Masters of forbidden arts
Part II
The skills attained at the Black School seemed always to be the same. The scholar Michael Scot, for instance - a wizard almost contemporary with Roger Bacon - returned from Spain in command of innumerable demonic servants and in possession of a tome called The Book of Might, which contained the spells to release or restrain them. He is said to have flown on a demon that had taken the shape of a horse, to have summoned rich banquets from out of the air, to have forced his infernal helpers to build bridges and change the shape of mountains.
Yet Michael Scot was frightening to the ordinary people around him. When he died, he was burned with respect and The Book of Might was hung on the church wall near his grave, but for centuries afterward, people refused to open the book, or even to touch it, for fear of releasing the creatures its spells commanded.
The reason for their fear, of course, was that Scot was in league with the enemy of the universe, imperiling himself, those near him and the very order of nature. It was no easy matter to touch pitch without being defiled.
A wizard had to have great bravery and skill to command and guide the powers of darkness without being absorbed by them. In this respect, Roger Bacon was a paragon among wizards. Some of the friar's strength, it appears, derived from his charity. He summoned up the tormented ghosts of Julian the Apostate - the Fourth Century Roman emperor who had renounced Christianity - to frighten an atheist soldier into right behavior, but he called no diabolical servant for his own selfish ends. Once, it is true, he dealt with Satan himself, but that was an attempt to save a stranger he met on the road.
It happened this way: One day, as Bacon walked the country lanes of Oxfordshire, deep in contemplation, he came upon a young man seated on a grassy knoll, his sword across his knees and tears in his eyes. The friar stopped to give comfort - and to prevent the youth from doing himself an injury, as seemed likely - and thus heard a curious tale.
The young man had been a profligate: Having squandered his inheritance on drink and gambled away his lands, he entered into a contract with an old man who had appeared with an offer of aid. The bargain struck was that the old man would settle all of the young man's debts and give him the wherewithal to live; in payment, the young man would become the old one's to command.
The debts were indeed paid, and the old man had come to claim his due. Only then did the youth realize - by a sudden, sickening whiff of rotting flesh and the sight of glittering eyes in the shadow of the old man's hood - who his creditor was. Because he had been tricked, he was able to argue for a day's grace before the final reckoning, and that day was now ending.
Bacon's face grew grave as he listened. But he offered to help: There was a human soul at stake. He stayed with the youth through the long night, and in the chill dawn of the following morning, they went together to meet Satan at the edge of a wood in the north part of the country.
All seemed peaceful when they arrived at the meeting place. The air was smoky that morning, but this could have been because of charcoal burners at work in the wood. An old man, gowned and hooded in black, awaited them. He looked innocuous enough, although his face was hidden in shadow. When he raised his hand and his sleeve fell back, however, even Bacon flinched. There was no arm attached to the hand.
They got to business quickly. The old man called on Bacon to witness the contract he held, which did in fact specify that when all the young man's debts were paid, the youth "should be at the lender's disposing, and his without any delay, freely to yield himself upon the first demand of the aforesaid lender."
Bacon read the contract through, then, more thoughtfully, read it once more. Finally he asked the youth, "This is your signature? You agreed that when all your debts were paid, you would give yourself to Satan here?"
"That is so," replied the youth, "but I did not know it was he when I signed."
Bacon waved this aside. He said, "But it is clear to me that all your debts are not yet paid. You have not paid this creditor who stands before us. And as long as that debt remains unpaid, he has no claim." And the friar turned to the old man, his right hand tracing the sign of the cross in the air. But the hooded figure had vanished.
Unlike Bacon, many wizards made a habit of summoning demons. The evidence appears in the multitude of formulas for conjuration found in the grimoires, books of magical instruction. The Key of Solomon was the most famous.
The formulas derived from diverse ancient sources and therefore varied considerably in detail, but the general patterns of activity were the same. To summon a demon, the conjurer drew a circle - usually nine feet in diamter - around himself. The circle might be drawn on the floor with charcoal or on the ground with a sword or with a ceremonial knife called an arthame; it might enclose smaller circles or pentacles, five-pointed stars, it might be inscribed with Hebrew or Greek characters signifying the different names of God or other protective words.
The most important requirement was that the circle be unbroken. It thus became a powerful symbol of eternity, because it had no beginning and no end. It was a whole, a mirror of the universe. In the space within the circle, the wizard's inspiration was mighty concentrated; the line that formed the circle became a defensive barrier against the inimical creatures he conjured. As long as the wizard remained within the line, he was safe to begin speaking the words that called the creatures of Satan.
Some magic books gave words from unknown languages: One formula began,
Bagabi laca bachabe
Lamac cabi achababe
and continued with these curious syllables for nine lines. In other cases, the demons were summoned in the name of God himself, and wizards called upon them to come "visibly and without delay, in a fair human form, not terrifying." Every effort toward self-protection was made, and the most important not forgotten. The wizard must stay within his circle, if he put so much as a finger outside, he was doomed.
Although wizards sometimes conjured up Satan's minions to perform particular tasks, the most common motive was to enter into a diabolical contract - the same grim bargain that Bacon's young companion unwittingly agreed to. Perhaps the earliest recorded such contracts was that of a Sixth Century cleric named Theophilus, who sold his soul to just obtain church office. The practice was well known enough that even popes were accused of trading their souls for papal crowns.
A wizard could get much more than high office, however. In exchange for his soul, he could gain mastery over nature for the remainder of his life. By deliberately committing himself to the powers of evil - abjuring all that was good in the order for the universe, from the smallest growing flower to the stars and planets in their stately dance - he ensured the fulfillment of his every wish and whim. The Prince of Darkness was a gentleman and always kept his word. And having all eternity, Satan could afford to wait for inevitable close of one small life, when the promisted soul became his to devour.
But absolute power corrupts, absolutely, and the wizards who made the contracts seemed to live joyless and frantic lives, always shadowed by the horror that lay waiting at the end. Nowhere is this so evident as in the history of Doctor Faustus, a wizard who lived some years after Bacon and in a different country. Centuries after his death, he was made into a kind of hero, but the early Faustus legends tell a different tale.
The story begins in Germany, at Wittenberg, an ancient university town on the Elbe River. There in his youth went John Faustus, sent by his parents to study divinity. He distinguished himself in the years he was a scholar. His performance was so brilliant, in fact, that the university rectors and masters - "with one consent," the tale says - made him a Doctor of Divinity. The irony they could not appreciate was that, from the very beginning, the divinity scholar had also privately studied the arts of conjuration and necromancy - the raising of the dead for the purposes of inquiring about the afterlife. His strong and nervous intellect found its clerical diet insipid.
In the decades that followed, the acquisition of magical power became an obsession for Faustus. He renounced the divinity degree, to the relief of other scholars. As evidence by his miserably deteriorating body - white beard, raddled skin, shaking hands - his life was a debauch, a never-ending round of drinking and whoring. Inevitably, he developed a craving for sensations beyond what Wittenberg could provide.
One night Faustus left behind the narrow winding streets and steeply gabled roofs of the town and walked alone to a thick wood in the country. He came to a crossroads [the power of in-between places was not forgotten], and there in the dust he drew a circle. Standing within it, he drew more circles and also certain characters. Just before nine o'clock he began to chant, calling an underworld prince whose name was Mephistopheles. He paused, and in the distance heard the bells of the town echoing coldly from hill to hill as they announced the hour. A wind rose suddenly in the wood, so strong that it bent the tree trunks and roared among the branches. Faustus heard a drum-roll of thunder and saw bright stabs of lightning. But no rain fell, and the sounds died away.
He chanted again. A dragon flashed fiery coils among the stars, and a hoarse voice suddenly spoke Faustus' name. From the shadows of the trees came a rending howl, as if the trees themselves were keening. Then a globe of fire - a will-o'-the-wisp the size of a man - appeared at the very rim of the circle drawn in the dust.
Faustus cried "Mephistopheles!" The fiery globe split and trembled and dimmed and disappeared. In its place stood a mild-looking, middle-aged man dressed in a friar's habit.
"Will you step outside the circle, Faustus?" said the friar, pronouncing the words with an unpleasant hiss.
Faustus refused. There was a resigned sigh, and the friar asked, "Then what is your request?"
"That, leaving me unharmed, you come to me at midnight in the privacy of my chambers. I wish to make a pact with you."
"I am bound to do so," the friar replied, and Faustus found himself alone again.
He returned to the sleeping town and walked through empty streets to his own rooms to await Mephistopheles. The wait was a short one, but for Faustus it was full of shiverings. Something about his chambers seemed not quite right. He had the impression that eyes watched him from inside the walls; he turned to look and saw only the walls. When he sat at his desk he thought he heard rustlings and scrabblings - and worst of all, the click of teeth - near the entrance to the room. But when he glanced in that direction he saw only an empty archway. The minutes of waiting were a foretaste of the future. Faustus was never to be alone again.
Mephistopheles appeared without warning at the stroke of midnight, but not as a friar. He was a gaudily bedecked as a court jester and bejeweled as a sultan. He drifted restlessly around the room while he and Faustus talked. They could not come to an agreement. Faustus wanted to have the services of the demon without having to surrender his own soul, even though Mephistopheles pointed out that his master would never permit it.
In the end, they met twice more before Faustus took up his quill. "Now have I, Doctor John Faustus, unto the hellish prince and his messenger Mephistopheles given both body and soul," he wrote, "upon such condition that they shall teach me and fulfill my desire in all things." His term was to be twenty-four years, he continued, and he ended the statement with a string of blasphemies. The contract was written and signed in Faustus' own blood.
"Now my pleasures begin," he said when he was finished.
"Yes, indeed, my Faustus," said Mephistopheles in tranquil tones.
Faustus now had the ultimate powers a wizard could possess, and he might have done great deeds. But the record of his twenty-four years was one of drunkenness and buffoonery, of lies and lechery.
There could be no doubting the strength of his supernatural aid. His appearance altered amazingly for the better (This, he said, was because Mephistopheles had taken him to the den of a sorceress. The woman - who was assisted by an assortment of talking cats and apes - gave him a fiery portion that made him young again.) He was companioned by the most beautiful woman in the world. And he was surved by a large black spaniel that possessed quite un-doglike powers: When Faustus told the beast to produce food or drink or women for his friend, the orders were instantly obeyed. The spaniel, he later said - with lascivious detail - once allowed him to observe a Beltane Eve witches' orgy in the Hartz Mountains.
For the most part, Faustus contrived at petty and nasty tricks. When a priest refused him drink, he devised a vengeful gift, a lotion that removed hair and saved the necessity of shaving - but that (as the priest found out too late) took off skin as well.
He caused a cuckold's horns to grow on the brow of a harmless knight in Innsbruck, and when the knight chased him over the fields outside the city, he caused the bushes of the countryside to change into mounted musketeers, who brought the knight to his knees. Annoyed by the antics of a group of students he caroused with, he had Mephistopheles create the illusion that they were in a vineyard, in snatching at the wine jugs, they unwittingly beat one another bloody and senseless.
It was a sorry performance, and its final act contemptible. A month before the contract came due, Faustus dismissed Mephistopheles and turned to loud lamentation and repentance. He prayed. He read the gospel. He lectured his drinking companions - the few that were left - on the dangers of vice. And he kept them close beside him, Faustus had no taste for solitute.
On the eve of his day of reckoning, Faustus left his own house in Wittenberg and repaired to an inn in the village of Rimlich, accompanied by his friends, who later said that they had spent the evening drinking while Faustus wept for his sins. One of them said he had seen a large black spaniel crouching at the inn door; thinking it to be Faustus' dog, he opened the door for it, but the animal refused to enter.
Eventually the company went to bed, leaving Faustus alone. All agreed later that the inn was quiet, so quiet that they heard the bells of Wittenberg strike midnight.
A wind rose up then, they said. It blew steadily, beating branches against the windows and rattling doors on their hinges. They heard a ground-floor door slam. The wind hissed up the stairs and into the passageway outside their chambers. Each man saw his own door tremble and strain at its hinges, then heard the creak of his neighbor's as the wind passed by. Last of all they heard a crash at the door that barred the room where Faustus lay.
A gurgling scream echoed down the passageway, and then another, a fearsome howling that brought the guests bolt upright in their beds. One man thought of a fox in the snare, another of the rack and thumbscrews. Then there was nothing. The wind died suddenly. The rest of the night was profoundly peaceful.
But none of the company slept and none left his room. When the dawn came, they gathered in the passageway and together went to Faustus' chamber. The first man in blanched and turned away.
The chamber was a charnel house. Swaths of blood were painted on the walls and spattered on the ceiling. A gray mass adhered limply to one wall - the contests of Faustus' smashed skull. In a corner, a disembodied eye stared upward from the floor. The rest of the body - bitten, clawed and cruelly distorted - was found in the stableyard below the room, flung across a pile of horse dung.
For decades after that - until it was torn down, in fact - no one would live in Faustus' house in Wittenberg. It was too dark and cold and still, and those who passed by at night said that they had seen a pallid, one-eyed face staring at them from an upper window.
Faustus' death was the most lurid of its kind, but there had been others. One of these, years before, had touched Roger Bacon himself and influenced the curious choice he made at the end of his long life.
Bacon sometimes traveled with a companion called Friar Bungay, a cheerful roisterer and a wizard of a rather minor sort. Bungay maintained a running feud with a sorcerer named Vandermast, which for years involved activities no more irritating than duels of spirit-raising and dunkings in streams. Finally, however, Bungay played an especially humiliating trick on Vandermast. He caused the sorcerer to be spirited into a pond while the man was making love. After that, matters escalated, until the pair, alone together in the dead of night, apparently tried a battle with demons. They were found the next morning, charred and lifeless, near the scorched remains of two magic circles.
At about this time, two young students went to Bacon's chambers at Oxford with a simple request: They wanted to see how their fathers were. Bacon had a magic looking glass - probably made of beryl, the stone most commonly used for the purpose - that enabled him to see events occurring as many as fifty miles away. He knew both the fathers and the sons, and being of a generous nature, he granted the students' request.
Bacon withdrew the glass from its hiding place and held it up for the boys. They named their fathers. The surface of the glass, blue and misty at first, gradually cleared to reveal the figures of two old men, tiny and distant, but clearly the fathers of the boys. The boys watched transfixed as the silent actors - once fast friends - shook their fists at each other. Then one of the figures drew his sword without ceremony and hacked the other down. Bacon covered the glass quickly and began to speak, but the damage had been done. One son demanded revenge, the other defended his parent, although neither could tell what had caused the fatal battle. In an instant daggers were drawn, and in another the two boys lay mortally wounded on the floor of Bacon's study.
After this, Bacon altered. He retired to his chamber and allowed admittance to no one, save for the messenger who delivered the news about Friar Bungay. Days later, he emerged gaunt and pale. He had resolved to abjure his magic. It was knowledge, he said, not meant for fallible mortals, and too much death attended the practice. Its burden had become too heavy for him to bear.
Bacon himself cleared his university chambers of their decades of clutter. Useful objects - his prisms and mirrors, his lovingly assembled bird skeletons, his astronomical equipment - he gave away to the more lean and threadbare of his students. But the magic books were burned. Bacon built a bonfire for his Key of Solomon and his Arabic Picatrix, his Persian Canon and other studies. Cast onto the flames, the guilded pages curled and blackened, the gold ran like tears, the painted diagrams peeled and crackled, and the letters soared off as smoke.
"In that flame," says one account sadly, "burnt the greatest learning in the world."
At last, shorn of his enchantments, the aged friar retired to an anchorite's cell built into the wall of the church. Two years after that, he died and his fellow friars laid him in his grave.
Bacon was not, of course, the last worker of magic. Other wizards followed him, and witches, too, the wizards' humble cousins. But among the watches of the universe who dared to alter its order, the kindest and the best was Roger Bacon. It is fitting that affectionate memories cherished tales of his prowess for centuries, long after he had gone to dust.
Wizards and Enchanters - Content | Myths and Legends
Masters of Forbidden Arts - Part I | Myths and Legends