One of the most mysterious places in this Castillian city is the famous cave of Salamanca. It is said that there Hercules founded an academy to impart magical teachings and that Satan himself gave classes in the dark arts. At night, the devil perverted the souls of seven students for seven years with lessons about magic, divination, and necromancy, and some say that he did so through a talking head. In return, these students had to pay a price. At the end of this education one of them, chosen randomly, remained forever in the devil’s service. Classes ended on St. John’s Day and the students would race to be the first to leave on that day. The door was so small that they had to leave the cave one by one.

One of the students who attended these diabolical classes was the Marques

of Villena, Enrique of Aragon, whose fame as a magician and necromancer would accompany him for life. Legend has it that the marques were locked in the cave when he was the last to leave, so he was to stay in the cave with the devil forever, but once he found himself alone, he took the opportunity to hide in a jar. There, crouched, he waited for his chance to scape. When the teacher and his students returned, they were surprised not to see him in the cave and when they saw a book of magic on the table, they thought he had used it to escape and decide to go out to look for it. In their haste, they left the door open and the marquis took advantage of it and fled, hiding in a church nearby. From there he left and never set foot on the crypt again. However, Enrique de Villena lost his shadow, since he had to leave it in the jar to escape from the cave, where he never returned to practice dark studies. It is said that all those who mixed themselves with the dark arts lost their shadows.

The suspicions that in that cave the forbidden arts were learned came from before. Jeronimo Munzer, a German traveler who visited Salamanca in 1494 already warned of it. And these stories reached the ears of the Queen Isabel the Catholic, who ordered to close that place for good. This german traveler compared the cave to the places where the Romans performed their oracles. Others point to a possible place of initiation rites of druids in the Celtic period. Perhaps, the ancient memory that the art of divination was practiced there is at the origin of this legend, or it could also be that the crypt was a safe space to learn and teach clandestinely other knowledge that was considered “suspicious” knowledge at the time, although not necessarily diabolical.

The fame of the cave of Salamanca survived inside and outside Spain, and even the name Salamanca itself has been etymologically related to a “place of enchantment” or “seat of divination”. From Spain, the legend also moved to Latin America, where even today the term salamanca is associated with magic and witchcraft in Argentina, Peru and Chile.

 

Sources:

Arrizabalaga Mónica. (2018). La Cueva de Salamanca . In España: La Historia Imaginada: De Los Antiguos Mitos a Las Leyendas contemporáneas (pp. 126–129). essay, Espasa.