Supernatural (62 page)

A mixture of hypnosis and telepathy was used in a series of experiments conducted by the Soviet scientist Leonid Vasiliev in the 1920s and 1930s.
The aim of the experiments was to discover not only whether telepathic communication was possible but also if it could be proved.
In one test, Vasiliev used a hypnotist and a hypnotic subject who, the hypnotist claimed, could be made to fall asleep by telepathic suggestion.
The hypnotist was placed in one room, and the subject in another.
Only Vasiliev and his assistants knew precisely when the hypnotist made the mental suggestion.
In repeated tests, they established that the subject fell asleep within one and a half minutes of the suggestion.
Later, they discovered that distance made no difference.
A subject in the Crimean city of Sebastopol fell asleep at a telepathic suggestion made in Leningrad, more than one thousand miles away.
Vasiliev wondered whether telepathic communication might depend upon some kind of electromagnetic radiation, and tried sealing the hypnotist up in a lead chamber.
It made no difference whatever, proving that the waves involved in telepathy have nothing in common with radio waves.

After Simon Magus, the most famous magician in European history is Faust, also known as Dr Faustus.
The Faust legend has maintained its potency for almost five centuries, and has inspired at least three great works of literature—Christopher Marlowe’s
Dr Faustus
(1604), Goethe’s
Faust
(1808 and 1832), and Thomas Mann’s
Doctor Faustus
(1947)—as well as many musical works.
From all these, the picture that emerges of Faust is of a brilliant, proud, restless man who longs to share the secrets of the gods.
But these characteristics have evolved over the centuries, and as we go backward in time we come closer to the truth about the person who called himself Faust.
Thomas Mann’s Faust is a great musician; Goethe’s Faust is a restless scholar, chafing against the frustration of being merely human; Marlowe’s Faustus is a scholar who has been led into temptation by the lust for power.
The book on which all these were based is Johann Spies’
Historia von D. Johann Faustus,
which appeared in Berlin in 1587.
Its hero is little more than a magical confidence trickster.
Significantly, his chief gift is hypnosis—although, of course, the author does not use that word.

In a typical episode in the Spies’ book, Faust goes to a Jew and offers to leave behind his arm or leg as security for a loan.
The Jew accepts, and Faust appears to saw off his leg.
Embarrassed and disgusted by this, the Jew later throws the leg into a river—whereupon Faust appears and demands his leg back.
The Jew is forced to pay him heavy compensation.
In another anecdote, Faust asks a wagoner with a load of hay how much hay he will allow him to eat for a few pence.
The wagoner says jokingly: ‘As much as you like.’
When Faust has eaten half the wagonload, the wagoner repents his generosity and offers Faust a gold piece on condition he leaves the rest undevoured.
When he reaches home the wagoner discovers that his load is intact, ‘for the delusion which the doctor had raised was vanished’.

Even the Faust of this original book is described as ‘a scholar and a gentleman.’
He is said to have been the son of honest German peasants, born near Weimar in 1491, but brought up by a well-to-do uncle in Wittenberg.
This uncle sent him to university.
Faust’s ‘strong powers of mind’ soon distinguish him, and his friends urge him to enter the Church.
But Faust has greater ambitions.
He begins to dabble in sorcery.
He studies Chaldean, Greek, and Arabic.
He takes his degree of Doctor of Divinity, and also a medical degree.
In due course, he becomes a famous doctor.
It is intellectual brilliance that is his downfall, ‘the boldness of his profane enquiries’—a quality that later generations would consider a virtue, and for which even Spies has a sneaking admiration.
Faust wishes to become a great magician, and this is why he invokes the Devil.
Having entered into his pact with the Devil, Faust is corrupted by the Prince of Darkness, who proceeds to fill him with greed and lust for power.

At this point, it is worth quoting the
Historia
on a subject that has some bearing on the lives of magicians.
‘It used to be an old saying that the magician, charm he ever so wisely for a year together, was never a sixpence richer for all his efforts.’
This belief that unusual powers cannot be used for financial gain is fundamental and persistent.
And there seems to be some truth in it.
None of the great magicians from Simon Magus to MacGregor Mathers has died rich, and most of them have died paupers.
The few who have succeeded in living comfortably—Emmanuel Swedenborg and Gurdjieff, for example—made their money in other ways than magic.

When we pass from the Faust legends to the obscure original, as described by some of his contemporaries, we encounter exactly the sort of person that this investigation has led us to expect: a coarse, vulgar, boastful man, with some natural talent and an overmastering desire for fame.
We don’t know if he was named Georg Sabellicus or Johannes, but he was often called Faustus Junior.
The first we hear of him is in 1507 when, through the good offices of a nobleman, he obtained a post as a teacher in a boys’ school in Kreuznach near Frankfurt.
Apparently he was a homosexual, for he proceeded to seduce some of his pupils, ‘indulging in the most dastardly kind of lewdness’.
When found out, he fled.
In 1509, Johannes Faust was given a degree in theology in Heidelberg, some forty miles from Kreuznach.
In 1513, the canon of St.
Mary’s church in Gotha in what is now East Germany, recorded that he had heard Georg Faust, known as ‘the demigod of Heidelberg’, boasting and talking nonsense in an inn in nearby Erfurt.

The alchemist Trithemius recalls a meeting with Faustus Junior as early as 1507, and dismisses him as a fool, a boaster, and a charlatan.
In the few other references we have he is casting horoscopes, making prophecies, or being driven from town to town by his unsavoury reputation as a sodomite and
necromancer
(one who foretells the future by communicating with the dead).
From Johann Wier, an acquaintance of Faust who wrote about him, we learn that Faust was wont to boast about ‘his friend the Devil’—which may have been nothing more than a typical piece of bombast.
A story of Faust’s malicious humour recorded by Wier describes how Faust, when a prisoner in the castle of Baron Hermann of Batenburg, offered to show the nobleman’s chaplain how to remove his beard without a razor, in exchange for a bottle of wine.
The chaplain was to rub his beard with the ‘magic formula’, arsenic.
The gullible chaplain did this.
His beard fell out, just as Faust had prophesied—but it took most of the chaplain’s skin with it.
Wier also tells us that Faust was a drunken wanderer who spent much of his time in low taverns, impressing the locals with conjuring tricks.
Other contemporary chroniclers describe him as a liar and a ‘low juggler’.

We do not know when Faust died—it was probably in the 1540s—but we do know how his legendary fame began.
A Swiss Protestant clergyman, Johanne Gast, once dined with Faust, and was unfavourably impressed by him—perhaps because of Faust’s hints at his pact with the Devil.
At all events Gast later spoke of Faust in one of his sermons, declaring that he had been strangled by the Devil, and that his corpse had persisted in lying on its face, although it had been turned on its back five times.
This story had the right touch of horror to appeal to the imaginations of his congregation.
Soon other stories grew up.
One told how the Devil had twisted Faust’s head around completely so that it looked down his back.
Another recounted how, toward the end of his life, Faust began to hope that he might escape the Devil’s clutches—but the trembling of the house at night warned him that the end was near.

The 16th century was an age of religious persecution, a time when a man could be executed on the mere suspicion that he did not believe in the Trinity.
The very idea of a man selling his soul to the Devil was enough to make Faust’s contemporaries turn pale.
Little wonder, then, that Spies’
Historia
became one of the most popular works of its time.
Phillip Melancthon, a follower of Luther, also preached about Faust.
He gilded the lily somewhat with a story that Faust had defeated and eaten a rival magician in Vienna.
Luther also has two slighting references to Faust in his
Table Talk,
from which it is clear that he regarded Faust as a common charlatan rather a demonic wonder worker.
The only powers that some of Faust’s educated contemporaries were willing to grant him were the gifts of casting accurate horoscopes and of foretelling the future.
In 1535, for instance, Faust correctly predicted that the Bishop of Munster would recapture the city, and in 1540 he foretold the defeat of the European armies in Venezuela.

Legend has made Faust the most famous figure in the history of necromancy.
But when we peer through the legendary mist, what do we find?
Most of the more sensational stories about the man as told by people who knew him, tell of feats that have been more or less duplicated by other men of strange powers down the ages.
It is difficult to decide whether this helps to support or to discredit Faust?
credentials as a magician.
When we try to sift fact from legend, it becomes clear that Faust knew something about hypnosis.
It may be that he also knew how to conjure poltergeists.
The priest Gast claimed that when Faust was angered by the poor hospitality offered to him by some monks, he sent a poltergeist to trouble them.
Apparently the rattling spirit created such a furore that the monks had to abandon their monastery.
Accounts made it plain that Faust was stupid, boastful, and malicious.
The same is true of many men of strange powers.
As we shall see, Faust’s restless egoism, his desire to impress, his need to bend nature to his will are characteristic of many of the best-known magicians from Simon Magus onward.
Magicians are not comfortable people to know.

Faust was not the most celebrated magician of his age.
He had two remarkable contemporaries, Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, whose fame greatly and deservedly surpassed his own, and who were undoubtedly white magicians.
Agrippa and Paracelsus were both students of that strange mystical system of knowledge called the Cabala, whose purpose is to show the fallen man his way back to Paradise and the godhead.
The two works that contain the essence of cabalistic teaching—the
Sefer Yetsirah,
Book of Creation, and the
Zohar,
Book of Splendor—are of such profound importance in the history of magic that we must say a few words about them here.

The Book of Creation dates from the 2nd century
AD.
The Book of Splendor appeared in an Aramaic manuscript written by a student named Moses de Léon in the late 13th century.
It is, however, a tradition that the teachings of both books date from the beginning of human history, when angels taught Adam the secret of how to recover his lost bliss.
Cabalists think of man as a being who is tied up and enveloped in a complicated straitjacket—like Houdini before one of his celebrated escapes—and whose problem is to discover how to untie all the knots.
Most men do not even realise that they are tied up.
The cabalist not only knows it: he knows also that man’s highest state is total freedom.

According to the Cabala, when Adam sinned he fell from a state of union with God.
He fell down through 10 lower states of consciousness into a state of amnesia, in which he totally forgot his divine origin, his true identity.
Man’s task, therefore, is to clamber back until he once more attains his highest state.
The journey is long and hard.
It is not simply a matter of climbing, like Jack clambering up the beanstalk, because the ‘beanstalk’ passes through 10 different ‘realms’.
But even that image is too simple: the beanstalk does not pass straight upward, like a fireman’s pole, but wanders from side to side.

The image of the beanstalk is apt because the Cabala is essentially the study of a sacred tree—the Tree of Life.
At the top of the tree is God the Creator, who is called Kether (the crown).
The nine other branches of the tree are wisdom, beauty, power, understanding, love, endurance, majesty, foundation, and kingdom.
These are known collectively as the Sefiroth—emanations, or potencies, and it is they that constitute the realms through which the beanstalk passes.
There is a further complication.
The traditional picture of the Tree of Life looks rather like a diagram of a chemical molecule, in which the atoms are connected to each other by lines.
These lines correspond to the 22 paths of the Cabala that connect the realms.

The Tree of Life no longer grows on earth.
How, then, does the aspirant set about climbing it?
There are three main ways.
First, one may explore the realms on the astral plane.
Another way to explore the realms of the Cabala is through inner vision—that is, by achieving a semi-trancelike or visionary state in which the realms appear before the inner eye.
A third way is the obvious one: study of the Cabala itself.
It is, however, perhaps the most difficult way of all, because its revelations of man’s consciousness and destiny are not spoken of directly, but lie hidden in an enormously complex system of symbols.

The realms of the Sefiroth, however, are not themselves symbols.
According to the Cabala, they are real worlds.
For instance, if the wandering astral body finds itself in a realm containing doves and spotted leopards, a land bursting with an almost overwhelming glory of life, it is almost certainly in the realm of Netshah, or Venus—symbol of endurance and victory.

The doctrines of the Cabala were probably far above the head of a charlatan such as Faust.
But Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus were not charlatans.
They regarded themselves as scientists and philosophers, and they were far more intelligent than Faust.
Yet both of them were flawed by the defects we have come to realize are characteristic of so many magicians: a craving to be admired, and a crude will to power.
When these ambitions are frustrated, even men of genuine powers will often misuse their powers like a charlatan.