On Christmas Eve in the year 1715, two men passed with hurried steps through one of the gates of Jena: the younger wore the braided coat and carried the sword of a university scholar; the second bore the blue cloak and the weather-beaten countenance of a husbandman. They took the road toward Ammerbach. Night had fallen when they reached their destination, where the master of a dwelling received them as expected guests. Withdrawing from the family circle, the three men conferred for a long time in hushed tones. The watchman’s horn sounded the ninth hour; thereupon, lantern in hand, all three set out once more. An hour had not elapsed before they reached a lone vineyard hut, situated near the ancient place of high execution. The door was merely pushed to. Before crossing the threshold, the student traced upon the wood the name of the Tetragrammaton; his two companions followed him into the narrow chamber.
After prayer had been offered, the coals found within the hut were set to glowing in an earthen flowerpot, upon which the lantern was placed for light. The student laid upon the table several manuscripts, leaden seals, and certain objects he held to be amulets. One of the peasants drew his sabre and traced a circle upon the ceiling. He then recited a formula three times; the student, in his turn, began to invoke Och, prince of the spirits of the sun, that he might dispatch Nathael, guardian of the hoard they hoped to discover. He could not bring the prescribed repetition to its close. His head dropped heavily upon the board; one companion slumped down beside him, and the third sank to the floor of the room.
One must retrace the days preceding these events to learn the names of these men and the design of their undertaking. At Michaelmas, the student Weber had journeyed from Leipzig to the University of Jena to pursue the study of medicine. He had entrusted his garments to the tailor Georg Heichler. A conversation concerning buried riches had brought him into acquaintance with the shepherd Friedrich Geßner, who claimed knowledge of a cache at Dobritz, watched over by a spirit. He described its gold, its precious stones, and a ruby shining like the sun; he even professed to have thrust a limed wand between the iron bars to draw forth a few coins. These words are those which the compiler attributes to the shepherd; no treasure is anywhere verified in the pages that follow.
Yet, according to Geßner’s belief, the means to force an entrance were wanting: either a spring-root, or an incantation drawn from the book of Faust. Weber possessed no such root, but held copies of the Höllenzwang and the Clavicula Salomonis. Hans Zenner, a peasant of Ammerbach, was admitted into the secret. On the twenty-first of December, the three confederates gathered at Zenner’s hearth. Geßner gave himself out as versed in the science of spirits; Weber was deemed the more learned in reading the manuscripts required for the operation. They deferred their trial until Christmas Eve and selected the solitary hut. Heichler had been instrumental in bringing them together, yet took no part in the conjuration, the company having resolved to restrict their number to three.
On the morrow, after divine service, Heichler repaired to the hut. He found the three men lying in an atmosphere thick with fumes. Weber was still breathing, though he answered only with inarticulate sounds; his two companions gave no sign of life. Reche, the student’s valet-de-chambre, was summoned to the spot. Aided by Heichler, he endeavoured to raise Weber and had him conveyed to Jena; the magistrates were apprised of the occurrence. Dr Slevogt, the physician, observed that the young man appeared not to have lost his reason, but that his hands and feet bore marks of frost or grievous lesions. He remained for a long time feeble and afflicted with pain. These observations attest a perilous condition; they do not, of themselves, reveal what agent had produced it.
Watchmen were dispatched to guard the dead and the brazier. The narrative places toward one of the clock that night a knocking at the door, followed by the appearance of a small apparition which the watchers took for a child. One among them began to pray; another collapsed beside one of the corpses. When morning came, all three watchmen were discovered insensible. Two recovered their senses; Johann Georg Beyer succumbed. Rumours of a revenant soon ran through the countryside. The historical chapter records this dread as an impression and a rumour; it provides no proof that an apparition was indeed present.
The examination of the remains left more than one question unresolved in the minds of contemporaries. Wedel, the town physician, and Zech, the surgeon, detected in Geßner no internal or external lesion capable of accounting clearly for his dissolution. Zenner exhibited red streaks and contusions upon his breast and face, his tongue protruding from his jaws. The practitioners noted, however, neither fracture of the vertebrae nor extravasation of blood within the neck. They debated the possible consequence of a fall, an apoplexy, or a comatose seizure, without succeeding in reconciling every sign. The examination of Beyer revealed no violent injury either; his report described, in particular, engorged vessels and an affection of the lungs.
The charcoal was examined in its turn. The physician found nothing extraordinary in its nature, yet recalled that freshly kindled charcoal, when its exhalations are inhaled in great measure, can bring about grave and sometimes fatal accidents. Following these examinations, an inquest commission assembled the instruments of the case. The chronicle states that three volumes of acts and a chest of seized articles were transmitted to the three higher faculties of Leipzig; it was from their joint deliberation that the formal opinions preserved in the record were derived. The faculty of medicine adopted this very hypothesis: the three men had tarried long in a confined and shuttered room; Weber had begun to feel faint after the brazier was fired; the two peasants were dead. The faculty did not pretend to exclude every other cause with absolute certainty; it deemed the natural vapours far more probable than the direct operation of a spirit.
The obsequies added a visible mark to these divergent opinions. The watchman Beyer was accorded an honourable sepulture; the remains of the two peasants were conveyed under armed guard through the town to the gallows-field and cast into a pit. The compiler records this disparity of treatment without imputing it to any judicial determination regarding the precise cause of their death.
In Jena, opinion was divided. Certain theologians discerned in these deaths a providential chastisement for the act of conjuration; other observers denounced this as a convenient expedient, wherein the Devil was made to answer for every riddle. Between these extremes, contemporaries acknowledged that the superstition had been genuine, without conceding that its supposed powers were real. The 1862 chapter broadens its inquiry to the place of the demonic in the beliefs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then reproduces the written opinions submitted to the authorities. It is proper to distinguish between them: the physicians inspected flesh and a vessel of burning coal; the theologians weighed actions against their confession of faith; the jurists were charged with determining a punishment. None of these offices transforms a supernatural hypothesis into an established material fact.
The theological report accounts the conjuration a heinous sin and beholds in the catastrophe a manifestation of divine justice. The legal opinion proves far more circumspect touching the cause of death: natural causes, it states, do not permit one to assert at the outset a supernatural intervention. It nonetheless considers the enterprise of the three men deserving of severe chastisement. The conclusion it submits is conditional: following religious instruction and demonstrated repentance, Weber was to be expelled from the university and banished in perpetuity; Heichler, who had not witnessed the rites but had assisted in their contrivance, was to be banished for ten years.
One must pause upon this distinction. The compiler provides neither date of hearing, nor record of trial, nor confirmation of the actual execution of these sentences; on the contrary, he explicitly confesses that he knows not whether the decree was carried into effect, the printed acts breaking off at this juncture. It would therefore be an error to treat the jurists' advisory opinion as a judgment whose enforcement is historically assured. What the document preserves with greater certainty is a night of charcoal fumes and mortal dread, two corpses whose autopsy leaves several signs unexplained, a surviving student, and three irreconcilable manners of giving meaning to the event. Historical proof halts where the record ends; the phantom spirit was long invoked only by those who sought to venture beyond it.