The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code (29 page)

He does, however, add famously, `While there's life, there's hope', although there may not be much hope, one suspects, ultimately for Faust. In fact, his soul is redeemed, largely through the pure love of a good woman, and instead of a hellish climax, there is the sweet sound of hymns of the mystical chorus and a prayer to `Virgin, Queen of Motherhood' to `Keep us, Goddess, in thy grace'.

Goethe's intelligent and often humorous work nevertheless contributed to the widespread idea of the reality of the pact, which fuelled countless witch trials. Ironically, many cases of devilworship, both real and imagined, were born in the heady hot-house atmosphere of religious houses.

Weird sisters

In the medieval and Renaissance world few who entered convents or monasteries had a true vocation for the religious life. Often there was simply nothing else for them to do: girls especially would be forced to take the veil if their families failed to provide the requisite dowry for them to marry, or if they were too independent - too much of a handful - to be accepted in the outside world. But living an enclosed, sexless life all too often induced acedia, or the particular sort of `abysmal apathy"3 common to the monk or nun's sequestered existence, and out of such fertile soil grew some spectacular episodes of mass hysteria, particularly centring on a belief in possession by demons. Little wonder that single-sex religious houses were veritable hot-beds of the wildest fantasies - which spelt very bad news for some ...

One infamous case of apparent mass demonic possession took place at Loudun, Vienne, in France in 1634, which became known to a wider twentieth-century audience, first through Aldous Huxley's book The Devils of Loudun (1952) and then through Ken Russell's brilliant but astonishingly graphic film, The Devils (1971)14, which showed torture and death at the stake in unflinching detail.

In this alarming story of dark human potential, erotomania took fast hold among the nuns of Loudun, resulting in fits of screamed blasphemies and obscenities together with much abandoned rolling around on the floor and displaying of genitalia. In the great release this afforded the repressed women under their wimples, frustrations of all kinds emerged into the light of day.

The confession of the real-life Sister Jeanne des Anges reveals a profound abhorrence of her religious life, normally hidden beneath the modest submissiveness expected of a nun, besides illustrating the contemporary belief that all such hysteria was the work of possessing demons:

My mind was often filled with blasphemies, and sometimes I uttered them without being able to take any thought to stop myself. I felt for God a continual aversion . . . The demon beclouded me in such a way that I hardly distinguished his desires from mine; he gave me moreover a strong aversion for my religious calling, so that sometimes when he was in my head I used to tear all my veils and such of my sisters' as I might lay hands on; I trampled them underfoot, I chewed them, cursing the hour when I took the vows ... More often than not I saw quite well that I was the prime cause of my troubles and that the demon acted only according to the openings I gave him . . . As I presented myself at Communion, the devil took possession of my head, and after I had received the blessed host and half moistened it the devil threw it in the priest's face.15

The Mother Superior herself claimed to be possessed by the demons Balan, Iscaron, Leviathan and Behemoth, while the nuns under her care exploded into a mass of writhing, screaming frustrated female flesh. Their exorcist, Father Urbain Grandier, found that with each successive attempt to rid the women of the possessing devils the outbreak became stronger. In the end, Grandier himself was seized by the Inquisition and subjected to the abominable agonies of the Boot, and then his mangled but still living body was committed to the pyre. Somehow, despite his suffering, he managed to maintain his innocence and refused to name any accomplices, but a forged pact with Satan was produced that sealed his fate. It read:

My Lord and Master, I owe you for my God; I promise to serve you while I live, and from this hour I renounce all other gods and Jesus Christ and Mary and all the Saints of Heaven and the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church, and all the goodwill thereof and the prayers which might be made for me. I promise to adore you and do you homage at least three times a day and to do the most evil that I can and to lead into evil as many persons as shall be possible to me, and heartily I renounce the Chrism, Baptism, and all the merits of Jesus Christ; and in case I should desire to change, I give you my body and soul, and my life as holding it from you, having dedicated it forever without any will to repent.

Signed URBAIN GRANDIER in his blood.16

It never seem to dawn on his persecutors that since the possessions continued after he was burnt to death he was effectively exonerated - perhaps they argued that once possessed, always possessed. Or perhaps they simply ignored the inconvenient fact of Grandier's passing.

(Montague Summers solemnly recounts how Grandier tested positive for a `Witch Mark': `two marks were discovered, one upon the shoulder-blade and the other upon the thigh, both of which proved insensible even when pierced with a sharp silver pin'." Summers fully believed that `the discovery of the devil mark' was nigh to `infallible proof' of Devil worship, the mark being an indelible brand of `Satan's own sign manual'.)"

The nuns' lewd performances rocketed from strength to strength, drawing large and appreciative audiences. Sister Claire

... fell on the ground, blaspheming, in convulsions, displaying her privy parts without any shame, and uttering filthy words. Her gestures became so indecent that the audience averted its eyes. She cried out again and again, abusing herself with her hands, `Come on then, fuck me j 19

(Had the observers really wanted to avert their eyes, they would hardly have travelled miles to be part of the audience.)

Yet one must exercise caution in layering on modern scepticism too thickly. Father Surin, who arrived at Loudun as an exorcist was himself possessed, and, like Jeanne, described the curious sensation of watching and listening to himself, unable to stop uttering obscenities and blasphemies, in a kind of unholy out-of-the-bodyexperience. The hysteria may have originated in the most intense sexual frustration and monastic acedia, but it soon took on a life of its own.

Another father confessor who suffered for his charges' hysteria was Louis Gaufridi, a priest of Accoules, near Marseilles, who was jailed in 1611 for `foulest sorcery' and condemned largely because he, too, was discovered by local surgeons to bear the devil's mark 20 His accuser was the teenager Madeleine de la Palud, who admitted in court that her allegations were `all imaginings, illusions, without a word of truth in them' and that she had merely `swooned for the love of Gaufridi'. As Colin Wilson notes, `She then began to quiver with erotic frenzy, her hips moving up and down with the movements of copulation."' Gaufridi was also convicted of trafficking with Satan, and condemned to a heretic's death. Once again latent sexual problems had become magnified at the hands of an institutionally celibate and sex-hating organization.

Despite Madeleine's confession, Gaufridi was `persuaded' to reveal the formula of his Devil's pact, which read:

I, Louis Gaufridi, renounce all good, both spiritual as well as temporal, which may be bestowed upon me by God, the Blessed Virgin Mary, all the Saints of Heaven, particularly my patron S. John-Baptist, as also S. Peter, S. Paul, and S. Francis, and I give myself body and soul to Lucifer, before whom I stand, together with every good that I may ever possess (save always the benefit of the sacraments touching those who receive them). And according to the tenor of these terms have I signed and sealed 22

Gaufridi's alleged victim, Madeleine, signed an even more blood-curdlingly blasphemous pact:

With all my heart and most unfeignedly and with all my will most deliberately do I wholly renounce God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; the most Holy Mother of God; all the Angels and especially my Guardian Angel, the passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, His Precious Blood and the merits thereof, my lot in Paradise, all the good inspirations which God may give me in the future, all prayers which are made or may be made for me.23

If nothing else, these pacts reveal a real talent on the part of the local officers of the Inquisition for imaginative Devil worship. They also underline the central point that without the Church there could be no Devil worship and even no Devil. The one feeds off the other.

Gaufridi and Grandier were almost certainly innocent of the Satanism of which they were accused and for which they died so horribly, although they may have encouraged the women of the convent to flirt - perhaps a little more than that. However, others, like Faust, were not necessarily so blameless, although the extent to which one apportions sin will depend on one's own spiritual background.

Trampling the cross

Jeffrey Burton Russell explains that the earliest idea of the pact - originally a deal between two more or less equal parties - changed dramatically in medieval times:

It was now assumed that the person making the pact did so as a grovelling slave, renouncing Christ, trampling the cross, worshipping Satan ... offering the obscene kiss ... Heretics and other evildoers had put themselves under Lucifer's command whether or not they had made a conscious and deliberate submission.21

Certain elements in that list echo the alleged blasphemies of the Knights Templar - specifically trampling the cross and renouncing Christ. Almost all historians reject the reality of these accusations, and one can understand why, given the prevalence of confessionby-torture: basically this is inadmissible evidence. But in this case, is it really worthless? As we have seen, the fact of the existence of the `Church of John in the East', the Mandaeans, who encountered the knights in what is now Turkey, adds an ironic twist to the tale. If the inner circle, or at any rate a high-ranking group, within the Templars did indeed become enthused with (most would say, with Summers, `infected by') the Johannite heresy, then no doubt they really did spit and trample on the cross and renounce Jesus, seeing him as an impostor, usurper and possibly even accomplice or accessory to the fact of murder. But to many of the initiates, steeped as they were in that time with a fervent belief in the conventions of Christianity - after all, most Templars joined the Order because they were devoted to Christ - such actions must still have seemed blasphemous, even diabolic. Perhaps in their heart of hearts they truly believed themselves to have gone over to the other side, to be Devil worshippers. This echoes the Cathars' concept of the Baptist as a devil: this would make sense if they knew that the two men had been bitter rivals, for assuming (and who wouldn't?) that Christ is without question always and for ever Goodness personified - the cowboy in the white hat as it were, intent on cleaning up the town - John must therefore be Evil, the scowling bar-brawler in the black hat. But as the song says, `It ain't necessarily so'.

While the Templars' contribution to humanity may not be great - although they did give us the monetary cheque and some stunning Gothic cathedrals - other heretics and Luciferans gave us much more that has proved of lasting value. Indeed, it is true to say that without their intellectual striving, we may well still be in the Dark Ages. Although the true flowering of both these official and unknowing Luciferans was to come much later, in the Age of Enlightenment, its roots were already thrusting through the tentatively promising soil of the Renaissance, nourished in the dark on Mephistophelean magic.

Anti-Christ

When Leonardo da Vinci mused on the painter's power exalting him to the status of the `Grandson of God',25 it was both a curious and extraordinarily bold statement, for its implications are nothing if not outrageously heretical. To most people, both then and now, it was and is an unwritten article of faith that Jesus was a lifelong, pure celibate, with no children - so to talk of God possessing a grandson, however metaphorically, is astonishing blasphemy. It may be countered that it was merely a clever turn of phrase, virtually meaningless, implying a vague grandeur, nothing more - and that it is pointless trying to analyse it. After all, writers have routinely called themselves the likes of `children of Nature': in his 1914 Immanuel Kant Houston Stewart Chamberlain declared that `All arts, all sciences, all Thought are "daughters of the Eye"', adding `and so it is that the painter is "nipote a Dio", "the grandson of God"'. But he completely misses the point. Being a child of Nature is one thing, but even daring to imply, however poetically or metaphorically that Jesus had children was nothing short of extreme heresy. But in any case, this is Leonardo da Vinci, a viciously antiChurch heretic: indeed, as a sort of Anti-Christ himself, when he made any remark about the Deity it is surely worth noting.

So what drove Leonardo to make such a dangerously controversial statement, even in the privacy of his own notebooks? What did he really mean by aligning himself with the `Grandson of God'? Was he claiming kinship with the historical figure of Christ? (Although, judging by his anti-Jesus, wickedly Johannite symbolism, that seems rather unlikely.) Was he perhaps even implying that he knew Jesus had a son? Or was he not referring, however indirectly, to Jesus at all - but to John? Clearly he saw the Baptist, as least figuratively, as Son of God, and few Johannites would qualify more in their devotion to the cause to be his `son' than Leonardo da Vinci. Whatever his motive, likening himself to the grandson of God would not have been the chosen metaphor of a God-fearing, devout Renaissance Catholic - quite the reverse.

In any case, few more Luciferan individuals than Leonardo da Vinci have ever walked the earth, in his audacity, his refusal to set limits on his own potential or imagination, and his constant challenge to received wisdom, especially to the religious establishment of his day.

In Turin Shroud: In Whose Image?26 Clive Prince and I argued that the `Holy Shroud of Turin' - long believed to bear the miraculously imprinted image of Jesus himself, complete with horrific marks of crucifixion - was a brilliant fake by Leonardo, who not only used his own face for that of Jesus', but created the image using a technique that we now know as photography. In fact, we argue, the Shroud is nothing less than a 500-year-old photograph of Leonardo da Vinci ...