Supernatural (63 page)

Like Faust, Cornelius Agrippa became the subject of many remarkable legends.
What was the truth behind such incredible tales?
Cornelius Agrippa—whose real name was Heinrich Cornelis—was born in Cologne in 1486.
His parents were sufficiently well-off to send him to the recently founded university of Cologne, where he proved to be a brilliant scholar.
It was an exciting time for young intellectuals.
Gutenberg had invented the printing press some 50 years before Agrippa was born, and the printed book had created the same kind of revolution as radio and television were to do five centuries later.
Agrippa read everything he could lay his hands on.
One day he discovered the Cabala, and it at once appealed to something deep within him.
A magician was made.

At the age of 20 Agrippa became a court secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor, and a distinguished career seemed assured for him.
But Agrippa was a divided man.
Part of him, as we have said, craved celebrity and power; but he loathed the world of diplomacy and courtly intrigue by which such success could be achieved.
By now he was also obsessed by the ultimate other world of the Cabala.

At about this time, he attended the University of Paris where he studied mysticism and philosophy.
There he met a Spaniard named Gerona, who had recently been forced to flee from his estate in Catalonia after a peasants’ revolt.
Agrippa offered to help him, sensing that if their mission succeeded, Gerona’s gratitude might enable Agrippa to settle in Spain and devote his life to study of the Cabala.
They went to Catalonia, and Agrippa devised a brilliant plan that enabled them to capture a stronghold from the rebels.
But they were later besieged, Agrippa was forced to flee, and Gerona was captured and probably murdered.
The episode was typical of the bad luck that was to pursue Agrippa for the rest of his life.

He returned to his job as court secretary, but he felt so frustrated that he left after a few months and began wandering around Europe.
Within a year or two he had acquired a reputation as a black magician, and it was to cause him a great deal of trouble.
In 1509 he taught in Dôle, France under the patronage of Queen Margaret of Austria.
The local monks became jealous of this patronage, however, and plotted against him.
When one of them preached against him in the presence of the queen, Agrippa decided it was time to move on.
In 1515 he was knighted on a battlefield in Italy, and became Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim—a name taken from that of a small village near Cologne.

He was granted a pension by King Francis I of France, but this was revoked when Agrippa refused to cast horoscopes for the king’s mother.
Agrippa was later made official historian by Queen Margaret, but was unwise enough to publish a work in which he attempted to demonstrate that all knowledge is useless.
This so enraged his academic colleagues that he lost his job.
Soon he was imprisoned for debt.
Agrippa certainly lacked tact, for after this he again made the mistake of speaking his mind about Queen Margaret, for which he was thrown into prison and tortured.
His health broken, he died in 1535 at the age of 49.
Legend says that, as he lay on his deathbed, he cursed his wasted life and the black arts that had seduced him.
Whereupon his black dog rushed out of the house and threw itself into a river—clearly proving thereby that it was a demon in disguise.

These biographical snippets, however richly spiced with legends, hardly add up to a man of strange powers.
The certainty that Agrippa was indeed a magician, however, lies in the three volumes of his treatise
The Occult Philosophy,
which is regarded as one of the great magical texts.
The book makes it clear that Agrippa knew all about thought pressure.
Magic, he insists, is a faculty that springs from the power of the mind and imagination.
There are mysterious relations between the human body and the universe, and between the earth on which we live and higher spiritual worlds.
Thus, he argued, a stone can teach us about the nature of the stars.
Agrippa believed that all nature is bound together by a kind of vast spider’s web.
Most human beings never learn to use their innate magical powers because they believe that they are cut off from the rest of nature.
The magician, on the contrary, knows that his thought, if properly directed, can set the web vibrating and cause effects in far distant places.

Agrippa wrote his extraordinary masterwork when he was only 23 years old.
It shows that, even at this early age, his study of the Cabala had given him some profound insights.
Because he was always in danger of being burned as a black magician, he was careful to insist in his book that his knowledge is of a kind that any serious student can acquire from study of the great philosophers and mystics.
But he also admits that he has successfully practised divination and foretelling the future.
For example, he describes two methods by which he claims to have detected the identity of thieves.
One method is to pivot a sieve on forceps held between the index fingers of two students.
The sieve will begin to swing like a pendulum when the name of the guilty person is mentioned.
Similarly, if the sieve is pivoted so that it can be made to spin, it will stop spinning when the thief’s name is spoken.

Agrippa insists that the success of these and other magical techniques are due to spirits—similar, presumably, to the spirits that help fakirs to perform their wonders.
The overwhelming impression that emerges from the book is that Agrippa was a sensitive—born with the gifts of precognition, telepathy, and the ability to influence events by using the power of his mind.
His belief that mind is more powerful than matter runs like a thread through the book.
The Occult Philosophy
is the work of a young man—full of vitality and brilliance—and of a dreamer who peered into a world that few of us have the gift to see.

The case of Paracelsus is even more tantalising than that of Agrippa.
His writings prove him to have been a more remarkable man—a great scientist as well as a magician.
But, again, seeking the truth about him is like groping about in a fog, so obscured is his life with myth and legend.

He was born as Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim in 1493, the son of an impoverished Swiss nobleman who had become a doctor.
He studied medicine in Basel and completed his education at universities in Italy and Germany.
His gifts as a physician were immediately apparent, and a series of remarkable cures soon earned him a formidable reputation.
In 1524, when he was only 29 years old, he was appointed professor of medicine at Basel University.
In nine years he had become one of the great names in medicine in Europe.

It was at this point that his career, so rich in both achievement and promise, was undermined by the same kind of character defects that brought ruin to Agrippa, and that seem to be hallmarks of so many magicians.
He was vainglorious.
He chose the pseudonym ‘Paracelsus’ because it implied that he was greater than Celsus, the famous physician of ancient Rome.
He was a heavy drinker, and was prey to sudden violent tempers.
One of his first acts as professor at Basel University was to order his students to hold a public burning of the books of Avicenna, Galen, and other famous doctors of the past.
This enraged his colleagues, who condemned him as an exhibitionist and a charlatan.
When they plotted against him, Paracelsus compounded his unpopularity by calling them names—like many paranoid people he had a powerful gift for invective.
For a while his reputation held his enemies at bay and when he cured the publisher Frobenius of an infected leg that other doctors had decided to amputate, it seemed that he had become invulnerable to attack.
Soon after this, however, a patient declined to pay his bill and Paracelsus took him to court.
Owing to the plots of his enemies, he lost the case, whereupon he rained such violent abuse on the heads of the judges that a warrant was issued for his arrest.
He was forced to flee Basel—and his long soul-destroying downfall had begun.

For the remainder of his life Paracelsus wandered all over Europe as an itinerant doctor, writing book after book of which few were published in his lifetime, and pouring scorn and invective on his enemies.
Fourteen years of wandering and disappointment wore him out.
In 1541, when he was 48 years old, he was invited by the Prince Palatine to settle at his seat in Salzburg.
At last he might have found contentment in a quiet life of study.
But he continued to drink too much, and six months later he rolled down a hill in a drunken stupor, and died of his injuries.

Then, ironically, his books began to be published, and they spread his fame over Europe once more.
They have a range and boldness of imagination that is reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks.
Paracelsus immediately became a kind of patron saint of occultism—a position he maintains even today, with his writings being studied by a new generation of occultists.

As with Agrippa, it is difficult to discover four centuries later what genuine powers lay behind the many legends of Paracelsus’s magical prowess.
One thing is clear: most of the stories concern remarkable cures, and this suggests that he was primarily gifted with seemingly magical powers of healing.
For example, we are told that he cured an innkeeper’s daughter who since birth had been paralysed from the waist down.
The medicine he gave her was probably saltpetre in teaspoonfuls of wine.
This would obviously have had no effect, but it seems that the hypnotic force of his personality and his natural healing power brought about a cure.
We are also again confronted by the paradox of the split personality: a man who was bad-tempered, thin-skinned, and boastful, yet who could be taken over by some strange power that rose from his subconscious depths and made him a great healer.

So we reach the odd conclusion that the contemporaries of Agrippa and Paracelsus were probably right when they called them charlatans—but that, at the same time, both men possessed genuine powers.
It would be another four centuries before the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung attempted to explain these powers scientifically in terms of that vast reservoir of energy known as the subconscious mind.

In the 16th century it was still dangerous for a man of knowledge to gain a reputation as a wizard or sorcerer.
The witch hunting craze was spreading across Europe, and many people were being burned for being in league with the Devil.
This no doubt explains why we know so little of the lives of the alchemists who followed in the footsteps of Agrippa and Paracelsus.
That remarkable 16th century French physician and prophet Nostradamus took care to hide his visions in verse of such obscurity that even nowadays we cannot be certain what most of them mean.

Dr John Dee, the most highly regarded magician of Shakespeare’s time, is almost unique among magicians in that he possessed practically no occult powers.
Perhaps this is why he managed to avoid the usual magician’s destiny of spectacular success and tragic downfall.

He was born in 1527, the son of a minor official in the court of King Henry VIII.
From childhood on he was an avid reader, and when he went to Cambridge University at the age of 15, he allowed himself only four hours’ sleep a night.
After Cambridge he went to the University of Louvain in Belgium, where Agrippa had also studied.
When Dee read Agrippa’s
Occult Philosophy,
he knew that he had stumbled on his life’s work—the pursuit of magical knowledge.
At the age of 23 he gave a series of free lectures on geometry in Rheims, France, and was so popular that he was offered a professorship.
But he preferred to return to England to pursue his occult studies.

When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, she asked Dee to cast a suitable date for her coronation.
Dee did so, and from this time on he enjoyed royal protection.
Even so, as one suspected of magical practices, he still had to behave with extreme caution.
Moreover, Queen Elizabeth was notoriously stingy: her patronage did nothing to improve Dee’s finances, and he remained poor all his life.
Dee married a lady-in-waiting who bore him eight children.
He lived quietly and studied astrology, crystal-gazing, and alchemy.

The aim of crystal-gazing is to induce a semi-trancelike state in which the subconscious mind projects future events as images in the crystal.
Dee was too much of an intellectual to be good at this.
He realized that what he needed was a working partner with natural occult faculties, especially in scrying.
In 1582 he met Edward Kelley, a young Irishman who claimed to have second sight.
Kelley was undoubtedly a crook—he had had both his ears cut off for forgery—but it seems equally certain that he did possess second sight, and that he was also a medium.
Dee’s wife took an immediate dislike to the Irishman, but when Kelley went into a trance and began to get in touch with spirits, Dee was so delighted that he overruled his wife’s objections.

How did Dee and Kelley go about summoning the spirits?
One famous print shows them in a graveyard practicing necromancy.
From what we know of the pious Dee, however, it seems unlikely that he went in for this sort of thing.
We can learn more from his
Spiritual Diaries.
It is clear that he went into training before endeavouring to summon the spirits.
He abstained for three days from sexual intercourse, overeating, and the consumption of alcohol, and he took care to shave his beard and cut his nails.
Then began a two-week period of magical invocations in Latin and Hebrew beginning at dawn and continuing until noon, then beginning again at sunset and continuing until midnight.
Kelley, meanwhile, gazed intently into the crystal ball.
At the end of fourteen days, Kelley would begin to see angels and demons in the crystal.
Later, these spirits would walk about the room.
Dee, however, does not seem to have seen the spirits, but he recorded lengthy dialogues he had with them.

One’s instant response to this is the conviction that Kelley made Dee believe that nonexistent spirits had manifested themselves.
The trouble with this view is that the conversations, which came via the mouth of Kelley, were often so crammed with abstruse magical lore that it is almost inconceivable that the illiterate Irishman could have made them up as he went along.
Dee, of course, was familiar with the lore, and certain of the demons quoted chunks of Agrippa’s
Occult Philosophy.
This makes it possible that Dee transmitted them telepathically to Kelley.
The likeliest explanation, however, is that Kelley was a natural medium.