“To Give Myself to be Carried Immediatly into Hell”: Weather, Witchcraft, and Two Late Seventeenth-Century Contracts Between a Magician and a Student

ABSTRACT On 20 June 1696, the magician John Ellis signed a contract with the St Albans physician, mystic, and meteorologist Gustavus Parker promising to teach Parker about ritual magic. Failure to do so, Ellis agreed, would lead to his departure for hell for all eternity. The following year, the two men signed another contract with similar yet stricter terms. Both documents, now collected in Lansdowne 846, offer a window into the ideals and praxis of the transmission of ritual magic, the significance of spirit summoning in said praxis, and the impact of legal restrictions on service magicians in early modern Britain.