Raising Hell by Robert Masello Read Free Book Online Page A

one out. They could be, at once, the most dreaded foe or most prized ally. To stay on the safe side, it was always wise to give them a wide berth and a polite tip of the hat.
    Especially as they often had unpleasant friends that they could call upon.
    Thomas Aquinas, in his Sententiae, declared in no uncertain terms that “magicians perform miracles through personal contracts made with demons.” If that wasn’t clear enough, Ebenezer Sibly, author of The New and Complete Illustration of the Occult Sciences (1787), warned his own readers that while sorcerersand witches could call upon all sorts of spirits and apparitions, there were three types in particular that were most likely to do the magicians’ bidding.

    Sorcerer selling a bag of wind (tied up in three knots of a rope). From Olaus Magnus’ Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus, Rome, 1555. *
    First, according to Sibly, there were the astral spirits, who haunted mountaintops and deep, dark forests, ancient ruins, and any spot where someone had been killed. Then there were the igneous spirits, of a “middle vegetative nature,” but “obsequious to the kingdom of darkness.” These monstrous creatures, with a naturally nasty turn of mind, were particularly receptive to skillful conjurers. Last, there were the terrine spirits, who seemed to have an innate hatred of mankind. Maybe it was because of where they lived. Confined to the “hiatus or chasms of the earth,” caves and mines and tunnels, they were simply chafing at the bit to cut loose and create some real mayhem. Some of their attacks were recorded in a treatise entitled De Animantibus Subterraneis (On Subterranean Hauntings) in 1549 by a German metallurgist named Georgius Agricola.
    According to Agricola, the workers in a mine called the Rosy Crown, in the district of Saxony, were suddenly surprised by a dreadful apparition, a “Spirit in the similitude and likeness of a horse, snorting and snuffling most fiendishly with a pestilent blast.” Its breath was so noxious that a dozen miners died onthe spot, while the others scrambled up to safety, screaming in terror. And despite the fact that the mine was rich with ore, no one would ever go back down again to dig it. In Schneeberg, Saxony, the mine of St. George was also haunted by a terrine spirit, but this one took the shape of a man in a big, black cowl. When the miners encountered him, he grabbed hold of one of them and hurled him at the roof of the mine. By the time he came down, bruised and battered, the others had already taken their leave.

    Witches brewing up a hailstorm. From the title page of Ulrich Molitor’s De Ianijs et phitonicis mulierbus, printed by Cornelius de Zierikzee, Cologne, 1489. *
    But all of these spirits, in the view of Sibly, existed in a state of “continual horror and despair” themselves. “That they are materially vexed and scorched in flames of fire,” Sibly wrote, “is only a figurative idea, adapted to our external senses, for their substance is spiritual, and their essence too subtile for any external torment. The endless source of all their misery is in themselves, and stands continually before them, so that they can never enjoy any rest, being absent from the presence of God; which torment is greater to them than all the tortures of this world combined together.”
    The conjurers who called upon them, for whatever purpose, ran the risk of sharing their fate.
    LOVE AND DEATH
    Human nature being what it is, there were two areas that the sorcerer was most often called on to explore—one was love, the other death. And he had at his disposal a whole raft of potions and philters, talismans and incantations.
    When it came to winning a woman’s love, there were easy methods—and there were hard. Among the easier ways of winning her heart, there was what might be called the horoscope ploy. As outlined in an eighteenth-century French manuscript now in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, “To gain the love of a girl or a