An English Faust

I’m completely beguiled by witchcraft and magic, by the search for deeper, sometimes darker, forms of knowledge and understanding. I’ve read deeply into lots of sources, including the infamous Malleus Maleficarum – the Hammer of the Witches, a medieval treatise based on misconception and misunderstanding, but one that was to have dire consequences for so many people, particularly women. I’m captivated also by the Faust legend, another dangerous quest.

There is an odd ambiguity in the medieval and early modern understanding of witchcraft and magic. Witchcraft was disapproved of as malevolent magic, though magic, in the form of alchemy, was a reasonably respectable if occasionally risky occupation. It would have been lethal for a woman to set herself up as an alchemist or a magus, for the simple reason that accusations of witchcraft and demonology would quickly follow. Men were on slightly more certain territory, though they, too, were in danger of slipping over boundaries. It was all a matter, you see, of perception…and politics!

Dr Faustus is the stuff of legend; but Dr John Dee is the stuff of English history. His is a fascinating story, one that embraces science and magic, high politics and low comedy. It’s a story long waiting to be told in full. Now it has, admirably, by Glynn Parry in The Arch-Conjurer of England: John Dee.

Conventionally Dee was a scientist living in Tudor England, a man with a brilliant scholarly mind who set off in pursuit of some rather dubious notions. He really stands on the cusp of a great change, a time when superstition, giving way to reason, was still fighting a determined rearguard action. In a profession like his one really needed powerful protectors to avoid accusations of black magic, and as Glynn shows, Dee’s protectors included some of the most powerful in Elizabethan England. His patrons went as high as the Queen herself, taking along William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, her chief minister, and Francis Walsingham, her spy master, on the way.

Dee claimed to be able to foretell the future, a skill particularly desired by those in power. He also had a practical political use as a kind of counter-magus! In 1558 when Elizabeth came to the throne in succession to her Catholic sister, Mary, there were many dangers for the nascent Protestant queen. In France Nostradamus, the court magician of Catherine de Medici, predicted all sorts of dire things for England. Dee was hired to give a different spin and cast a better horoscope!

Dee was clearly a reasonably astute politician himself, at least on occasion. His best ‘prophecies’, in other words, were tailored to support policy drifts, which included casting positive auspices on Robert Dudley’s campaign in support of the Dutch revolt against the Spanish, and Cecil’s campaign against the perceived Catholic threat. This was wizardry as a handmaiden to statecraft!

Alas, poor Doctor Dee, astute but not astute enough. He slipped and slipped badly - he made one political contact, one magical contact and one prediction too far. The political contact was a disreputable Polish nobleman by the name of Albrecht Laski. Believing that this man was favoured by the Queen, Dee then hired one Edmund Kelley, a ‘scryer’ who claimed to be able to talk to angels, to back up his prophecy that Laski would be king of Poland. Here Dee took his eye off the political ball; for the player to watch was not Elizabeth but Burleigh, who had no intention of advancing the Catholic Laski’s political ambitions. Down came the house, magic and all.

Now on Continental exile, Dee’s story slips from Faustian tragedy to Rabelaisian comedy. The fraudulent Kelley persuaded him that the only way for him to retain his magical powers was for the two to indulge in a spot of wife swapping. Dee agreed, sufficient proof, if any is needed, that even the most sophisticated minds are not free from risible forms of folly.

Parry has done splendid work in placing Dee, the man, the myth and the magic, in the wider stage of Elizabethan court politics. It explains why his little vessel was subject to such vagaries, moved along in one direction or another by changes in the wind. He also proves one thing that I’ve long believed – that innocence often goes hand in hind with scholarly curiosity, and, goodness, what an innocent Dee was.

There was one nugget of information which I fount wholly delightful. It was Dee who coined the term ‘British Empire’, though with all of his other prophecies this showed no great prescience on his part. His British Empire grew from the spurious contention that King Arthur, no less, had once planted colonies in the Americas. I can just see it - an Elizabethan Englishman in the Colonial Court of King Arthur!

Parry has brought our home-grown Faust out of the shadows. His scholarly efforts are commendable, and weighty. I could only wish that he had carried them a tad more lightly; the long passages from Dee’s own writings are crushingly dull. Still, if you are interested in the occult and the place of prediction in politics, if you are interested in the highs and the lows of an Elizabethan life, then I think you will enjoy this book. I did.

Baphomet and the Templars

During the Great Purge in Russia in the 1930s NKVD, the Russian secret police, recreated Leon Trotsky as a great Satan at the head of fascist-rightist conspiracy to kill Stalin and his party comrades and thus bring down the Soviet Union. Having conjured up this unlikely demon they then forced those destined to be processed in the public show trails to admit that it was all true. No evidence was required, just beatings and all the subtle tortures, psychological and otherwise, in which they specialised.

There are historical precedents that they might have drawn on for their modern demonology. In the early fourteenth century, on the urging of King Philip IV of France, the Knights Templar, a Crusading order, was suppressed on an accusation of heresy. Philip wanted to get his hands on the order's wealth but simple dissolution was not enough, no, the knights had to stand accused of the most elaborate of crimes. And one of the crimes they stood accused of was worshiping an idol by the name of Baphomet.

There are no independent accounts of the existence of this devil-like creature beyond the records of the Templar interrogations and an earlier twelfth century poem. Twelve of over two hundred knights examined admitted to his existence. It's as well to remember that the confessions, like those obtained in Russia by the NKVD, were the result of systematic torture. Baphomet, in other words, may very well just have been the invention of a particularly imaginative Inquisitor, whose existence was confirmed by those anxious to avoid any further pain. The thing is we just can't be sure. After all, the elaborate schemes woven around the head of Trotsky in Russia did not take away from the fact that he was indeed an enemy of Stalin, constantly critical of contemporary Soviet policy.

But who, or what, is Baphomet, and why was Satan not sufficient, a figure who appeared repeatedly in the trials of alleged witches? The records are confused and contradictory. He was worshipped in the form of a head, either as a skull, a head with a beard, or a head with two or three faces. He was a black cat, an obvious witchcraft familiar. He had a goat's head and horns and a body combining the features of a dog, a donkey and a bull.

It would seem to be an amalgam of Pagan deities and Christian monsters. The name itself would seem to suggest Mahomet, an archaic and corrupt spelling of the name of the Prophet Muhammad. After all the Templars had close dealings through history -and not always hostile - with the Muslim communities of the Middle East. But if it is it is based on the deepest ignorance; for Muslims abhorred idolatry, and there is nothing in Islamic tradition that resembled anything like the forms of worship of which the Templars were accused. Those who take the view that Baphomet represents an attempt to syncretise Islam and Christianity simply ignore the fact that the Templars were never accused of dabbling in Islam in any form. No, they were, like witches, Christian heretics.

So, while it seems unlikely, the possibility remains that the Templars were engaged in the worship of some form of the horned god, either in the form of the Christian devil or in an older pre-Christian guise, and here Pan comes to mind. Personally I see this as a crude device by long-dead interrogators, but even so Baphomet has had a long afterlife.

In 1854 Eliphas Levi, a French occultist, published Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Dogmas and Rituals of High Magic) in which an image of Baphomet appeared, drawn by himself. It was clearly an imaginative effort, because it bears little resemblance to the Templar testimony. It's an odd kind of amalgam, one whose sex is even indeterminate. Although he makes no such admission himself, Levi may have drawn on the grotesques depicted in the Templar churches of Lanleff in Brittany and Saint Merri in Paris, which show a bearded man with bat wings, female breasts, horns and goat-like hindquarters. Levi explained the significance of the figure, which appears on the front cover of his book, thus;

The goat on the frontispiece carries the sign of the pentagram on the forehead, with one point at the top, a symbol of light, his two hands forming the sign of hermetism, the one pointing up to the white moon of Chesed, the other pointing down to the black one of Geburah. This sign expresses the perfect harmony of mercy with justice. His one arm is female, the other male like the ones of the androgyn of Khunrath, the attributes of which we had to unite with those of our goat because he is one and the same symbol. The flame of intelligence shining between his horns is the magic light of the universal balance, the image of the soul elevated above matter, as the flame, whilst being tied to matter, shines above it. The beast's head expresses the horror of the sinner, whose materially acting, solely responsible part has to bear the punishment exclusively; because the soul is insensitive according to its nature and can only suffer when it materializes. The rod standing instead of genitals symbolizes eternal life, the body covered with scales the water, the semi-circle above it the atmosphere, the feathers following above the volatile. Humanity is represented by the two breasts and the androgyn arms of this sphinx of the occult sciences.

He was to call his creation the Goat of Mendes, another derivative, drawing on Herodotus’ description of the ram-deity worshipped in the Egyptian town of Dejedet. And by this route Baphomet made it into modern occult practices, a central figure in the cosmology of Thelema, devised by Aleister Crowley, a great magus or a great fraud, I leave it to you to choose which. Nosce te Ipsum :-)

Hitler and the Occult

It maddens me when I see references, in both fiction and fact, to Adolf Hitler's supposed interest in occult forces. He did not have an astrologer, as some have alleged.. In fact he was altogether contemptuous of the practice, and astrologers were among one of the many groups persecuted during the Third Reich.

There were, however, some among the leadership prepared to take the practice seriously, either for political ends or out of simple superstition. Heinrich Himmler and Rudolf Hess were most notable amongst the latter. The man who came closest to being the 'court' astrologer was Karl Ernst Krafft, who was arrested in May 1941 following Hess's flight to Scotland, when Hitler, in his fury, ordered a fresh purge of occultists and astrologers of all kinds. Goebbels joked at this time that it was odd that not one amongst the group was able to predict what was about to happen to them!