The exorcisms involved over 30 people praying incessantly over the victims for several hours. Although the others rid themselves of their evil spirits by vomiting, John gnashed his teeth and was ‘so miserably rent, that abundance of blood gushed out, both at his nose and mouth’.26 Even after the spirits had been cast out, they continued to menace their hosts, appearing ‘sometimes in the likeness of a bear with open mouth, sometimes of an ape, sometimes of a big black dog, sometimes of a black raven with a yellow bill’.27 However, on one crucial level the exorcism had restored order. Everyone involved now knew that the victims were caught up in a straightforward battle between good and evil – and that the source of the evil was Edmund Hartlay’s magic.
3. The Magic
This was a tragedy that grew out of the nature of magic and the nature of the hold it exerted over those involved in its practices. And at its heart was a circle ritual. It would be easy – particularly in view of John Dee’s reproof – to take the attitude that Edmund made a fatal mistake when he went beyond the use of the charms and herbs that might seem more appropriate – and far safer – for a folk-magic practitioner. But, as we have already seen, the Christian charms used by people like Edmund in fact constructed for them a persona resonant with spiritual power. Magic was a spiritual belief system, whether it involved Edmund mixing vervain and peony or John Dee constructing the Seal of God. The influential sixteenth-century magician Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa wrote: ‘The very original, and chief worker of all [i.e. God] doth by angels, the heavens, stars, elements, animals, plants, metals, and stones convey from himself the virtues of his omnipotency upon us.’28
Emma Wilby, in her groundbreaking book Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,29 has demonstrated that the animal-shaped spirits of the witch trial records in many cases represent powerful visionary experiences that were a crucial part of folk magic. The spirit encounters of village and small-town magical practitioners could be every bit as complex and varied as – and often remarkably similar to – those that resulted from the experiments of an educated magician like John Dee. At the heart of John Dee’s magic was The Sworn Book. His copy still exists – manuscript Sloane 313 in the British Library. The Sworn Book was written in the early thirteenth century by the magician Honorius ‘in collaboration with an angel called Hocrohel’30 and claimed to be the ultimate summary of the art of magic. It was a product of the Medieval Renaissance, when contact with the Arab world led to an extraordinary upheaval in the way many thinkers viewed the universe – a conviction that the universe was a complex and mysterious puzzle crying out to be engaged with, explored and investigated.
Europe’s first scientists such as Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon were inspired to study phenomena such as light and magnetism using the combination of observation, reasoning and experiments that would become the ‘experimental method’ of modern science.31 But science had a rival, sister discipline, equally passionate about engaging with the universe in the same spirit of individualistic scrutiny, but with a different emphasis: the discipline that The Sworn Book calls ‘the science of wisdom’ – magic.32 Magic sought to explore the creative spiritual forces that lay behind the natural world – and not through deliberately distanced observation, but through establishing a relationship with them. It relied upon the human mind’s capacity for engaging with reality through poetic metaphor – making it both a philosophy and a psychological phenomenon. The Sworn Book gives detailed instructions for circle rituals to invoke the help of spirits and describes the various spirits and their areas of expertise – accounts that are often eerie and disturbing:
They have antlers like deer, claws like griffins. They bellow like mad bulls. […]
Their bodies are […] huge and terrifying […] with talons in the manner of dragons, and their heads have five faces; one is of a toad, another of a lion, the third of a serpent, the fourth of a dead man lamenting and grieving, the fifth of a man beyond comprehension.33
The spirits who appeared to John Dee’s scryer, Edward Kelley, usually took human form, but not always:
Now he is become like a great wheel of fire. […] He thrust out his hands on the sudden, and so became like a wheel full of men’s eyes. […] Now there is a great eagle, which is come, and standeth upon it. […] She hath two monstrous eyes: one like fire red; her right eye as big as my fist, and the left eye, is crystal like.34
As one of the spirits, Galvah, herself explained, ‘Angels […] neither are man nor woman. […] I am a beam of that wisdom which is the end of man’s excellency.’35 Significantly, The Lenkiewicz Manuscript includes incantations for making exactly this kind of contact with spirits among its love spells and descriptions of magic stones:
I bind thee thou sprite N [name], by these three words + tetragrammaton + anatemate + anatematevethe + and by all that belongeth to these three words.