Every so often a letter comes to the desk from someone rebuilding a library. Their books were stolen, or lost in a move, or simply read until they fell apart, and they want to start again. Nearly always they ask for older books, and nearly always there is one in particular they remember: a fat paperback with a lurid cover, bought at a railway station or a drugstore in 1971, that first told them what alchemy was, or that the tarot had a history, or that the Kabbalah existed at all.
I know the feeling, because I had one too. This essay is about those books: the popular surveys of magic and the occult published between about 1945 and 1975, which for many readers of my generation were the only door into the subject that was open.
The surveys
They came in two waves. The first, in the years after the war, were handsome illustrated histories written by collectors and enthusiasts, many of them reissued in paperback twenty years later.
- Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy, by Emile Grillot de Givry. French, 1929. English, 1931. Nearly four hundred pictures from old books, with a text that lets them speak.
- Witchcraft in England, by Christina Hole. 1945. A folklorist's sober account, with illustrations by the young Mervyn Peake.
- The Mirror of Magic, by Kurt Seligmann. 1948. A Swiss surrealist painter and collector of old books on magic writes its history from Babylon to the eighteenth century. Reissued in paperback in 1971 under another title.
- The Secret Lore of Magic, by Idries Shah. 1957. Long extracts from the grimoires, in English, at a time when they were otherwise very hard to find.
The second wave came with the occult boom of the 1960s, when novels like Rosemary's Baby sold in millions and every newsstand had a rack of paperbacks on the supernatural.
- The Morning of the Magicians, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. French, 1960. English, 1963. A breathless mixture of alchemy, lost civilizations, secret societies, and science fiction, which invented or popularized half the myths that still circulate about the occult and the Nazis.
- The Tarot, by Mouni Sadhu. 1962. A long course of study in the tradition of the French and Russian occultists, solemn and demanding. Many readers kept it for forty years.
- The Black Arts, by Richard Cavendish. 1967. The clearest of them all: Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy, ritual magic, and the black mass, explained by a historian with a dry wit and no axe to grind.
- Man, Myth and Magic, edited by Richard Cavendish. 1970 to 1972. An illustrated encyclopedia sold in weekly parts at newsagents, with articles by serious scholars beside practitioners. Many readers kept the parts in the binders sold for them.
- Ritual Magic in England, by Francis King. 1970. The first history of the English magical orders from their own papers, written with candor and some gossip.
- The Occult, by Colin Wilson. 1971. An existentialist writer's bestseller arguing that occult experience points to a latent human faculty he called Faculty X. Enormous, enthusiastic, and uneven.
In the same years Dennis Wheatley lent his name to a paperback series of occult classics and novels, many of them long out of print, which put books that had been scarce for decades into every chain bookshop.
What they did well
It is easy to be superior about these books. They deserve better. Their authors read widely at a time when universities would not touch the subject, and they brought pictures from rare books to readers who would never see the originals. Most of them wrote clear prose. The best of them, Cavendish above all, described practices without either recommending or sneering at them, which is exactly what we try to do in our own guides. And they were cheap. A teenager with pocket money could own one.
What they got wrong
They also passed on, and sometimes manufactured, a good deal that historians have since rejected. Read them with these in mind:
- Murray's witch-cult. Many surveys repeat Margaret Murray's thesis of an organized pagan religion behind the witch trials, long after historians had abandoned it. See the guide to Witchcraft and Modern Paganism.
- Nine million witches. The figure appears again and again. The best current estimates are in the range of forty to sixty thousand executions.
- The Egyptian tarot. The tarot was a card game invented in fifteenth-century Italy. The Egyptian origin is a story of 1781. See Divination and Tarot.
- The occult Reich. Most of what popular books say about Hitler and the occult began with The Morning of the Magicians and its imitators and has no basis in the documents. See The Occult Revival.
- No footnotes. Few of these books cite their sources, and anecdotes passed from one to the next until they looked like facts. When a story matters, trace it back.
Read them, in short, as documents of their own moment. They are a superb record of what the occult looked like from 1967, and that is a part of the history too.
Caring for an old paperback
Mass-market paperbacks were made to be thrown away. The paper is acidic and browns at the edges, and the glue of a "perfect" binding dries out and lets the pages go. If you are rebuilding a library with them, a few habits will keep them alive longer:
- Keep them upright on the shelf, supported so they do not lean, and out of direct sunlight, which fades spines in a single summer.
- Do not open them flat or bend the covers back. The spine will crack and the pages will drop out.
- Do not repair a loose cover or spine with adhesive tape. The tape yellows, the glue migrates into the paper, and nothing can undo it. A loose book is better kept in a folded paper wrapper or a small box.
- Leave old receipts, letters, and notes where you found them, or record the page before you move them. They are part of the book's history.
- Write your name and the date in pencil inside the front cover. Some future librarian will thank you.
On our shelves
Most of these surveys stand in the Tower in class T 3, with the general histories of magic. Witchcraft in England is with the witchcraft literature at L 7, Shah with the grimoires at L 2, Sadhu with the tarot at L 5, King with the histories of the orders at D 6, and Pauwels and Bergier with the occult revival at D 5, where they belong as evidence rather than as history. Our run of Man, Myth and Magic is in the Waters, complete except for one issue. If you have number 68, please write.