Nigromancy in the Later Middle Ages

The struggle of the early modern church against witchcraft is rightly famous. However, before they were hunting woman flying on broomsticks to nocturnal orgies, church authorities were most concerned about a very different sort of magic: nigromancy. Nigromancy, meaning black magic or black divination, was a highly intricate form of ritual magic, whose educated adherents summoned demons with magic circles drawn in blood and long Latin recitations replete with words such as conjuro, adjuro, and exorcizo (I conjure, I adjure, and I exorcise).i Church authorities condemned nigromancy as dangerous, depraved, and apostate, and they harshly punished anyone who took part in it. A papal bull from 1326 speaks of a “pestilential plague” spread by “men who are Christian in name only [who] sacrifice to demons, adore them….[T]hey ally themselves with death and make a pact with Hell.”ii Even some modern scholars describe nigromancers as “demon-worshipers” or dismiss them as badly trained clerics with too much time to get into trouble.iii However, none of these charges, neither corruption, Satanism, nor simple ignorance, are accurate reflections of nigromancy’s relationship with religion. Nigromancy was, for the most part, a reasonable application of Christian theology, whose practitioners considered themselves pious experts of a virtuous art. Despite, or perhaps because of, these claims to religious orthodoxy, church authorities in the early fourteenth century, a time of increasing religious intolerance and brutal persecutions, resolved that nigromancy was a form of heresy, punishable by execution.

Medieval Christian Demonology

Although Neoplatonic, Islamic, and Jewish influences were important, nigromancy was rooted in Christian demonology. To show this it is necessary to dwell at length on how educated Europeans in the Middle Ages understood the nature and power of demons. The thirteenth century saw the rise of Scholastic demonology, which, like Scholasticism generally, created a logically consistent, well argued, and largely homogenized doctrine integrating earlier Christian writers, such as the fourth century Augustine of Hippo, with Aristotelian philosophy. The development of such a thorough demonology had several motivations, but one result was a heightened fear of magic, particularly nigromancy, the form of magic with which religious authorities would have been most familiar.v The demons of the Middle Ages appeared more powerful, more menacing, and more personal than the demons of antiquity, echoing the more personal and collaborative human-demon interactions in nigromancy as compared to earlier forms of magic.vi

That the power of demons, and therefore the power of nigromancy, could be demarcated and analyzed with a science-like precision rests on the fact that demons, like angels, were considered preternatural, rather than supernatural. That is, they operated within the bounds of nature, although they may have gone against nature’s usual course. Only God was considered supernatural, and thus only God could work true miracles.vii However, whether any particular act resulted from natural, preternatural, or supernatural power could be nearly impossible to determine. In fact, one of the most threatening aspects of nigromancy was its potential to deceive the faithful with false miracles.

Demons were fallen angels, thus they possessed the same abilities as angels, which they used to hinder rather than help humanity. They were thought to reside not in Hell, but in the lower atmosphere, where they could carry out their business of drawing humans into sin.viii As to the physical bodies of demons, there were several opinions. Augustine, reflecting ancient beliefs, held demons had natural bodies of air, although he allowed that they might be incorporeal.ix Thomas Aquinas, in his On Evil (1272) and other works, thought demons were incorporeal and assumed bodies of compressed air, though he, like Augustine, considered the question unimportant.x The famous inquisitorial handbook Malleus Maleficarum of 1486, which drew heavily on Aquinas, said demons created bodies by taking elements out of the environment; they then simulated speech “by some disturbance of the air included in their assumed body.”xi Regardless of exactly how demons did it, theologians and magicians agreed that demons could appear in physical form, usually grotesque versions of animals or foreigners. Thus, nigromantic rituals often specified that the summoned demons appear in a pleasing, human form.xii

While the powers of demons were vast, they were not infinite. Demons were not supernatural and thus could not work true miracles. Furthermore, they acted only with the permission of God, who allowed demons to work evil in the world in order to test the faith of humans and punish sinners.xiii Although divination was perhaps the most common form of nigromancy, theologians held that demons did not have true foreknowledge of the future. Aquinas argued that demons could predict the future only through revelations from God, their knowledge of external causes, or “when they predict the things they themselves are about to do.”xiv Nevertheless, with their great intellect, length of experience on Earth, and ability to move very quickly, demons could make strikingly accurate predictions.xv Presumably, magicians thought the demons they conjured to tell the future actually knew the future, although nigromantic texts were chiefly practical and seldom focused on the art’s theoretical aspects.xvi Whether demons knew the future or simply made correct predictions would be of little practical importance.

Demons could not transmute one substance into another or create something ex nihilo. They could only change a substance by accelerating a natural process, such as putrefaction.xvii They could also deceive people, either through illusions like their assumed bodies or by affecting the senses through a change in the balance of humors.xviii Demons could affect local motion, as their ability to control air and bodily humors indicates. Lastly, demons could not control the will, but they could take possession of a human body or induce appetites to which people might respond.xix These views were generally accepted, though some writers afforded demons greater power, and some less.

Most spirits summoned in nigromantic rituals were quite explicitly evil, but nigromancy also occasionally invoked angels, along with neutral spirits, whose existence church authorities adamantly denied.xx The idea of neutral spirits came essentially from an alternative demonology based on the Greco-Roman belief in daimones, partially corporeal natural spirits, who could be either good or evil.xxi This theory remained influential in early Christendom, but by the Middle Ages, evil demons had decisively replaced ambivalent daimones, at least in the Christian world. However, in addition to church doctrine and ritual, nigromancy drew on Neoplatonic, Islamic, and Jewish magic, which had different concepts of demons.xxii It is natural that nigromancers might incorporate non-Christian concepts that seemed most useful for their art.

The Practitioners of Nigromancy

Just who were the nigromancers who caused the church so much consternation? We can confidently assume from trial records, literature, and other sources that a large majority of nigromancers were clerics, both in reality and in public imagination.xxiii Hence, the twelfth-century author and eventually bishop of Chartres John of Salisbury wrote of being a pupil forced to look for spirits on his anointed fingernail as part of a priest’s scrying ritual. xxiv A fourteenth-century monk was allegedly so fond of reading that he read books of nigromancy and began to practice it in secret until his fellow monks found out and imprisoned him until penitent. Fifteenth-century friars at the court of the antipope Benedict XIII were charged with using nigromancy in one particularly political, yet not implausible, case. Many other records of such incidents exist. No particular episode can be verified with certainty, but as a whole the evidence is convincing.

There were two main reasons why nigromancers tended to be clerics. First, nigromancy was a learned art, requiring literacy and knowledge of Latin. Although it had earlier antecedents, nigromancy only became widespread and fully developed in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, when education greatly expanded, producing a small but significant population of learned men.xxv In the Middle Ages, such men were almost always clerics, even if they had no official religious duties.xxvi Second, clerics would have had the confidence, knowledge of Christian ritual, and supposed piety needed to contend with demons.xxvii

That the practitioners of an art so hated by the church were usually members of that church might seem paradoxical. To some extent, how one explains this paradox is a personal and moral judgement. Richard Kieckhefer, the preeminent scholar of nigromancy, argues that this phenomenon is an unfortunate product of the medieval education system.xxviii Everyone who studied at a medieval university would be ordained, whether or not one planned on working for the church. Many of those who did work for the church would have had minimal religious training and few duties to perform. This produced a sizeable class of under-employed and poorly trained people with basic knowledge of Latin and church ritual, who “might readily get into trouble.”xxix However, one need not put such a negative face on the matter.