Europe's inner demons

Although a comprehensive history of ritual magic in the Middle Ages has yet to be written, the main outlines of the story are clear.⁽¹⁾ Some awareness of the art had existed ever since Antiquity;

⁽²⁾ but in the later Middle Ages the art became far more elaborate, and it also began to evoke far more interest. A couple of contemporary comments will give a fair idea of what was involved. They come from educated men who were neither magicians nor persecutors of magicians but who, through their professional concerns, were well placed to know about such things.

Michael Scot was court astrologer and tutor to the young emperor Frederic II, and in the opening years of the fourteenth century, probably at Palermo, he wrote for him a vast work, the Liber introductorius, on astrology and related subjects.⁽³⁾

In it he not only gives a list of the names by which demons may be invoked, he also states that, if a demon is to be imprisoned in a ring or a bottle, sacrifices have to be made first — indeed, as demons have a taste for human flesh, the magician may have to take some from a corpse, or even cut off a piece of his own.⁽⁴⁾ A century later, also in Italy, another writer on astrology and astronomy, Cecco d’Ascoli, gives a similar indication. It was traditional to ascribe the invention of ritual magic to Zoroaster; and according to Cecco, Zoroaster discovered that “those four spirits of great virtue who stand in cruciatis locis, that is, in east, west, south and north, whose names are as follows: Oriens, Amaymon, Paymon and Egim, who are spirits of the major hierarchy and who have under them twenty-five legions of spirits each. . because of their noble nature seek sacrifice from human blood and likewise from the flesh of a dead man or a cat. But this Zoroastrian art cannot be carried on without great peril, fastings, prayers and all things which are contrary to our faith.”

⁽⁵⁾

Sacrifices of blood or flesh were not the only way of soliciting the attention of demons. Around 1300 the Catalan Arnald of Villanova, who was eminent both as a writer on medicine and alchemy and as the physician and confidant of popes and kings, wrote a critique of ritual magic. He noted that some magicians tried to coerce spirits by means of artificial figures, words or “characters”; though for his part he did not accept that mere men could coerce spirits at all.⁽⁶⁾

But already before 1250 the German monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, whose views on demons we have already considered, had hinted at a whole ritual of conjuration. In the Dialogus miraculorum he tells how a sceptical knight was converted to a belief in demons by a priest called Philip, who was a practitioner of ritual magic. Challenged to show what he could do, the magician took the knight to a cross-roads at noon — like midnight, a propitious time for such operations. He drew a circle on the ground with a sword, placed the knight inside it and warned him that if he allowed any of his limbs to stray across the circumference he would infallibly be seized and torn to pieces. The magician having withdrawn to perform his ritual, the knight was left to watch demonic manifestations all around him, ending with the appearance of a gigantic black demon, too hideous to look at.⁽⁷⁾

These scattered references effectively dispose of what would otherwise have been a formidable obstacle. It is known that the techniques of conjuring up demons were enshrined in writing as early as the thirteenth century; but very little of the extant material dates from earlier than the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, and without confirmatory evidence we could hardly have assumed that the prescriptions we find there were known to practising magicians centuries earlier. The comments of Michael Scot, Cecco d’Ascoli, Arnald of Villanova and Caesarius of Heisterbach settle the matter: it is clear that the extant sources are closely modelled on — if indeed they are not copied from— the magical books of the Middle Ages.