The legend of the black dog: Giovio, Weyer and the demon on a leash

Of all the legends that grew up around Cornelius Agrippa, the most famous concerns a black dog. According to the story, the animal that followed him everywhere was no ordinary dog but a familiar demon, which the magician kept on a leash and which abandoned him only at the point of death. The story is false, but its origin and its refutation are precisely documented, allowing us to observe how a myth forms around a historical figure.

Paolo Giovio's account

The most influential version is found in the Elogia virorum literis illustrium of Paolo Giovio, Bishop of Nocera and a celebrated historian, published in 1546. Giovio, who had never met Agrippa, writes that the magician was always accompanied by a black dog wearing a collar covered with nails arranged in magical characters. As he approached death, Agrippa supposedly removed the collar from the animal with words of malediction.

According to Giovio, Agrippa said: “Abi, perdita bestia, quae me totum perdidisti”, that is, “be gone, wretched beast, that hast utterly destroyed me”. The dog then ran off to throw itself into the Saône, vanishing for ever. Giovio sets the scene in Lyon, whereas Agrippa almost certainly died in Grenoble: this detail alone reveals how unreliable the account is.

The testimony of Johann Weyer

The refutation comes from a direct witness. Johann Weyer, who had lived in Agrippa's household as a young man, devoted a few pages to his master's dog in the De praestigiis daemonum of 1563. He relates that it was called Monsieur, that it was an ordinary black dog and that Agrippa also had a female called Mademoiselle. Weyer himself had often taken it out on a leash, and so could speak of it with full knowledge.

Agrippa was very fond of that dog: he let it sit beside him while he studied and sleep near his bed. It was this very affection, according to Weyer, that had fed the suspicions of simple folk, who could not explain how the scholar knew news from distant countries. In reality Agrippa received letters from correspondents all over Europe. Weyer attributes the origin of the rumours to ignorance and malice.

Other legends and their meaning

Other tales also grew up around Agrippa, collected by authors of the second half of the sixteenth century. It was said that he paid innkeepers with coins that later turned into pieces of horn or shell, and that one of his pupils, secretly opening a book of magic, summoned a demon and was killed by it. These stories lack any documentary basis and repeat motifs widespread in folklore about magicians.

The legend of the black dog enjoyed a long literary fortune and reached as far as the black poodle in which Mephistopheles hides in Goethe's Faust. Its success is explained by the fame of the author of the occult philosophy, but also by the need to give a concrete face to fears connected with magic. The contrast between Giovio and Weyer remains an eloquent example of how direct testimony can dismantle a rumour, without however managing to erase it from the imagination.