The Reference Desk of the Beyond

Demons, alchemists, hauntings and the credulity of centuries.

Lewis Spence catalogued the whole machinery of the supernatural without believing a word of it — and the 1920 encyclopaedia is stranger than anything it debunks. The pick of it here, each linking to the entry it came from.

The demon took her amulet off first. Jeannette Abadie, a girl of Gascony, fell asleep during high mass and a demon carried her to the Sabbath — but only after prudently removing the protective amulet from her bosom, which she found again on her own threshold. The chief demon there "had on his head two faces, like Janus." Her confession saved her from the stake.Read it: Abaddon
Albertus Magnus was said to have made the Philosopher's Stone and handed it to his pupil St. Thomas Aquinas — who destroyed it, "suspecting it to be a contrivance of the devil." Tradition also credits Albertus with inventing the pistol and the cannon.Read it: Albertus Magnus
Artephius wrote *The Art of Prolonging Life* and stated in the preface that he was one thousand and twenty-five years old. Cardan's verdict: the books were composed by "some practical joker who wished to play on the credulity of the partisans of alchemy."Read it: Artephius
Abracadabra comes from a god of the calendar. Abraxas's name was built from seven Greek letters totalling 365; he commanded 365 gods, to whom the Gnostics assigned 365 virtues, one for every day of the year.Read it: Abraxas
The Devil publishes almanacs. The *Almanach du Diable* of 1737–38 purported to be printed in the infernal regions; the Jansenists retaliated with the *Almanac de Dieu*, which claimed satirically to be printed in heaven. Both were suppressed.Read it: Almagest
There is a recorded haunting that consisted entirely of a smell: a house "'haunted' with the perpetual odour of violets."Read it: Apparitions
The fortune cookie, two thousand years early. In aleuromancy, sentences were written on slips, each rolled inside a ball of flour, mixed nine times and handed out to the waiting crowd. Apollo presided, under the name Aleuromantis.Read it: Aleuromancy
A demon went to supper and was caught out by his drink order. Baltazo, possessing a woman of Laon in 1566, dined with her husband and touched nothing — "which shows that demons are averse to water."Read it: Baltazo
How to hatch a gold-detector. The *Black Pullet* gives the recipe: set a black hen to hatch one of her own eggs, hood her eyes so she cannot see, and keep her in a box lined with black. The chick will have "a particular instinct for detecting the places wherein gold is hidden."Read it: Black Mass
Witches' butter: the Devil gave Swedish witches cats to steal food, but the cats gorged themselves and were "obliged to disgorge their stolen meal." The yellow vomit found in kitchen gardens was known as witches' butter.Read it: Busardier
A pope who was made pope at twelve — Benedict IX, installed by an ambitious family when the papal crown was more than once put up for sale. The strangest story about him has him charming the Roman matrons to follow him "over hill and dale, through forests and across rivers… as though he were a sort of Pied Piper."Read it: Belphegor
Pythagoras was a thief. Apollo gave the magician Abaris a golden arrow he could ride through the air — the Greeks called him the Aerobate — and Pythagoras stole it and worked wonders with it. Abaris also carved a statue of Minerva from the bones of Pelops and sold it to the Trojans as a talisman fallen from heaven: the Palladium.Read it: Abaris
Trial by cake and serpent. Near Lavinium a serpent was kept in a sacred cave; young women were sent in blindfolded carrying barley-and-honey cakes. If the serpent ate the cake the woman was innocent; if it refused, she was not.Read it: Alphitomancy
You could be acquitted of witchcraft by weight: the accused was weighed against the great Bible of the church, and if lighter than the Bible, was innocent.Read it: Bibliomancy
Delancre's objection to a divination method, preserved in full: the axe must supposedly be stuck in a round pot — "which is absurd. For how could an axe be fixed in a round pot, any more than the pot could be sewed or patched if the axe had broken it to pieces?"Read it: Avichi
The Devil has a university. A magician brought before the Parliament of Paris testified that sixty-three masters in the faculty of Magic lived at Toledo, and took the Devil's Bible for their textbook.Read it: Bible of the Devil
The bezoar stone once fetched ten times its weight in gold as an antidote to poison. Early naturalists explained its origin: aged stags ate serpents to renew their youth, then stood in running streams with only their heads out, whereupon a fluid distilled from their eyes and hardened in the sun.Read it: Bezoar
Sorcerers had to silence the cockerel, whose dawn crow routed the Sabbath — so they smeared his head and breast with olive oil, or hung a collar of vine-branches round his neck.Read it: Cock
Inside the cock's stomach was said to lie the stone *Lappilus Alectorius*, which gave strength and courage, and which was credited with the gigantic might of Milo of Crotona.Read it: Cock
The beheading game, centuries before Gawain. In the Irish tale, a demon called The Terrible proposed the test of courage: cut off my head today, and let me cut off yours tomorrow. Cuchulain beheaded him; the demon "immediately picked up his head and vanished," returned next day, and declared him champion of Ireland.Read it: Briatic World
The equator-crossing ceremony, as recorded here: the Father of the Line arrives in a cask, attended by a courier, a devil, a hair-dresser and a miller; the victim is curled, floured and drenched. "The origin of this custom is not known, nor is it quite clear what part the devil plays in it. It is said, however, that it may be averted by tipping the sailors."Read it: Baptism of the Line
The demon Bifrons is the one who "lights the strange corpse-lights above the tombs of the dead" — and can move corpses from place to place. Twenty-six infernal regions obey him.Read it: Bifrons
A charm with an unusually specific finish: the stone chrisoletus drives away night-hags and preserves from melancholy — and "its virtue is the greater if a hole be made in it, and the hairs of an ass passed through."Read it: Chrisoletus
The Cock Lane Ghost was an eleven-year-old girl. The 1762 London sensation — rappings, apparitions, crowds — turned out to be the work of the tenant's daughter, and her father Parsons was prosecuted and pilloried.Read it: Cock Lane Ghost
A ghost identified by process of elimination: at Corinth, Arignote sat reading in a haunted courtyard while the spectre appeared to him as a dog, then a bull, then a lion. He conjured it into a corner. They dug there, found a skeleton, buried it properly, and the haunting stopped.Read it: Arignote
In Burma the soul is an invisible butterfly, the *leippya*, which leaves the body in sleep and can be caught by a witch — hence illness. Cure is by noise, and by beating the patient severely, "the idea being that the fiend which possesses him is the sufferer."Read it: Burma
Adalbert distributed the parings of his own nails and locks of his hair as powerful amulets, and produced a letter he said had been carried to him from Jesus Christ by the hand of St. Michael.Read it: Adalbert
A Victorian spirit-photographer confessed — and his believers refused to accept it. When Buguet admitted his 1874 London spirit pictures were faked, "there were yet a number of persons who… thought that he had been bribed to confess trickery of which he was innocent."Read it: Buguet
Elfin cats haunt the Scottish Highlands: "as large as dogs, black in colour, with a white spot on the breast… arched backs and erect bristles." Some hold they are witches in disguise.Read it: Cathari
In Cambodia the most feared spirits are those of women who died in childbirth, who hide in the trees and torment passers-by "with their hideous laughter," showering stones down on them.Read it: Cambodia
Alexander of Tralles, a serious sixth-century physician, prescribed a ring engraved with Hercules strangling the Nemean lion as "an excellent cure for colic."Read it: Alexander of Tralles
A working oracle fraud, described mechanically: Alexander the Paphlagonian's serpent was rigged "by means of ingenious mechanical contrivances" to answer questions, and sealed rolls containing questions came back with the seals intact and answers written inside.Read it: Alexander the Paphlagonian
The first woman ever to practise divination is named: Bagoe, a pythoness believed to be the Erythraean sibyl, who "judged all events by the sound of thunder."Read it: Bagoe
The Golden Plant of Mount Libanus, prized by alchemists, could be seen at night by torchlight — and was invisible by day.Read it: Baaras
Spence pauses mid-entry to ask the obvious question nobody asks: witches ride broomsticks to the Sabbath — "Does the broomstick magically take the place of a flying horse?"Read it: Broomstick
Divination by caul: if the membrane over a newborn's head is red, happy days are in store; if lead-coloured, misfortunes.Read it: Amniomancy
A sorceress of Labour was rewarded for attending the Sabbath by being suspended in mid-air head downwards.Read it: Birraark
The scapegoat, described as ritual technology: the High Priest laid both hands on the goat of Azazel, confessed the sins of the people onto it, and drove it into the desert — the people then "return home with clean consciences."Read it: Azazel
George Bauer worked real silver mines, and the practical knowledge cured him of believing in transmutation — but "if he abandoned one superstition he adopted another," and he took from the miners a belief that fire-damp was created by malicious spirits underground.Read it: Bat
The Devil is said to be unable to take perfect human form: "having fallen lower than any man," he must carry some deformity — hence the cloven foot.Read it: Cloven Foot
Witch-finding as political weapon: in the African procedure described, the finder lightly switched a chosen spectator with a quagga-tail, and that person "was immediately dragged away and butchered on the spot" — along with everyone and everything in his hut. "The reader will perceive how terrible the cruel custom could be made to gratify private revenge."Read it: Africa
An accused witch tried to save herself by naming a girl; the girl confessed under the accusation "and was burnt along with her accuser."Read it: Berande
Freemasonry had women's lodges in eighteenth-century France, with splendid names: the Mopses, the Felicitaries (1742), and the Fendeurs — the Woodcutters — instituted in 1763.Read it: Adoptive Masonry
A herb called abyssum was used to exorcise a haunted house: signed with the cross and hung at the four corners of the building.Read it: Abyssum