CHAPTER V
SOME FAMOUS SORCERERS AND MAGICIANS
Amidst a great multiplicity of commentaries and studies on the work of Dante, no one, that we are aware, has signalised its characteristic in chief. The masterpiece of the glorious Ghibelline is a declaration of war against the papacy by a daring revelation of mysteries. The epic of Dante is Johannite and Gnostic; it is a bold application of Kabalistic figures and numbers to Christian dogmas, and is further a secret negation of the absolute element therein; his visit to the supernatural worlds takes place like an initiation into the Mysteries of Eleusis and Thebes. He is guided and protected by Virgil amidst the circles of the new Tartarus, as if the tender and melancholy prophet of the destinies of the son of Pollio were, in the eyes of the Florentine poet, the illegitimate yet true father of the Christian epic. Thanks to the pagan genius of Virgil, Dante emerges from that gulf above the door of which he had read the sentence of despair; he escapes by standing on his head, which means by reversing dogma. So does he ascend to the light, using the demon himself, like a monstrous ladder; by the force of terror he emerges from terror, from the horrible by the power of horror. He seems to testify that hell is without egress for those only who cannot go back on themselves; he takes the devil against the grain, if I may use so familiar an expression, and attains emancipation by audacity.[258] This is truly protestantism surpassed, and the poet of Rome’s enemies has already divined Faust ascending to heaven on the head of the defeated Mephistopheles. Observe also that the hell of Dante is but a negative purgatory, by which is meant that his purgatory seems to take form in his hell, as if in a mould; it is like the lid or stopper of the gulf, and it will be understood that the Florentine titan in scaling Paradise meant to kick purgatory into hell.[259]
His heaven is composed of a series of Kabalistic circles divided by a cross, like the pantacle of Ezekiel; in the centre of this cross a rose blossoms, thus for the first time manifesting publicly and almost explaining categorically the symbol of the Rosicrucians. We say for the first time because William of Lorris, who died in 1260, five years before the birth of Dante, did not complete the Romance of the Rose, his mantle falling upon Clopinel some fifty years later. It will be discovered with a certain astonishment that the Romance of the Rose and the Divine Comedy are two opposite forms of a single work—initiation by independence of spirit, satire on all contemporary institutions and an allegorical formula of the grand secrets of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross.
These important manifestations of occultism coincide with the fall of the Templars, since Jean de Meung, or Clopinel, a contemporary of Dante in the old age of the latter, flourished during his best years at the court of Philip the Fair. The Romance of the Rose is the epic of old France, a profound work in a trivial form, a revelation of occult mysteries as instructed as that of Apuleius. The roses of Flamel, Jean de Meung and Dante belong to the same bush.
A genius like Dante could not be an arch-heretic. Great men give an impetus to intelligence, and the impetus takes effect subsequently in activities which are started by restless mediocrities. It may have been that Dante was never read and he would assuredly not have been understood by Luther. This notwithstanding, the mission of the Ghibellines, made fruitful by the potent thought of the poet, raised up the empire against the papacy by slow degrees; it was continued from century to century under various names, and in the end it made Germany protestant. It was certainly not Luther who produced the Reformation; it was the latter which took possession of Luther and impelled him forward. This square-shouldered monk could boast only obstinacy and daring, but he was the needful instrument for revolutionary ideas. Luther was the Danton of anarchic theology; superstitious and rash, he believed that he was obsessed by the devil; it was the devil who dictated his arguments against the Church, made him declaim, spout nonsense, and above all things write. The inspiring genius of all the Cains asked nothing at that time but ink, preassured that, given this fluid flowing from the pen of Luther, there would be presently a sea of blood. Luther was conscious of the fact, and he hated the devil because he was another master; one day he threw the ink-horn at his head, as if to satiate him by the violent libation. The episode recalls that jocular regicide who daubed his accomplices with ink when he signed the death-warrant of Charles I.
The device of Luther was: “Turk rather than papist;” and as a fact protestantism at its root is, like Islamism, simple Deism organised into a conventional cultus, or if it differs therefrom it is only by its remnants of catholicism imperfectly effaced. From the standpoint of the negation of catholic dogma, the protestants are Moslems with a few superstitions the more and a prophet the less.
Men renounce God less unwillingly than they give up the devil, as the apostates of all times have proved abundantly. Speedily subdivided by anarchy, the disciples of Luther had but one bond of belief in common; all had faith in Satan, and this spectre, magnifying in proportion as their spirit of revolt took them the farther from God, reached terrible proportions at last. Carlostad, archdeacon of Würtemberg, being one day in the pulpit, saw a black man enter the temple, take a seat in front of him and stare at him with dreadful fixity through the entire length of his sermon. He became anxious, left the pulpit and questioned the assistants; but no one had seen the phantom. Carlostad returned home in a state of dismay; he was met by the youngest of his sons, who said that a stranger in black had inquired for him and promised to return in three days. There was no room for doubt in the mind of the hallucinated archdeacon; that stranger was the spectre of his vision. A fever was brought on by his terror, he retired to bed and died before the third day.
These unhappy heretics were afraid of their own shadows; their consciences had remained catholic and consigned them to hell without pity. Walking one evening with his wife Catherine de Bora, Luther looked up to heaven, which was bright with stars, and said in an undertone, as he sighed deeply: “Ah, beautiful sky, which I shall never see!” “What!” exclaimed his wife. “Do you then think that you are condemned?” Luther answered: “Who knows whether God will not punish us for having been unfaithful to our vows?” Supposing that Catherine, seeing his lack of self-confidence, had cursed and left him, it may be that the reformer, overcome by the Divine Warning, would have recognised his criminal offence in betraying that Church which was his first spouse and would have turned weeping towards the cloister which he had left wilfully. But God, Who withstands the proud, doubtless found him unworthy of this saving affliction. The sacrilegious comedy of Luther’s marriage was the providential punishment of his pride, and as he remained obstinate in his sin, that punishment was always with him and derided him to the end. He died between the devil and his wife, appalled at the one and exceedingly embarrassed by the other.
Corruption and superstition are well paired together. The epoch of the dissolute Renaissance, equally persecuting and credulous, was certainly not that of the second birth of reason. Catherine de Médicis was a sorceress, Charles IX consulted necromancers, Henry III played at devotion and debauch. It was the heyday then of astrologers, though a few of them were tortured from time to time, to make them change their predictions. There were, moreover, the court sorcerers, who dabbled a little in poisoning and deserved the hangman’s rope. Trois-Échelles, the magician of Charles IX, was a juggler and rogue; one day he made confession to the King and his misdeeds were not peccadillos; the King forgave him, but promised his cure on the gallows if he had a relapse; he did relapse, and was hanged in due course.[260]
When the League vowed the death of the weakly and miserable Henri III it had recourse to witchcraft and Black Magic. L’Étoile[261] declares that a wax image of the King was set on the altars where priests of the League said Mass, and that the image was stabbed with a knife during a prayer embodying maledictions and anathemas. When the King failed to die with sufficient celerity, it was concluded that he was also a sorcerer. Pamphlets were published representing Henri III as holding conventions where the crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah were but the prelude of more frightful and unheard of outrages. Included among the King’s minions there was said to be one who was the devil in person, and young virgins were abducted and prostituted by force to Beelzebub.[262] The people believed these fables, and a fanatic was found at last to execute the threats of sorcery. Jacques Clément suffered from visions and imperious voices, which commanded him to kill the King; he sought regicide like a martyr and died laughing like the heroes of Scandinavian mythology. Scandal-mongering chronicles have pretended that a great lady of the court supplemented the inspirations of the monk’s solitude by the magnetism of her caresses; but the anecdote is wanting in probability. It was the monk’s continence which promoted his exaltation, and had he begun to lead the blind life of passion an unsatiable appetite for pleasure would have possessed his entire nature and he would not have been willing to die.