Visitors ask for "the grimoires" the way they might ask for the dictionaries, expecting a set. There is no set. There are hundreds of handbooks of magic, copied, cut, combined, and renamed over two thousand years, and what they share is less a content than a job. A grimoire is a book that tells you what to do.
The word
Grimoire is the French grammaire in an altered form. In medieval France a grammaire was a book written in Latin, which for most people meant a book they could not read. From "incomprehensible book" to "book of spells" is a short step, and in time the word came to mean a manual of magic and nothing else. English borrowed it in the nineteenth century. The same history hides in the English word "glamour", which began as a Scots form of "grammar" and once meant an enchantment.
What a grimoire contains
Open almost any of the ritual handbooks and you will find the same parts in roughly the same order:
- The preparation of the operator: fasting, washing, confession, and prayer over a set number of days.
- The choice of time, by the days and hours of the seven planets and the phase of the moon.
- The making and consecration of tools: knife, wand, pen, ink, parchment, robe, incense.
- The circle, with the divine names to be written around it.
- Prayers and conjurations, often very long, built from psalms and lists of holy names.
- A catalog of spirits, each with its rank, appearance, powers, and seal.
- "Experiments" for particular ends: finding treasure or stolen goods, winning love or favor, becoming invisible.
- The license to depart, by which the spirits are dismissed in peace.
Charm books and books of secrets are plainer. They offer short prayers and recipes for healing people and animals, stopping blood, protecting the house, and finding what is lost.
Borrowed authority
Hardly any grimoire carries the name of its real author. They are attributed to Solomon, Moses, Enoch, Hermes, Saint Cyprian, Pope Honorius, Albertus Magnus, and Agrippa. The false name was not quite a lie in the modern sense. It was a claim about lineage: this knowledge is old, it comes from one who was wise or holy enough to command spirits safely, and it has reached you by a chain of worthy hands.
False dates serve the same purpose. A title page that reads "Memphis, 1517" or "Rome, 1670" is a costume. The catalog entry must give both the claim and the evidence.
A manuscript genre in the age of print
Grimoires went on being copied by hand for three centuries after the invention of printing. One reason was caution. Another was that the copying was part of the work: several texts instruct the operator to write out the book personally, with a consecrated pen, and some describe a "book of spirits" that must itself be consecrated before it can be used.
Print came in two waves. The learned Latin magic of Agrippa and his circle was printed in the sixteenth century for scholars. The cheap vernacular grimoires arrived in the eighteenth, and they reached a far wider public.
Who owned them
In the Middle Ages the owners were mostly clergy and students, the people who had Latin. In the centuries that followed they were physicians, schoolmasters, soldiers, village healers, and above all treasure hunters, for whom a spirit who knew where gold was buried was a business proposition. In eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century France, peddlers sold little grimoires at fairs alongside almanacs and saints' lives. Emigrants carried them across the Atlantic. By the twentieth century they could be ordered by post.
Most owners wanted ordinary things: health, safety, money, love, and the return of what had been lost. The grimoires are a record of everyday worry as much as of cosmic ambition.
How to read one
- Find out which version you have. Note the editor, the translator, and the manuscripts used. Two books called The Key of Solomon may share less than half their contents.
- Read the prayers. They show the religious world of the text. Much of the most notorious magic turns out to be made of psalms and liturgy.
- Look at the page. Layout, diagrams, colored inks, and the wear on particular leaves tell you how the book was used.
- Look for the owner. Names, dates, and notes in the margins are often the most valuable thing in a copy.
- Keep your distance. These are historical documents. Some of what they prescribe is dangerous or cruel, and none of it is advice.
Why a library keeps them
Because they preserve what official histories leave out: what people feared, what they hoped for, and what they were willing to try. They are evidence for the history of religion, medicine, science, law, and the book trade, all at once. And because, read as books, they are far stranger and more human than their reputation.