May 30

The Reckoning of Christopher Marlowe

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His body was buried the next morning in an unmarked grave, and the pardon came down twenty-eight days later.

On May 30, 1593, Christopher Marlowe—the most celebrated playwright in England, son of a Canterbury shoemaker who had climbed through Cambridge on a scholarship, and the renowned the author of Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and the play that forever became synonymous with the dark side of occultism, Doctor Faustus—died of a stab wound above the right eye in a room in Deptford, South London. He was only twenty-nine years old.

To the bewilderment of all Marlowe’s friends and admirers, his killer, Ingram Frizer, was pardoned by Queen Elizabeth within the month and immediately returned to the service of his employer. The official explanation—“a quarrel over the bill”—satisfied no one, neither at the time or in the four centuries since.

But Marlow’s life was, perhaps, more exciting and mysterious than any of his dramas. He was, after all, the man responsible for putting the Elizabethan occult imagination on stage, and lived his own life inside the shadowy world of government espionage. He was charged with heresy ten days before his death. And three-hundred and eighty years later, the place of his bizarre murder would become the birthplace of modern Chaos Magick…

The Spy Who Conjured Faustus

Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury in February 1564—the same year as Shakespeare, a fact that has fueled a century of conspiracy theories about authorship that we’ll set aside for a brief moment, because the truth about Marlowe is considerably more interesting than the Shakespeare question. Marlowe won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he studied for six years on a foundation established by Archbishop Matthew Parker (such scholarships intended to produce clergy for the Church of England). Marlowe, a born rebel, eschewed the basis of his scholarship early on, declaring himself both an atheist and a bohemian. His absences from Cambridge were so frequent that the university considered denying him his Master of Arts degree in 1587; only through the intervention of the Privy Council—the highest governmental body in England, signed by some of the most powerful men in Elizabeth’s government—was the young heretic granted his degree, no questions asked.

And so began the very first mystery in the life of Christopher Marlowe. Why was he given the ultimate “hall pass” towards an education he neither wanted nor (despite his literary genius) deserved? The Council’s letter to Cambridge was decidedly vague—further fueling centuries of speculation. According to the instruction, Marlowe had “done Her Majesty good service” in matters that “was not expedient” to specify. His “controversial statements,” it added, “were not his true nature but simply his playing of a part assigned to him by the government.”

Hmmm… So—like many of the great and influential occultists before him, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and John Dee among them—Marlowe was a spy. Only later was it revealed that Marlowe had been traveling to Reims—the center of English Catholic exile on the Continent—not because he was defecting to Catholicism, as his absences suggested, but because he was infiltrating the Catholic networks for Francis Walsingham’s intelligence service.

The man who wrote Doctor Faustus—the English language’s first great treatment of the soul’s bargain with supernatural power—had spent his university years playing a double agent in the ideological and psychological wars surrounding the Reformation.

The Original Doctor

While Marlowe’s presumed anti-religious beliefs would normally keep him from the annals of occult and western esoteric history, it is, perhaps, his best-known work that places him squarely within its center: 1592’s Doctor Faustus—the first great literally expression of the “Faust legend.” He’d based his play not upon the legends or even any specific historic figure (ah-hem, Agrippa!)—but rather on the original Faustbuch, a pamphlet about a historical magician who had gained notoriety in early sixteenth-century Germany by dabbling in the occult. Unlike future interpretations of the story—including Goethe’s epic two-part poem nearly two centuries later—the “Faustus” of Marlowe’s play is not simply a fool who sells his soul for party tricks: he’s is an intellectual at the absolute edge of what natural science can offer; only because the accepted disciplines of the era have failed his hunger for more knowledge does he turn to magic.

“Philosophy is odious and obscure,” he declares in the play’s opening scene. “Both law and physic are for petty wits. Divinity is basest of the three.” To Marlowe’s doctor, medicine cannot conquer immortality, nor can the law of man deliver power. And (much aligned with Marlowe’s own beliefs), theology cannot answer the questions regarding superhuman potential. To him, it is only magic that can assist man in reaching his destiny as a perfect spiritual being.

Faustus conjures Mephistopheles using the formula from De Praestigiis Daemonum, a genuine grimoire (leaving ages of scholars scratching their heads regarding just how well-versed Marlowe truly was in occultism), invokes the proper magical circles, and recites the correct magical words. With unparalleled research (presumedly), Marlowe had successfully brought to the Elizabethan stage the greatest and most accurately display of then-known ceremonial magic.

It didn’t necessarily win him any friends. Una Ellis-Fermor called it “perhaps the most satanic play in literature.”—not because it celebrates Satan, but because Marlowe had demonstrated the relationship between human desire and supernatural power in a way unknown of within accepted drama.

The School of Night

Twelve days before his death, Marlowe had been summoned to appear in-person before the Privy Council. Once there, he was arrested, questioned, and released on bail with strict instructions to report back to them daily—a harsh form of parole. The charge? Heresy—based upon a document found in the apartment of his fellow bohemian playwright, Thomas Kyd, himself under suspicions of “libel” against foreigners (although historians now suspect his innocence). The document itself was flagged as an “Arianist tract,” described by one investigator as “vile heretical conceits denying the eternal deity of Jesus Christ.” Within days, the government received a more detailed report from an agent named Richard Baines: a systematic catalogue of Marlowe’s alleged opinions, so explosive that the document—now known as the “Baines Note”—has been studied by scholars ever since. According to Baines, Marlowe had said that “religion was but a device of policy to keep men in awe,” a mere construct to “keep men in fear.” Worst of all, it claimed that “Moses was but a juggler” and “Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest.”

Egad! Any surprise these men were prone to violent bar brawls? Severely tortured, Kyd claimed the writings were Marlowe’s, not his. Whether any of this was accurate is disputed—Baines was an informer with his own agenda, and Kyd was speaking under extremely brutal duress. But what it tells us, combined with everything else we know about Marlowe, is that he moved in a world where heretical and dangerous ideas flowed like ale. He was associated with the so-called “School of Night”—a circle that included Sir Walter Raleigh, mathematician Thomas Harriot, the poet George Chapman, and other freethinkers known for their anti-authoritarian ideals.

On May 30, 1593, Marlowe spent the day at a tavern in Deptford belonging to a widow named Eleanor Bull. He was joined by three friends—Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres, and Robert Poley—all of whom held rumored ties within the intelligence world: Poley had just arrived from the Hague on government business; Skeres was a known government agent; and Frizer was a business associate—and cousin—of Thomas Walsingham, whose family had employed and protected Marlowe for years. All afternoon, the four men ate and drank in the tavern’s outdoor garden. However, by evening, an argument broke out and soon escalated: according to the coroner’s later inquest, Marlowe attacked Frizer over the bill, grabbed his dagger, inflicted two superficial wounds on Frizer’s head, and was then stabbed above the right eye in the struggle. Marlowe was dead within minutes.

Contemporary historian Charles Nicholl, whose 1992 investigation, The Reckoning, is the most serious scholarly treatment of the case, concluded that the killing was very probably ordered—either to silence Marlowe before his heresy trial produced embarrassing testimony about the “School of Night” and its members, or as part of a darker intelligence operation whose details remain lost to time. All that was certain was this: England had lost the only writer who might have given Shakespeare a genuine run for his money.

The Ateph Wand of Steel

While Marlowe’s story seemed to end on that cold day in 1593, it would cast a long shadow on the world of the occult hundreds of years later:

Deptford, South London—the neighborhood where Marlowe was killed—remained one of the rougher corners of the city through the twentieth century: a riverside district that had been a major naval dockyard, then an industrial area, then a community of overlapping working-class communities with a long tradition of nonconformism and a healthy disrespect for authority. In the mid-1970s, a derelict five-story apartment block called “Speedwell House”—delegated by the council to student housing pending demolition—had become home to a community of squatters, artists, amateur musicians, anarchists, and occult experimenters. Among them was a young man named Peter James Carroll, who had recently read Kenneth Grant’s The Magical Revival and had discovered the writings of Austin Osman Spare. Carroll kept an iron crowbar near his door, which the Speedwell residents called the Ateph Wand of Steel. He still treasured it decades later. In 1976, Carroll and his friend Ray Sherwin met at the Goat Roast—a celebration of the Deptford Olympics they’d invented themselves—and in the following years would found the Illuminates of Thanateros, the first Chaos Magick order. Carroll’s Liber Null, written in those Deptford years and eventually published by Weiser in 1987, is the foundational text of the Chaos Magick movement.

The neighborhood Christopher Marlowe was killed and left his Faustian questions unanswered— ten days before a heresy trial that might have destroyed the entire “School of Night”—was, three hundred and eighty years later, the neighborhood where the most radical and influential new magical movement of the twentieth century was born.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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