Esoteric Coffeehouse

Everyone remembers the witch hunts of the 1500 and 1600s as an ugly chapter of Western history. Thousands of so-called witches were burned, drowned, or tortured in an attempt to get rid of what the Inquisitors called ‘devil worship’. Today, we rarely believe that the witches were in league with the devil. In fact, during the early 20th century, scholars thought that witchcraft itself was a complete invention of the witch hunters (1). Even when some reality to the phenomenon was admitted, witch beliefs were dismissed as the matter of ‘female hysteria’ or peasant superstition (2).

Beginning with the 1960s and 70s, scholars began to consider witchcraft as more than a fiction of the Inquisition, and concentrated on analyzing its meaning for the peasant society (3), (4). Yet even this attempt was marred by a tendency of dismissing witchcraft as pure imagination.

If most scholarship believed witchcraft had no reality to it, there was one early dissenting voice: Margaret Murray, who maintained in 1926 that witchcraft was real, and that it actually represented a European-wide pagan religion dedicated to a horned god identifiable as Janus or Cernunnos (5). The medieval civilization was thus divided into the true Christians and the pagan “secret society” that adopted Christianity only as a facade. In an era of rationalism, numerous scholars rejected Murray’s work as pure fantasy (6).

Murray may have used her imagination to embellish the facts, but this does not necessarily mean that the whole phenomenon of witchcraft was imaginary. However, it was not until Carlo Ginzburg’s landmark studies that scholars began to really consider this possibility.

(more…)

My earlier two-episode vampire analysis has prompted me to thinking about the quest for immortality, which is probably as old as mankind. The first known hero story, that of the Sumerian Gilgamesh, has the prince unsuccessfully seeking the plant that would bestow him immortality. In the Bible, the first human beings, Adam and Eve, were apparently created immortal only to lose the gift due to evil temptation. Adam and Eve’s story assumes that humanity was initially meant to be immortal. But if immortality is the natural state of mankind, would it be possible to recover it by some means?

I shall conspicuously pick from the countless attempts at achieving immortality those related to alchemy. Commonly described as the art of making gold, alchemy often had the goal of achieving life-extension or immortality. In fact, scholars consider that life extension, not gold was the foremost goal of Chinese alchemy (1). In the West, the attainment of the elixir vitae was initially secondary to the art of goldmaking (2). The first author to emphasize it was the Arab alchemist Jabir (3). He conceived of the “elixir vitae”, another name for the magical Philosopher’s Stone, which transformed metals into gold. The alchemists who came to possess the Stone would then be expected to live many years, or even forever.

From this concept an entire legend of immortal alchemists was born. One of the earliest embodiments was the French alchemist Nicholas Flamel (1330 – 1418), which was reputed to have faked his own death (4) and was recently featured in a novel as an ‘immortal’ (5). The Renaissance magus Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, though less associated with alchemy, was portrayed as having lived several hundreds of years in Mary Shelley’s The Mortal Immortal (6). Yet perhaps the most influential ‘immortal’ in his age was the mysterious Count of St Germain, whom I have talked about in my previous article. He was reputed to have lived hundreds or even thousands of years, a legend that he apparently cultivated as well (7).

(more…)

There is a new vampire movie in town called Twilight. Twilight is built on a best-selling novel featuring a forbidden love between a mortal girl, Bella, and an immortal vampire, Edward (1). Like Angel in the series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampire-boy Edward is haunted by his own immortality and ‘stuck between two worlds’. Edward is the newest (and perhaps cleanest) of the breed that I would call the ‘good vampires’: he is an innocent as he has inherited his vampirism from his parents and, to top it all, avoids drinking human blood at all costs. His image made me think of the tendency in today’s pop culture to portray romantic, good vampires. Coppola’s Dracula, vampire Louis in Interview with the Vampire or Buffy’s Angel immediately spring to mind. This led me to wonder: what is the prototype of the ‘good vampire’? To find out, I thought to go back to the source of modern vampire stories. At the end of the line I re-discovered one legendary summer night back in 1816.

On a dark and stormy night in Switzerland, a few illustrious friends met at Lord Byron’s Villa Dorati (2). Amongst the invitees the most well known were Percy Shelley and his wife Mary Shelley; a less famous character was Dr. Polidori. Lord Byron came up with the idea of a contest: each should write their own supernatural tale. Out of this competition originated Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Yet, there was a second book that today is almost forgotten: Dr. Polidori’s The Vampyre. It is ironic that one rainy night could spawn two major twentieth century pop myths: Frankenstein and the Vampire (later called Dracula).

(more…)