2001 Inductees

Nostradamus

Nostradamus

1503 - 1566

Michel de Nostradame, more commonly known as Nostradamus, was born on December 14, 1503, in St. Remy de Provence. He was adept in both astrology and astronomy. A clairvoyant, Nostradamus used both sciences to interpret the visions he received in the secrecy of his study.

He was often referred to as the prophet of doom because of the visions he had involving death and war. His followers say he predicted the French Revolution, the birth and rise to power of Hitler, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

His prophetic vision....942 cryptic poems called The Centuries consisting of verse groups in sets of 100. A single verse is commonly called a quatrain and 100 quatrains a Centurie. They have enthralled generation after generation of readers. He appears to have predicted some of history's most monumental events from the Great Fire of London (1666) to the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger.

His parents were of simple lineage from around Avignon. Nostradamus was the oldest son, and had four brothers; of the first three we know little; the youngest, Jean, became Procureur of the Parliament of the Provence.

Nostradamus' great intellect became apparent while he was still very young, and his education was put into the hands of his grandfather, Jean, who taught him the rudiments of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Mathematics and Astrology.

When his grandfather died, Nostradamus was sent to Avignon to study. He already showed a great interest in astrology and this became common talk among his fellow students. He upheld the Copernican theory that the world was round and circled around the sun more than 100 years before Galileo was prosecuted for the same belief.

Since it was the age of the Inquisition and the family were converted from Judaism to the Catholic faith by the time Nostradamus was nine years old, his parents were quite worried, because as ex-Jews they were more vulnerable than most. They decided to send Nostradamus off to study medicine at Montpellier in 1522.

Nostradamus obtained his bachelor's degree after three years, with apparent ease. Once he had obtained his license to practise medicine, Nostradamus decided to go out into the countryside and help the many victims of the plague.

After nearly four years he returned to Montpellier to complete his doctorate and re-enrolled on 23rd October 1529. Nostradamus had some trouble in explaining his unorthodox remedies and treatments he used in the countryside. Nevertheless his learning and ability could not be denied and he obtained his doctorate. He remained teaching at Montpellier for a year but by this time his new theories, for instance his refusal to bleed patients, were causing trouble and he set off upon another spate of wandering.

While practising in Toulouse he received a letter from Julius-Cesar Scaliger, the philosopher considered second only to Erasmus throughout Europe. Apparently Nostradamus' reply so pleased Scaliger that he invited him to stay at his home in Agen. This life suited Nostradamus admirably, and circa 1534 he married a young girl 'of high estate, very beautiful and admirable', whose name was lost to us. He had a son and a daughter by her and his life seemed complete.

Then a series of tragedies struck. The plague came to Agen and, despite all his efforts, killed Nostradamus' wife and two children. The fact that he was unable to save his own family had a disastrous effect on his practice. He then quarrelled with Scaliger and lost his friendship. His late wife's family tried to sue him for the return of her dowry and as the final straw, in 1538, he was accused of heresy because of a chance remark made some years before. To a workman casting a bronze statue of the Virgin, Nostradamus had commented that he was making devils. His plea that he was only describing the lack of aesthetic appeal inherent in the statue was ignored and the Inquisitors sent for him to go to Toulouse.

Nostradamus, having no wish to stand trial, set out on his wandering again and kept well clear of the Church authorities for the next six years. We know little of this period. From references in later books we know he travelled in the Lorraine and went to Venice and Sicily. Legends about Nostradamus' prophetic powers also start to appear at this time.

By 1554 Nostradamus had settled in Marseilles. In November that year, the Provence experienced one of the worst floods of its history. The plague redoubled in virulence, spread by the waters and the polluted corpses. Nostradamus worked ceaselessly.

Once the city had recovered, Nostradamus moved on to Salon which he found to be so pleasant a town that he determined to settle there for the rest of his life. In November he married Anne Ponsart Gemelle, a rich widow. The house in which he spent the remainder of his days can still be seen off the Place de la Poissonnerie.

After 1550 he produced a yearly Almanac - and after 1554 The Prognostications - which seem to have been successful, and which encouraged him to undertake the much more onerous task of the Prophecies. He converted the top room of his house at Salon into a study and, as he tells us in the Prophecies, worked there at night with his occult books. The main source of his magical inspirations was a book called De Mysteriis Egyptorum.

By 1555 Nostradamus had completed the first part of his book of prophecies that were to contain predictions from his time to the end of the world. The prophecies were described in books entitled Centuries the word having nothing to do with one hundred years; they being so called because there were a hundred verses or quatrains in each book. The verses are written in a crabbed, obscure style, with a polyglot of vocabulary of French, Provencal, Italian, Greek and Latin. In order to avoid being prosecuted as a magician, Nostradamus writes that he deliberately confused the time sequence of the Prophecies so that their secrets would not be revealed to the non-initiate.

It is extraordinary how quickly the fame of Nostradamus spread across France and Europe on the strength of the Prophecies, published in their incomplete form of 1555. The book contained only the first three Centuries and part of the fourth. The prophecies became all the rage at Court, the Queen, Catherine de Medici sent for Nostradamus. He set out for Paris on 14th July 1556. On 15th August, Nostradamus booked a room at the Inn of St. Michel, and the next day he met with the queen.

One could only wish that there had been a witness to record their meeting. Nostradamus and the Queen spoke together for two hours. She is reputed to have asked him about the quatrain concerning the king's death and to have been satisfied with Nostradamus' answer. Certainly she continued to believe in Nostradamus' predictions until her death. The king, Henri II, granted Nostradamus only a brief audience and was obviously not greatly interested.

Two weeks later the queen sent for him a second time and now Nostradamus was faced with the delicate and difficult task of drawing up the horoscopes of the seven Valois children, whose tragic fates he had already revealed in The Centuries. All he would tell Catherine was that all of her sons would be kings, which is slightly inaccurate since one of them, Francois, died before he could inherit.

Soon afterwards Nostradamus was warned that the Justices of Paris were inquiring about his magic practices, and he swiftly returned to Salon. From this time on, suffering from gout and arthritis, he seems to have done little except draw up horoscopes for his many distinguished visitors and complete the writing of the Prophecies. Apparently he allowed a few manuscript copies to circulate before publication, because many of the predictions were understood and quoted before the completed book came off the printing press in 1568, two years after his death.

The reason for this reticence was probably the king's death in 1559. Nostradamus had predicted it in I.35 and may have felt that it was too explicit for comfort and that it would be advisable to wait some years until things had quietened down. But the following year, 1560, King Francis II died, and this time he was openly quoted.

In 1564 Catherine, now Queen Regent, decided to make a Royal Progress through France. While travelling she came to Salon and visited Nostradamus. They dined and Catherine gave Nostradamus the title of Physician in Ordinary, which carried with it a salary and other benefits.

But by now the gout from which Nostradamus suffered was turning to dropsy and he, the doctor, realized that his end was near. He made his will on 17th June 1566 and left the large sum, for those days, of 3444 crowns over and above his other possessions. On 1st July he sent for the local priest to give him the last rites, and when Chavigny took leave of him that night, he told him that he would not see him alive again. As he himself had predicted, his body was found the next morning.

He was buried upright in one of the walls of the Church of the Cordeliers at Salon, and his wife Anne erected a splendid marble plaque to his memory.

It was rumoured that a very secret document existed in his coffin, that would decode his prophecies . In 1700, the coffin was moved to a prominent wall of the Church. Careful not to disturb his body a quick look inside revealed an amulet on his skeleton, with the year 1700 on it. One night in 1791 during the French Revolution, soldiers from Marseilles broke into the church, in search of loot. The next morning they were ambushed by Royalists. The soldier who had used Nostradamus' skull as a wine glass, the night before, died by a sniper's bullet.

"Under the Oak (coffin) lightening strikes in Gienne.
Not far from there (Salon) is hidden the treasure
For after long centuries it is grabed
Found, shall die, eye pierced by a spring (of a trigger)."

Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim

Agrippa

1486 - 1535

A natural mystic, Agrippa was one of the most important occultists of the 16th century. His writings on magic and the occult influenced generations of thinkers that followed. Like Paracelsus, he was far ahead of his time, which made him very unpopular with his contemporaries. He spent most of his life in trouble with the authorities of Church and state.

Agrippa was born on September 14, 1486, in cologne, and was educated at the University of Cologne. Some biographers say he was born into a noble family, but the prevailing view is that he adopted the name von Nettesheim himself, after the founder of Cologne.

As a young man, he excelled in his studies. He became proficient in eight languages and was a voracious reader. He was fascinated by alchemy and magic and delved into the Kabbalah and Hermetic literature, attracted by the idea of achieving a spiritual union with the Godhead.

His first job was an appointment as court secretary to Maximilian I, Holy Roman emperor and king of Germany, who sent him to Paris as a spy. In what would become a hallmark of his career, Agrippa became embroiled in local political trouble and was forced to leave.

By the time he was 24, he had collected a vast store of knowledge, which he set down in a three volume work, On Occult Philosophy (De Occulta Philosophia), which was a summation of all the magical and occult knowledge of the time. Agrippa maintained that magic had nothing to do with the Devil or sorcery but depended upon natural psychic gifts such as second sight. He believed in the ultimate power of will and imagination to effect magic and in the power of mind over body; a jilted lover, he said, could truly die of grief. He said that man could achieve his highest potential by learning the harmonies of nature.

Agrippa embraced astrology, divination, the magic of numbers (numerology) and the power of gems and stones. He described the astral body as the "chariot of the soul" and said it could leave the physical body like a light escaping from a lantern. It was said that he practiced necromancy for divination and conjured various demons.

After writing On Occult Philosophy, more than 20 years passed before it was published. Meanwhile, Agrippa weathered one storm after another in his life. In 1509, at the University of Dole, France, he earned a doctorate of divinity and lectured on the Kabbalah. He tried to win the patronage of Maximilian's daughter, Margaret of Ghent, with a flattering work, The Nobility of Women, but the local monks denounced him as a heretic, and he was forced to flee to England the same year.

Agrippa spent years drifting around Europe, forming secret societies, holding various jobs until his temper or his occult views caused him to be run out of town. He was frequently at odds with the Church, for he considered many monks to be ignorant and narrow-minded. He was unlucky in marriage: two wives died and the third ruined him emotionally and financially.

In Lyons he was appointed physician to Louise of Savoy, the queen mother of the king of France. She was slow to pay him and kept him confined in Lyons, impoverished from 1524 to 1526. Finally, he was able to quit his job and leave for Metz, where he undertook the defense of a woman accused of witchcraft. The chief evidence against the woman was that her mother had been burned as a witch. Agrippa destroyed the case against her with the theological argument that man could be separated from Christ only by his own sin, not that of another. As Reginald Scot describes in Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), Agrippa triumphantly "delivered her from the claws of the bloodie moonke, who with hir accusers, were condemned in a great summe of monie to the charter of the church of Mentz; (sic) and remained infamous after that time almost to all men." The humiliated inquisitor threatened to prosecute Agrippa for being a supporter of heretics and witches. Ever after that, Agrippa was suspected of witchcraft himself and was considered an enemy of the Church.

Many fantastic tales surround the life of Agrippa, who was widely regarded as a black magician. He was said always to be accompanied by his familiar, who took the shape of a large black dog. On his deathbed, he renounced his magic works and the familiar by saying, "Begone, wretched animal, the entire cause of my destruction," where-upon the familiar ran out and threw himself in a river.

Agrippa conjured demons and spirits, sometimes using magic mirrors. He supposedly conjured the spirit of Tully to deliver an oration for him; the spirit was so effective that it reduced the audience to tears. It was also said that when Agrippa traveled, he paid innkeepers in gold coins that later turned to seashells. He became associated with the story of Faust, the legendary doctor who sold his soul to the Devil.

The most famous occult legend about Agrippa tells of an unfortunate young man who poked about in his study. Agrippa, who was living in Louvain, Belgium, at the time, rented out a room to this young man. Once when Agrippa was out of town, the youth asked the magician's wife for a key to his study, saying he was interested in reading some of the books. At first the wife refused, but the youth begged her until she relented and gave him the key.

In the study, the youth found a book of magic spells lying on a table and began to read aloud. Suddenly there was a knocking at the door, and a demon appeared. The demon demanded to know why he had been summoned. The young man was so terrified that he could not reply, whereupon the demon seized him by the throat and strangled him.

When Agrippa returned home, he was horrified to find the corpse. If he called the authorities or tried to get rid of the body, he would be accused of murder. he summoned the demon to restore the corpse to life. The demon did, and Agrippa sent the reactivated corpse to walk up and down the market-place, and then collapse in an apparent natural death. But the marks of strangulation were found, and Agrippa was accused of murder. Once again, he had to flee town.

Agrippa secured the patronage of Charles V. who appointed him to chronicle history. by then, he was disillusioned with magic and considered it a waste of time. Theology, he said, was the only thing worth studying. Around 1530 he had published On the Vanity of Sciences and Arts, an attack on all sciences and the occult, in which he took the view that knowledge only makes man aware of how little he really knows. The book angered the king, who had Agrippa jailed for a year on charges of heresy.

After his release, On Occult Philosophy was published, and it appeared to contradict everything Agrippa had said in Vanity. The apparent inconsistency further blackened his reputation.

Agrippa went to Cologne, where he got into trouble with the inquisitor. Not only was he thrown out of Cologne, he was banished from all Germany. He went back to France, but his uncomplimentary remarks about his former employer, the queen mother, led him again into jail.

Upon his release, he went to Grenoble, where he died in 1535. His first work, On Occult Philosophy, survived to have a profound impact upon the development of Western occult thought.

The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft
Rosemary Ellen Guiley

Aleister Crowley

1875 - 1947

Aleister Crowley, who dubbed himself "The Beast", was once called "the wickedest man in the world." This dark reputation stayed with him throughout time.

Known largely for his involvement with ceremonial magic and, during his time, his mountaineering, Aleister Crowley was a man who contributed much to the occult science, leaving a large amount of writing as his legacy, as well as one of the most artistically and magically rendered tarot decks, the Thoth Tarot, painted by Lady Frieda Harris.

Edward Alexander Crowley was born in Leamington, Warwickshire on Tuesday October 12, 1875. His family were members of the Plymouth Brethren, a somewhat strict, almost cultist religious group that followed the Bible as the one standard. There were some interesting twists to this group - one, that they did not feel a need for a vicar, minister or priest to speak to god for them. The felt each member had a direct line. And two, that Christmas was a pagan holiday, not to be followed by Christians.

Aleister greatly admired his father and often attended him on his ministries to villages. At the age of 11, his father died of cancer of the tongue, leaving Aleister with a mother he despised and who first gave him the title of "Beast."

During his boyhood, Aleister discovered his love for climbing, scaling the chalky cliffs of Beachy Hill with a friend. He would later meet Oscar Eckenstein, a well known mountaineer, who would teach him the glissade, a move that helped establish Crowley as a fine but reckless mountaineer.

In 1895, Aleister attended Trinity College, Cambridge for 3 years, never getting a degree. At the end of his time there, in November 18, 1898 he was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, taking the motto "Perdurabo" - "I shall endure to the end." The Golden Dawn was one of the few secret magical societies to allow both men and women to practice rituals together. William Butler Yeats was a member at the same time as Crowley. The society itself had much infighting and conflict. Crowley was involved with the order for a short time, then continued his magical studies on his own.

It was in 1903 that Aleister met Rose Kelly, the sister of a friend from his college year. He would marry her, initially to allow her the freedom to pursue her affair with a married man. Soon, he was to fall in love with her, calling her the most beautiful and fascinating woman in the world. She was the woman with him during an experience that would completely change his life. More exactly:

"At a series of invocations, undertaken with Rose, he received from the Angel Aiwass, on behalf of the Secret Chiefs, between Friday, 8 April and Sunday, 10 April 1904, his Liber Legis, or The Book of the Law of the New Epoch of Mankind. A new millennial religion was born; the Book was to be its Bible, its Koran; and Aleister Crowley was to be its prophet, its saint, even its godhead."

"The Beast Demystified" by Roger Hutchinson

The law this book established, called the "Law of Thelema", is one of the most well known statements attributed to Crowley - "(Do what) Thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under will."

Aleister would go on to write more than 70 books including The Equinox, 777, The Book of Lies and Magic in Theory and Practice as well as a magical diary.

Crowley's marriage to Rose lasted little more than 3 years, during which time he abandoned her, along with their 2 year old daughter, in Ranjoon. It was there that his daughter died of typhoid and although Crowley was not to blame directly, he did not help by his blaming of Rose, his claiming that her drunken negligence was the cause of the child's death.

Crowley had little long term luck with women, some due to his use of magical sexual partners while married and some, perhaps, due to his choice in women. His second wife, Marie Teresa Ferrari de Miramar, a Nicaraguan woman, also turned to drink and disappeared from his life soon after their marriage.

Aleister Crowley was publicly involved in scandal and even in some dubious situations. Bisexual, a man of hedonistic ways, a traveler and philosopher, he lived the life of an eccentric to the limit. Although he consciously experimented with drugs, his addiction to heroin came as a result of a prescription to treat his asthma. Heroin was not initially known for its addictive qualities and was generally prescribed by physicians for various ailments.

Perhaps one of Aleister Crowley's greatest contributions to humanity was in his making so much of the occult knowledge, held secret by many groups, available to all. And one of the most magnificent forms of this knowledge, created towards the end of his life, was his tarot deck which he created with Lady Frieda Harris. The project, which began with the intent of being a three month endeavor, took five years to complete; with Crowley often asking Lady Harris to redo certain images repeatedly until he was satisfied. The deck that they created is still considered to be one of the masterpieces of the tarot.

Aleister Crowley died on December 1, 1947 in Hastings. He was cremated at Brighton on Friday, December 5, 1947. A dozen or so people attended, Lady Frieda Harris being among them. One of these people rose and recited the following verse:

"Thrill with lissome lust of the light,
O man! My man!
Come careering out of the night
Of Pan! Io Pan!
Io Pan! Io Pan! Come over the sea...

But he was a man who had taken the motto "Perdurabo" - "I shall endure to the end." When his picture appeared on the album cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band by The Beatles, a resurgence of interest in him began. And so it is that today we find even those of a lesser radical lifestyle becoming enamored by the persona of Aleister Crowley, as well as the mysteries of his writings.

Many of Aleister Crowley's practices appear to be very dark by nature, although some of this is due to his employment of dark humor and the desire to shock others through his words. At other times, his writings can be poetically beautiful. Take, for example, this quote from his book Magic in Theory and Practice:

" ...Magick is as mysterious as mathematics, as empirical as poetry, as uncertain as golf, and as dependent on the personal equation as love.

That is no reason why we should not study, practice and enjoy it; for it is a Science in exactly the same sense as biology, it is no less an Art than Sculpture; and it is a Sport as much as Mountaineering.

Indeed, there seems to be no undue presumption in urging that no Science possesses equal possibilities, of deep and important Knowledge; that no Act offers such opportunities to the ambition of the Soul to express its Truth, in Ecstasy, through Beauty; and that no Sport rivals its fascinations of danger and delight, so excites, exercises, and tests its devotees to the uttermost, or so rewards them by well-being, pride, and the passionate pleasures of personal triumph.

Magic takes every thought and act for its apparatus; it has the Universe for its Library and its Laboratory; all Nature is its Subject; and its Game, free from close seasons and protective restrictions, always abounds in infinite variety, being all that exists."

Still, there is little doubt that Crowley had a very dark side to his life. After leaving the Golden Dawn, he became involved in a Clandestine Masonic order called the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), which had been started by Theodor Reuss (1855-1923), and over which Crowley took complete control in 1921, they would attempt to merge various fringe and some entirely illegitimate branches of Freemasonry and other fraternal societies, for the purpose of practicing various sexual magic rituals. Although Crowley would claim a Masonic lineage to his grave, he was never actually a member of any legitimate Masonic body.

During his lifetime, and to this day, there are many claims which have been made regarding the life of Aleister Crowley. Some claim that he practiced many dark and diabolical acts, including performing sacrifices and various rites that would later drive others to insanity, while others claim that he was a man who was simply misunderstood. In the end, there is likely as much myth as there is fact about his life. There is little doubt that he was a man of great ego, and Yeats would refer to Crowley simply as a "madman", but he was also a man of genius who left behind a considerable body of work and, with Lady Frieda Harris, one of the most strikingly beautiful Tarot decks of all time.