The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code (35 page)

... we are now dealing with observed facts which are nevertheless absurd; which are in contradiction with facts of daily observation; which are denied not by science only, but by the whole of humanity - facts which are rapid and fugitive, which take place in semi-darkness, and almost by surprise; with no proof except the testimony of our senses, which we know to be often fallible. After we have witnessed such facts, everything concurs to make us doubt them. Now, at the moment when these facts take place they seem to us certain, and we are willing to proclaim them openly; but when we return to ourself, when we feel the irresistible influence of our environment, when our friends all laugh at our credulity - then we are most disarmed, and we begin to doubt.105 May it not all have been an illusion? May I not have been grossly deceived? ... And then, as the moment of the experiment becomes more remote, that experiment which once seemed so conclusive gets to seem more and more uncertain, and we end by letting ourselves be persuaded that we have been the victims of a trick.106

It may be apt at this point to quote Dr Margaret Mead, who declared to the American Association for the Advancement of Science: `The whole history of scientific advancement is full of scientists investigating phenomena the Establishment did not believe were there.' 107

To dare to boldly go where man has never even considered being is the mark of the fearless Luciferan, seeker and maker, quester in both triumph and despair. And with the coming of the Enlightenment, a new kind of mage arose and courageously saluted God - but this time made in his own image.

CHAPTER SIX

Do What Thou Wilt

As the West crawled towards the Age of Enlightenment, when the likes of Locke, Voltaire, Newton and Hume's secular religion of rationalism began to draw hearts and minds on its often precarious journey away from the medieval mindset, a wave of both Luciferan invention and discovery and quasi-Satanic decadence was unleashed - although, as Colin Wilson points out, the eighteenth century boasted little actual magic.' It was as if, after all those years in the iron grip of the ecclesiastical authorities a dam had broken, and the energy released had to find its own level quickly, be it in the form of exciting new discoveries in chemistry or medicine, or the grim trappings of an orgiastic faux Black Mass. Yet the Dark Ages of clerical oppression were not over: the Inquisition still had the power to torture and kill, and `witches' were still being condemned by both the Catholic and Protestant ignorant - on both sides of the Atlantic.

In Salem,' Massachusetts, for one year beginning in 1692 a terrible contagion of witch hysteria swept not one, but twenty-three communities, ending with 141 people arrested - including a fouryear-old child who was clapped in irons - nineteen hanged, one legally crushed to death and many more traumatized and robbed of their health, peace of mind and property.

The craziness allegedly began when the Reverend Samuel Parris' slave Tituba instructed his ten- and eleven-year old daughters about voodoo, although that may well be a convenient excuse. In any case, the girls began to convulse and act in ways that could `only' mean demonic possession - and that, in turn, could only mean terrible news for their community.

As the girls' accusations spread to other localities and the tragic harvest of their hysteria began to fill the jails, one of the accused, John Proctor, wrote a beseeching letter to the authorities, including the now-legendary witch-finder Cotton Mather, from Salem Prison on 23 July, 1692:

The innocency of our Case with the Enmity of our Accusers and our Judges, and Jury, whom nothing but our Innocent blood will serve their turn, having Condemned us already before our Tryals, being so much more incensed and engaged against us by the Devil, makes us bold to Beg and Implore your Favourable Assistance of this our Humble Petition to his Excellency, That if it be possible our Innocent Blood may be spared, which undoubtedly otherwise will be shed, if the Lord doth not mercifully step in. The Magistrates, Ministers, Jewries, and all the People in general, being so much inraged and incensed against us by the Delusion of the Devil, which we can term no other, by reason we know in our own Consciences, we are all Innocent Persons. Here are five Persons who have lately confessed themselves to be witches, and do accuse some of us, of being along with them at a Sacrament [witches' Sabbat], since we were committed into close Prison, which we know to be Lies. Two of the 65 are (Carriers Sons) Youngmen, who would not confess any thing till they tyed them Neck and Heels till the Blood was ready to come out of their Noses, and 'tis credibly believed and reported this was the occasion of making them confess that they never did, by reason they said one had been a Witch a Month, another Five Weeks, and that their Mother had made them so, who had been confined here this nine Weeks. My son William Proctor, when he was examin'd, because he would not confess that he was Guilty, when he was Innocent, they tyed him Neck and Heels till the Blood gushed out of his Nose, and would have kept him so 24 hours, if one more Merciful than the rest, had not taken pity on him, and caused him to be unbound. These actions are very like the Popish Cruelties. They have already undone us in our Estates [seized money and property of the accused], and that will not serve their turns, without our Innocent Bloods. If it cannot be granted that we can have our trials at Boston, we humbly beg that you would endeavour to have these Magistrates changed ... and begging also and beseeching you would be pleased to be here, if not all, some of you at our Trials, hoping thereby you may be the means of saving the shedding [of] our Innocent Bloods, desiring your prayers to the Lord in our behalf, we rest your Poor Afflicted Servants,

JOHN PROCTOR ETC.3

Note that Proctor describes the local people as being `incensed against us by delusion of the Devil', the complete reversal of how the accusers understood the situation: as experience took its dreadful toll, like all innocent `witches' Satan was embodied by those who accused them of worshipping him. And, speaking to a solid Puritan audience, Proctor also points out - with total justification - that `these actions are very like the Popish cruelties'.

Cruelty is no respecter of religion once the Devil is let in to rampage throughout a community via a fundamentalist belief in him, tempered by not a shred of humour, individual conscience or intelligence. Lucifer is not to be found in Salem - but once the Devil has been conjured, he is free to take over minds. And then humans go into swarm mode.

Although Proctor's petition caused the authorities to reconsider their criteria for dealing with `witches', it came too late for him and his fellow prisoners, who were hanged.

Montague Summers notes that while the godly Salem residents fasted, the witches were supposed to have indulged in `a Sacrament that day at a house in the Village, and that they had Red Bread and Red Drink.'4 He adds: `This "Red Bread" is certainly puzzling" - but not if seen as the desperate invention of an accused witch eager to placate the authorities with ever more fanciful accounts of satanic goings-on. Summers also asserts that the Rev. George Burroughs, accused by eight witches of `being an Head Actor at some of their Hellish Rendezvouses' `certainly officiated at their ceremonies',' for several of the residents testified to seeing him do so. By that time, however, sworn testimony, had come to be utterly worthless.

Tellingly, as the hysteria spiralled out of control, the girls' power craze meant they finally overstepped themselves and accused the governor's wife of witchcraft - an unwise move. When writs were issued for slander, the girls fled. Their `possession' was miraculously over.

Lessons about persecution and injustice were not well learnt: the succeeding centuries saw countless lynchings of poor blacks,' while America in the twentieth century suffered the McCarthyite antiCommunist `witch-hunts' and the later epidemic of accusations of satanic ritual abuse, mainly by fundamentalist Christian social workers. Arthur Miller's classic play The Crucible (1953), while outwardly about the Salem witch hysteria, is in fact an allegory for the McCarthyite House Committee on Un-American Activities.'

We have seen what a similar hysteria - mass craziness - did to Europe as the Inquisitors' eagerness to exterminate witches wiped out whole communities, especially in France and Germany. However, the Devil need not be invoked as such: Hitler persuaded most ordinary German citizens that all Jews were evil and that any indignity and horror could be inflicted on them because they were not human. Yet lesser-known contagions are often more instructive about the extraordinary capacity decent folk have for being blinded - almost literally - by an idea that provokes hysteria.

During the Second World War bomb-maddened and half-starved British folk often turned on any strangers in the neighbourhood, believing them to be Nazi spies, with a viciousness that their decent pre-war selves would never have believed possible. Occasionally, however, a kind of madness overrode even their persecution of strangers: on one occasion in remote East Anglia, the mob turned on a man who far from being a new face in the area was actually one of them, a neighbour known well to them all. Happening to be out on a Home Guard patrol, he was seized, roughed up, and, despite his desperate and bewildered protestation that he was their long-time neighbour, shot dead. He had spoken to the crowd, reminded them of his identity, and even shown them his papers, but they were so possessed by bloodlust that they literally could not see him as he was. The next day when the red rage had ebbed away, the people were stunned by the fact of a very familiar but very dead man, and the bewildered grief of his traumatized family. No one had any way of explaining what had happened .9

His satanic majesty

The last major fling of the English witch-hunters took place in the seventeenth century, as Elizabeth I's successor, James I (1566-1625)1° spread his own fear - amounting to a phobia - of witches through a land already raw with religious division, plotting and paranoia. His predecessor, while mouthing platitudes about individual consciences, had made it impossible for Catholics to worship legally in her kingdom, and resentment grew among them exponentially. Known as `the wisest fool in Christendom' (although even that remarkably back-handed compliment is debatable), James had survived the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 when he and his Parliament were targeted by a group of Catholic fanatics, which merely added fuel to the fires of religious intolerance and a heightened atmosphere of suspicion.

Even before Guy Fawkes and his co-religionists attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament," James had published his Daemonologie (1597), providing zealous witch-hunters with plentiful ammunition. In the book, the narrator Epistemon explains what categories of `unlawful charms, without natural causes' are to be considered witchcraft:

I mean by such kind of charms as commonly daft wives use, for healing of forspoken [bewitched] goods, for preserving them from evil eyes, by knitting ... sundry kinds of herbs to the hair of the goods; by curing the worm, by stemming the blood, by healing of horse-crooks ... or doing such like innumerable things by words, without applying anything meet to the part offended, as mediciners do.

This was a licence to persecute herbalists and traditional healers - be they efficacious or basically harmless, continuing the ancient traditions of folklore. Even if the healer's aim was only to do good, it was still witchcraft. (Many fundamentalist Christians take much the same view about healers today - unless they are of the same persuasion.) Yet what were the poor folk to do in an age when toothache could kill and `official' medicine was not only often worse than useless but also expensive, and the local wise woman with her mysterious jars of herbs might just provide some relief?

Under James, witches were everywhere, like the later `Reds under the bed' hysteria of twentieth-century America. The king himself took an active interest in the major cases, even participating in a number of the trials. Not surprisingly with this unofficial royal warrant, the courts were soon full of wall-eyed, deformed and senile old women on their way to the gallows.

In Scotland, the witch mania saw women at Forres bent double into barrels filled with tar, rolled down Cluny Hill and set alight at the bottom. This would have particularly satisfied James, who was convinced he had been cursed by witches during a visit to Forres in 1600. Having fallen ill while in the neighbourhood he had the area searched: a coven was found in the very act of melting a wax image of the monarch. (Somewhat suspiciously perfect timing.) They were tried and rolled down the hill to their deaths. Of course it is perfectly possible that people were trying to kill James with any means at their disposal - including the `sympathetic magic' of stabbing his image - but whether or not that made them witches or merely desperate to get rid of him must remain open to question.

As his reign progressed, James abandoned his belief in the supernatural abilities of witches, but persisted in seeing them as anti-social elements with subversive potential. Ordinary folk were slower to strip witches of their powers. For, as H. T. F. Rhodes notes in his The Satanic Mass (1954):