Raising Hell Read Free

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