It is true that the pope also speaks of “a certain pestiferous society of men and angels” — but here caution is required. At first glance one might suppose that he was thinking of some secret society in which human beings consorted with demons; one might even wonder whether there was not, after all, a sect of Satanists. Only, the phrase does not mean anything of the kind. It was simply a traditional cliche, which can be traced back verbatim through Ivo of Chartres, in the twelfth century, and Hrabanus Maurus in the ninth, to Isidore of Seville in the seventh. And in the end it turns out that Isidore himself was merely adapting a passage where St Augustine, reflecting on magic, comments that the whole world outside the Christian Church was a society of wicked men and wicked angels, i.e. demons. Though ritual magic was a reality, and though books of magic themselves insisted that the magician must operate in the presence of assistants, there is no evidence whatsoever for the existence of a Devil-worshipping sect of magicians.
In 1326 another group was discovered at Agen, in south-western France.(31) A canon, another cleric and a layman were charged with invoking demons to produce storms of hail and thunder and to kill men. This too was a case of ritual magic — the canon possessed books of magic, and also had vessels full of powders and fetid liquids. His two accomplices were caught by the town guards while trying to procure more vehicles of maleficent power: they were stealing heads and limbs from corpses hanging on the town gallows. The layman was burned straightaway, while the two clerics were handed over to the ecclesiastical authorities. The pope adopted the same approach as in 1318: he appointed a cardinal to judge the case. And in the same year of 1326 he also appointed a commission of three cardinals to judge a prior and two lesser clerics, charged with using images and invoking demons for magical purposes.
As we have seen, in the 1320s the Inquisition was also empowered, and even encouraged, to proceed against practitioners of ritual magic. Yet in the event professional inquisitors seem to have dealt with very few such cases.*** Only two are known in detail. In 1323 the inquisitor of Paris, acting together with the episcopal ordinary, tried two laymen, an abbot and a number of canons. It appeared that the Cistercian abbot of Sarcelles had lost some treasure and had employed a magician called Jean de Persant to recover it and to find the thief. The magician’s accomplice, under torture, described his master’s plan, which was curious. A cat was fed on bread soaked in water and consecrated oil, with the intention that it should be killed and its skin cut into strips to form a magic circle. Standing in the circle, the magician would invoke the demon Berith — a familiar figure in the magic books — who would then make the desired revelations. The magician was burned at the stake, along with the remains of his accomplice, who had died in prison; the ecclesiastics were unfrocked and imprisoned for life.(32)
In 1329 the inquisitor of Carcassonne sentenced a Carmelite monk called Pierre Recordi to perpetual imprisonment on bread and water, with chains on hands and feet. The man had confessed to trying to obtain possession of women by the techniques of ritual magic. He had offered wax puppets, mixed with his own saliva and with the blood of toads, to Satan. He would place the puppet under the threshold of the woman’s house, and she would then have to yield or else be tormented by a demon. After the image had done its work the monk would sacrifice a butterfly to the helpful demon — who would manifest himself in a breath of air. This case at least seems to have been faked — Recordi confessed, inter alia, that the wax images bled when pricked; and he also said that all the images had been thrown into the river — so not one was ever produced in evidence. Moreover, he retracted the whole confession again and again, in the course of a trial which lasted several years.(33)
The Inquisition was in no sense the spearhead of the campaign against ritual magic. On the contrary, its intervention was small-scale and, one suspects, self-defeating. The very year after the sentencing of Recordi, Pope John withdrew the powers he had granted; all trials then in progress were to be completed as quickly as possible, and the documents forwarded to him. One wonders whether these second thoughts were not prompted by the Recordi case; leading Carmelites are known not to have shared the inquisitor’s views, and they may have induced doubts in the pope himself. However that may be, though magicians continued to be tried under the inquisitorial procedure, it was no longer the Inquisition that tried them. When the next pope, Benedict XII, had to deal with a case of ritual magic he appointed one Guillen Lombardi to carry out the investigation. Lombardi was not a friar, as were the regular inquisitors, but a canon and later provost of a collegiate church. He was also a highly qualified lawyer; and he operated under the eye of the pope himself, for the prisoners were held in the papal prisons.(34)
It is striking how often, in the first half of the century, the accused were clerics — something which rarely happened in the great witch-hunt itself. The reason is plain: ritual magic could be practised only by those who were learned enough to study the magic books; and in that period such people were still mostly to be found amongst the clergy. Moreover clerics, being professionally concerned with demons, were more apt than laymen to fancy that they could command them. And for the same reason they were apt to be suspected, whether by laymen or by their fellow clerics, even when in reality they were innocent of any dealings with the hosts of hell. That was the state of affairs at the beginning of the fourteenth century, at the time of the trials of Pope Boniface and Bishop Guichard; it still obtained during the spate of trials under John XXII; and clerics continued to figure in the few trials known to have been held under Benedict XII and Clement VI — which brings us to mid-century.
After that date the evidence becomes very fragmentary. It is certain that ritual magic continued to be practised (it was still being practised in the seventeenth century), and also that from time to time action was taken to suppress it and to punish its adepts. On the far side of the Pyrenees the inquisitor-general of Aragon, Nicolas Eymeric, whose writings we have already considered, certainly had some dealings with such people: he mentions the confessions which he extracted from them, and also the Solomonic books which he had seized and burned. In France, on the other hand, the Inquisition seems to have been permanently handicapped by the restrictions imposed by John XXII in 1330. In 1374 the inquisitor of France wrote to Pope Gregory XI complaining that many people, including clerics, were invoking demons; and that when he tried to proceed against them, his jurisdiction was contested. The pope responded by authorizing him to prosecute and punish such offences, but limited the authorization to two years.(35) And although the authorization must have been renewed, only a couple more cases of ritual magic are known to have been judged by inquisitors.
In 1380 the provost of Paris, Hugues Aubryot, was summoned before the bishop of Paris and a Dominican inquisitor to answer a number of charges.(36) His real offence seems to have been that he had infringed the privileges of the Church by imprisoning clerics, including members of the University; but the charges ranged from heretical talk to partiality towards Jews. Moreover, though Aubryot was in his sixties, he was accused of seducing young girls and married women by means of magic. Although demons are not specifically mentioned, one suspects that they were lurking somewhere in the background of this trial; anyway Aubryot was imprisoned for life. The other case involved one Géraud Cassendi, notary of Bogoyran near Carcassonne.(37) He was tried by the Inquisition in 1410, on a charge of invoking demons and seducing women and girls. A witness stated that he had seen Cassendi take some threads of gold from an image of the Virgin and work them into his shirt. Thus protected, he had conjured up demons by reading from a book; whereupon many demons appeared — though they disappeared again when the witness, understandably alarmed, threw a shoe at them. The outcome of this case is unknown.
***
As bishop of Pamiers 1317-26 Jacques Fournier, later Pope Benedict XII, operated as inquisitor for his diocese and tried thirty-eight cases of heresy and one case of superstitious practices. His register includes not a single case of ritual magic. Cf. J. Duvernoy,