Pope Sylvester II and the Devil
Many young men traveled to Spain to get an education. One of these men was Gerbert d’Aurillac, who became the first French pope, Pope Sylvester II. He’s credited with reforming European education by emphasing the importance of rhetoric, logic and grammar in monastery schools. He introduced the Arabic numeral system to Europe, helped to standardize the use of the abacus, and revolutionized European astronomy with a gadget called the armillary sphere, or spherical astrolabe.
People accused Gerbert d’Aurillac of dark sorcery and cahooting with the Devil.
Rumor held that Gerbert won his papal office in a game of dice with Satan, fiddling contests having not yet been invented. Others believed he’d stolen his Muslim teacher’s spellbook, and then used it to evade the man’s pursuit. He was said to have built a mechanical head, which answered his yes-or-no questions, like a Magic 8-Ball for the 10th century AD.
Source: dontcallmemarge.com
Illustration of Lucifer, taken from a French manuscript of the fifteenth century
The devil in the centre of the picture and those round the sides combine elements of the human form with those of pigs, cats, angels, dragons and carry hooks and instruments of torture, they are shown in different colours, with snarling faces and huge fangs, and are intended to instill terror and fear of hell and damnation into the beholders.
Source: english.cam.ac.uk
Here’s a fun fact…
Spiral staircases in medieval castles are running clockwise.
Why?
This is because all knights used to be right-handed. When the intruding army would climb the stairs they would not be able to use their right hand which was holding the sword because of the difficulties of climbing the stairs. Left-handed knights would have had no troubles, except left-handed people could never become knights because it was assumed that they were descendants of the devil.
Source: themiddleages.net
Hans Memling
Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation (c.1485)
Oil on oak panel, 22 x 15 cm (each wing)
I divided this into a photoset for your viewing pleasure (the pairs consist of a wing and it’s back side)
You know how you get bored in class, and if you’re one of the bad kids you take out your pocket knife and carve something into the desk? Well, nothing new. Seems that kids have been doing it for centuries.
Choir stalls - 15th century : St John the Baptist, Dronfield, Derbyshire.
Bored choir boys, sermon too long; read into this what you will.
Source: flickr.com
Emperor Lucifer, master of all the rebel spirits, I beg you to favour me in the call that I am making to your grand minister LUCIFUGÉ ROFOCALE, desiring to make a pact with him; I beg you also, prince Beelzebub to protect me in my undertaking. O count Astarot! Be favourable to me, and make it so that this night the grand Lucifege appears to me in human form, and without any bad odour, and that he accords to me, by the pact that I am going to present to him, all the riches I need.
From the Grand Grimoire. The Grand Grimoire is a black magic grimoire that claims to date to 1522. It is possibly written some point after the 18th century.
The book is called “Le Veritable Dragon Rouge” (“The True Red Dragon”) in Haiti, where it is revered among many practitioners of Vodou.
image:
Lindorm dragon from the alchemical scrolls of Sir George Ripley, 15th century.
Lindorms were most often encountered in churchyards, where they fed on human corpses, and would sometimes invade churches.
The dragon’s strength is found in its tail, not in its teeth. Its lashing tail does great harm, and the dragon kills anything it catches in its coils. The dragon is the enemy of the elephant, and hides near paths where elephants walk so that it can catch them with its tail and kill them by suffocation. It is because of the threat of the dragon that elephants give birth in the water. The dragon’s venom is harmless. The dragon has a crest and a small mouth. When the dragon is drawn from its hole into the air, it stirs up the air and makes it shine. Dragons are found in India and Ethiopia. Dragons are afraid of the peridexion tree and stay out of its shadow, which will harm them. Doves roost in the tree to be safe from the dragon. Dragons cannot stand the sweet smell breathed out by the pantherand hide in a hole when the panther roars.
Allegory/Moral
The Devil is likened to a dragon because he is the worst of all serpents. As the dragon makes the air shine, so the Devil makes himself appear as the angel of light to deceive the foolish. The crest of the dragon represents the Devil crowned with pride. As the dragon’s strength is not in its teeth but in its tail, the Devil, deprived of his strength, deceives with lies. The way in which the dragon attacks elephants represents the way the Devil attacks people, lying in wait along their path to heaven, wrapping them in his coils, and suffocating them with sin.
The Carpenter, the Servant and the Witch - part III
Day three - The Witch
shall die today. I feel no fear for I know it would end like this. And I am not sorry. Man does not choose his way. Before death, I shall pray for those who turned me in and for those that judged me (please God, don’t let it be the boy’s father who betrayed me). I am alone in the dark and it is cold. I can’t lay on my back, I feel the wounds burning, and when I lay on my stomach rats smell the blood and clime on my back…
Just make it all end, let it be done with. They say you die from the smoke, suffocating, and not from the fire. I hope it is true. I don’t think about Heaven nor Hell. I’ve seen both, here on Earth. I doubt there is anything beyond death. I am greatful, God, for everything you gave me, and I pray to the angels above to watch over those I cured for it is the only human thing, only value I was ever able to give.
I can hear logs being brought to the square. They all curse me and I haven’t done anything to them. Not good, not bad. They negotiate how much rotten vegetables to bring to throw at me. And I know they are hungry. Let them be. They are only doing their job. So was I. And the boy’s good father should continue his job. Let him ornament the whole world with his cheap crucifixes and than, maybe than, all those that sinned will repent.
by
“O frondens virga” from Ordo Virtutum, written (and at the time performed) by Hildegard of Bingen
O frondens virga,
In tua nobilitate stans,
sicut aurora procedit.
Nunc gaude et laetare et nos debiles dignare
a mala consuetudine liberare,
atque manum tuam porrige ad erigendum nos.
Did you know?
There were no birthdays in medieval times. Only name days were celebrated.
(Birthdays are a fairly new invention, started about 150 years ago. There was, and still is, a great controversy and disagreement from church about this. Supposedly, it is a day when you celebrate the devil, your ego and all your earthly qualities. In short.)
Too bad…
In Latin superbia, this is a apparently the father of all sins and is otherwise known as vanity or narcissism. Pride caused Lucifer to fall from heaven into hell. Pride is to love yourself and to be big-headed; to be arrogant, over-confident and blind to the concerns of others.
Animal symbols - The horse, lion, and peacock.
Colour - violet
Punishment - broken on the wheel.
image: Lucifer trapped in Earth’s frozen core. (Giovanni Stradano, 1587)
illustrator Arthur Szyk’s (1894–1951) “The Scribe”
“The Scribe” is one the most symbolic and complicated paintings to come out of his Paris period, perhaps his whole career.
In it the scribe and his surroundings are the medium, and the tight, almost illegible Germanic script that he is penning, is the message. Szyk wrote the document himself, a commentary on the modern world and its relation to its medieval forbear, as he saw it from Paris in the 1920s.
But the cherubim aren’t inured from modernity, they hold aloft a dollar bill — an almost spoof-like image of a divine little bailout that reminds us of the different sensibilities that governed the modern and medieval eras.
“I think he’s saying, there’s things that are real, things that matter, and things that don’t,” continued Ungar. “He’s trying to say that both worlds exist and that somehow in this world, one has to negotiate and make a choice.”
Read more: http://www.forward.com/articles/105203/#ixzz1M9TYcl6o
The Codex Gigas (English: Giant Book) is the largest extant medieval manuscript in the world. It is also known as the Devil’s Bible because of a large illustration of the devil on the inside and the legend surrounding its creation. It is thought to have been created in the early 13th century in the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice in Bohemia (modern Czech Republic). It contains the Vulgate Bible as well as many historical documents all written in Latin. During the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, the entire collection was stolen by the Swedish army as plunder, and now it is preserved at the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm, though it is not normally on display.
According to one version of a legend that is already recorded in the Middle Ages the scribe was a monk who broke his monastic vows and was sentenced to be walled up alive. In order to forbear this harsh penalty he promised to create in one single night a book to glorify the monastery forever, including all human knowledge. Near midnight he became sure that he could not complete this task alone, so he made a special prayer, not addressed to God but to the fallen archangel Lucifer, asking him to help him finish the book in exchange for his soul. The devil completed the manuscript and the monk added the devil’s picture out of gratitude for his aid. In tests to recreate the work, it is estimated to have taken 20 or more years to have written the work.
