booknetsaWebster-secretSocietiesAndSubversiveMovements

It is clearly to the same source that we may trace the magical formul for the healing of diseases current at
the same period. From the earliest times the Jews had specialized in medicine, and many royal personages
insisted on employing Jewish doctors,(17) some of whom may have acquired medical knowledge of a high
order. The Jewish writer Margoliouth dwells on this fact with some complacency, and goes on to contrast
the scientific methods of the Hebrew doctors with the quackeries of the monks:
In spite of the reports circulated by the monks, that the Jews were sorcerers (in consequence of their superior
medical skill), Christian patients would frequent the houses of the Jewish physicians in preference to
the monasteries, where cures were pretended to have been effected by some extraordinary relics, such as the
nails of St. Augustine, the extremity of St. Peter's second toe,... etc. It need hardly be added that the cures
effected by the Jewish physicians were more numerous than those by the monkish impostors.(18)
Yet in reality the grotesque remedies which Margoliouth attributes to Christian superstition appear to
have been part derived from Jewish sources. The author of a further article on Magic in Hastings' Encyclopædia
goes on to say that the magical formul handed down in Latin in ancient medical writings and used
by the monks were mainly of Eastern origin, derived from Babylonish, Egyptian, and Jewish magic. The
monks therefore " played merely an intermediate rôle."(19) Indeed, if we turn to the Talmud we shall find
cures recommended no less absurd than those which Margoliouth derides. For example: The eggs of a
grasshopper as a remedy for toothache, the tooth of a fox remedy for sleep, viz. the tooth of a live fox to prevent
sleep and of a dead one to cause sleep, the nail from the gallows where a man was hanged, as a remedy
for swelling.(20)
A strongly " pro-Semite " writer quotes a number of Jewish medical writings of the eighteenth century,
republished as late as the end of the nineteenth, which show the persistence of these magical formul amongst
the Jews. Most of these are too loathsome to transcribe; but some of the more innocuous are as follows: "
For epilepsy kill a cock and let it putrefy." " In order to protect yourself from all evils, gird yourself with the
rope with which a criminal has been hung." Blood of different kinds also plays an important part: " Fox's
blood and wolf's blood are good for stone in the bladder, ram's blood for colic, weasel blood for scrofula,"
etc.-these to be externally applied.(21)
But to return to Satanism. Whoever were the secret inspirers of magical and diabolical practices during
the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the evidence of the existence of Satanism during this long period
is overwhelming and rests on the actual facts of history. Details quite as extravagant and revolting as those
contained in the works of Eliphas Lévi(22) or in Huysmans's Là-bas are given in documentary form by Margaret
Alice Murray in her singularly passionless work relating principally to the witches of Scotland.(23)
The cult of evil is a reality-by whatever means we may seek to explain it. Eliphas Lévi, whilst denying
the existence of Satan " as a superior personality and power," admits this fundamental truth: " Evil exists; it
is impossible to doubt it. We can do good or evil. There are beings who knowingly and voluntarily do
evil."(24) There are also beings who love evil. Lévi has admirably described the spirit that animates such
beings in his definition of black magic:
Black magic is really but a combination of sacrileges and murders graduated with a view to the permanent
perversion of the human will and the realization in a living man of the monstrous phantom of the fiend.
It is, therefore, properly speaking, the religion of the devil, the worship of darkness, the hatred of goodness
exaggerated to the point of paroxysm; it is the incarnation of death and the permanent creation of hell.(25)
The Middle Ages, which depicted the devil fleeing from holy water, were not perhaps quite so benighted
as our superior modern culture has led us to suppose. For that " hatred of goodness exaggerated to the point
of paroxysm," that impulse to desecrate and defile which forms the basis of black magic and has manifested
itself in successive phases of the world revolution, springs from fear. So by their very hatred the powers of
darkness proclaim the existence of the powers of light and their own impotence. In the cry of the demoniac:
" What have we to do with Thee, Jesus of Nazareth? art Thou come to destroy us? I know Thee who Thou
art, the Holy One of God," do we not hear the unwilling tribute of the vanquished to the victor in the mighty
conflict between good and evil?
The Rosicrucians
In dealing with the question of Magic it is necessary to realize that although to the world in general the
word is synonymous with necromancy, it does not bear this significance in the language of occultism, particularly
the occultism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Magic at this date was a term employed to
cover many branches of investigation which Robert Fludd, the English Rosicrucian, classified under various
headings, of which the first three are as follows: (1) " Natural Magic,... that most occult and secret depart-
Nesta H. Webster — Secret Societies and Subversive Movements — Part I
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