Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (review)

The grimoire is a complex phenomenon. It comprises a book of magical instructions, partly derived from magical theory, partly from magical practice, aimed principally at a solitary practitioner, at least until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the rise of the group, coven, or school as the largely desired alternative to solo working. The grimoire is thus also a record of traditional practicalities—not a magical diary, which is the record of one particular session or series of sessions—but a gallimaufry of practices aimed at producing some desired outcome, either for the benefit of the magician him- or herself or the magician’s client, or to the detriment of some third unfortunate party. Hence the grimoire can serve, among others, the historian, sociologist, theologian, and anthropologist as a spyglass to be trained on the psychologies of those societies and individuals within those societies that, not only in the past both long distant and recent, but also in much of the present world outside western Europe and North America, subscribe to and firmly believe in a cosmos not limited to or bound by the dictates of sensual materialism.

What exactly constitutes a grimoire, however, can be disputed. Is it the so-called Egyptian Book of the Dead, for example, a guide to the soul’s successful negotiation of the afterlife (rather like the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation), or is it a collection of spells to be recited at key moments in the soul’s postmortem journey to ensure its control over the nonhuman entities into which it comes in contact? Or does it share its nature with both? When it comes to medieval grimoires, on the other hand, there can be no doubt that their intention is to provide the magician with opportunities for material satisfaction. Clerics frequently possessed books that told them how to call up demons, and achieve their ends with the help of these malign creatures—hence the Church’s denunciation of such works—and it seems that medieval grimoires record actual practice, as opposed to fanciful imaginings. That is to say, their references to circles, characters, foreign or unknown words, can be seen in the records of magicians’ trials as well as in the pages of surviving manuscript grimoires. During the early modern period, print made a great difference in the ease with which grimoires could be obtained, although manuscript material continued to be desirable and to flourish. Indeed, as late as the 1880s and 1890s, magicians belonging to the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn continued to write out their rituals as an act of magical commitment. Printing, too, democratized magical practice in ways that undermined the exclusivity hitherto attendant upon the magician who until then had been male, literate, and quite often clerical, and this relatively easy multiplication of texts enabled Western magic to be carried to other parts of the globe and return thence altered, modified, and embellished to what seemed, even in the secularized, scientifically oriented, postindustrial West, an ever-growing audience and market for a refreshed and vibrant occultism.

Inasmuch as study of the grimoire can offer us such a rich range of perceptions, then, it is remarkable that no one has thought recently to study this genre in more detail. Davies’s book, however, amply and in many ways brilliantly fills this lacuna, although sometimes the journey is so quick it leaves the reader a little breathless. Davies’s first chapter, for example, covers ancient, late antique, and medieval times, from the biblical period to the fourteenth century, which is fast by any standard, although it must be acknowledged that most of the material one expects to see is actually discussed in one form or another. His second chapter takes us through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and discusses the development and dissemination of the printed grimoire, taking in Trithemius, Agrippa, the increasing accessibility of the grimoire to women, and its relationship with the witch trials of the period. (Women had not altogether been outside...