Raising Hell (12 page)

Indeed, the founder of the Monks of Medmenham was Sir Francis Dashwood, who, at the age of sixteen, inherited vast estates and great wealth. On his obligatory grand tour of the European continent, he was reputedly trained by a master Cabbalist in Venice, and on his return to England he brought back with him a collection of magical and pornographic texts and engravings. He squandered even more money—huge sums of it—turning his ancestral manse into a palace unrivaled in its luxury and extravagance.

But by 1752, when all of that had palled, he turned his eye on the abandoned Medmenham Abbey, situated nearby on a neighbor’s property.

After getting to know the landlord of the abbey, a young man named Francis Duffield, Dashwood negotiated a long-term lease and immediately began an expensive but secret process of renovation. His aim was to convert the holy ruins into a private retreat for the most depraved and sacrilegious activities, and to that end he had the chapel walls painted with indecent murals, the upstairs “cells” outfitted as boudoirs, the cellars filled with fine wines and the library with forbidden, lubricious books. And then he went about enlisting his fellow members.

In emulation of Christ’s twelve disciples, he chose twelve men to join him as members of the Superior Order, and each one was rebaptized with the name of a disciple. (Conveniently, this number, plus Dashwood himself, also made up a witch’s coven.) Among the original “monks,” or “friars” as they also sometimes called themselves, were several powerful and influential men of their time, including the earl of Sandwich, the marquis of Bute, Charles Churchill, John Wilkes, George Bubb Dodington, and Thomas Potter, son of the archbishop of Canterbury.

For his initiation into the order, the novice was dressed in a white linen robe, and at the tolling of the bell, he was led to the chapel and made to knock on the closed wooden door.
When it opened, to the sound of low, solemn music, the initiate walked to the communion rail. There, while the other members knelt around the altar, he was asked to declare his most profoundly held principles (or, to be more accurate, his lack of them) and to abjure the faith by mocking its language and intent. If he did this with sufficient gusto and wit, he was admitted into the order by participating in further sacrilegious rites, followed by a banquet in his honor.

At this feast, as described by Charles Johnstone in his contemporary account
Chrysal,
"nothing that the most refined luxury, the most lascivious imagination could suggest to kindle loose desire, and provoke and gratify appetite, was wanting, both the superiors and the inferiours [of whom there were also twelve] vying with each other in loose songs and dissertations of such gross lewdness, and daring impiety, as despair may be supposed to dictate to the damn’d.”

But by some accounts, this wanton conduct was nothing compared to the more unholy aims of the group; its motto, inscribed above a doorway, was
Fay ce que voudras
("Do what you will"). In an aspidal sanctuary of the chapel, the eucharist of Hell was celebrated, and the chapel itself was formally dedicated one night to Satan. What exactly went on in this inner sanctum of the abbey was never known for sure; no one but members of the order were ever allowed inside, and they were all bound to secrecy, and for good reason: if their vile rituals had become common knowledge, their lives and careers would have been ruined.

As it is, their professional lives were what brought the order down in the end. Though the members were united in their decadence, many of them rose to prominence in the government—Bute became prime minister, Bubb Dodington joined the cabinet, Dashwood himself became chancellor of the exchequer—and they often came to sit on opposite sides of the fence: in the House of Lords, Lord Sandwich at one point impeached John Wilkes for blasphemy.

At their last meeting, in the early summer of 1762, only half a dozen of the members convened. With rumors circulating
about the evil practices of the Monks of Medmenham, and so much now at stake, it was decided to end the order. The diabolical and pornographic accoutrements of the abbey were spirited away, and the abbey was shuttered once more. By the time Horace Walpole came to see it in 1763, he found it to be “very ruinous and bad.” Sold by Francis Duffield in 1777, its later caretakers charged a small admission price to picnickers and sightseers who came to see the cloisters and chapel where the monks had run riot and Satan had been invoked.

The Devil forces a pact upon those who have conjured him up. Guaccius,
Compendium Maleficarum.
**

ELIPHAS LÉVI

Although he was better known as a theoretician than an actual maker of magic, Eliphas Lévi did indeed conjure up one important soul and left a full record of the experience in one of his many books,
Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual.

In 1854, Lévi, a large man with a great forked beard, and much noted for his mastery of magic, was approached in London by a young woman, an adept who was dressed all in black. Claiming to be a friend of Sir Bulwer Lytton (the English author
who was himself a student of the occult), she asked Lévi if he could summon the spirit of Apollonius of Tyana, a pagan philosopher, and ask of it two questions. Lévi, a man who could no more resist a young woman than he could a lavish dinner, decided to abandon his books and take on the assignment; though there’s no record of it, the impoverished French magician might also have been tempted by a tidy commission.

Satan rebaptizing young sorcerers. From R. P. Guaccius’
Compendium Maleficarum,
Milan, 1626.
*

In any event, to prepare for the big night, Lévi put aside his usual appetities and practiced fasting and abstinence for twenty-one days. (He had arrived at twenty-one by multiplying 3 and 7, two numbers with powerful occult reputations.) What food he ate was strictly vegetarian, and for the last seven days before the ceremony he claims to have eaten nothing at all. All the while, he meditated deeply upon the life and writings of the ancient philosopher Apollonius, even going so far as to hold imaginary chats with him, in order to create a strong mental bond between the two of them.

Then, on July 24, Lévi outfitted himself in a white robe (to
signify the purity of his aims) and put a vervain wreath, entwined with gold, around his brow (vervain purportedly kept demons at bay); with a brand-new sword in one hand and a manuscript of the ritual in the other, he was ready at last to enter, alone, the magical “cabinet” which the mysterious woman had obligingly prepared for the ceremony.

This cabinet consisted of a single room, high in a turret; four concave mirrors were on the walls, a new white lambskin on the floor. The altar was made of white marble, and carved in its top was a pentagram; a copper chafing dish, filled with charred alder and laurel wood, was placed atop the altar, and another chafing dish was placed on a tripod to one side. Around it all was a magic circle, formed from a chain of magnetized iron, to ward off any hostile spirits.

With some trepidation, Lévi lit the two chafing dishes, in order to get a pall of smoke going, which the spirit of Apollonius could use to give itself some definition. For hours he recited, in low, sonorous tones, the necessary invocations to the dead: “In unity the demons chant the praises of God,” he intoned, “they lose their malice and fury . . . Cerberus opens his triple jaw, and fire chants the praises of God with the three tongues of the lightning . . . the soul revisits the tombs, the magical lamps are lighted.”

Gradually, as the smoke swirled in the air around him, Lévi thought he could discern a shape. He tossed more twigs into the chafing dishes and recited his prayers more loudly. In the mirror opposite, he saw a vague figure, approaching him as if from a great distance. He closed his eyes and summoned the spirit, three times, to appear before him. When he opened his eyes again, “there was a man in front of me, wrapped from head to foot in a species of shroud, which seemed more gray than white; he was lean, melancholy and beardless.”

Terrified at his own success, Lévi found himself almost unable to speak; he felt chilled to the bone and slapped one hand down on the pentagram to reassure himself. Then, making his first mistake, he tried to order the ghost to obey him by pointing the sword at it. The ghost, not pleased, promptly disappeared.

Lévi ordered it to come back, but instead he felt something touch the arm holding the sword; instantly, the arm went numb, from the elbow to the hand, and the point of the sword drifted downward. The figure then reappeared, and though it never spoke, answers to the two questions Lévi had planned to ask came to his mind. One answer was “death,” the other was “dead.” Weakened with fear, no doubt intensified by his weeks of fasting, Lévi apparently fell to the floor in a faint.

For days afterward, the arm remained sore. “Something of another world had passed into me,” Lévi wrote, “I was no longer either sad or cheerful, but I felt a singular attraction towards death, unaccompanied, however, by any suicidal tendency.” On two subsequent occasions, he claimed to have raised the spirit again, each time learning a great secret of the Cabbala. But he could never be certain exactly how, or why, the operation worked: “I do not explain the physical laws by which I saw and touched; I affirm solely that I did see and that I did touch, that I saw clearly and distinctly, apart from dreaming, and this is sufficient to establish the real efficacy of magical ceremonies.” He did add one caveat: “I commend the greatest caution to those who propose devoting themselves to similar experiences; their result is intense exhaustion, and frequently a shock sufficient to occasion illness.”

LA VOISIN

Although her married name was actually Catherine Monvoisin, to the nobles of the French court of Louis XIV, who flocked to her for poisons, love philters, and necromantic rites, she was simply known as La Voisin—the purveyor of magic and skilled practitioner of the Black Mass.

Her husband was an unsuccessful jeweler, and La Voisin first turned her hand to magic as a means of making ends meet. She began with the usual parlor tricks, reading palms and faces, telling fortunes with coffee grounds, and gazing into crystal balls. When that went well, she broadened her horizons, moving on
to such feats as the raising of specters and invocation of demons. In her Paris home, she kept a small, secret chapel, its walls hung with black drapes; the altar was covered with black cloth and a mattress, on top of which rested thick black candles. These candles were made from human fat, which La Voisin procured with the help of two hangmen. They brought her the bodies of the executed felons, and whatever she didn’t need of them was burned in the chapel furnace.

But her true calling became the manufacture of love potions and, even more pointedly, poisons. Men and women of rank, caught up in the eternal intrigues of the French court, came to her for elixirs, powders, and spells; what they wanted, in nearly every case, was to better their position or social standing, and if that meant getting someone to fall in love with them, fine; if it meant killing someone who stood in their way, that was fine, too. If they needed a baby to be born in secret, La Voisin would act as midwife; if they wanted an abortion, she could perform the operation. She was sorcerer and physician, apothecary and poisoner, and she grew quite rich as a result.

But her most loyal customer was the marquise de Montespan, a beautiful young woman who had come to the court as a lady-in-waiting to the queen. It wasn’t long before the marquise had caught the roving eye of the king, and not long after that, in 1667, she showed up on La Voisin’s doorstep, looking for a way to replace both the queen and the duchesse de La Vallière, the king’s current mistress, in the royal affections.

To get the job done. La Voisin brought in a priest, Father Mariette, who said a special Mass designed to get the marquise what she wanted; he prayed not only that the queen would be barren but that the king would lose all interest in the duchesse and fall madly in love with the marquise instead—to the point of asking her, in the end, to become his new queen. The ritual was repeated twice, the last time in a church where the hearts of two doves (a bird of amatory reputation, sacred to Venus and to Christ) were consecrated on the altar in the names of the king and the marquise. Whether it was due to the ceremony or not, things did begin to go her way, for by July of that year the
marquise de Montespan had become the king’s most prized mistress.