Europe's inner demons

The notion of the pact was not new — it is to be found already in Augustine — but it took on a new significance when, in the Europe of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it was applied to the magical practices then proliferating. Aquinas argues that every attempt to communicate with a demon, whether explicit or tacit, is not merely sinful but amounts to apostasy from the Christian faith. It does so because, in every such attempt, some part of the worship that ought to be rendered to God alone is diverted to one of God’s creatures, and a fallen, rebellious angel at that. In all this Aquinas was speaking as a representative of contemporary orthodoxy.

In practice the ecclesiastical authorities took a far more serious view of those forms of magic which involved an “explicit pact”, i.e. the deliberate invocation of particular demons, than of those which did not. In 1258 Pope Alexander IV laid down the principle that inquisitors were not to concern themselves with cases of divination as such, but only with those which “manifestly savoured of heresy”.⁽²⁵⁾ This can only refer to the invocations characteristic of ritual magic. And the pronouncements of Pope John XXII in the 1320s, which Burr mistakenly supposed to be concerned with witchcraft, likewise turn out to refer to ritual magic.

In 1320 the pope, disturbed by reports that were reaching him concerning the practice of ritual magic at the papal court at Avignon itself, decided that the time had come to clarify and define the relationship between magic and heresy. After first taking written opinions from five bishops, two generals of monastic orders and three masters of theology, and then discussing the matter with them at a special consistory at Avignon, the pope wrote to the cardinal of St Sabina, who in turn wrote to the inquisitors of Toulouse and Carcassonne.⁽²⁶⁾

Henceforth the inquisitors were empowered to act against practitioners of ritual magic as heretics; and in 1326 or 1327 the pope tried to reinforce their efforts by a bull, Super illius specula.

⁽²⁷⁾ Between them, the letter of authorization and the bull show perfectly clearly what practices were involved. On the one hand magicians were trying to win the favour of demons by adoring them, doing them homage, entering into pacts with them, giving them written documents and other pledges; on the other hand they were trying to bind demons to their service by enclosing them in specially made rings, mirrors, phials and the like, so that they could ask them questions and extract answers, and generally compel their assistance. The purposes for which these things were done were themselves “most foul”, but it was the involvement of demons that made the whole undertaking heretical. The bull makes this perfectly plain. Christians are given eight days to abandon such practices, after which they become liable to almost all the penalties for heresy. Within eight days, too, all books and writings on magic are to be handed over for burning, on pain of excommunication and maybe worse penalties as well.

The Treatise against the invokers of demons

of Nicolas Eymeric. which is often referred to as the earliest book on witchcraft, exists only in manuscript; though a summary of it is included in his celebrated Directorium Inquisitorum or Inquisitors’ Guide.⁽²⁸⁾ Eymeric, a Spaniard, had been functioning for some twelve years as inquisitor-general for Aragon when he wrote it, in or just after 1369; so it can be taken as a fair account of everything that an experienced investigator knew or believed about the occult arts in the last part of the fourteenth century. On inspection it turns out to be not about witchcraft but, once again, about ritual magic.