Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (12 page)

“The first preparation … would produce mental confusion, impaired movement, irregular action of the heart, dizziness and shortness of breath.

“The belladonna in the second ointment would produce excitement which might pass to delirium.

“The third ointment, containing both aconite and belladonna, would produce excitement and irregular action of the heart.”

This seems clear enough, but to me it seems unlikely that enough of the essential ingredients would penetrate through the skin—even the scratched, inflamed and broken skin of a lice-ridden mediaeval peasant—to produce the supposed results. I am inclined to the opinion that the “flying ointment” was supplemented with an infusion of fly agaric, the “sacred mushroom”
amanita muscaria;
certainly the one or two contemporary English covens which
may
have some connection with traditional witchcraft use such an infusion for producing visions.
¹¹

The real Sabbath seems to have been a much tamer affair than the imaginary Sabbath of the schizophrenic and the visionary; a rural feast with plenty to eat and drink
¹²
followed by dancing and a sexual orgy. The food seems to have consisted of rustic dainties; the Pendle
witches of 1633 feasted on “flesh smoaking, butter in lumps and milk” while twenty years earlier the Lancashire witches ate “Beef, Bacon and roasted mutton”. The dancing was accompanied by music, both vocal and instrumental. Sinclair, in his
Satan’s Invisible World Discovered
, spoke of the Devil as being the author of “several bawdy Songs which are sung” and went on to relate that a “reverend Minister” had told him that “one who was the Devil’s Piper, a wizard, confesst to him that at a Ball of Dancing the Foul Spirit taught him a bawdy song to sing and play, as it were this night, and ere two days passed all the lads and lasses of the town were lilting it through the street. It were abomination to rehearse it.” While there is little doubt that many celebrations of the Sabbath ended in an indiscriminate sexual orgy I doubt whether this was invariably so, and I am sure that many of the grosser descriptions of sexual perversity contained in late mediaeval and renaissance treatises on witchcraft owed more to the prurient imaginations of their authors than to the actual practices of the witch-cult. I do not question, however, that ritual sexual intercourse between the “Devil” (i.e. the human being who presided and acted as High Priest at the Sabbath) and female members of the cult was a frequent observance at the Sabbath nor that artificial phalli were sometimes used for this purpose; both Isobel Gowdie and Janet Breadheid, seventeenth-century Scottish witches, described the Devil’s “nature” (i.e. his penis) as being “huge, very cold, as ice” and “cold as spring well-water” and similar evidence was given at many of the trials.

In the popular imagination the “Black Mass”, the impious parody of the Eucharist, is inextricably associated with the Witches’ Sabbath, but this was not so. The Black Mass seems to be of much later origin and although accounts of something like a diabolical communion service occur in one or two late Catholic treatises on witchcraft I am fairly sure that these accounts are derived from confused ecclesiastical and popular recollections of the Agape, or love feasts, of the Cathars and other mediaeval Manichee sects. Nevertheless, in the Paris of the seventeenth century there was a blending of impiously-said Masses with the darker sexual components of witchcraft, a deep and final degradation of the worship of the Great Mother.

¹
J. W. Brodie-Innes, an Edwardian novelist who was also an occultist and a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, wrote a story in which this extraordinary feat was carried out by a Scottish witch of the seventeenth century. Certain English members of the contemporary witch-cult who are familiar with the story have claimed to be able to do the same thing. Even more surprising, some of them have actually found those who are credulous enough to believe them!

²
It is true, of course, that at the present time we seem to be entering a similar era. Hence, no doubt, the popularity with the young of the poetry of Corso and Ted Hughes, the “novels” of William Burroughs, and, most worrying of all, the pseudo-radicalism of the sinister racialism of Fanon. Margaret Murray’s books, never completely out of fashion, are clearly due for a great revival!

³
Since the Moscow trials of the ’thirties, in which so many of the Old Bolsheviks confessed to almost every possible crime—an actual
majority
of the Bolshevik Central Committee that had made the October Revolution were capitalist agents if the evidence given at the trials was to be believed—we have all grown considerably more sceptical about evidence extracted under torture. There is a remarkable similarity between, for example, a young German girl of the sixteenth century confessing that, naked, she had attended the Sabbath and there indulged in every variety of perversion and some of the confessions produced at the Moscow trials. One remembers that one of the Moscow accused confessed, in a fervour of self-recrimination, to having met and plotted with Trotsky at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen although, in reality, the hotel had been burnt down some years before; this is very like the fervent repentance displayed by some accused witches for impossible supernatural crimes to which they had confessed.

⁴
Here I must once again draw an analogy from the strange intellectual underworld of Marxist sectarianism. The Trotskyists class the Soviet Union as “a degenerated workers’ state with socialist foundations and a degenerate, bureaucratic superstructure”. At the time when the Soviet Union seemed ahead in the space race, having just launched Sputnik I, I heard a Trotskyist arguing that this proved that there was “a socialist foundation to the Soviet Union’s economy”. Years later, when the U.S.A. had triumphantly beaten Russia to the Moon I heard the same Trotskyist contending, while in argument with an orthodox Communist that this American success showed “that there were bureaucratic deformations in the Soviet economy”. This method of reasoning shows a surprising resemblance to that of Margaret Murray.

⁵
The fundamental error of Frazer and the Seligmans was that they overestimated the magico-religious aspects of sacral kingship and underestimated the political. It seems highly improbable that the senile and incestuous Major Weir—another of Margaret Murray’s candidates for incarnate godship—could ever have been regarded as a Divine King. For a penetrating criticism of the Frazerian theory of sacral kingship see, E. E. Evans-Pritchard
The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan
(C.U.P. 1948) and the symposium
The Sacral Kingship
(Leyden 1959).

⁶
A fifth theory of the nature of the witch-cult—a theory charming in its eccentricity—has been put forward by Robert Graves; this theory I have briefly examined in
Appendix B
, “Robert Graves, Witches and Islamic Mysticism”.

⁷
Unlike the overwhelming majority of those who reject the supernatural components of witchcraft confessions I am myself inclined to the belief that there may be a tiny substratum of truth in some of the stories of supernormal events told by witnesses at the witch trials; i.e. I accept the existence of extra-sensory perception and I regard some of the extraordinary events related by simple people in the course of their evidence at the trials as having actually happened—the result of a spontaneous manifestation of extra-sensory faculties. This does not, of course, imply that I accept any
particular
instance of E.S.P. as being genuine; I adhere to the “bundle of sticks” theory—while there is a very low probability of any individual supernatural story being veridic there is a very high probability that of the
totality
of such stories one or more are true.

⁸
While the surviving manuscript of the
Sacred Magic
is written in an early eighteenth-century hand internal evidence seems to show a probability that the work was based on an earlier, possibly early sixteenth century, original.

⁹
Compare Guazzo in
Compendium Maleficarum:
“The opinion which many hold who follow Luther and Melanchthon is that witches only assist at these ceremonies in their imagination, and that they are deceived by some trick of the Devil, in support of which argument the objectors often assert that the witches have very often been seen lying in one spot and not moving thence. Additionally what is related in the life of St. Germain … that … when certain women declared they had been present at a banquet they were all the time sleeping … is germane …”

¹⁰
In an appendix to Margaret Murray’s
magnum opus
.

¹¹
The ointment used by these covens is simply a heavy grease worn, like the oil of the long-distance swimmer, as a protection against cold.

¹²
The drink appears to have been neither more nor less than whatever alcoholic beverage was normally drunk in the locality. Nevertheless certain modern occultists have endeavoured to attack an esoteric significance to
Vinum Sabbati
, the Wine of the Sabbath. One disciple of Crowley seems to have looked upon it as the male and female sexual secretions “mingled in the Holy Grail” (i.e. the vagina); he has failed, however, to produce any authority for this conception.

The Mass was and is the central religious practice of Catholic Christianity. It is not surprising that the supposed miracle of the Mass—the supernatural transformation of the substance of bread and wine into the veritable Body and Blood of Christ—daily performed by the priest, led to a popular belief that the ceremony had magical powers, that a priest could use his magical powers of transubstantiation
¹
in order to achieve his own ends; that the Mass could be said with the intention of death, sexual love or material gain. This belief was not confined to the illiterate populace but was held by a large number—possibly a majority—of the secular clergy. Evilly disposed priests would say a Requiem Mass for a still living enemy and, when one remembers mediaeval mortality rates, it is not surprising that this malicious rite often met with seeming success.
²

Eventually an underground literature came into existence designed to supply the demand for practical instruction in such perversions of the sacerdotal function. Probably the most notorious of these unpleasant instructional manuals was the
Grimoire of Honorius
—falsely attributed to one of the Popes of that name—which gave detailed information on how to use the Mass as an adjunct of (black) magical
rites. To obtain a demon as a servant, for example, one was supposed to, firstly, say a Mass of the Holy Ghost, secondly, to tear the eyes from a living black cockerel, thirdly, to conduct a long-winded evocation ceremony and, finally, to throw a living mouse to the demon who appeared. As the Anglican writer Charles Williams has commented it is not unlikely that anyone who performed this revolting series of blasphemies and cruelties supposed he saw—or indeed saw—a devil.

I have little doubt that there were always, and possibly still are,
³
unworthy priests prepared, for gain, to say Masses designed to achieve dubious ends. It was only in seventeenth-century France, however, that the activities of such creatures became Big Business.

As early as 1668 Paris had begun to be disturbed by dark gossip concerning sorcery, poisons and murder and in the summer of that year a professional fortune-teller, a certain Le Sage, and his associate, a priest named Mariette, were arrested, interrogated and finally charged with sorcery—an offence punishable by death. At their trial they told their judges that their main business was the compounding and sale to clients of love philtres that had been charged with magical power by being placed beneath the chalice while Mariette said a midnight Mass over them on a black-draped altar at the dark of the moon. The judges, not surprisingly, asked the accused warlocks for the names of their clients. They were probably surprised and embarrassed by the names that were given; for the prisoners named as customers not only such well-known individuals as the Marquise de Bougy and the Duchesse de Vivonne but also the Marquise de Montespan, mistress and favourite of Louis XIV! No word of this evidence was ever allowed to leak out. All was suppressed. Le Sage was sentenced for life to the galleys while Mariette was given the mild sentence of nine years’ banishment—the presiding judge who conferred the sentence being the father of one of his clients. Only four years later, while his galley lay at anchor off Genoa, Le Sage was mysteriously released, presumably owing to the intervention of some powerful patron, and returned to Paris and the arms of his mistress, a certain La Voisin.

Amongst Le Sage’s acquaintances was Captain de Chasteuil, a Doctor of Laws, a Knight of the Order of Malta—while fighting against Algerian pirates he had been taken prisoner and spent two years as a galley-slave—and at one time a Captain of Guards. After his return
from slavery de Chasteuil became a Carmelite prior, an office which he seems to have found quite compatible with the study of magic and alchemy and, indeed, with smuggling his fourteen-year-old mistress into his cell at night. Eventually the girl became pregnant; de Chasteuil strangled her and buried her body beneath the floor of his monastery chapel. The crime was discovered as the result of a chain of coincidences—as unlikely as everything else in the life of de Chasteuil—and he was condemned to death by hanging. He was rescued from (quite literally) the foot of the gallows by the armed followers of his friend Louis de Vanens, the captain of a galley (and, like de Chasteuil himself, a practising magician), and spirited away to the court of the Duke of Savoy at Turin. He rose rapidly in the ducal favour, becoming Captain of the Royal Guard and tutor to the Prince of Piedmont, heir to the throne. In 1675, however, the sudden death of his patron, probably from poison, neccessitated a rapid departure from Savoy and he made a discreet return to France. In Paris he set up in business as a purveyor of spells and poisons, as an alchemist, and as a forger.