So: we’re looking for the palace of the Doge, to prepare for a trip the next day.

Venice is a disorienting braid of fascinating streets packed with fascinating distractions; when moving down lanes running between medieval buildings. This is a subtle city, and it’s easy to get lost.

Most of the places that are open in the off-season sell near-identical items – touristic brick-a-brac for livelaughlovers hunting souvenirs: carnival masks, the same Murano glass objects, teeshirts with the city's winged lion on it. Also many types of feather quills and engravable stamps for sealing letters, for some reason. I’m not sure anyone ever needed these things in the available quantities.

Occasionally though – there is a really unique store or exhibit that leaves a mark.

We find the Doge's Palace just after dusk. My wife is not overly impressed. I think it's OK, though more for the momentous conversations that took place inside it, then its architectural grandeur. Beside it, an advertising pull-up, with words that trigger imagination – malefica, inquisition, stregheria, torture. The vibe intensifies; it is so immaculate, it almost has its own ominous theme music.

We go inside.

On the second floor of this ancient building, we find the former facilities that housed the Night Lords of Venice – the secret court that prosecuted witches, apostates, heretics and atheists. The museum oddly focuses on torturing witches.

The first thing I notice is some of the gear from this supposedly historic and educational exhibition is still used today, in some of the spicier BDSM scenes. The exhibits say they’re replicas of the originals.

Secrets of Solomon: A Witch’s Handbook

The day before finding this place, I’d been rereading Secrets of Solomon or The Art Rabidmadar (Clavicula Salomonis de Secretis), Joseph H. Peterson’s excellent critical edition of this curious grimoire. Allegedly belonging to Leonardo Longo and Francesco Viola, and discussed during their interrogation in these same rooms, it features the spirit families of the mighty Grimorium Verum, and detailed guidance on talisman production. It also features a series of experiments of cosmic scope: the means of contacting the star demons known as the Almathai.

It’s a powerful work, and one worth exploring in detail – a thought shared by Witchfather Gerald Gardner, whose library provided one of the manuscripts that went into Peterson’s edition.

Back in Venice, in the rooms that Longo and Violo may have appealed, argued and pleaded for their freedom and lives. The meeting hall is on the second floor. Upstairs, on the third floor, there are dungeons. Curious to find upstairs dungeons – though I guess the Night Lords were old boys, who perhaps didn't like climbing the stairs when they didn't have to.

We're pushing on closing time, so move perhaps too quickly; it feels damp, dark and tortured here. We burst into a cell with a bed in it, and little else but the plastinated body of a woman, with a short summary “Female witch awaiting sentencing” (or something to this effect).

Plastination is a process of using resins to preserve corpses. The room has a cloying cold feeling, and both of us feel sick almost immediately, and don't linger.

This one seemed incongruous – like it was included purely to display the broken body of a tortured witch awaiting capital punishment.

She was quite an attractive woman, too, from the brief glimpse I stole, before realising what was before me, and the visceral reaction to the spectacle taking hold.

I left that room rapidly. Everyone who could left rapidly. It was a bit to take in, and the walls seemed stained with the residue left by the drama of the interrogations.

Not a great time, but a remarkable one, and one worth remembering. Made more so by the serendipitous stumbling across the actual site where these men, Longo and Violo, and many others, were investigated and tried.

It is their path, and in their footsteps, we tread, in a tricksy half-light – the hero’s path, of curiosity, adventure, unsanctioned spiritual inquiries and the burning desire to learn and know more, whatever the cost.

#travel #witchcraft #grimoires

It's an affecting site – especially when you look slightly more into the story. Further details that have since emerged that the allegations, trials and murders showed once again, the motives were more upon the earth, rather than under it.

One young accuser, Ann Putnam, accused over 60 people. Her father would buy their land at cut-rate prices; the veritable fire sale.

It highlights the error of attributing to devils what people are perfectly capable of doing for, or to, themselves.

This memorial stands in stark contrast to the mid-century, highly affected gropings towards some “witchiness”; that weird American expression that gets tangled up with feminism, social issues and various flavours of New Thought. This is fine, as far as it goes – but you have to ask where the other bits are; the flying ointments, Sabbats, shapeshifting, the arrangements with tutelary spirits. All the actual magical bits, where things go bump in the night.

Beyond this, what is most curious about this is just how sexless, safe and neutered the end result is. It all seems very ... confected.

A wild quest; illicit love, pirate gold and lost history

A few minutes away, near the Salem seaside, there’s a museum bearing testament to something that seems too outrageous to be true – and the hoard of pirate treasure to prove it.

An underwater archeologist and treasure-hunter named Barry Clifford weathered ridicule for years, hunting for a rumoured lost pirate ship he heard about as a boy: the Wydah.

Clifford was possessed by the story of the captured slave-transport ship, which had been turned to the pursuit of extra-legal income gathering activities by a gathering of rogues and rapscallions in the early 1700s.

The ship, as a so-called republic of the sea, was governed by the egalitarian, libertarian values of “the articles”, the code which each sailor would swear to uphold. The ship was captained by the dashing Sam Bellamy, who turned to piracy for love – specifically, the love of Maria Hallett.

After a stellar career as a pirate captain, Bellamy was apparently heading around the Massachusetts coastline.

About this time, Maria was branded “the Witch of Wellfleet”, apparently due to being seen howling, pleading and cursing on the beach.

The god-fearing locals thought she was communicating with the devils of storm and sea; they did not know that her pirate love, and his crew of free men, were sailing through ship-wrecking seas to meet her. They also did not know she was with child.

Bellamy’s ship, laden with a legendary horde of reallocated Spanish gold, was lost that night; those who didn’t drown were captured and hung. The body of Sam Bellamy was never found. Maria Hallett apparently gave birth to a boy, though never revealed who the father was.

Sometime after, she and the child also disappeared. Another mystery – no one knows where she went, or what happened next. There is a theory he survived, and they were reunited, and lived out their lives together – though this is just a tale; do the stories of pirates and witches get happy endings?

Three hundred years later, after a decades-long treasure hunt, Barry Clifford found the wreck, with 200,000 catalogued items – among which – in a story almost too fantastic, the hoard of the actual pirate treasure.

The exhibition deftly placed piracy in the context of the time, and tells these stories. It’s all there, including the treasure. It’s a wonderful, exciting place to visit, and so well done.

So, on the face of it, it seems Salem’s history of witchcraft is largely fabrication, misapprehension, and wilful ignorance, capitalised on with an evocative and high-valence PR exercise. Meanwhile, other stories, no less compelling, remain largely underexposed.

#travel #witchcraft #myth