Cellini: the Italian sculptor who battled demons with farts in the 1500s
In the world of fantasy, few beings are more feared than the necromancer – the magician whose speciality is in death magic, nigh-on invariably a black-clad, fearsome villain who can kill with a stare, then puppet those corpses to do his wicked bidding.
All very rad, all very metal, all very fantastical. People don’t rise from the dead at a Latin-sounding command from a cloaked figure on a mountain-top, preferably with a lightning storm going on behind them. Yet, like everything in the world of fantasy, it’s a concept that had to come from somewhere, and the truth is, people have been calling themselves necromancers for as long as we’ve had a concept of death taking the people we love from us
It makes sense after all. Death is an eternal foe for all of us to face. A greedy bastard who just won’t ever have their fill of the people we cherish most in our lives. The fantasy of having power over it is a tantalising one, yet one that still goes against the very nature of humanity. Thus, the stories we tell of the people who take life and death into their own hands often paint them as the villain. We quite simply weren’t meant to have that power.
Yet there have been people who have tried their hand at necromancy in real life, who wouldn’t take no for an answer and tried to delve into concepts they didn’t understand as a way of reaching into the undiscovered country and finding who would take their hand – people like the 16th-century sculptor Benvenuto Cellini: a Renaissance man in the truest sense of the word, his works are celebrated as some of the greatest works of European art from the Middle Ages.
Yet that wasn’t enough for him. In true Renaissance man fashion, he was a controversial figure with a profound interest in the occult.
Why did Cellini want to be a necromancer?
What makes this more incredible is the fact that we’re hearing this from the mouth of the man himself. Cellini wrote an autobiography called My Life between 1558 and 1562, but didn’t see publication until 1728. I fundamentally can’t imagine why it went unpublished for so long because it’s (quite literally as it turns out) one hell of a read. A rip-roaring thriller of a piece that’s probably a true depiction of his life as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is of his, but even if a third of it is true, then Cellini had an incredible life.
This part of it is almost certainly one of the faker parts of the book, but it really does need to be seen to be believed. Cellini writes that in his 30s, he told all and sundry of his desire to know more about demonology and necromancy until one of the people he told was a priest who was friendly with him. The said priest took him at his word and invited him to a ritual that he said could bring back Cellini’s lost love, Angelica. All he needed to bring was “a little boy of pure virginity.’ Don’t worry, he said, it’s not that kind of ritual.
No, instead, according to Cellini, it’s something just as bad. A ritual that works. The group were confronted with a terrifying infestation of demons, ghosts and other abominations that freaked out even the necromancer in charge of the ritual. These legions of the damned were advancing on the group, and this is where Cellini must be fucking with us because I’m going to quote the translation of Cellini’s My Life, written by scholars of Italian Renaissance literature, Julia and Peter Bondanella.
In Cellini’s very words, written in a book studied by generations of very serious historical academics, the priest got rid of these foul beasts because he “let out such a blast of farts, accompanied by such an abundance of shit that it produced a far more overpowering smell than the asafetida.” Needless to say, Cellini was put off from getting into necromancy any further after this. Can’t help but agree with him, really.