Grimoires: A History of Magic Books

  • Owen Davies
Oxford University Press: 2009. 384 pp. £14.99, $29.95 9780199204519 | ISBN: 978-0-1992-0451-9

You might expect to find grimoires — collections of magic spells, recipes and charms — on the shelves of medieval mystics or in the pages of Harry Potter books. But as social historian Owen Davies shows, they are not confined to history and fantasy.

Johann Kruse's 1950s campaign against superstition and sorcery targeted books conveying such beliefs (inset, right). Credit: PA PHOTOS; BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (ADD.39844, F.51)

In the 1960s, for example, the German Lutheran minister Kurt Koch waged war against what he called the “flood of magical conjuration which washes the Alps”, namely the superstitions he had found across southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland. To his dismay, such beliefs were promoted in cheap, mass-produced grimoires such as The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses — a title that had circulated in Europe since at least the eighteenth century.

Two contrasting positions in the modern view of grimoires are personified in another dispute in Germany in the 1950s. On one side was Johann Kruse, a schoolteacher who had seen many people, including his own mother, accused of witchcraft in rural Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany. Like Koch, he wanted to see such beliefs banished. In 1950 Kruse founded the Archive for the Investigation of Contemporary Witchcraft Superstition, and he published the exposé Witches Among Us? the following year. In 1956, he successfully sued the publisher Planet-Verlag for selling a cheap version of The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. Kruse's campaign seems at first like a noble attempt to combat ignorance and deceit by targeting publishers who were exploiting the gullibility of uneducated people. But such efforts often had moralistic overtones, akin to attempts to suppress pulp fiction in favour of more 'improving' literature.

On the other side of this debate were academic folklorists such as Will-Erich Peuckert, who testified for the defence against Kruse and felt that folk beliefs were a valid part of cultural tradition. Davies is refreshingly neutral, content with wry asides that leave no doubt about his views on these childish compendiums of 'magic'.

But grimoires weren't always ridiculous. Some collections of recipes and tricks from antiquity, such as the Stockholm and Leiden papyri — discovered in the 1820s and probably made in Egypt in the third century ad — provide a valuable window on the technologies of their age, describing the preparation of medicines, pigments, dyes and metals. And some 'magic' books — such as Giambattista Della Porta's Natural Magic (1558), which describes a camera obscura — are scientific treatises on mathematics and optics. These claim an allegiance to magic only because of the Neoplatonic view that natural magic is the mechanical system of nature, a web of hidden or occult forces.

In this regard, Davies's book disappoints. Despite offering an overview of magical tradition, he never really beds it into the history of ideas wherein magic occupies a valid pre-scientific role. One looks in vain for the sort of synoptic theses that motivate, for example, Keith Thomas's magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971), or Norman Cohn's study of witchcraft and persecution, Europe's Inner Demons (Basic Books, 1975).

Most of all, there is no sense of why magical belief proves so tenacious when magic itself does not work. As anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski argued, magic ritualizes hope in an adverse world, so that one coincidental success cancels out countless failures. And as Thomas showed, religion encouraged magical belief even while competing and sometimes merging with folk superstitions. In the Middle Ages, many uneducated parish priests conducted services as arcane rituals, with an incomprehensible liturgy and the Eucharistic host wielded like a talisman or cure-all.

Magic has long been associated with experimental science, as made clear by Lynn Thorndike in his multi-volume survey of those two activities, published between 1923 and 1958. Technology often carried the suspicion of demonic witchcraft, not least in the invention of the printing press, which is sometimes attributed to Faust instead of Johannes Gutenberg. That is one reason why grimoires can be read as practical guidebooks, such as the 'how-to' Kunstbuchlein of German tradition. As William Eamon showed in Science and the Secrets of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1994), these made a selling point of their promise of forbidden and hidden knowledge.

Davies reveals with relish just how banal this could make such 'secret' books. They might offer nothing more dangerous than cures for stomach ache and bad breath — although few plumb the Pythonesque depths of an Icelandic book from the seventeenth century with its runic spell to “afflict your belly with very great farting”. By the twentieth century, the history of magic becomes a dispiriting, yet curiously compelling tale of charlatans and quacks who invented comically grandiose sects and titles. Davies deflates these with the understatement: “The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor was a mail order organization founded in 1884 by Peter Davidson, a Scottish violinmaker.” He stops short of mentioning the flirtation of today's celebrities with vulgarized Kaballah — the point is made.

Also left implicit is Davies's analogy between popular grimoires and the modern plague of 'how-to' titles offering success in wealth or love. One can readily see that they are part of the same tradition, promising exclusive access to empty secrets. Internet magic has not diminished the desire for printed grimoires: given their fetishistic status, it seems that possession is still nine-tenths of the lore. Grimoires makes clear the continuity of magical belief in popular culture. Science and technology do not expel it, but merely give it new forms.