Raising Hell (2 page)

THE SACRED CIRCLE

The circle has always held great meaning for magicians and mystics, philosophers and priests, alchemists and astrologers. The simple act of drawing a circle around something or someone was often considered a means of protecting it from outside forces of evil. If someone fell ill in ancient Babylon, a circle was drawn around the sickbed to defend the patient from the demons who were presumably preying upon him; in medieval Germany, Jews did the same when a woman was giving birth, just to make sure no mischievous spirits got into the act. When Roman emissaries were sent to deliver news (or ultimatums) to foreign rulers, they drew a circle around themselves with the base of their staff to symbolize that they should be immune from retribution. Even prehistoric societies revered the circle, as the circular stone monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury attest.

Why? What gives the circle such a powerful reputation? In part, it is the figure’s simplicity; the circle is, at once, capable of circumscribing anything and everything, and at the same time it contains nothing. At its center it is a hole. Over time, and in many disparate cultures, the circle has become a symbol of the unity, the oneness, of all things, a single line that seemingly has no beginning and no end, a figure that can suggest everything from the eternal to the idea of perfection.

Alchemists used a symbol they called the
ourobouros.
A circle formed by the image of a dragon or a serpent swallowing its own tail, this mystical symbol sometimes carried the Greek phrase
En to Pan,
or “All is One.” Using the kind of numerology at which alchemists were so skilled, they counted the three words in the Greek phrase, the seven letters of which the words were comprised, and then added them together to get 10—a
number that itself was thought to mean “all things.” Not only does 10 mark the completion of the primary numbers, it is also made up of a 1 and a 0; add a 1 and a 0 and what you get, again, is a 1. Many a learned treatise was written to elaborate on all this.

Magicians used the circle for a couple of different reasons. On the one hand, by drawing a circle and remaining inside it, the magician thought it would be easier to marshal and concentrate his powers. The circle would keep the unseen energies from running off every which way. But more important, the circle would also provide a protective barrier against the infernal forces his incantations might summon up. The demons outside could gibber and rail, but as long as the magician—and in some cases his assistant—stayed inside the magic circle, all dangers could be kept at bay.

If, that is, the circle had been done right.

Though the recipe differed in many details, the general instruction remained fairly consistent. The circle was drawn on the floor or in the dirt (a wooded glen was often a good choice of locale) with the tip of a sword, a knife, a staff. Sometimes charcoal or chalk was used. A French grimoire from the 1700s suggested the circle should be fashioned from strips of skin, cut from a young goat, and secured to the floor with four nails pulled from the coffin of a dead infant.

It was also important when drawing the circle to do so in the appropriate direction. If it was drawn in a clockwise manner, or deasil, it was designed to perform feats of white, or good, magic. If it was drawn counterclockwise, its purpose was malign. Going to the left in this way was called widdershins, a word derived from an Anglo-Saxon phrase that meant “to walk against.” The sun went from east to west, from right to left, and anything that went in the opposite direction was thought to be moving against nature and, consequently, against the powers of good.

As to size, nine feet was generally considered the proper diameter of the outer circle, with another, smaller circle—eight feet in diameter—drawn inside it. In that narrow space between
the rims of the two circles, the magician placed various holy objects and talismans that were thought to ward off evil forces. He might put crosses there, a bowl of pure sanctified water, and plants like vervain (which demons supposedly hated). But most important of all, he had to make sure the circle was completely closed. Any little gap, and an enterprising creature could weasel its way in, possess his immortal soul, and cart it off to the infernal regions.

The magician himself had so much to do it’s a miracle he could ever remember it all. Among other things, there was a host of sartorial requirements. The standard garb, or pontificalibus as it was called, included a long robe made of black bombazine, to which two drawings on virgin parchment were attached, depicting the two seals of the earth. Under this outer robe, a ceremonial apronlike vestment known as an ephod was worn; the ephod, which was held up by two shoulder straps, was made of fine, white linen. Around his waist the magician wore a wide, consecrated girdle inscribed with magical words; on his feet, shoes decorated with crosses; on his head, a sable silk hat with a high crown. In his hands, the sorcerer held a wand and a Bible, either written or printed in the original Hebrew. So accoutred and equipped, he was ready to start his incantations.

Standing safely inside the inner of the two magic circles, and within the smaller triangle that was often demarcated inside of that, the magus was as protected as he could be from the demonic forces he was about to unleash. Which was just as well, since their return was heralded by the most dreadful and harrowing sounds—shrieks and growls, anguished cries, and angry barking. Long before they could be seen, the spirits and demons ranted and raved at the perimeter of the circle, trying to scare the daylights out of the magician and persuade him to abandon his nefarious scheme.

If that didn’t work, they took on visible shapes, also designed to intimidate and terrify. They appeared as lions and tigers, belching flame, snarling and snapping and clawing. If the magician faltered in his resolve, if—God forbid—he picked up his robes and tried to make a run for it, he’d be ripped to pieces
the moment he left the confines of the circle. But if he was stalwart, if he held on to his Bible and his wits, and continued uninterrupted to repeat the necessary conjurations, the demons would eventually be drawn close to both the outer circle and the innermost triangle and settle down; they would shed their beastly shapes and reconfigure themselves as naked men of a peaceful demeanor.

At this point, the magician could relax a little, but not a lot. For although the spirits had taken on a gentle appearance and were for the moment behaving themselves, they were still an antagonistic force, lying in wait for their first opportunity to sow doubt or fear in the mind of the sorcerer or trick him into doing something stupid. His best bet was to make his demands of them, or ask for the information he sought, as quickly as possible, while his strength and senses were intact.

As soon as that was done, as soon as he’d gotten what he was after, he could begin the rituals prescribed for dismissing the spirits. As these rites were performed, the spirits would regress, going backward through all the same stages and transformations that had announced their coming, until they vanished in a sulfurous cloud.

Then, and only then, could the magician safely poke his toe outside the confines of the sacred circle.

According to a celebrated account from eighteenth-century England, an Egyptian fortune-teller named Chiancungi made a fatal mistake. On a bet, he accepted the challenge of summoning up a spirit named Bokim. He drew the magic circle and installed himself and his sister Napula inside it. Then he went through all the necessary steps and recitations—to no apparent avail. Nothing showed up. He tried to conjure the spirit, over and over again, until he gave up in disgust and stepped outside the magic bounds. The moment he did, he and his sister were set upon and crushed to death by the invisible spirit, which had been silently lying in wait for them the whole time.

PENTAGRAM AND HEXAGRAM

In addition to the magic circle, there was another sacred shape that provided the magician with a powerful measure of protection—and that was the pentagram. A five-pointed star, the pentagram was to be drawn around the rim of the larger circle and again just inside it. Demons, it was thought, had an inborn fear and loathing of the pentagram.

Why? With demons, it’s never easy to say why they felt or behaved the way they did. But according to some early theologians, the five points of the pentagram stood for many things that demons, unnatural creatures that they were, felt a quite natural aversion to—the living, breathing world of nature, for one. The five points could be thought to represent the four elements of which the world was believed to be composed—earth, air, water, and fire—plus the quintessence of them all. Or the four points of the compass and its center. Or the five wounds inflicted on the body of Christ. Or—and this was considered very significant—man himself. With arms and legs extended, a human being could be viewed as a five-pointed star (the head being the fifth point), and man was often said to be the embodiment, the microcosm, of all of nature. And what could be more repulsive than that to a creature of the dark, bent on destroying order and goodness at every opportunity?

If, however, a magician wished to issue a clarion call to the forces of evil, the pentagram was good for that, too. All that he had to do was turn it upside down, so that its two lower points were now on top, symbolizing the reversal of the natural order and pointing upward like the Devil’s horns: “It is the goat of lust,” the magician Eliphas Lévi wrote, “attacking the heavens with its horns.” This particular configuration was also known as the Goat of Mendes, because the inverted star roughly resembled the shape of a goat’s head. When used for such black and nefarious purposes, the pentagram was sometimes called the footprint of the Devil or the sign of the cloven hoof.

In the manuals of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a nineteenth-century mystical order, the overturned pentagram was recommended whenever “there may arise an absolute necessity for working or conversing with a Spirit of an evil nature.” Even so, it was a good idea to write inside the pentagrams the names of power—the ancient Hebrew Tetragrammaton, for example, and other such names as Hallya, Ballater, Soluzen, Bellony, and Hally—so that once the devils did appear, they didn’t get out of hand.

In
The Tree of Life,
Dr. Israel Regardie, who wrote four volumes on magic and the Golden Dawn between 1937 and 1940, went so far as to suggest that the actual physical laying out of the pentagram was a waste of time and chalk. If the sorcerer had sufficient powers of imagination (and if he didn’t, why was he mucking around with sorcery at all?), he could simply imagine his protective pentagram “on the Astral Plane in glowing figures of fire, so that through the streaming lines of light and power, representative of the spiritual being, no lesser entity of any kind dare make its way. . . . The blazing five-pointed star is like the flaming sword which debarred Adam from the Edenic paradise.”

To go that extra mile, a magician might also construct—on this plane or the astral one—a hexagram. Created by laying one triangle upside down on top of another, this six-pointed star was also known as the Seal of Solomon. Solomon himself, the king of Israel, was said to have worn a ring with the seal on it, and engraved with the real name of God, which gave him the power to control and corral the spirit world. Using the ring, he was able to get the demons to help build his temple for him. Furthermore, the ring allowed him to travel, each day at noon, up into the Firmament, where he could listen in on the secrets of the universe. (Legend has it that the Devil was able one day to persuade Solomon to take the ring off his finger; the moment he did, the Devil assumed his shape, and Solomon had to wander in distant lands for three years until he could get his throne back.) For alchemists, the two triangles of the hexagram symbolized fire (an upward-pointing triangle) and water (a downward-pointing triangle), making the figure as a whole the ideal sign for the
elusive philosophers’ stone, thought to be an amalgam of the two elements.

THE GREAT GRIMOIRES

Any sorcerer worth his salt had a grimoire, or book of black magic, on which he relied for all the necessary instruction and advice. Raising spirits was a devilishly difficult and dangerous task: first, you had to conjure them up, then you had to keep control of them long enough to get them to do your bidding, and finally you had to make sure you got rid of them safely and soundly and that you managed to hang on to your own soul throughout the whole process.

None of this was easy.

The great grimoires (which meant, literally, “grammars") were weighty and seemingly impenetrable books, often written in ancient tongues, filled with confusing and arcane lore, meant by their very obscurity to fend off dilettantes and amateurs and reward the wizard willing to put in the required time and effort. If you could get through the grimoire itself, you were halfway to meeting a demon.

Two of the most venerable of these books were known as the
Key of Solomon,
or
Greater Key,
and the
Lesser Key of Solomon
(also called
The Lemegeton
)
.
Some believed that these Keys were written by King Solomon himself; others believed they were written by devils and entrusted to the king. They came to be called Keys after the lines in Matthew 16:19, in which Jesus says to Peter, “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” These books, it was thought, held the power to unlock occult powers and wisdom.

The ruler of Israel in the tenth century
B.C.,
Solomon was widely regarded as a master magician, one who could control the spirits and get them to do whatever he desired. It was even said that he had marshaled their forces to help in the building
of the Temple in Jerusalem. In the
Greater Key,
he set out all the necessary steps for summoning a spirit and keeping hold of the reins, as it were, once you had. The book also included the fasting and purification rituals to which the magician must submit himself before trying any such conjuration, along with practical advice on what to wear, what equipment to use, how to go about drawing the magic circle, etc.