlds as a unit. We find them combined by two mighty bonds: those of correspondence and causality. All things in the elementary world have their antitype in the celestial, and all celestial things have their corresponding ideas. These correspondences are strung from above downwards as strings on the harp of the universe, and on that harp the causalities move up and down like the fingers of a player. While your students of nature seek the chains of causality in only one direction, the horizontal, that which runs through things on the same level, that which connects things in one and the same elementary world; we, the students of magic, search with still greater diligence those perpendicular chains of causality which run through and combine corresponding objects in the three worlds. Our manner of investigating this perpendicular series resembles your method of examining the horizontal but slightly, ifat all. What unnecessary trouble your induction causes you! You wish to investigate the nature of some manifestation of force, for instance; you analyze it with great painstaking into different factors, you strive to isolate each of these factors and to cause them to act each its own part, to find out what each has contributed to the common expression of force. We meet with no such hindrances. A secret tradition has presented to us our perpendicular lines of causality almost entire, and we are able to fill up the lacunæ of this tradition by an investigation which is not impeded with any great difficulties. This investigation relies on the resemblances of things, for this similarity is derived from a correspondence, and causality is interwoven with correspondence. Thus, for instance, we judge from the resemblance between the splendor of gold and that of the sun that gold has its celestial correspondence in that luminary, and sustains to it a causal relation. Another example: the two-horned beetle bears a causal relation to the moon,which at its increase and wane is also two-horned; and if there were any doubt of this intimate relation between them, it must vanish when we learn that the beetle hides its eggs in the earth for the space of twenty-eight days, or just so long time as is required for the moon to pass through the Zodiac, but digs them up again on the twenty-ninth, when the moon is in conjunction with the Sun.[31]Do not smile at this method of investigation! Beware of repeating the mistake which ‘common sense’ is so prone to make in seeing absurdities in truths which happen to be beyond its horizon? Our method is founded on the idea that there is nothing casual in nature. To be sure we accept a divine arbitrament, but by no means a natural fortuity. Not even the slightest similarity between existing objects is a meaningless accident! Not even the slightest stroke in the figures by which we fix our words and thoughts in writing is without deep significance. Every thing inthe work of nature and of man has its cause and its effect. We can not make a gesture, nor say a word, without imparting vibrations to the whole universe, upward and downward,—vibrations which may be strong or feeble, perceptible or imperceptible. This principle runs through the whole of our cosmical system, and this thought must be true even for you analyzers.
“Before explaining more fully the magical use of our series of correspondence and causality, I wish to show you a couple of them. I shall choose the simplest, but at the same time the most important. I commence with
The Scale of the Holy Tetrad.(Table I.)
From which is found the Correspondences to the Four Elements.
“Here you see one of the nets which magic has stretched from the Empyrean down into the abyss. For each of the sacred numbers there is a separate scale of the same kind: ‘The universe,’ says Pythagoras, ‘is founded upon numbers,’ and Boethius asserts that ‘Every thing created in the beginning of time was formed according to the relations of certain numbers, which were lying as types in the mind of the Creator.’ It is consequently a settled fact with us that numbers contain greater and more effective forces than material things; for the former are not a mixture of substances, but may, as purely formal entities, stand in immediate connection with the ideas of divine reason. This is recognized also by the fathers: by Hieronymus, Augustine, Ambrosius, Athanasius, Bede, and others, and underlies these words in the book of Revelation: ‘Let him who hath understanding count the number of the beast.’ Those varied and relatively discordant objects which form a unity in the same world, are arranged side by side in thescale; whereas those things which in different groups or different worlds correspond to one another, form the ascending and descending series.
“Do not forget that correspondence also implies reciprocal activity! Thus, for instance, the letterהin the holy name of God indicates a power which is infused into the successive orders of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, and which is imparted through them to the constellations Leo and Sagittarius, and to the two wandering luminaries Mars and the Sun. These angels and stars all pour down into the elementary world the abundance of their power, which produces there fire and heat, and the germs of animal organisms, and kindles in man reason and faith, in order to meet finally in the lowest region, its opposites: cold, destruction, irrationality, unbelief, represented by the names of fallen angel-princes. I will now show you another table which is an introduction to the study of Astrology and treats more in detail of certain parts of the preceding, showing howthings in the elementary world and microcosm are subject to the planets. In showing this to you I will remind you of the verse:
‘Astra regunt hominem; sed regit astra Deus.’(The stars guide man; but God guides the stars.)
(TableII.)
“The value of these, as of many other tables, will be clear to you when I now pronounce the first practical principle of magic:—
“As the Creator of the universe diffuses upon us, by angels, stars, elements, animals, plants, metals and stones, the powers of his omnipotence, so also the magician, by collecting those objects in the elemental world which bear a relation of mutual activity to the same entity (an angel or a planet) in the higher worlds, and by combining their powers according to scientific rules, and intensifying them by means of sacred and religious ceremonies, is able to influence this higher being and attract to himself its powers.
“This principle sufficiently explains why I have collected around me all the strange things you here see. Here, for instance, is a plate of lead on which is engraved the symbol of a planet; and beside it a leaden flask containing gall. If I now take a piece of fine onyx marked with the same planet-symbol, and this dried cypress-branch, and add to them the skin of a snake and thefeather of an owl, you will need but to look into one of the tables given you to find that I have only collected various things in the elementary world which bear a relation of mutual activity to Saturn; and, if rightly combined, can attract both the powers of that planet, and of the angels with which it is connected.
“The greatest effect of magic—at the same time its triumph, and the criterion of its truth—is a successful incantation. Shall we perform one? If we go through all the necessary preparations, we shall have a bird’s-eye view of the whole secret science. Only certain alchemists have a still greater end in view; they aspire to produce in the retort man himself,—nay, the whole world. You men of the nineteenth century know only by reputation of our attempts to produce anhomunculus, anda perpetuum mobile naturæ. Could you only count the drops of perspiration these efforts have wrung from us! There is something enchanting, something overpowering, in alchemy. It is giganticin its aims, and in its depths dwells a thought which is terrible, because it threatens to crush that very cosmic philosophy on which our faith is founded. We occupy ourselves with the elements, until the idea steals upon us that every thing is dependent on them; that every thing, Creator and created, is included in them; that every thing arises by necessity and passes away by necessity. If you can only collect in the crucible those elements and life-germs which were stirring in chaos, then you can also produce, in the crucible, the six days of creation, and find the spirit which formed the universe. I have abandoned alchemy only to escape this thought; but a parchment will, sealed with seven seals, and hidden in the most secret corner of my vaults, contains the remarkable experiences I have had when experimenting for theperpetuum mobileandhomunculus.[32]