Carcosa Bound

(A title that will get you reading.)

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.