The First Necromancer - How a Medieval Sorcerer Combined Astrology & Black Magic

the world of medieval sorcery remains veiled in a thick cloud of mystery why should be rather obvious the practice of magic was violently persecuted and those found guilty of it could be and were burned alive yet despite this official status of being a condemned art necessarily in League with diabolical forces glimpses onto medieval magical practice do survive and they do provide us a small glimpse a window onto the world of medieval necromancy what we find is a confusing bewildering array of magical Traditions Jewish magic for summoning Angels through the incense smoke a top a decorative altar Arabic astral magic likely surviving from the times of pre-islamic Arabic paganism systems of demonic conjurations for the binding and control of demons attributed to King Solomon the Hermetic art of using astrology to create talisman and to Infuse images with Stellar influence along with several other variant magical strands however one brief text surviving in a single manuscript and originating in the 14th century stands out for a few reasons the first is that we know its author by name and moreover it is a fascinating attempt to systematize many of these variants of magical strands into a unified theory of Astral necromantic magic Antonio de monos de ultis at manifestes the book of hidden and revealed things is a fascinating snapshot into the theory and working practice of medieval magic specifically the conjuration of demonic astral spirits and how astrological demonic and hermetic forms of magic came to be systematized in the later 14th century now if you're interested in Magic her philosophy Alchemy cabala or the history of the occult make sure to subscribe here to esoterica and check out my curated content on those topics in esoterism also if you want to support my work by providing accessible scholarly and free content on topics and esotericism here on YouTube I'd hope you consider supporting this work on patreon with a one-time donation via Paypal with the super thanks options you can find below the video or by picking up some of our cool merch on the uh Channel store but now let's explore the very lucky the incredibly lucky survival of an authentic text of medieval astral and demonic magic Antonio Danto day ultis at manifestes I'm Dr Justin Sledge and welcome to esoterica where we explore the Arcane in history philosophy and relig [Music] [Music] religion on September 26 1327 the Italian poet encyclopedist and astrologer czecho was burned alive convicted of practicing criminal necromancy of course cheo's execution probably had as much to do with his pensent for collecting enemies at court like it was a hobby or something his pathological narcissism Remains the most tangible aspect of his personality when you study him however beneath his lack of social accum did Lay the reality that he did on several occasions publicly lecture on the secrets of of Astral necromancy now I have already made an entire episode just about czecho dooli if you want to deeper dive into this fascinating and strange medieval character you can check out that link in the card above but how czecho did this is worth exploring in order to set the stage for the more radical in fact text day ultis at manifestes rather than publicly lecture on how to perform necromancy which would have been just straightforwardly foolish in the 14th century especially considering the very much Pro Inquisition very much anti-magic Pope John the 22nd was running the show in Italy at that time or throughout wall of Latin Christendom czecho embeds or hides his discussion of demonic sorcery as part of his commentary on the 13th century cosmological textbook desar Mundi of John of sacrobosco what he does is employ a classical rhetorical trick the non proo quaro I'm not approving of any of this I'm just telling you what the book says or I'm just telling you about it this has long been used when lecturing on heterodox positions of pagan philosophers like like Aristotle thus a lecturer could be like uh look I'm not saying the universe is eternal or anything that's uh that's clearly manifest heresy but here is why the great genius Aristotle who we kind of agree about everything else thought that it was wink wink nudge nudge I'm the radical avarest Seager of Brant please don't Exile me well it didn't work he got exiled but he uh he did uh end up in Dante's Paradise so you know he who laughs last and all that well czecho kind of did the same move with astral necromancy in his lectures and commentary on desera Mundi now the commentary still survives although it hasn't yet been translated into English you can find a good copy of it in Latin but what czecho fors is a theoretical combination theoretical combination of astrology and solomonic demonic conjuration that could be wielded by your sorcerer for any number of ends wink wink nudge nudge please don't burn me alive well they did however his commentary on desah somehow survived and undaunted and a generation or so later Antonio de monmo would kind of pick up where chuo left off and actually pushed the envelope much much further and he probably managed not to get burned alive so good job Tony we know very little about Antonio's life he was born apparently at monomo South of cona Italy on the Adriatic Coast he obtained a doctorate in arts and philosophy and medicine and he worked as a professor of grammar at the University of bolognia by around 1360 bolognia being the oldest continually functioning European University in 1384 he obtained the chair of astrology which had been previously occupied by czecho dusi yes about a generation after the fact he's holding the same position of czecho I'm toast thanks necrom mancy doolie so let's just appreciate that this guy was like well the previous guy got burned alive for this so I'm going to I'm going to double down on it I'm going to do it even more radically it's that kind of completely insane bravery that we're impressed by around here he later appeared as professor of philosophy and medicine at the University of Padua in 1393 the following year he completed a textbook on how to cast horoscopes in which actually included the horoscope of Emperor Charles IV that text by the way somewhat expanded by Regio montos would actually become the only text printed coming to be known as de yudik is Navi Tatum Liber prlar mimus in 1540 or so from the scant references to Antonio during his lifetime and shortly afterwards he seems to have been basically universally praised by his contemporaries and his inheritors and there's no evidence whatsoever shockingly that he was ever persecuted for his magical compositions perhaps he didn't lecture on them publicly after repeatedly being told not to do that and then make a ton of enemies at court on account of his complete narcissism you know you learn from the past sometimes however along with his popular textbook on casting horoscopes what actually concerns Us in this episode is a work on astral necromancy and to a lesser degree his shorter work on hermetic image magic so just a brief word on what I mean by astral necromancy this is a very strange combination of terms by the Middle Ages the term necromancy was no longer associated with the strict sense of the term which is communing with the dead to learn the future the way that it was used back in Roman and greo Roman times rather this was now a catchall term for Conjuring binding and interacting with demonic being beings so why astral necromancy well that has to do with where medieval Scholars thought demons live unlike later Protestant conceptions and I think popular conceptions now that primarily locate demons in Hell medieval theologians typically had them located in the Airy regions beneath the moon but above the Earth again we're thinking about this in in terms of geocentrism folks but this all lines up both with the Arista tilian cosmology which was the cosmology of the day along with a couple sections of scripture where for instance at Ephesians 2:2 Satan is actually referred to as the ruler of the kingdom of the air but to add another important layer to all this because those demons dwell in the upper regions they are both sorted by and they are bassed in the astral Rays flowing down from the planets and the Stars well planets were thought of as stars at that time just weird wandering ing stars but thus astral necromancy is going to be consolidating knowledge of astrological timings or elections and the nature of these demonic beings into one unified system of sorcery of course the systematic nature of De ultis at manifestes is what's truly striking about it along with the astral necromantic commentary of czecho Desi Antonio Killy has at his disposal a wide range of classical and magical sources along with a host of astrological textbooks from Antiquity and from the Islamic World he's also apparently familiar with textbooks of solomonic magic he clearly has knowledge of a text of the key of Solomon very much Akin actually to the earliest known attestation of that text in a 15th century manuscript that survives down to this day in fact I've seen that manuscript it was used to be over in Amsterdam in fact after Peter abano he's the second person in history to mention the text even even with citations that we can still pin down in the surviving manuscript tradition other solomonic texts that he has access to would include the RS almadel this is a text describing the preparation of a kind of portable Altar for summoning Spirits or more particularly angels and to the Smoke of incense I've actually done a whole episode about the ARs armadel if you're interested in I don't know summoning angels and incense smoke another text no longer extant but quoted by by both Antonio and czecho dooli is the de Angelica faon or fic or factura it's all kind of corrupt in these manuscripts a text that seems to explain the causal mechanisms by which astral demons or intelligences made use of natural and Stellar potencies to affect changes down at this part of the world thus laying the groundwork for the combination of astrological and necromantic forms of magic and Antonio's thinking but that text is either lost or it never existed further Antonio makes use of a range of pseudo Arista tilian magical texts the most famous of which without doubt was the secretum secretorum in fact that was probably one of the most read books of the Middle Ages period though the specific text of the ARs Magica of Aristotle uh that remains Elusive and if it existed it no longer survives now Antonio's sources weren't totally novel and even collections of such sources actually predate him the most famed example would be the magical collection known as the Suma sakra Magik by the Catalan beario ganel that was composed in 1343 around this time but what does make detis at manifestos extraordinary is that it's it's his Antonio signs off on it and thus takes credit for it as his book I can't overstate how shocking that is as pointed out in the inter introduction to the critical edition of the text deul at manifes is doubly impossible for the 14th century it's impossible in that texts like this are occult texts were almost always thought to have been revealed to someone in Antiquity who had access to Secrets otherwise not available to human beings thus these texts were revealed to people like Adam or Seth or they were given by the angel Raziel or they were a secret tradition given to then passed on to shimai in addition to the Manifest sections of the Torah or they were given as Divine wisdom to Solomon Etc you didn't just write a book of occult magic precisely because the very magic was thought occulted from Human Experience normally and thus it was in need of some kind of Revelation secondly you didn't very well write a book on astral necromancy and then attach your authorship to it by name because this wasn't legal either by Canon or secular law sorcery especially sorcery involving explicit or implicit packs with demonic beings which since Thomas aquinus was just all of sorcery was simply High heresy ask czecho you can't because he's ashes there's not much if any of that Nono quaro business in this text and even that didn't work for czecho and Antonio even just straight up cops to summoning demons at one point in the book he admits to doing what he's talking about commenting that despite the literature saying that you can't summon demons on cloudy nights well he've had some success summoning them even on rainy nights necromancy Flex thus straightforwardly admitting to a capital crime in a manuscript it's like signing his own death warrant so while this text isn't very well known outside of a frankly tiny group of medievalists it wasn't even fully published in 2012 it's truly extraordinary it's the first textbook of magic we know of apparently written by an author in history that we can detect by name who takes credit for having written it but that said day ultis at manifesti survives in a single manuscript just one probably copied in Italy in the 15th century given some of the mistakes in copying and for paleographic considerations it's unlikely to be the autograph of Antonio and that it's in France shows that it it did travel now it's a rather brief text occupying nine double columns or about 24 pages in the modern Edition double that if you include the Latin text the manuscript it is found in also contains a range of hermetic astrological image magic also by the way written by Antonio he wrote two of these things I'll mention the latter one in a minute but the manuscript BNF Latin 7337 is a fascinating collection of magical and magical adjacent text which has been digitized and can be found online in fact I'll have a link in the description to the text so the resolution isn't quite as high as you might like it's still cheaper than a plane ticket to Paris but what does day ulties at manifestes actually argue the text is actually structured like a Scholastic argument in four parts the first part details theoretical considerations such as the nature location and calls a mechanism by which the intelligence is this is a technical name for demons in this text we'll talk more about why we know they're demons in just a minute well how those intelligences can be conjured the second aspect details how the intelligences operate through occult means just without making themselves visible to and hence they are ult or not manifest through the means of things like Talisman and other ritual objects imbued with their power the third tackles the Manifest the appearances of the intelligences it's the name of the book when they actually appear and are conjured to appearance so that they actually appear before the Magus and lastly the purported fourth part of this book was probably exactly the how for accomplishing all this now sadly that part is either lost or it was never completed by Antonio because he came to his senses after writing three parts of this and again it's pretty easy to imagine why he might stop at that point even if he outs himself by name as having firsthand knowledge of such Conjuring in the text it's still another line to cross into teaching this to others a how to guide to astral necromancy was probably just a bridge too far but regardless let's dive further into the text and anonio denotes that the sublunar region of the cosmos the place where we are is occupied by three kinds of intelligences they're all outside the grace of God and thus they're evil demons and not just neutral demones of say neoplatonism or something like that the first species of the intelligences of those grouped under the four cardinal signs are directions Aries in the East Libra in the west Capricorn in the South and cancer in the north along with two other signs of their respective triplicity the fiery signs in the East the Airy signs in the west earthy signs in the South and the watery signs in the north those watery signs being the more important although the easterly ones are more noble thus the intelligences are of four orders with three in each order we're told for instance that orans is the chief intelligence of the western fiery signs this is a clear link again to our solomonic Magic from that we can probably deduce that the other solomonic demon demons amayan Pimon and egum though their exact names are all over the place in this manuscript transmission history probably represent the other four directions another demon though mention forer pretty clearly from the Latin for lust but otherwise unknown in magical literature is responsible for just that Vice the vice of lust particularly under the influence of Venus as we'll see in just a minute these intelligences were so grouped because of the specific which cause them to rebel against God thus they are housed are better trapped by the astral forces which map onto their personality so to speak it's kind of I don't know Poetic Justice further they make use of their powers to condemn human Souls of which they are jealous we're free and we have souls that can go to heaven unlike them finally one must be careful summoning these various intelligences at the same time because they can prove dangerous because they stand in various kinds of relat of antagonism or protagonism based on their astrological position so the same reason why you I don't know wouldn't date a Capricorn or an aquarius well you don't summon those kind of things together for whatever reason so you don't mix the streams it's a mixed metaphor I mean these beings also just hate being summoned by human beings employing Divine Powers so they're already kind of mythed off when they have to show up so don't conjure them which they don't want to be conjured and then conjure them in mixed types so they don't like each other you're just going to get wrestling the second type of intelligences are those which are distributed through the signs of the zodiac and represent three more sets and these intelligences are the altitudes taken from the solomonic RS almadel again check out my episode on the RS almadel now Antonio is actually a bit more ambiguous about these entities sometimes indicating that they might be good Angels specifically from the rank of the powers in the Angelic hierarchy of pseudo dius indeed the's armadel seems to be I don't know relatively clear that the demon or the spirits that get summoned there are actually good angels and not demons that one conjures but again this is all very muddy water though he does note that upon the time of one's birth one of those intelligences of the altitudes is assigned to every person as a kind of persecuting demon based on their social rank so peasants and princes get different degrees depending on their social rank as a kind of inverse guardian angel of sorts so these do seem in the end to be probably evil the final set of intelligences are those associated with the seven traditional planets again these are still sublunar beings which track the location of the planets in the sky but emphatically emphatically not the planetary Angels which actually Propel the Heavenly spheres these intelligences actually end up being well they end up being the demons that the ancient pagans like the Greeks and the Romans it ends up being the demons that they worshiped as gods and with whom they communed with with their rituals and were manifest to them as Divine beings again when you look up you don't see Mars you see the well the intelligence of Mars in effect this sublunar region is a kind of demonic prison of Astral forces but because these entities are in general very powerful they used to be Angels but they're also interesting because they are more proximate to the stellar and planetary Rays then they end up being imbued with a further specific set of powers especially when conjured and employed in astrological appropriate times now from a theoretical point of view the system is like a vast Cosmic clock of various intelligences increasing and decreasing in power specific to those intelligences through astrological time such that an exorcist and this is a term that Antonio prefers to use for the megus or the magist he likes the term Exorcist for reasons that should be obvious but it's the ability to cause those powers to be activated either through directing it into say an amulet or a Talisman by which the intelligences themselves never become apparent they remain occult or by actually summoning them to appearance or manifestation to accomplish some task or best of all combining astrological and Magical elements into one magical system in effect it's a fullblown synthesis of solomonic magic for which astrological elections were never that big of a deal and still if you read some text of solomonic magic they're still not that big of a deal with astrology and astral magic was was widely recognized at that time as extremely powerful this is also just a readymade magical game mechanic I mean you need some device or write some code for a basically a slightly more complex version of a medieval amary sphere with the various intelligences weaking and empowering through that cycle such that you could induce or conjure them at the optimal moment of the game or just have the game limit you when you can actually do it somehow at any rate this system is I think incredibly elegant if you understand medieval cosmology and could just be an excellent game mechanic for magic but with that theoretical and game theoretical business out of the way the text now terms in Scholastic form to some of the more practical questions around the exercise of magic we know where the demons are we know when they're more or less powerful well how do we get them to do stuff bees include why some people can see the intelligences and others can't given identical conditions well the intelligences can manipulate Optics and they can be selectively choosing in who they appear to and how they appear well why do they appear primarily to virgins like children because virgins are more akin to them in their asexual Purity this is also why without serious constraining exorcisms they will never appear to children born of impure sexual relations like bastards born out of wedlock you're not going to get demons that show up and talk to you why do they appear in water and crystals because these kind of optical situations allow for a more pure reflection as opposed to just open air chapter 2 Then goes into further detail on the importance of astrological timings as you can imagine that's going to be Paramount here this is especially the case for Magical timings the cycle begins with cancer and not Aries that matters that's the time of the astrologers not the time of magicians and the first hour of the night is a importance to both summon but also to be on guard against the magical powers of the intelligences chapter 3 introduces the concept of the altitudinal or intelligence that I've mentioned earlier and chapter 4 introduces how to infuse images especially Talisman and factories with specifically astrological powers for instance and this should be obvious to anyone who does a little bit of astrology if you want to overcome someone you might produce a Talisman under the correct election sign such that your sign either your birth sign or when you cast the horoscope is ascendant and the person you're trying to overcome is in the descendant of course this is all very typical astrological magic very much coming from sources like fabit inura and in from the technical hermetica from here the text introduces another core distinction of Antonio's magical theory that such operations can be purely astrological through the focusing of astrological timings or it can be purely magical through the induction of the intelligences or most optimally it should be a combination of the two many objects such as rings and wax images or talismans can be cast at the opportune astrological time and thus they can be imbued with the astral Powers but also the confidence of The Exorcist to accomplish some kind of magical end in fact that confidence business is actually coming in from medieval medicine folks like galin the confidence of the doctor actually matters a great deal in medieval medicine in fact Antonio has another text in this manuscript that I just mentioned where he details the production of hermetic images including one that was cast by Tomas Dian yeah Dean father of the famed writer Christine Dean to repel the French forces of Charles I along with several other kind of hermetic images one of which Antonio lays claim to having produced himself one of the three he says I made that one and it worked so how do such images affect us why would these images affect us just as molten wax ink or silver can store and focus astral influence so too were our bodies infused with Asal influence at the time of our birth through the suppleness of our infant bodies our little baby bodies were like molten wax or ink or silver thus those astral traits and influences have become trapped in our bodies and if we produce magical objects with sympathetic or antipathetic astral influence along with the will and confidence of The Exorcist being poured into those objects as well those images will impel us or compel Us in various ways this is why pure ink silver and parchment and wax are required they can't have had any previous astral influence attached to them in in order that the various astral influences not be muddied so you have to use pure silver new parchment new wax Etc however such objects can also be infused with powers directly through demonic intelligences through the practice of magic here rather than just waiting around for astral conditions the intelligences are impelled through honors like sweet SE fumigations and respectful incantations or you just force them they're just compelled through forceful bindings seemingly through use of divine names to affect power into those various kinds of objects thus giving them magical powers however in the use of Magic the condition of The Exorcist is tantamount and various conditions must be right for the whole business to be effective the weather must be quiet and clear though remember earlier Antonio confessed to having summon intelligences even during the reain the location must be secretive and remote the intelligences are they're introverts like me bash shy you they're not going to show up in a big crowd of people the ideal location is at Crossroads thus the microcosm mirroring the macrocosm of the distribution of the division of the intelligences that crossroads business continues all the way down into contemporary ideas about magic further The Exorcist must be in a pure State as possible they got to be Catholic surprise surprise 14th century they have to have been recently bathed they must be learned eloquent and above all they must be confident for maximal effect and frankly to endure the Terrors that the intelligences will induce upon them further they should also make sure to be using the correct circles and Pentacles the unending Circle represents the eternality and wholeness of God the motion of the prime mover is always circular and in fact he indeed names these circles the name of God he notes that the suffumigation the incantations the Pentacles and the Very ious kinds of magical characters and divine names can all be consulted in the clavicula Salamon so he doesn't reproduce them in the text but he does make it clear that one must proceed employing them you should also note the earliest manuscript of the cicular salomonis still isn't published that's a thing it's just not published however a curious element remains in all of this while The Exorcist must be pure they cannot employ certain divine prayers probably prayers Associated from the mass why well it'll drive away the intelligences they're evil thus other secular incantations more reminiscent of medieval courtly life are preper are preferred to induce the appearance of the intelligences you kind of Court them you don't exercise them indeed it appears that while one must be pure in a sense of the intelligences actually might show up if the Exorcist is more in climb to sin if you have some sin in you if you're up to no good they have a better shot of coming up why because they get a better shot of condemning your soul recall these are demons they got their own agenda on all this and in this way the text remains strident within Orthodox demonology going all the way to Augustin weall in the city of God Augustine argues that all this demonic business it's all just a bunch of Illusions it's just a demonic long con to eventually Doom the soul of The Necromancer however with the astrological and magical practices completed Antonio makes the relatively obvious Point obviously it would be better to combine astrological and Magic into one unified theory and practice and surprise surprise that all is ultimately what he expounds in this text and that's the great Genius of this system it's a system it combines astrological elections Islamic at hermetic image magic with the system of the conjuration of the intelligences found in the numerous texts of the solomonic tradition to produce one of in my opinion the greatest and earliest synthetic magical systems in all of the European magical tradition that said it's kind of surprising to me that I don't think most people have ever even heard of Antonio monomo de ultis at manifestes outside of a very tiny subset of medievalists however it did only survive in one manuscript which was only really detailed in a pretty expensive group of books that most people don't have by Thorndike in 1934 and it only received a critical Edition and translation in 2012 and then in a pretty technical volume in the history of magic so all that considered I guess it's not so surprising after all that most people have never heard of this I mean this is the kind of thing that's exactly the kind of stuff you'll cover on a channel called esoterica it can be found in Penn State's magic and history series in the volume invoking Angels edited by the absolutely amazing scholar Claire fanger here you'll find a fantastic introduction though the Thorndike version over here in volume 3 does still hold up pretty well if you want to read that online for free and which does a great job of all situating the text in the history of magic more generally along with a critical addition of both the Latin text along with an English translation which is not always given with these text though Antonio's text on hermetic image magic doesn't yet have a translation but it does have a great critical addition along with a general introduction in French which you can consult that so if you want to try your handed Latin that's another great text to produce in general while 20th and 21st century magic does seem to capture most of the I don't know air time and conversations about magic both in theory and in practice the Middle Ages still contains a great deal to surprise us more on medieval magic and necromancy soon I promise until then I'm Dr Justin Sledge and thank you thank you for watching esoterica where we explore the Arcane in history philosophy and [Music] religion [Music] [Music]

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Length: 36min 25sec (2185 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024