The Role of Grimoire Publication

Felix Castro has made some excellent comments lately that I’d like to highlight.  I’d especially like to respond:

I had some idea years ago about put all the books of st. cyprian together with all their charms, but by now I didn’t decided to do it, the problem is the bad use of them, as in Latinamerica people stills believes in the magical power of the book, and they use the book for magic really.

During the last years many persons have contacted with me via e-mail asking for Books of St. Cyprian, Satan pupils wanting to do a pact with me, they put their knowledge and I lend my books…, invitations for finding treasures, including elementals, dwarfs that had the treasure, etc. etc.

I’ve found myself in the same situation, as my pages on the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses will attest.

So, why publish grimoires, or about grimoires?  Well, first I think there’s a significance to the study of such works for the furthering of history, psychology, anthropology, and other areas.  Nonetheless, that’s a purpose for a small audience, with the vast majority of people interested in books of magic seeking them out for their purported power.

A believer in magic needs no convincing as to the value of this information.  An individual should have the power, he or she would likely claim, to change matters for the better, to ward off ill luck, or to fight off attacks by hostile magicians.  Yet if we do not accept this view, is not magic fraud, and should we be passing on information that leads to error?

I would say yes.  Lack of information on a topic is likely to lead to situations in which some people can exploit others.  The Web has transformed the world   If you need a copy of the Key of Solomon, and I claim I can help you with its secrets for $200, then it places me in a position of power over you.  If you can get a copy of the Key from Joe Peterson’s site or the local bookstore, as well as reading views ranging from high praise to condemnation on that work, you can make an informed decision about whether my help is really worth $200.  If one sees magic as fraud, then this might increase the chance that one defrauds oneself, but it is a choice to do so.  Also, it is difficult to find the profit motive when defrauding oneself.

This doesn’t mean that this is universal, however.  In favor of Mr. Castro’s position, for instance, is that Galicia has only about 50% of its population online, in comparison to almost 80% in the United States.  Lack of ready access to information on a broad scale could change the equation here somewhat.

Thoughts?

My Trip to Dunwich

Last weekend I made a quick trip up to New England to narrow down some possibilities on the authorship and ownership of the Book of Oberon, and to drop off a friend at a retreat.  We kicked around Salem on Thursday for a few hours, visiting  the house that was the basis for Lovecraft’s “The Unnamable” and a few shops before I dropped her off near Worcester.

Friday and Saturday were research days.  Friday was dedicated to the Beinecke Library at Yale, home of the Voynich manuscript, where I checked on a manuscript of the Sepher Raziel and some book sale catalogs.  On Saturday I made a slight detour to Devil’s Hopyard State Park, the basis for the same site from “The Dunwich Horror“.  I spent more time there than I expected wandering through the woods, but I was able to make it to the Widener Library at Harvard (another Dunwich location).  Both Yale and Harvard involved a couple of low-key bookstore excursions, which turned up very little, I’m afraid.

Sunday I met up with Call of Cthulhu authors Bret Kramer and Brian Courtemanche (and, briefly, Matt Sanborn) for a tour, in sub-freezing weather, of yet more sites from “The Dunwich Horror.”  We haunted Wilbraham and Hampden, viewing the mountain there and ravines where whippoorwills are purported to congregate and plot their unhallowed deeds.  Next was a stop at New North Salem to view the Bear’s Den.  We were concerned about the off-road nature of the trek, but a couple locals put us on track to the falls, which turned out to be spectacular when half-frozen.  The evening concluded with a fun evening of Arkham Horror, in which Yig was vanquished.

Monday, I picked up my friend and drove back to New York.

Other than that, the trip consisted mainly of reading Johannes Dillinger’s new book on treasure hunting (review when I finish) and watching lots of NCIS in the hotel.

If you’d like to see some photos from the trip, I’ve posted a good number of them on my Flickr account.

The History of Western Sex Magic – New Discovery from Sweden

While writing my review of Tidebast och Vandelrot, I came across one particular charm that effectively rewrites the history of sex magic in the West.   Because it involves sex and some of you might be at work or eating, I’ve taken the liberty of putting it behind a cut:

On the Shelf Review – Tidebast och Vandelrot

When studying the history of grimoires, a key problem is the gap between the folklore revolving around the books and their actual content.  Both sets of data are often difficult to access, with some scholars ending up with one and not the other.  When a work comes along that deals at great length with both of these, it certainly bears comment.

Unfortunately, Thomas Johnson’s dissertation, Tidebast och Vändelrot:  Magical Representations in the Swedish Black Art Book Tradition, has not been published at this time.  If you have a research library that subscribes to the ProQuest Dissertations database nearby, it may be worth a trip to download a PDF of Johnson’s work.

For his dissertation, Johnson scoured the libraries and archives of Sweden to find svarteboka, the “black books” in which rural curers and magicians recorded their lore.  In Tidebast, he provides an illuminating examinations of what is known about such individuals and the popular legends that surrounded them and their works.  He examines thirty-five such books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, detailing their backgrounds and performing statistical analyses on the topics of the spells.   In the process, Johnson comes to some interesting conclusions.   For example, many of the charms in these books are for healing purposes, with much fewer items with malefic intent, yet the general character of the books rarely varies based on the good or bad reputation of the magician.  All of this is examined within the framework of modern research on magic, grimoires, and charming, and would make this a work definitely worth reading for both scholars and practitioners.

Did I mention that Johnson then translates all thirty-five of those books from Swedish and includes the text in a massive 500-page appendix?

That’s right, we’re talking about nearly two thousand charms, incantations, home remedies, and other items from across Sweden.  They range from invocations of the Faustian demon Marbuel to tricks to scare dragons away from treasure to techniques to make a herring flip itself on the grill when being cooked (that one’s a little heavy on the mercury).  Frankly, I’ve tried to read it all and failed, largely because there’s just so much interesting material in here that I never get very far.  Overall, it might constitute one of the largest collections of such material ever published in English, and its value in bringing to light the magical traditions of Swedish society cannot be overemphasized.

Needless to say, this book is highly recommended, and it’s a shame that its scope is so great that publishing it would be difficult.  It certainly deserves a much broader audience.

 

Merry Christmas and Other Winter Solstice Holidays of Your Choice around This Date

As it’s said.  I’ve had a number of projects going on, which I’ll probably talk about later.

In the meantime, if you’re reading this right now, you’re either alone or trying to desperately avoid your family.  In those cases, why not check out the latest episode of The Unspeakable podcast, in which I guest star and have an interesting discussion of being used as a body shield?  That’ll kill quite a good bit of time.

More later.

On the Shelf Review – A Book of the Offices of Spirits

This release from Teitan Press, of which I received a review copy, includes a bit of a back story involving me.  The editor, Colin Campbell, came across two notable and previously unpublished manuscripts attributed to the 19th century spiritualist and occultist Frederick Hockley.  Given their unusual nature (as we’ll discuss) they were a clear choice for publication.  When they were on the verge of publication, he realized that Hockley’s source was actually our very own Book of Oberon from the Folger Shakespeare Library.  He added some additional material, contacted Joe, and moved along.

(This is actually par for the course with research for book projects – you’re always finding items you wish you’d known about three months before.  I’ll probably end up with items I wish were added to the Friend before publication.)

The heart of A Book of the Offices of Spirits is a new example of the Officium Spirituum, a list of spirits that appear in magical manuscripts describing the nature, dominion, and benefits of each being.  This list includes eighty-two spirits, along with additional lists of twelve spirits each for each king of the cardinal directions.  As is illustrated in the introduction, many differences can be observed between the list here and the better known one in the Goetia, which seems to be derived from Wier’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum.  The book itself does not delve into the differences to a great extent, so those interested in such questions might have to examine the three works for themselves.  Beyond this, the books contain instructions regarding magical herbs, fairy summonings, incense, and other topics.

The book also contains quite a bit of supplementary material.  We also receive Hockley’s one-paragraph introduction to the work – which, I should add, is highly revealing regarding his perspectives on Raphael, Denley, and other figures – a horoscope of John Palmer, or “Zadkiel,” other lists of spirits from two other manuscripts, and a full introduction from the editor.  As the Folger discovery was made too late to incorporate into the other material, the book also includes a section on the older manuscript, along with some corrections of the notes to the text proper.  All of this appears inside an attractive black cover with a gilt reproduction of the manuscript’s title page on the cover.

Buyers should bear in mind that this is approximately 25-30 pages of a 230-page manuscript on which a team of people is still working.  That having been said, it’s a work of importance in its own right that also provides an interesting window for those who are waiting for our version to appear.  I highly recommend it.

Just Released: A Book of the Offices of Spirits

The latest release from Teitan Press is quite a special work:

“A Book of the Offices of Spirits” is the first ever publication of this Solomonic text or grimoire which, in common with the better-known “Goetia,” is essentially a catalog of demons, giving their name, description, rank in the infernal hieararchy, number of attendant legions, offices (abilities), as well as a variety of magical rituals for their conjuration and other purposes. The text has its origin in a magical manuscript written by one John Porter in 1583, which was itself probably drawn from earlier European sources. In the early nineteenth century the Porter manuscript came into the possession of the British occult fraternity, “the Mercurii,” and a transcription of key sections was compiled by John Palmer. Palmer’s transcription was in turn copied by the renowned occult scholar Frederick Hockley, and this transcription, along with another anonymous late nineteenth century manuscript copy, for the basis for the present work.

What makes this special is that this is apparently Hockley’s copying of a manuscript that has its origins in the Book of Oberon.  I’m looking forward to seeing a copy of it, and you’ll get my full report when it appears.

 

I’m Published in the Spanish Call of Cthulhu Rulebook

My piece on “The Chapel of Contemplation,” originally published in The Unspeakable Oath 18, is appearing in the next edition of the Spanish Call of Cthulhu rulebook.  It appears to be on sale here.

I’m very happy about this, and I also hope it will be helpful for new Keepers as a followup to “The Haunted House” / “The Haunting,” the first scenario in the rulesbook.    It’s a quick and fun scenario, but it never really illustrated how to use the material therein to set up your own campaign, which was clearly part of the intent.  My article provides a toolkit giving the Keeper some statistics and other items to build into their own campaign after this scenario.

Who knows – maybe it’ll travel to some other rulesbooks in other languages?

The Conjure Codex, from Hadean Press

The most impressive release from Hadean Press so far is the Conjure Codex, a compendium of lore on modern evocation practice featuring the work of many authors.  I gave the compilers a tip on where to find some information, in exchange for which they sent a contributor’s copy.

The book contains a number of articles from several authors drawing together a wide variety of spiritual practices – grimoires such as the Grimorium Verum and the Ars Paulina, shamanism, necromancy, Afro-Caribbean religion, and hoodoo – and discussing their relations.  I’m still not convinced of the grimoire-shamanism link in particular, and I might have something to write about that later, but there’s a great deal of material that displays the range of modern grimoire magic practice.  I particularly enjoyed the introduction and interview with Jake Stratton-Kent, along with Humberto Maggi’s piece on his work with the Ars Paulina.

For those who don’t find that appealing, I’d point out two other pieces therein.  The first is a translation of the classic occult work The Comte de Gabalis, while the other is The Queen of the Hairy Flies, a treasure-hunting treatise published here in English for the first time.

I should also add that the photographs and illustrations on esoteric topics, the work of various artists, are simply beautiful.  It’s certainly not what I expected from a book at this price.

If any of this interests you, or if you’ve found either The True Grimoire or Geosophia appealing, then I’d recommend this as an acquisition for your collection.

Back from New York City

I went to New York City last week on Tuesday and Wednesday.  Tuesday was spent looking over the manuscript collections at the New York Public Library for a potential future project.  I did not accomplish my goal of figuring out how to reproduce the material I wanted, but I did agree to write a new article for an upcoming anthology.  Almost the entire discussion process occurred by Facebook, which was a new one for me.

After finishing my work for the day, I stopped by The Compleat Strategist to round out my Cthulhu RPG collection.  Among my purchases were The Armitage Files, Arkham Detective Tales, The Laundry RPG, Cthulhu 101, Realms of Crawling Chaos, Age of Cthulhu 5, and some others I can’t remember at the moment.  I then stopped at Tsampa Restaurant to meet with – no kidding – Warlock Asylum, with whom I had a great conversation and handed off some Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft literature.  I spent the rest of the evening with Call of Cthulhu author Oscar Rios, watching Sons of Anarchy.

Wednesday was much less exciting for blog readers, save for the discovery that my bank thinks me purchasing $200 worth of roleplaying games is suspicious.  They must not be paying attention.  Other than that, it was mostly librarian association meetings and the like.  Between public transportation and traffic, I managed to make it home after seven hours.  I’ll try not to do that again.