Raising Hell Read Free Page A

“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 theelusive 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