Europe's inner demons

These were devices contrived by the pope for his own, political purposes. But this was not always the case. Ritual magic was a reality, and already at the beginning of his reign the pope found evidence of it at his own court.⁽³⁰⁾ In 1318 he appointed a commission consisting of the bishop of Fréjus, a prior and a provost to carry out an investigation, by inquisitorial methods. The suspects were all men, and they included eight clerics and an unspecified number of laymen. The pope claimed that news of their activities had reached him from a reliable source, and certainly all the stock features of ritual magic are there: the spells read from books, the magic circle, the consecrated mirrors and images; and also the demon who, when duly conjured up, will imperil men’s salvation, or cause them to wilt away, or even kill them outright.

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⁾