Demonic possession and exorcism are discussed in numerous medieval and early modern written sources and have been the subjects of a great number of modern academic investigations.

In the stories concerning possession and exorcism the demons are perceived through an ecclesiastical veil: they appear as the Devil's obedient servants, who, led by the black archfiend, seduce peo­ple to indulge in vice and trouble them with illnesses, diseases and misfor­tunes.

Nevertheless, the Catholic Church never had a total monopoly on the European mindscape. Along with the official demonology of the Church, sev­eral beliefs, practices and traditions concerning demons and spirits survived. For example, the genres of learned magic known today as divination and rit­ual magic employed spiritual beings extensively. The basic elements of their demonological views derive from Judaeo-Christian traditions, but the perspec­tive is broader and the relationship with the spirits more complex.

The histories of divination and ritual magic in particular have been widely studied during the last twenty-five years, and we have an extensive prelimi­nary understanding of the roles of demons in these areas of magic.^[797] There are, however, other popular fields of medieval learned magic that have not been much explored from the demonological or spiritual point of view. These include genres that have been called natural magic, image magic and Hermetic magic. The boundaries of these categories are anything but clear. Natural magic refers usually to a literary tradition of magic that claims to be based solely on natural influences without demonic interventions. Hermetic magic is based on pseudepigraphical texts ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus. The family of Hermetic writings known as Hermetica contains a wide variety of both religious-theoretical and practical texts dating from antiquity down to the Middle Ages.

‘One way is abominable—[that] which requires suffumigations and invoca­tion, such as the images of Toz the Greek and Germath the Babylonian, which have stations for the worship of Venus, [and] the images of Balenuz and Hermes, which are exorcized by using the 54 names of the angels, who are said to be sub­servient to the images of the Moon in its orbit, [but] perhaps are instead the names of demons, and seven names are incised on them in the correct order to affect a good thing and in inverse order for a thing one wants to be repelled. They are also suffumigated with the wood of aloe, saffron and balsam for a good purpose; and with galbanum, red sandlewood and resin for an evil purpose. The spirit is certainly not compelled [to act] because of these, but when God per­mits it on account of our own sins, they [the spirits] show themselves as com­pelled to act, in order to deceive men. This is the worst idolatry...'^[799]

This quotation illustrates, among other topics, the nature of Hermetic image magic. Formulas combine astral influences, properties of natural substances and images with invocation and holy names of spiritual beings suspected of being demons. This paper explores this still rather obscure field: demons and other spiritual beings in Latin manuals of natural magic and image magic, most of which are labelled Hermetic.

Before exploring the relationship between demons and illness in the tradi­tion of learned magic selected for study here, it is worth taking a brief look at the tradition itself. Medieval learned magic mostly refers to sources written in Latin that circulated in the Latin West. Benedek Lang has recently divided learned magic into five rather independent literary traditions: natural magic, image magic, ritual magic, divination and alchemy. The first three deserve attention here. Manuals of natural magic circulated with works of natural science (e.g. with astrology, lapidaries and herbariums) and presented them­selves as a science based on two axioms of Hellenistic and scholastic science: the astrological influence (astral radiation) and the occult properties of stones, metals, plants and animals. The most popular texts were the Experimenta of Pseudo-Albert the Great, the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum, and Kyranides which will be discussed in more detail below. Image magic pre­sented itself as a science as well. It shared the same two principles as natural magic, but emphasized the role of images and often included the invocation of spirits. The majority of the manuals are translations from Arabic, and most of them belong to the family of technical Hermetica.4

The tradition of ritual magic is based more on the invocation of spirits and manifold rituals, including prayers and holy words (often taken from the Christian liturgy), diabolical or unidentified names, symbols and magic circles, fasting and purification, and sometimes even the construction of a ritual hall or building.

The similiarities—suffumigations, invocations, material auxiliaries and so on—between the traditions of image magic and ritual magic make the lat­ter a rewarding source of comparison with the Hermetic texts discussed in this paper. Claire Fanger has divided ritual magic into ‘angelic’ and ‘demonic’ magic, depending on the object of invocation.^[804] The former was focused on seeking knowledge, asking advice and protecting the agent from evil by invok­ing angels and biblical entities. In the latter tradition, diverse (usually non­Christian or diabolical) spirits were invoked for personal gain. In all branches, the spirits were usually invoked by name: Richard Kieckhefer has identified 189 different names in the so-called Munich handbook (a manual of ritual magic from the fifteenth century), 88 of which are said to be demons.^[805] Only 17% of the names are established ones, and, in general, the use of unidentified and haphazard names (sometimes called ‘barbaric names’) is a commonplace in ritual magic.

In ritual magic the spirits are invoked for gaining advantage: for favour in court, for attaining knowledge or revealing secrets, or for fortune in love. The connection between spirits and illness is rare. Sometimes the linkage appears in the context of curse formulas that became more popular during the four­teenth and fifteenth centuries. Some formulas gave instructions for injuring the victim or making him fall ill with the help of demonic auxiliaries. In the Munich handbook, for example, there is one instruction for causing dementia: The practitioner goes to his victim and ‘openly recites a conjuration' command­ing the malign spirit Mirael to afflict the victim's brain. Then the practitioner inscribes a short conjuration and a magic circle, conjures the demons thrice and even urinates on the victim's doorstep ‘in the manner of a camel.' After seven days of rituals the victim becomes demented without himself realizing his condition.^{[807] [808]}

Nevertheless, only a minority of the vast number of late medieval curse for­mulas harness spirits to cause illness or link demons to illness. As this paper shows, the subject appears more often in the less explicitly demonic genres of natural and Hermetic magical texts. Usually, sympathetic rituals (those based on symbolic or an indexical connection between the ritual and its purpose or victim) such as voodoo dolls combined with utilization of astrological influ­ences were sufficient to harm the victim. The example illustrates, however, that combinations existed, and other sources such as miracle narratives in which ‘possessed' people are cured show that the topos of employing spiritual and demonic beings for inflicting maladies (mental illnesses in particular) was relatively commonly known.