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Paris, but at the instigation of jealous professional brethren he was accused of heresy and
fled to his native place. At Padua a chair of medicine was created for him, but the
accusation followed its victim; by some he was charged with denying the existence of
demons, by others with obtaining his knowledge from seven imps whom he kept in a
bottle. However this may be, the Inquisition instituted a process, but the designed sufferer
was delivered by death--as some say, on the eve of his execution. The intervention
infuriated the Tribunal, though the testament left behind him by Peter of Abano affirmed
his belief in the orthodox faith. The magistrates of the city were ordered, on pain of
excommunication, to exhume his body, but it was removed by a faithful servant and
buried secretly in another church. The Inquisition clamoured for the punishment of the
offender but
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was content in the end to burn the dead physician in effigy. As a counterpoise, a century
later his bust was placed in the town-hall of Padua. His undoubted works, which are
frankly unreadable, betray no acquaintance with the occult sciences beyond a belief in
astrology, which in those days was catholic as Rome and powerful as the Holy Tribunal.
He remains, therefore, one of the moral martyrs of Magic, faussement accusé, as Gabriel
Naudé has it. His accusation and the mode of its prosecution remain also among the
lesser glories of the Holy Office.
Accepting the Heptameron as a work belonging to the period of its first publication, it is
here placed among the Rituals of a composite character, not because it professedly deals
with devils, but because the nature of its angels and spirits is indicated by the manner of
their conjuration; in a word, they are described as angels and threatened as demons.
The procedure is divided into two parts--a general method for the evocation of the Spirits
of the Air, who are undoubtedly demons, and a set of angelical conjurations proper to
each day of the week. The second section presumably belongs to the department of White
Magic--if I may adopt this glorious distinction in the ribaldry of a passing moment--as the
intelligences concerned are said to be good and great, though their offices are mixed and
confusing, including the discovery of treasures, the detection of secrets, fomenting war,
opening locks and bolts, procuring the love of women, inclining men to luxury and
sowing hatred and evil thought. Obviously, White Magic of this kind is much blacker
than it is painted. Though the entire Heptameron appears under one attribution, the first
part only is ascribed in the text to Peter de Abano. Therein the personal preparation of the
operator corresponds to that given in the Second Part of the present work, and the
ceremonial itself,
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which, if cited at all, would have to be printed in extenso, as it contains no detachable
portions, is much too elaborate to be inserted in this place, more especially as that of the
Lemegeton will provide later on a fairly complete notion of the scope and purpose of the
Composite Rituals, taken in their broad aspect, and will illustrate the fact that all
conventional distinctions dissolve therein.