Raising Hell Read Online Free PDF Page B

force the rebellious spirits to accept his pact. Appear, then,instantly, or I will continually torment thee by the mighty words of the Clavicule.
    Done right, this will bring the demon calling. But he will assent to the sorcerer’s demands only “on condition thou give me thyself at the end of twenty years, so that I do with thee, body and soul, what shall please me.”
    Now, you’d think that this would be the moment the sorcerer would rethink the whole deal. Twenty years of great living in exchange for an eternity of pain? But many sorcerers believed they could have their cake and eat it, too—that they could sign the bargain, then wriggle out of it later. Assuming he was thinking this way, the sorcerer would scrawl on a piece of virgin parchment, in his own blood, the words “I promise great Lucifuge to repay him in twenty years for all he shall give me. In witness whereof I have signed,” followed by the sorcerer’s name.
    The sorcerer, still enclosed in the magic circle or pentagram, would then toss the parchment to the waiting demon, who’d look it over for loopholes. If he was satisfied with it, he’d take it back with him to Hell and file it in the archives. It’s for this reason that so few of these actual documents have ever been found—that, and the fact that if such a written pact had ever been discovered by the church authorities, the sorcerer who’d signed it would have been in for some very big trouble right here on earth. Making deals with the Devil was heresy at its worst, a renunciation of God, the Virgin Mary, the saints, the church, the whole shebang. This was not the kind of contract you ever left lying around the house.
    One of the few such documents that do exist, now housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale of France, claims to be the pact that Urbain Grandier made with the Devil in 1634. Grandier, a powerful priest known for his oratory, arrogance, and vanity, was accused of having bewitched the Convent of the Ursulines in Loudun; the nuns showed harrowing signs of demonic possession, and in court twelve of them gave the names of thedemons by whom they claimed to be possessed. Their testimony was corroborated by a sheet of parchment on which Grandier had supposedly written his vow in a clear hand:
My Lord and Master, I own you for my God; I promise to serve you while I live, and from this hour I renounce all other Gods and Jesus Christ and Mary and all the Saints of Heaven and the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church, and all the good will thereof and the prayers which might be made for me. I promise to adore you and do you homage at least three times a day and to do the most evil that I can and to lead into evil as many persons as shall be possible to me, and heartily I renounce the Chrism, Baptism, and all the merits of Jesus Christ; and, in case I should desire to change, I give you my body and soul, and my life as holding it from you, having dedicated it for ever without any will to repent. Signed Urbain Grandier in his blood.
    After a good deal of torture, Grandier was taken on a stretcher to the public square—his legs had been broken by his inquisitors—and burned at the stake. According to a monk who was present at the execution, a big black fly buzzed around and around Grandier’s head. In the monk’s opinion, this droning insect was in actuality the devil Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, there to make sure the pact was observed and to carry Grandier’s soul off to Hell.
    From the moment a deal with the Devil was signed, both participants kept a close eye on each other—the Devil knew that the sorcerer would be trying to renege on the deal somehow, and the sorcerer knew that the Devil would be hovering nearby to make sure his prey didn’t escape. By one account, the two black dogs who accompanied the magician Agrippa von Nettesheim everywhere he went were in fact demons, keeping track of his whereabouts. The French historian Palma Cayethad purportedly signed a pact that