, Gilles de Rais had remained until this moment a
Christian mystic under the influence of Jeanne d'Arc, but after her
death--possibly in despair--he offered himself to the powers of
darkness. Evokers of Satan now flocked to him from every side, amongst
them Prelati, an Italian, by no means the old and wrinkled sorcerer of
tradition, but a young and attractive man of charming manners. For it
was from Italy that came the most skilful adepts in the art of alchemy,
astrology, magic, and infernal evocation, who spread themselves over
Europe, particularly France. Under the influence of these initiators
Gilles de Rais signed a letter to the devil in a meadow near Machecoul
asking him for "knowledge, power, and riches," and offering in exchange
anything that might be asked of him with the exception of his life or
his soul. But in spite of this appeal and of a pact signed with the
blood of the writer, no Satanic apparitions were forthcoming.

It was then that, becoming still more desperate, Gilles de Rais had
recourse to the abominations for which his name has remained
infamous--still more frightful invocations, loathsome debaucheries,
perverted vice in every form, Sadic cruelties, horrible sacrifices, and,
finally, holocausts of little boys and girls collected by his agents in
the surrounding country and put to death with the most inhuman tortures.
During the years 1432-40 literally hundreds of children disappeared.
Many of the names of the unhappy little victims were preserved in the
records of the period. Gilles de Rais met with a well-deserved end: in
1440 he was hanged and burnt. So far he does not appear to have found a
panegyrist to place him in the ranks of noble martyrs.

It will, of course, be urged that the crimes here described were those
of a criminal lunatic and not to be attributed to any occult cause; the
answer to this is that Gilles was not an isolated unit, but one of a
group of occultists who cannot all have been mad. Moreover, it was only
after his invocation of the Evil One that he developed these monstrous
proclivities. So also his eighteenth-century replica, the Marquis de
Sade, combined with his abominations an impassioned hatred of the
Christian religion.

What is the explanation of this craze for magic in Western Europe?
Deschamps points to the Cabala, "that science of demoniacal arts, of
which the Jews were the initiators," and undoubtedly in any
comprehensive review of the question the influence of