A grimoire is a book of magic: a manual that tells its reader how to prepare for, perform and survive an operation intended to command spirits or bend natural forces. The word is French and is generally derived from grammaire, which once meant any book of learning written in Latin. To the unlettered, a book in an unknown tongue and a book of spells were much the same object.
Grimoires have a reputation for mystery which the texts themselves do little to deserve. Read in bulk they are repetitive, procedural and oddly bureaucratic. That is exactly what makes them valuable. They are among the best evidence we have for what people in earlier centuries wanted and feared, and for the lengths to which they imagined going. This guide explains how to read them as documents. It is not a manual, and the archive does not publish working texts. The threats with which scribes protected ordinary books, a humbler relation of the grimoire's warnings, are collected in Curses for Books.
The anatomy of a grimoire
Despite their variety, the books of ceremonial magic follow a recognizable plan.
Preparation of the operator. The magician must be purified, typically by fasting, sexual abstinence, bathing and prayer over a set number of days. The requirements are monastic in character and often lifted directly from religious practice.
Times and seasons. Each operation is assigned to particular days and hours, governed by the planets. Tables of planetary hours are a standard feature.
The instruments. There are detailed instructions for making and consecrating the tools: a knife, a wand, a robe, ink, parchment and so on. Materials are specified with a fussiness that guarantees difficulty.
The circle. The operator works inside a protective figure drawn on the ground and inscribed with divine names. Leaving it during the operation is the stock disaster of magical folklore.
The conjurations. Long addresses, composed largely of sacred names and escalating threats, summon the spirit and compel it to appear in a tolerable form and answer truthfully.
The catalog. Many grimoires include a register of spirits, giving each one's name, rank, appearance, seal and specialty. One finds treasure, another teaches languages, a third reconciles enemies.
The license to depart. The spirit is formally dismissed. The books stress that this must never be omitted.
Two things stand out. The procedure is modeled on the liturgy and the law court, the two most impressive rituals its authors knew. And the magician acts throughout as a pious man, commanding spirits by the power of God's names. In its own understanding this was not devil worship. It was a kind of exorcism run in reverse.
Borrowed authority
Almost no grimoire is by the person named on its first page. They are ascribed to Solomon, to Moses, to Enoch, to ancient philosophers, to popes and saints. This is pseudepigraphy, and it had a purpose beyond salesmanship. A ritual was thought to be effective because it had been revealed or perfected by someone with exceptional standing before God. An honest attribution to the anonymous cleric who actually compiled the book would have made it worthless.
The most important name is Solomon. Scripture credits the king with unequalled wisdom, and later legend, in Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition alike, added that he had mastered the spirits and bound them to build his temple. A magician who used Solomon's book was claiming Solomon's license.
The main families
The Solomonic cycle. The Key of Solomon survives in many manuscripts, the oldest from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and is chiefly concerned with preparation and with the making of talismans. The Lesser Key of Solomon is a seventeenth-century compilation in English. Its first part is the celebrated register of seventy-two spirits with their seals, a list with older roots that has become the single most reproduced item in magical literature.
Astral magic. A different tradition, learned and philosophical, entered Europe from Arabic. Its great monument, known in Latin as the Picatrix, was translated in the thirteenth century from a work composed some two hundred years earlier. It is concerned with drawing down the influence of stars and planets into images made at the right moment, and its theoretical basis is the doctrine of correspondence described in our entry on Hermeticism.
Angelic and visionary texts. Some medieval works seek not treasure or love but knowledge, promising the operator a vision of God or instant mastery of the liberal arts through prayer and the contemplation of figures.
The cheap print grimoires. From the eighteenth century, small printed books of magic were sold by pedlars across the European countryside. They mix conjurations with remedies, charms against theft and advice on winning at cards. These pamphlets, more than the learned manuscripts, were what ordinary people meant by a magic book, and their reputation for bringing misfortune on the owner was part of their appeal.
Who used them
The older picture of the sorcerer as an outsider does not survive contact with the evidence. The men who copied and used ritual magic in the Middle Ages were overwhelmingly clergy of the lower ranks: people who could read Latin, knew the rites of the church intimately, and had time on their hands. One historian has called this milieu a clerical underworld. Their magic is recognizably the work of men trained to believe that correctly performed words produce real effects.
What they sought is disclosed by the spirit catalogs, and it is touchingly ordinary. Money, in the form of buried treasure. Advancement and the favor of the powerful. The love of a particular person. Knowledge without the labor of study. Invisibility and revenge make their appearances. The grimoires are a map of what a talented, frustrated, underemployed man might have wanted in a world that offered him few routes to any of it.
The grimoires are a map of what a talented, frustrated, underemployed man might have wanted in a world that offered him few routes to any of it.
The modern editions
Most readers now encounter the grimoires in English versions produced during the occult revival at the end of the nineteenth century. These editions made the texts famous and shaped modern ceremonial magic. They should be used with care. Their editors combined manuscripts freely, omitted what they found distasteful, and presented the results in an atmosphere of solemn antiquity that the originals do not always share. The process is characteristic of the revival as a whole, discussed in our map of the tradition.
Later currents went further. The practitioners described in our entry on chaos magic treat the spirit catalogs as a vocabulary to be used without belief, a development that would have baffled the original compilers.
How to read one
- Read it as a document of desire. Ask what the book promises, and you will learn what its readers lacked.
- Notice the borrowing. Identify the psalms, the liturgical formulas and the legal phrases. The grimoire is a collage of the authoritative languages of its day.
- Attend to the difficulty. The impossible ingredients and exhausting preparations are not incidental. They explain in advance why the operation failed, and they ensured that it was seldom attempted.
- Distrust the title page. Establish the date and origin of the actual manuscript or edition, which will usually be far later and humbler than claimed.
- Prefer scholarly editions. A modern critical text with an introduction will tell you more than any number of atmospheric reprints.
Approached in this way, the books of magic lose their glamour and gain something better. They become a record of human wishing, set down with a clerk's thoroughness by people who hoped that the universe, properly addressed, might be made to answer.