The notion of ‘words of power’ which give the initiate dominion over the spirit worlds — and so over the material world — is a very ancient one. Solomon was said to have this dominion, and in his Temple the Tetragammaton — the most sacred and powerful name of God — might only be pronounced once a year on the day of the Atonement by the High Priest alone in the Holy of Holies. Outside trumpets and cymbals prevented others from hearing. It was said that someone who knew how to pronounce it could inspire terror in angels. Even earlier, among the Egyptians, it was said that the Sun god, Ra, had created the cosmos using words of power, and it was said that knowledge of these words gave the initiate power not only in this life but in the afterlife.
Abraham Abulafia also recommended using the names of God in diagrammatic form. The practice of working with magical signs and sigils again features largely in Hebrew tradition, but with an admixture of Egyptian and Arab elements it became widespread in the Middle Ages. This was largely because of the spread of grimoires — grammars — of spells such as The Testament of Solomon and The Key of Solomon. Most of the spells promised the fulfilment of selfish desires, whether sexual, avenging or the finding of treasure. Preparation of materials such as beeswax, the blood of an animal, powdered lodestone, sulphur and perhaps the brain of a raven, might be followed by an act of purification. Then the ceremony itself, perhaps involving sickles, wands, swords, performed at propitious times. The result might be that a ring or perhaps just a scrap of paper was inscribed with the sigil — or signature — so that the carrier of it, wittingly or unwittingly, would be duly affected by the disembodied being for good or for ill. In the mid-fourteenth century, The Sacred Magic of Abraham the Jew taught how to excite tempests, raise the dead, walk on water and be beloved of a woman. All of this was to be achieved by using sigils and squares of cabalistic letters.
Today the Church makes a clear distinction between a few strictly regulated ceremonies intended to invoke spiritual powers taking place within a church context — and all other ceremonies intended to invoke or otherwise engage in commerce with disembodied spirits not under its aegis. These latter are labelled ‘occult’, which in modern Christian parlance usually means black magic.
In the Middle Ages no such distinction would have been practical. Rituals were performed under the aegis of the Church to try to ensure, for example, good crops or success in a duel. Consecrated bread was seen as a cure for the sick and a preservative against the plague, amulets giving protection against lightning and drowning were made out of church candles. Scraps of paper bearing magical formulae were inserted into roofs as protection against fire. Church bells could ward off thunder and demons. Formal curses were pronounced to drive away caterpillars. Holy water was scattered on the fields to ensure a good harvest. Holy relics were wonder-working fetishes. Baptism could restore sight to blind children and overnight vigils at the shrines of saints would bring vivid visionary dreams and cures in the tradition of the ‘temple sleep’ advocated by Asclepius.
Later Christian apologists tried to distinguish between legitimate Church practice, a matter of petitioning high-level spiritual beings who might choose to agree to a request or not, and magic conceived as a mechanical process involving the manipulating of occult forces. But this involves a misunderstanding. Magic is also an uncertain process of invoking spirits, including some spirits of very high levels.
In the Middle Ages everyone believed in these spiritual hierarchies. Underlying all Church practice and lay spiritual practice was a belief that repeating a formula such as a prayer or performing a ceremony had the power to influence material events for good or ill. By means of these activities people believed that they could communicate with the orders of disembodied beings who controlled the material world.
That prayer was efficacious, that providence rewarded the good and punished the bad was then the universal belief and the universal experience.
If history was seen unquestioningly as a providential process, it was not in a fatalistic way. God had a plan for humankind that different orders of disembodied beings and different orders of incarnated beings were helping to unfold, a plan encoded in the Bible and elucidated by prophets.
But it was a plan that might go wrong at any time.
FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH IS STILL remembered as an evil day. On Friday 13 October 1307 the kings of the world finally moved to try to eradicate the esoteric influences they feared had been growing further and further from their control.
Just before dawn the seneschals of France, acting on the orders of the French king, Philip the Fair, descended on the temples and lodgings of the Templars, arresting some 15,000 people. In the Paris Temple, France’s great centre of finance, they found a secret chamber containing a skull, two thigh bones and a white burial shroud — which is, of course, what you will find if you break into a Freemasonic temple today.
Only a few of the knights — from La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast — managed to escape. They fled to Scotland, where they lived under the protection of the rebel king, Robert the Bruce.
The Inquisition accused the captured knights of making novices spit and trample on the cross of Christ. They were accused, too, of sodomy and worshipping a goat-headed idol called Baphomet. They confessed to seeing this idol with a long beard, sparkling eyes and four feet. Under pressure from Philip the Fair, Pope Clement published a Bill of Abolition, putting an end to the Knights Templar. All their assets were seized by the monarchy.
Appearing before a papal commission the knights said they had been tortured to make them confess. One Bernard de Vardo produced a wooden box in which he kept the charred bones that had fallen from his feet as they were roasted over a fire.
What was the truth behind their confessions?
Shortly before he died I was privileged to work with Hugh Schonfield, the great scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Schonfield did much to explain to Christian scholars Jewish roots of the New Testament that had hitherto been overlooked or misunderstood. Schonfield knew of the ATBASH cipher, in which the first letter of an alphabet is substituted for the last, second for the second last and so on. He also knew that this cipher had been used to encrypt messages in the Book of Jeremiah and in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Instinct led him to try it out on the word Baphomet. In this way he found coded in the word Baphomet the word ‘wisdom’.
The personification of wisdom that Templars confessed to communing with was, however, the goat-headed god of worldly wisdom. Since the time of Zarathustra initiation ceremonies had induced in the candidate altered states in which he underwent terrifying ordeals, was attacked by demons and so prepared to overcome the worst that life — and life after death — had to offer. Now the cunning torturers of the Inquisition were able to cause their victims such pain that they re-entered an altered state of consciousness, and it was then that the demon-king Baphomet appeared to them again, this time in triumph.
They were indeed facing the worst that life and death had to offer.
19. FOOLS FOR LOVE
Dante, the Troubadors and Falling in Love for the First Time • Raphael, Leonardo and the Magi of Renaissance Italy • Joan of Arc • Rabelais and the Way of the Fool