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Books: Lives of the Necromancers

W >> William Godwin >> Lives of the Necromancers



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[Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been numbered sequentially and
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LIVES OF THE NECROMANCERS:

OR

AN ACCOUNT OF THE MOST EMINENT PERSONS IN SUCCESSIVE AGES, WHO HAVE
CLAIMED FOR THEMSELVES, OR TO WHOM HAS BEEN IMPUTED BY OTHERS,

THE

EXERCISE OF MAGICAL POWER.


BY WILLIAM GODWIN.


LONDON

Frederick J Mason, 444, West Strand

1834





PREFACE.


The main purpose of this book is to exhibit a fair delineation of the
credulity of the human mind. Such an exhibition cannot fail to be
productive of the most salutary lessons.

One view of the subject will teach us a useful pride in the abundance
of our faculties. Without pride man is in reality of little value. It
is pride that stimulates us to all our great undertakings. Without
pride, and the secret persuasion of extraordinary talents, what man
would take up the pen with a view to produce an important work,
whether of imagination and poetry, or of profound science, or of acute
and subtle reasoning and intellectual anatomy? It is pride in this
sense that makes the great general and the consummate legislator, that
animates us to tasks the most laborious, and causes us to shrink from
no difficulty, and to be confounded and overwhelmed with no obstacle
that can be interposed in our path.

Nothing can be more striking than the contrast between man and the
inferior animals. The latter live only for the day, and see for the
most part only what is immediately before them. But man lives in the
past and the future. He reasons upon and improves by the past; he
records the acts of a long series of generations: and he looks into
future time, lays down plans which he shall be months and years in
bringing to maturity, and contrives machines and delineates systems
of education and government, which may gradually add to the
accommodations of all, and raise the species generally into a nobler
and more honourable character than our ancestors were capable of
sustaining.

Man looks through nature, and is able to reduce its parts into a great
whole. He classes the beings which are found in it, both animate and
inanimate, delineates and describes them, investigates their
properties, and records their capacities, their good and evil
qualities, their dangers and their uses.

Nor does he only see all that is; but he also images all that is not.
He takes to pieces the substances that are, and combines their parts
into new arrangements. He peoples all the elements from the world of
his imagination. It is here that he is most extraordinary and
wonderful. The record of what actually is, and has happened in the
series of human events, is perhaps the smallest part of human history.
If we would know man in all his subtleties, we must deviate into the
world of miracles and sorcery. To know the things that are not, and
cannot be, but have been imagined and believed, is the most curious
chapter in the annals of man. To observe the actual results of these
imaginary phenomena, and the crimes and cruelties they have caused us
to commit, is one of the most instructive studies in which we can
possibly be engaged. It is here that man is most astonishing, and that
we contemplate with most admiration the discursive and unbounded
nature of his faculties.

But, if a recollection of the examples of the credulity of the human
mind may in one view supply nourishment to our pride, it still more
obviously tends to teach us sobriety and humiliation. Man in his
genuine and direct sphere is the disciple of reason; it is by this
faculty that he draws inferences, exerts his prudence, and displays
the ingenuity of machinery, and the subtlety of system both in natural
and moral philosophy. Yet what so irrational as man? Not contented
with making use of the powers we possess, for the purpose of conducing
to our accommodation and well being, we with a daring spirit inquire
into the invisible causes of what we see, and people all nature with
Gods "of every shape and size" and angels, with principalities and
powers, with beneficent beings who "take charge concerning us lest at
any time we dash our foot against a stone," and with devils who are
perpetually on the watch to perplex us and do us injury. And, having
familiarised our minds with the conceptions of these beings, we
immediately aspire to hold communion with them. We represent to
ourselves God, as "walking in the garden with us in the cool of the
day," and teach ourselves "not to forget to entertain strangers, lest
by so doing we should repel angels unawares."

No sooner are we, even in a slight degree, acquainted with the laws of
nature, than we frame to ourselves the idea, by the aid of some
invisible ally, of suspending their operation, of calling out meteors
in the sky, of commanding storms and tempests, of arresting the motion
of the heavenly bodies, of producing miraculous cures upon the bodies
of our fellow-men, or afflicting them with disease and death, of
calling up the deceased from the silence of the grave, and compelling
them to disclose "the secrets of the world unknown."

But, what is most deplorable, we are not contented to endeavour to
secure the aid of God and good angels, but we also aspire to enter
into alliance with devils, and beings destined for their rebellion to
suffer eternally the pains of hell. As they are supposed to be of a
character perverted and depraved, we of course apply to them
principally for purposes of wantonness, or of malice and revenge. And,
in the instances which have occurred only a few centuries back, the
most common idea has been of a compact entered into by an unprincipled
and impious human being with the sworn enemy of God and man, in the
result of which the devil engages to serve the capricious will and
perform the behests of his blasphemous votary for a certain number of
years, while the deluded wretch in return engages to renounce his God
and Saviour, and surrender himself body and soul to the pains of hell
from the end of that term to all eternity. No sooner do we imagine
human beings invested with these wonderful powers, and conceive them
as called into action for the most malignant purposes, than we become
the passive and terrified slaves of the creatures of our own
imaginations, and fear to be assailed at every moment by beings to
whose power we can set no limit, and whose modes of hostility no human
sagacity can anticipate and provide against. But, what is still more
extraordinary, the human creatures that pretend to these powers have
often been found as completely the dupes of this supernatural
machinery, as the most timid wretch that stands in terror at its
expected operation; and no phenomenon has been more common than the
confession of these allies of hell, that they have verily and indeed
held commerce and formed plots and conspiracies with Satan.

The consequence of this state of things has been, that criminal
jurisprudence and the last severities of the law have been called
forth to an amazing extent to exterminate witches and witchcraft. More
especially in the sixteenth century hundreds and thousands were burned
alive within the compass of a small territory; and judges, the
directors of the scene, a Nicholas Remi, a De Lancre, and many others,
have published copious volumes, entering into a minute detail of the
system and fashion of the witchcraft of the professors, whom they sent
in multitudes to expiate their depravity at the gallows and the stake.

One useful lesson which we may derive from the detail of these
particulars, is the folly in most cases of imputing pure and unmingled
hypocrisy to man. The human mind is of so ductile a character that,
like what is affirmed of charity by the apostle, it "believeth all
things, and endureth all things." We are not at liberty to trifle with
the sacredness of truth. While we persuade others, we begin to deceive
ourselves. Human life is a drama of that sort, that, while we act our
part, and endeavour to do justice to the sentiments which are put down
for us, we begin to believe we are the thing we would represent.

To shew however the modes in which the delusion acts upon the person
through whom it operates, is not properly the scope of this book. Here
and there I have suggested hints to this purpose, which the curious
reader may follow to their furthest extent, and discover how with
perfect good faith the artist may bring himself to swallow the
grossest impossibilities. But the work I have written is not a
treatise of natural magic. It rather proposes to display the immense
wealth of the faculty of imagination, and to shew the extravagances of
which the man may be guilty who surrenders himself to its guidance.

It is fit however that the reader should bear in mind, that what is
put down in this book is but a small part and scantling of the acts of
sorcery and witchcraft which have existed in human society. They have
been found in all ages and countries. The torrid zone and the frozen
north have neither of them escaped from a fruitful harvest of this
sort of offspring. In ages of ignorance they have been especially at
home; and the races of men that have left no records behind them to
tell almost that they existed, have been most of all rife in deeds of
darkness, and those marvellous incidents which especially astonish the
spectator, and throw back the infant reason of man into those shades
and that obscurity from which it had so recently endeavoured to
escape.

I wind up for the present my literary labours with the production of
this book. Nor let any reader imagine that I here put into his hands a
mere work of idle recreation. It will be found pregnant with deeper
uses. The wildest extravagances of human fancy, the most deplorable
perversion of human faculties, and the most horrible distortions of
jurisprudence, may occasionally afford us a salutary lesson. I love in
the foremost place to contemplate man in all his honours and in all
the exaltation of wisdom and virtue; but it will also be occasionally
of service to us to look into his obliquities, and distinctly to
remark how great and portentous have been his absurdities and his
follies.

_May_ 29, 1834.




CONTENTS


INTRODUCTION

AMBITIOUS NATURE OF MAN
HIS DESIRE TO PENETRATE INTO FUTURITY
DIVINATION
AUGURY
CHIROMANCY
PHYSIOGNOMY
INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS
CASTING OF LOTS
ASTROLOGY
ORACLES
DELPHI
THE DESIRE TO COMMAND AND CONTROL FUTURE EVENTS
COMMERCE WITH THE INVISIBLE WORLD
SORCERY AND ENCHANTMENT
WITCHCRAFT
COMPACTS WITH THE DEVIL
IMPS
TALISMANS AND AMULETS
NECROMANCY
ALCHEMY
FAIRIES
ROSICRUCIANS
SYLPHS AND GNOMES, SALAMANDERS AND UNDINES

EXAMPLES OF NECROMANCY AND WITCHCRAFT FROM THE BIBLE
THE MAGI, OR WISE MEN OF THE EAST
EGYPT
STATUE OF MEMNON
TEMPLE OF JUPITER AMMON: ITS ORACLES
CHALDEA AND BABYLON
ZOROASTER

GREECE
DEITIES OF GREECE
DEMIGODS
DAEDALUS
THE ARGONAUTS
MEDEA
CIRCE
ORPHEUS
AMPHION
TIRESIAS
ABARIS
PYTHAGORAS
EPIMENIDES
EMPEDOCLES
ARISTEAS
HERMOTIMUS
THE MOTHER OF DEMARATUS, KING OF SPARTA
ORACLES
INVASION OF XERXES INTO GREECE
DEMOCRITUS
SOCRATES

ROME
VIRGIL
POLYDORUS
DIDO
ROMULUS
NUMA
TULLUS HOSTILIUS
ACCIUS NAVIUS
SERVIUS TULLIUS
THE SORCERESS OF VIRGIL
CANIDIA
ERICHTHO
SERTORIUS
CASTING OUT DEVILS
SIMON MAGUS
ELYMAS, THE SORCERER
NERO
VESPASIAN
APOLLONIUS OF TYANA
APULEIUS
ALEXANDER THE PAPHLAGONIAN

REVOLUTION PRODUCED IN THE HISTORY OF NECROMANCY AND WITCHCRAFT UPON
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF CHRISTIANITY
MAGICAL CONSULTATIONS RESPECTING THE LIFE OF THE EMPEROR

HISTORY OF NECROMANCY IN THE EAST
GENERAL SILENCE OF THE EAST RESPECTING INDIVIDUAL NECROMANCERS
ROCAIL
HAKEM, OTHERWISE MACANNA
ARABIAN NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENTS
PERSIAN TALES
STORY OF A GOULE
ARABIAN NIGHTS
RESEMBLANCE OF THE TALES OF THE EAST AND OF EUROPE
CAUSES OF HUMAN CREDULITY

DARK AGES OF EUROPE
MERLIN
ST. DUNSTAN

COMMUNICATION OF EUROPE AND THE SARACENS
GERBERT, POPE SILVESTER II
BENEDICT THE NINTH
GREGORY THE SEVENTH
DUFF, KING OF SCOTLAND
MACBETH
VIRGIL
ROBERT OF LINCOLN
MICHAEL SCOT
THE DEAN OF BADAJOZ
MIRACLE OF THE TUB OF WATER
INSTITUTION OF FRIARS
ALBERTUS MAGNUS
ROGER BACON
THOMAS AQUINAS
PETER OF APONO
ENGLISH LAW OF HIGH TREASON
ZIITO
TRANSMUTATION OF METALS
ARTEPHIUS
RAYMOND LULLI
ARNOLD OF VILLENEUVE
ENGLISH LAWS RESPECTING TRANSMUTATION

REVIVAL OF LETTERS
JOAN OF ARC
ELEANOR COBHAM, DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER
RICHARD III

SANGUINARY PROCEEDINGS AGAINST WITCHCRAFT
SAVONAROLA
TRITHEMIUS
LUTHER
CORNELIUS AGRIPPA
FAUSTUS
SABELLICUS
PARACELSUS
CARDAN
QUACKS, WHO IN COOL BLOOD UNDERTOOK TO OVERREACH MANKIND
BENVENUTO CELLINI
NOSTRADAMUS
DOCTOR DEE
EARL OF DERBY
KING JAMES'S VOYAGE TO NORWAY
JOHN FIAN
KING JAMES'S DEMONOLOGY
STATUTE, 1 JAMES I
FORMAN AND OTHERS
LATEST IDEAS OF JAMES ON THE SUBJECT
LANCASHIRE WITCHES
LADY DAVIES
EDWARD FAIRFAX
DOCTOR LAMB
URBAIN GRANDIER
ASTROLOGY
WILLIAM LILLY
MATTHEW HOPKINS
CROMWEL
DOROTHY MATELEY
WITCHES HANGED BY SIR MATTHEW HALE
WITCHCRAFT IN SWEDEN
WITCHCRAFT IN NEW ENGLAND

CONCLUSION




LIVES OF THE NECROMANCERS


The improvements that have been effected in natural philosophy have by
degrees convinced the enlightened part of mankind that the material
universe is every where subject to laws, fixed in their weight,
measure and duration, capable of the most exact calculation, and which
in no case admit of variation and exception. Whatever is not thus to
be accounted for is of mind, and springs from the volition of some
being, of which the material form is subjected to our senses, and the
action of which is in like manner regulated by the laws of matter.
Beside this, mind, as well as matter, is subject to fixed laws; and
thus every phenomenon and occurrence around us is rendered a topic for
the speculations of sagacity and foresight. Such is the creed which
science has universally prescribed to the judicious and reflecting
among us.

It was otherwise in the infancy and less mature state of human
knowledge. The chain of causes and consequences was yet unrecognized;
and events perpetually occurred, for which no sagacity that was then
in being was able to assign an original. Hence men felt themselves
habitually disposed to refer many of the appearances with which they
were conversant to the agency of invisible intelligences; sometimes
under the influence of a benignant disposition, sometimes of malice,
and sometimes perhaps from an inclination to make themselves sport of
the wonder and astonishment of ignorant mortals. Omens and portents
told these men of some piece of good or ill fortune speedily to befal
them. The flight of birds was watched by them, as foretokening
somewhat important. Thunder excited in them a feeling of supernatural
terror. Eclipses with fear of change perplexed the nations. The
phenomena of the heavens, regular and irregular, were anxiously
remarked from the same principle. During the hours of darkness men
were apt to see a supernatural being in every bush; and they could not
cross a receptacle for the dead, without expecting to encounter some
one of the departed uneasily wandering among graves, or commissioned
to reveal somewhat momentous and deeply affecting to the survivors.
Fairies danced in the moonlight glade; and something preternatural
perpetually occurred to fill the living with admiration and awe.

All this gradually reduced itself into a system. Mankind, particularly
in the dark and ignorant ages, were divided into the strong and the
weak; the strong and weak of animal frame, when corporeal strength
more decidedly bore sway than in a period of greater cultivation; and
the strong and weak in reference to intellect; those who were bold,
audacious and enterprising in acquiring an ascendancy over their
fellow-men, and those who truckled, submitted, and were acted upon,
from an innate consciousness of inferiority, and a superstitious
looking up to such as were of greater natural or acquired endowments
than themselves. The strong in intellect were eager to avail
themselves of their superiority, by means that escaped the penetration
of the multitude, and had recourse to various artifices to effect
their ends. Beside this, they became the dupes of their own practices.
They set out at first in their conception of things from the level of
the vulgar. They applied themselves diligently to the unravelling of
what was unknown; wonder mingled with their contemplation; they
abstracted their minds from things of ordinary occurrence, and, as we
may denominate it, of real life, till at length they lost their true
balance amidst the astonishment they sought to produce in their
inferiors. They felt a vocation to things extraordinary; and they
willingly gave scope and line without limit to that which engendered
in themselves the most gratifying sensations, at the same time that it
answered the purposes of their ambition.

As these principles in the two parties, the more refined and the
vulgar, are universal, and derive their origin from the nature of man,
it has necessarily happened that this faith in extraordinary events,
and superstitious fear of what is supernatural, has diffused itself
through every climate of the world, in a certain stage of human
intellect, and while refinement had not yet got the better of
barbarism. The Celts of antiquity had their Druids, a branch of whose
special profession was the exercise of magic. The Chaldeans and
Egyptians had their wise men, their magicians and their sorcerers. The
negroes have their foretellers of events, their amulets, and their
reporters and believers of miraculous occurrences. A similar race of
men was found by Columbus and the other discoverers of the New World
in America; and facts of a parallel nature are attested to us in the
islands of the South Seas. And, as phenomena of this sort were
universal in their nature, without distinction of climate, whether
torrid or frozen, and independently of the discordant manners and
customs of different countries, so have they been very slow and recent
in their disappearing. Queen Elizabeth sent to consult Dr. John Dee,
the astrologer, respecting a lucky day for her coronation; King James
the First employed much of his learned leisure upon questions of
witchcraft and demonology, in which he fully believed and sir Matthew
Hale in the year 1664 caused two old women to be hanged upon a charge
of unlawful communion with infernal agents.

The history of mankind therefore will be very imperfect, and our
knowledge of the operations and eccentricities of the mind lamentably
deficient, unless we take into our view what has occurred under this
head. The supernatural appearances with which our ancestors conceived
themselves perpetually surrounded must have had a strong tendency to
cherish and keep alive the powers of the imagination, and to penetrate
those who witnessed or expected such things with an extraordinary
sensitiveness. As the course of events appears to us at present, there
is much, though abstractedly within the compass of human sagacity to
foresee, which yet the actors on the scene do not foresee: but the
blindness and perplexity of short-sighted mortals must have been
wonderfully increased, when ghosts and extraordinary appearances were
conceived liable to cross the steps and confound the projects of men
at every turn, and a malicious wizard or a powerful enchanter might
involve his unfortunate victim in a chain of calamities, which no
prudence could disarm, and no virtue could deliver him from. They were
the slaves of an uncontrolable destiny, and must therefore have been
eminently deficient in the perseverance and moral courage, which may
justly be required of us in a more enlightened age. And the men (but
these were few compared with the great majority of mankind), who
believed themselves gifted with supernatural endowments, must have
felt exempt and privileged from common rules, somewhat in the same way
as the persons whom fiction has delighted to pourtray as endowed with
immeasurable wealth, or with the power of rendering themselves
impassive or invisible. But, whatever were their advantages or
disadvantages, at any rate it is good for us to call up in review
things, which are now passed away, but which once occupied so large a
share of the thoughts and attention of mankind, and in a great degree
tended to modify their characters and dictate their resolutions.

As has already been said, numbers of those who were endowed with the
highest powers of human intellect, such as, if they had lived in these
times, would have aspired to eminence in the exact sciences, to the
loftiest flights of imagination, or to the discovery of means by which
the institutions of men in society might be rendered more beneficial
and faultless, at that time wasted the midnight oil in endeavouring to
trace the occult qualities and virtues of things, to render invisible
spirits subject to their command, and to effect those wonders, of
which they deemed themselves to have a dim conception, but which more
rational views of nature have taught us to regard as beyond our power
to effect. These sublime wanderings of the mind are well entitled to
our labour to trace and investigate. The errors of man are worthy to
be recorded, not only as beacons to warn us from the shelves where our
ancestors have made shipwreck, but even as something honourable to our
nature, to show how high a generous ambition could sour, though in
forbidden paths, and in things too wonderful for us.

Nor only is this subject inexpressibly interesting, as setting before
us how the loftiest and most enterprising minds of ancient days
formerly busied themselves. It is also of the highest importance to an
ingenuous curiosity, inasmuch as it vitally affected the fortunes of
so considerable a portion of the mass of mankind. The legislatures of
remote ages bent all their severity at different periods against what
they deemed the unhallowed arts of the sons and daughters of
reprobation. Multitudes of human creatures have been sacrificed in
different ages and countries, upon the accusation of having exercised
arts of the most immoral and sacrilegious character. They were
supposed to have formed a contract with a mighty and invisible spirit,
the great enemy of man, and to have sold themselves, body and soul, to
everlasting perdition, for the sake of gratifying, for a short term of
years, their malignant passions against those who had been so
unfortunate as to give them cause of offence. If there were any
persons who imagined they had entered into such a contract, however
erroneous was their belief, they must of necessity have been greatly
depraved. And it was but natural that such as believed in this crime,
must have considered it as atrocious beyond all others, and have
regarded those who were supposed guilty of it with inexpressible
abhorrence. There are many instances on record, where the persons
accused of it, either from the depth of their delusion, or, which is
more probable, harassed by persecution, by the hatred of their
fellow-creatures directed against them, or by torture, actually
confessed themselves guilty. These instances are too numerous, not to
constitute an important chapter in the legislation of past ages. And,
now that the illusion has in a manner passed away from the face of the
earth, we are on that account the better qualified to investigate this
error in its causes and consequences, and to look back on the tempest
and hurricane from which we have escaped, with chastened feelings, and
a sounder estimate of its nature, its reign, and its effects.




AMBITIOUS NATURE OF MAN


Man is a creature of boundless ambition.

It is probably our natural wants that first awaken us from that
lethargy and indifference in which man may be supposed to be plunged
previously to the impulse of any motive, or the accession of any
uneasiness. One of our earliest wants may be conceived to be hunger,
or the desire of food.

From this simple beginning the history of man in all its complex
varieties may be regarded as proceeding.

Man in a state of society, more especially where there is an
inequality of condition and rank, is very often the creature of
leisure. He finds in himself, either from internal or external
impulse, a certain activity. He finds himself at one time engaged in
the accomplishment of his obvious and immediate desires, and at
another in a state in which these desires have for the present been
fulfilled, and he has no present occasion to repeat those exertions
which led to their fulfilment. This is the period of contemplation.
This is the state which most eminently distinguishes us from the
brutes. Here it is that the history of man, in its exclusive sense,
may be considered as taking its beginning.