Compromise and Conceit

As the Age of Enlightment drew to a close the Great Houses and Monarchies of Europe had begun to stifle under the pall of their own histories. A small circle of authors and scientists, many  of great repute in the salons of Europe, had begun to plot a revolutionary and terrifying new path for European history. In 1588,  amidst much debate about the rectitude of their vision, Cristopher Marlowe wrote his famous Tragical History of Dr. Faustus. Marlowe intended this as a warning to his friends and colleagues about the danger of their proud new ideas, but it was taken across Europe as a balanced description of the power and the dangers of his friends’ new vision. For he and his friends had raised Infernal Powers to Earth, and from them had begun to gain great powers. Their vision for the future was a Europe whose power waxed upon the strengths of Demonic magic.

 The people of England, Marlowe’s home nation, looked across the Ocean to the New World of the Americas, where their brave vision of a new land from which they could plunder their way to greatness had been stymied by a frightening and sinister local shamanism, which the Native American peoples practised freely. In Europe the Austrian Empire looked nervously Southward, to the growing Ottoman Empire whose Djinn and Alchemists gave the Ottoman army incomparable power. The great power which Marlowe’s circle of friends offered the Europeans promised not just a renewal of their stagnating culture, but an opportunity to hold back the seemingly inexorable march of the Turks towards Southern Europe, perhaps the only way of ensuring the survival of a free Europe into the 17^th Century.

 In the 10 years following Marlowe’s publication many more scientists and philosophers across Europe flocked to the homes of his friends to study the Infernal powers they had discovered. The group became known informally as The Hamburg Circle, from the city at which they were based. As they continued to develop new and more exciting branches of the Science of Infernalism, Marlowe led debate on its dangers, holding forth his great play as a warning of the inevitable end to which such Conjuring would surely lead it’s practitioners. However, in 1600 his English contemporary, William Shakespeare, published his great play Hamlet, and with it a Deliberation upon the Tragedy of the Flaw’d Conjuror. In this essay Shakespeare discussed the Tragedies he had already written, noting that the heroes in many of his texts were undone by their own fatal flaws. He compared his latest tragic protagonist, Hamlet, with Dr. Faustus, and observed that neither would have come undone had they not surrendered to their fatal character flaws. In Dr. Faustus’s case, Shakespeare argued, his flaws were arrogance, greed and deceptiveness. Had he been able to practise his Infernal arts openly, and had he been less bent on worldly gain and self-aggrandisement he would have been able to control Mephistopheles and use the Infernal powers he was offered for good. In short, Shakespeare concluded, had Faustus been a good Christian summoning under the supervision of the Christian church he would have been able to avoid the apparently inevitable trap so eloquently described at the end of the play. Shakespeare recommended that Infernalism and the Hamburg Circle be placed under the supervision of the Church, and suggested that good Christian men from the ruling classes would surely only be able to use their powers for good under these conditions.

The salons of Europe were set aflame by this argument, and the following year an anonymous pamphlet was distributed throughout Europe. This pamphlet, The Divine Puropses of Hell, described a Europe transformed by Demonic power. These Demonic powers, the pamphlet argued, could be easily controlled by good Christians and would have many benefits. In four chapters devoted separately to Civic Life, the Arts, War and Industry, the anonymous author described the transformative and liberating effects of harnessing Infernal powers. The people of Europe were captivated by the images contained therein, and for the next 50 years the Hamburg Circle developed their skills and powers, teaching novices from all over Europe. Shakespeare’s initial admonition that Infernalists should be supervised by the Church was forgotten in the rush to spread their teachings, and the original meaning of Marlowe’s text was reinterpreted as a warning against allowing ones own desires and flaws to interfere with the pure task of conjuring Demons for the good of Christendom.

The military academies of Europe and England, and both Churches, were at the forefront of development of Infernalism as a tool for everyday life. In 1681 the Ottomans were stalemated in a mighty battle at Saloniki, the first victory against the Turkish forces for nearly 100 years. With the signing of the temporary Constantinople Peace in 1682 the people of Europe realised the importance of Infernal forces in battle, and the final objections to their use in everyday life were swept away on a tide of euphoria. There might be no peace in Europe herself, and Demons might have transformed Europe’s internal conflicts to a new state of bloodthirstiness, but Europe herself would survive, and there was hope that perhaps the infidel would be defeated in the future.

The science of infernalism continued to spread across Europe through the rest of the 17^th Century and the first half of the 18^th Century. However, in 1739 a bizarre series of horrific murders, and the destruction of the entire village of Collona in Northern Lombardy at the hands of a mad conjuror, led the people of Europe to question their decision to so freely embrace their new science. In 1751 the first Convocation of Thaumaturges met in Hamburg, and under the auspices of both Churches, the Emperor of Prussia and the Kings of England, the Netherlands and France, it was decided that only practitioners from several strict schools of magic would be able to conjure Demons. These schools were the Hamburg, the Regency, the Trajectors, and the Order of Hermes, and only the most powerful and skilled of the Hamburg School’s practitioners would be able to conjure great Demons. Over the next 100 years the Inquisition worked throughout Europe to hunt down Demonologists and offer them a stark choice: the School or the Stake. The Hamburg School led the way to the formalisation of magic in schools, and it also coined the great phrase which described the rule of Infernalism in modern Europe: the Essential Compromise.