How to Approach Historical Grimoires
Books of ritual magic, read as the historical documents they are.
A grimoire is a manual of ritual magic: instructions for preparing the operator, drawing seals and circles, and calling angels or spirits. The genre runs from late antiquity to the chapbooks of the nineteenth century, and its texts were copied, altered and reattributed constantly.
This guide suggests how to read grimoires well, as windows onto the religious imagination, learned culture and anxieties of the people who made and used them.
What It Is
The most influential family is the Solomonic: the Key of Solomon (Clavicula Salomonis) and the Lesser Key or Lemegeton, whose first book, the Goetia, catalogues seventy-two spirits. Around them stand the Heptameron, the Arbatel, the Grimorium Verum, the Grand Grimoire and many others.
Almost none of these are what they claim to be. Their attributions to Solomon, Moses or Honorius are pious fictions, and each surviving manuscript differs. The editions in the archive, many made by nineteenth-century occultists, are themselves interpretations.
Why It Matters
Grimoires show how medieval and early-modern people understood the relationship between prayer, cosmos and power. They are also the direct source of modern ceremonial magic, through the Golden Dawn and Crowley.
Core Texts
The principal grimoires and the learned magic books that shaped them.
The Greater Key of Solomon: Including a Clear and Precise Exposition of King Solomon's Secret Procedure, Its Mysteries and Magic Rites; Original Plates, Seals, Charms and Talismans; Translated from Ancient Manuscripts in the British Museum, London
De Laurence Mathers
The Book of the Magi. Unabridged Reprint of Barrett's Magus, London, 1801. A Complete System of Occult Philosophy Consisting of Natural, Celestial, Cabalistic, and Ceremonial Magic; Invocations; Conjurations of Spirits, &c., &c.; Biographical Sketch of Seventeen Great Philosophers and Adepts
Francis Barrett
The Book of the Magi. Unabridged Reprint of Barrett's Magus, London, 1801. A Complete System of Occult Philosophy Consisting of Natural, Celestial, Cabalistic, and Ceremonial Magic; Invocations; Conjurations of Spirits, &c., &c.; Biographical Sketch of Seventeen Great Philosophers and Adepts
Francis Barrett
1801 · English · Grimoires
A Beginner’s Sequence
The learned background
Agrippa’s encyclopaedia explains the cosmology the grimoires assume. Read the relevant chapters before the rituals.
The Key of Solomon
Mathers’ edition is a composite of several manuscripts. Note how much of it is prayer and preparation.
The Greater Key of Solomon: Including a Clear and Precise Exposition of King Solomon's Secret Procedure, Its Mysteries and Magic Rites; Original Plates, Seals, Charms and Talismans; Translated from Ancient Manuscripts in the British Museum, London
De Laurence Mathers
The Goetia
The spirit catalogue that became the most famous grimoire in English.
An angelic alternative
Shorter texts that show the range of the genre, from planetary angels to Christian Neoplatonism.
