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Grimoires: A History of Magic Books

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Davies has written an entertaining survey of grimoires, surpassing in different ways Christopher McIntosh's earlier and shorter text on the subject The Devil's Bookshelf (1985), which is still a well-informed although limited introduction to the topic. The subtitle of Davies' book needs clarification. This is not a history of magic books in general, but a history of a specific type of magic book. As Davies states in his introduction, "grimoires are books of magic,... but not all books of magic are grimoires, for as we shall see, some magic texts were concerned with discovering and using the secrets of the natural world rather than being based on the conjuration of spirits, the power of words, or the ritual creation of magical objects". Although his history is limited primarily to "grimoires" as he understands them, he does touch on magic texts in general and looks at their relationship to the magical aspects of writing itself, including the ritual use of materials in book production and the eventual democratizing of literary magic through print and cheap productions, leaving only illiteracy as an obstacle.

Davies' approach is strictly that of a social historian writing a popular history, not a practitioner of magic. He is more concerned with the social influence of grimoires and any controversies surrounding them than their content (which is generally and lightly touched on) and effectiveness, and he considers the "lineage of magic" as "dubious" (page 11). At the top of his list in terms of "the greatest influence on the modern world of magic and religion" is The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses followed by "the most enduring, influential, and notorious Solomonic book," The Key of Solomon (pages 11 & 15). Other grimoires discussed include the Picatrix, the Sworn Book of Honorius, the Little Albert, the Grand Grimoire (and a version of it called the Red Dragon), the Book of St Cyprian, the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, Francis Barrett's The Magus, the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin, and Gerald Gardner's Book of Shadows among others. However, some may be disappointed by the low degree of coverage of certain texts. The American book pirate L. W. de Laurence and his publishing influence, on the other hand, receives ample coverage. Some may also be surprised to find Simon's Necronomicon, which Davies calls "a well-constructed hoax", treated as "no less 'worthy'" as a piece of magical literature than other grimoires. Of this and other Necronomicons he states: "Like other famous grimoires explored in this book, it is their falsity that makes them genuine" (page 268). These type of statements show that although false authorship and fictive elements are used in many grimoires, Davies lacks the discerning eye of a skilled practical magician and more careful scholar of magic.

Given the above caveats, Davies' text is still an enjoyable and informative read. It will certainly introduce some readers to grimoires they did not know existed and provide a historical context for them. For further context, Davies highly recommends Michael D. Bailey's Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present (2007) as "an ideal companion" (pages 286 and 291 [Note 4]). Like Davies' text, it too has its weaknesses, but each book is strengthened by the other if used together. In addition to being well bound with an attractive dust jacket, Davies' book also contains 27 illustrations, 17 plates on glossy pages, a six-page Epilogue, as well as chapter notes, an index, and a useful Further Reading section.

Grimoires: A History of Magic Books

Writing in similar vein to his "Cunning Folk: Popular Magic in English History", Davies has penned an enjoyable yet scholarly account of the evolution of magical spellbooks from earliest times to the present day, opening up new territory in his exploration of their development and proliferation in the United States by following a murky thread of tradition, complex borrowings and multiple piratings. In this, Davies' book splendidly supplements the work in European fields first undertaken by E. M. Butler, and now more recently, by Kiekhefer, Fanger, Luck, Klaassen, Peterson, Mathiesen, and Hutton. Well illustrated with previously unpublished material such as Francis Barrett's handwritten title page of his manuscript for "The Magus", Davies' book should be of as much interest to the student of the occult as to the historian.

I was surprised because "Grimoires", while it is a very good survey of magical books in the West from the Middle Ages to the present, actually is much more, the best one book study of esotericism in the West I have yet seen.

And here's why. In "All the President's Men" the source Deep Throat says, "follow the money" because that's how all of the seemingly disparate secrets are connected. When it comes to astrology, alchemy, magic and esoteric knowledge in the West, it's follow the book, or rather the books! In the East there are traditions that have continued their oral and direct transmission of wisdom and technique until the present day. In the West oral transmission essentially ceased and the esoteric traditions of the West from the Middle Ages onward have been heavily literary, dependent to a great extent on learning from books. Therefore, when you trace the history of grimoires, books of magic, as Davies has done, you can see the importance of magic books.

I was particularly taken by the incredible notoriety of DeLaurence, who I'd always taken as a plagiarist and publisher of pulp [Davies has a whole chapter called Pulp Magic!] In South America, in the Caribbean and especially in Jamaica, DeLaurence became notorious and the possession of his "Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses" the key to magical credibility. Amazingly enough I encountered this personally recently. I shipped a talisman to Jamaica recently and of course included my usual instruction booklet. The talisman was confiscated by Jamaican Customs! When I checked the Jamaican Customs regulations I found that there was no restriction on jewelry, but that magic books published by DeLaurence were specifically banned in Jamaica. What a synchronicity! Particularly since Davies mentions the Jamaican Customs regulations in his book.

So we have everything, King Solomon, Greek Magical Papyri, Hermes Trismegistus, Picatrix, Ficino, Agrippa, Key of Solomon, 17th & 18th century Europe and America, Petit Albert, Red Dragon, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th Books of Moses, Freemasonry, Joseph Smith, Voudun, Santeria, Allen Kardac, Hoodoo, Paschal Beverly Randolph, the Golden Dawn, Crowely, Necronomicon, Anton Levey, Gardner and Wicca. All the disparate strands of Western esotericism, all connected by grimoires!

I'm reading this and saying, "Why haven't I heard of this book before?" Well it was only published in 2009. Excellent, really excellent! This is exactly what an academic study is useful for, placing things in historical perspective. Definitely extremely useful and worth getting!

Not a bad book, the way it reads feels more like a fast ride through the many major grimoires throughout history. I did also find myself jumping around, I was more interested in specifics of the books, but mostly you find just a rough brief on dates, etc... I think what readers may get out of this book is that there is nothing new under the sun. Spells, astrology, etc., all seem to be a slightly different versions of an already worn out tale. There are only a handful of real grimoires, but all go back to the basics of the ancients... Solomon, the Chaldeans, etc... Over time these things developed into what you find in these books. I agree that because of the fascination of things like this, the 'real' printed book will be around for a while longer even in this digtal age. A real book has a life force of its own, not just magic books, but all good books.

Sometimes, I'm forced to tip my hat to the Algorithm that determines the Amazon.com recommendations. I am, frankly, impressed that this book was recommended to me. First of all, I loved it. Second of all, it was published in the US in 2010, and I've noticed that the Amazon Recommendation Algorithm works better for older books.

In a world where Harry Potter has his own Florida theme park and Americans talk to Astrologers over the phone for 1.99 a minute, the continued relevance of Magic is beyond doubt. One of the surprises of this book is the narrow band within which Magic operated, historically speaking. For example, a major focus of interest in regards to Grimories was their use to locate treasure. Davies has a fascinating chapter in the middle of the book about the relationship between contemporary Magical practice and the divinations of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church.

Magic Books existed before the printing press was invented, it's a tradition that stretches clear back to antiquity and many of the historically grounded Magic Books of Europe owe some influence to Egypt, Israel or Baghdad. Like many other emblems of literate culture, the tradition of Magic Book was sustained through the pre-printing press era by Church Officials and Monks, which is certainly evidence of a freedom of thought that one typically WOULD not associate with a Monastery circa 500 AD.

The Printing Press made the distribution of Magic Books easier, but it remained a very esoteric phenomenon until the late 18th/early 19th century till a host of related conditions: Discovery of "folk culture" by intellectuals, grown of Esoteric Societies among the lower and Middle classes (Freemasonry, etc.), growth of English language literacy among Colonial societies; brought the magic book into what we call "the Modern Era." Certainly, Magic loses a bit of its charm after the Industrial revolution, though whether that is due to the Industrial Revolution itself OR whether the Industrial Revolution is itself a manifestation of the same shift in outlook that caused Magic to lose its status as an emblem of free thinking intellectualism.

Contemporary Magic devotees fall into two main groups: People who are into it because they practice Wiccanism or some offshoot, and Harry Potter/Fantasy fans. These are large, powerful Audiences, but they bear little resemblance to the Audiences described for most of Grimories. I would have liked a chapter on "Mass Media and Magic" but it's a small point that doesn't mar an otherwise splendid treatment of an esoteric subject.

Owen Davies book on the history of grimoires is an excellent source for the history of these books. The author seems very knowledgeable if somewhat cold to the subject of ceremonial magic. I particularly enjoyed his attempts to track this genre into the 21st century. All-in-all it's a good read.

If you thought you were outside the realm of magic, think again. There has been _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ on television, for instance, with magic books central to some of the plots. When the program was popular, Owen Davies used to get e-mails from teenage girls asking about specifics of casting spells. "They had seen my personal website," writes Davies, "presenting my historical studies on witchcraft and magic and assumed I was a practitioner." Who knows if some of those inquiries were from your neighborhood teens with queries against you in particular? And even if Davies couldn't help the petitioners, and even if magic is all bogus and never works, it is still intimately associated with orthodox religions and has been since those religions began. In _Grimoires: A History of Magic Books_ (Oxford University Press), Davies gives a full and authoritative look at magic books, their origin, and their influence. There is plenty of history here, but magic continues into the current day. Grimoires still cast their spell.

Magic had plenty of specific uses beyond bringing blessings or curses. One was treasure hunting. You could go out and dig for treasure, and there wasn't anything heretical about that, but some treasures were kept hidden by ghosts and demons. "Who were you going to call?" jokes Davies. "Why, the priests and monks who had access to the grimoires which instructed on how to conjure, exorcise, and control them." (This was the sort of work that Joseph Smith and his father did, using seer stones, magic circles, and talismans to find treasure, until Smith used some different sort of magic to be given the golden plates from which he could translate the Book of Mormon.) Sexual magic was popular, whether to help in a sexual conquest or to improve sexual performance. Magic was also used for medical treatments, often jointly with religious healing. Exorcisms of illness demons could be combined with ordinary prayer as well as with using charms that might or might not be Christian versions of pagan amulets. Doctors might have recommended such remedies. Davies shows that although grimoires and magic lore were used by clerics and doctors, when the Renaissance came, and printed books became widespread, anyone who was literate could follow a grimoire's recipe. You didn't have to be literate to get a grimoire's benefit; just owning it could help you. _The Long Lost Friend_, printed in America in 1856, showed the blend of magic and Christianity when it proclaimed, "Whoever carries this book with him, is safe from all his enemies, visible or invisible; and whoever has this book with him cannot die without the holy corpse of Jesus Christ nor drowned in any water, nor burn up in any fire, nor can any unjust sentence be passed upon him."

_Grimoires_ is no grimoire, but it does include samples of wisdom from many books of magic and descriptions of magic practice. For instance, a monk in France in the sixteenth century was sentenced to life imprisonment after being tortured to confess that he exerted control over women by offering to the Devil wax puppets that contained his saliva and the blood of toads. A skeptical modern reader will be amazed that this sort of nonsense was ever thought to have any power. We have Viagra now, and we have metal detectors that are better for finding treasure than spells will ever be, and we have antibiotics, but still the call to understand the universe by means of the supernatural seems overwhelming for many. Magic, often yoked to better-accepted religions, never seems to go away. Incense, for instance, has for centuries often been used for magical purposes, and certain types were marketed for certain spells. For people concerned about incense smoke setting off their smoke detectors, aerosol sprays with the same magic potency are now manufactured for ritual use. The _Necronomicon_ was a fictional book of occult wisdom that fantasist H. P. Lovecraft used in his horror tales, but that has not kept "real" Necronomicons from being published and put to use by those who fancy "Lovecraftian" magic. You can get the latest on how to conjure up a demon on the internet. Davies's review is big and entertaining, and will serve up a good dose of dismay for those who think we ought to be done with the silliness of the supernatural.

This is a very thorough and enjoyable history of grimoires. However, I was disappointed that there was no mention of contemporary books such as those by Chumbley (or anything by Xoanon) or those produced by Scarlet Imprint (as just two examples). There is rich tradition of modern grimoires that could have been reviewed even if only in a page or two. On a purely personal level, and as someone who has studied Crowley academically for over 20 years, I find it unfortunate that the author followed the common party line (seemingly reflecting Crowley scholarship from the 70's) of indicating how evil and pathetic Crowley was. Again, a must read for the academic or the practitioner alike though I would have liked to see some more contemporary sources analyzed.

{forgive my grammar english is not my first language}

Owen Davies had a good idea for this book, but when in chapter four he starts talking about the belives in the caribeans he has some confusions for an example he stated that the Santeria of {cuba} and the Espiritismo of {Puerto Rico} came from the Obeah religion when that is not completly true it had some influence but the root of this two practices is from the Orisha.

I got my cuestions in the first chapter when he is talking of "the books of Enoch" and that Noah had a secret book that contain the art of astrology which he says that was written on a sapphire that Noah kept in a golden chest sounds more like a farie tail than truth saying that a "angel" gave it to him. In Juwish history or in Kabalah we have ever heard of such "books" something of that importance wud had been known...

Other than that the book has good information but it jumps a lot from history's time frame Owen shud had try to has a better cronological posture .

After reading a bit more then half of the book I decided to not read more of it. You find your self constantly skipping between times and the grimoires he is talking about. Would have been much better if he would have talked about one book at a time and not all of them at the same time as it is now. The structure of the book feels more like a lack of structure and I fail to see what the chapter names has to do with the content of the chapters.

Also I think his definition of what defines a grimoire is very different from mine since he seems to bunch many magical books that I do not feel belong to the grimoire tradition at all in to it.

His talk about the grimoires being astral magic makes no sense to me either. Astral magic is when you work on the astral plane. The grimoires on the other hand is designed to take spirits from the astral plane to the physical so it hardly qualifies as astral magic.

The material it self seems mostly correct though but because of the lack of structure I just cant continue reading it.

I have also asked my self for who this book is written. It is to complex for beginners and to unstructured for the scholars. The magicians usually wants something more specific then this. So who was the main target for the book?

With a good structure of the text I think this could be a good book though but as it is now I would not recommend it.

Edit" Had another look at it and now I think even less about it. Would be nice with someone that writes a book on grimoires that also knows what a grimoire is. This is a more pop culture approach to tryin to go thru the grimoire history and includes way to many books that simply do not belong the the tradition."