Grimoire The Magic Book PDF Download
This “history of magic books” might equally well have been subtitled a “history of magic through books.” Not all forms of magic, obviously. Davies is quick to recognize that large areas of magical practice exist entirely in oral culture. Yet one of the most important points he makes in this book is that “grimoires” are not just rare and expensive tomes available only to elite, learned magicians. At least from the time of the printing revolution, magic books were making their way into the hands of simple cunning folk (the subject of a previous book by Davies), and this trend only increased as time went on, culminating here in Davies’s fascinating chapter on “pulp magic.” So what is a grimoire, exactly? It does not have to be a long, complex, or erudite text, but neither can it be so simple as a single spell or written amulet. It is, rather, a compilation containing “conjurations and charms, [or] providing instructions on how to make magical objects such as protective amulets and talismans” (p. 1). Yet not all magical books are grimoires. Davies excludes esoteric texts that purport to deal with occult forces in the natural world, such as works on alchemy or astrology. The distinction is not absolute, of course. Books of astral magical rites and conjurations, such as the famous medieval Picatrix, definitely fit the category of grimoire, and occult books of secrets are treated at various points, if not as grimoires themselves, then for elements that they contributed to the grimoire tradition. Davies’s study of this tradition is, then, a survey of a broad and diffuse but still particular kind of magic—not “learned,” necessarily, but literate and by definition bookish.
Davies surveys this tradition in “the West,” that is, Europe and its overseas colonies. Islamic magical texts are mentioned only for their influence on medieval European magic, and again later for their prevalence in French West African colonies that were largely Muslim. Traditions from South or East Asia are mentioned only insofar as they get appropriated into works of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European occultism. This is not a study of esoteric books of any kind, but specifically of magic books, and magic, already difficult enough to define in Western European culture, becomes even more problematic a concept when applied around the globe. [End Page 212] Probably for similar reasons Davies has little to say about ancient pre-Christian magical texts in the West. In a later chapter, he will discuss how the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the nineteenth century allowed for various ritual texts, such as the famous Book of the Dead, to be translated into Western European languages and to influence Western occult traditions. But in their own era, such texts were as much “religious” as they were “magical,” a troublesome enough distinction in Christian culture, but virtually inscrutable in antiquity. In his treatment of the antique world, Davies is less concerned with ancient texts in their own right, and more so with the origins of supposedly ancient textual traditions on which later European grimoires would draw, such as the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus; various books attributed to Solomon; or the supposed sixth, seventh, and subsequent Books of Moses (beyond the first five that went into the Torah).
The first real grimoires, for Davies, appear in the early Christian centuries, certainly by the fourth century CE, although they of course claimed more ancient roots. In the remainder of his first chapter, he examines medieval tomes of astral spirit magic, angel magic, and more straightforward demonic magic—Picatrix, the Clavicula salomonis, the Almandal, and the various texts of the ars notoria. In his second chapter, he covers the early modern period, discussing first the great texts of Renaissance magic, and their incorporation of Hermeticism, Kabbalah, and other elements. He also discusses the effects of printing and the “democratization” of magical texts as inexpensive chapbooks made...