BOOKS Magical texts

Chris Hill explores an authoritative and visually stunning history of grimoires that mirror the societies that created them

Art of the Grimoire

An Illustrated History of Magic Books and Spells

Owen Davies

Yale University Press 2023

Hb, 256p, £25, ISBN 9780300272017

With a proven record in the study of magic and witchcraft, Owen Davies brings us this full colour appraisal of magical texts from around the world. With a focus upon the visual dimension of the texts from their first appearance to the modern day, Davies offers a sophisticated discourse that entwines history, aesthetics and the emergence of print media. Magical texts, he believes, are complex epistemological objects that mirror the underlying desires of their host societies, curious and unique explorations of the gaps in our understanding of being in the world.

Davies addresses the materiality of the magical text and how the symbiosis between author and existent publishing technology offers an insight into our social and intellectual development. In the opening chapters he looks at the invention of writing and the pictographic forms that flourished in the Middle East and China between 3400 BC and 1200 BC. Referencing Sumerian clay curse tablets and Shang dynasty animal oracle bones, he cogently explores the significance of magic within early civil society and the discursive limitations inherent in media itself. With the appearance of papyrus and ink, he explores the act of writing as a magical operation that facilitated the depiction of new metaphysical dimensions, geometries, and elaborate systems of correspondences, from Greek magical papyri to the elaborate 4th- and 5th-century hagiographies of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

At the heart of Davies’s history is the emergence of printing and the subsequent dissemination of hitherto occult secrets. The collapse of the Roman Empire in the late fourth century and the dispersal of intellectual property across its former territories he cites as a key moment in the gestation of magical works. A gestation that bore fruit by the 12th century as Islamic and Jewish thinkers assimilated the magical legacy of the ancient world into early works of astral and talismanic magic, angelology and numerology. Formulae to control spirits, find love and recover lost treasure proved popular and for many budding magi, texts such as The Comprehensive Compendium to the Entire Sea by Persian scholar Al Tabasi (d.1089) and the 13thcentury Sworn Book of Honorius offered a complete course in the magical arts. Davies’s history also embraces the world beyond the West in this early period of production and looks at the importance of block printing in the Buddhist world from the second century onwards, drawing our attention to such wondrous artefacts as the Diamond Sutra Scroll (AD 868) recovered from the Dunhuang Caves in China in the 1930s.

Considering the invention of imaginary languages and scripts along with a distinctive vocabulary of glyphs and signs, Davies notes how the generic features of the grimoire underwent consolidation just in time for the invention of movable type printing by Johannes Gutenberg (c.1393/1406-1468). With the floodgates now open and the unwanted scrutiny of Church and State during the Renaissance and Reformation, publishers capitalised on the commercial potency of magical works. Legendary texts such as the Testament of Solomon could be reproduced on demand, augmenting an expanding catalogue of titles in a profoundly heterodox literary marketplace. Works by such notable mystics as Heinrich Agrippa (1486-1535) and Paracelsus (1493-1541) now attracted a wider audience and more rarefied alchemical texts were made available through advances in copper plate engraving. By the early 19th century the amateur occultist was spoiled for choice, be it tales of Doctor Faust, the Dragon Rouge and Poule Noire spell books, or the authoritative Francis Barrett’s The Magus (1801). Less familiar works – Ethiopian Ge’ez scrolls, Ashanti Islamic manuscripts, Pennsylvanian Pow-Wow books and the visually exotic The Illustrated Night Parade of One Hundred Demons of Toriyama Sekien (1712-1788) – are given equal representation in Davies’s history.

The latter part of Davies’s work documents the age of pulp, the power of advertising and the commercial prowess of magical and occult texts. An interesting account of the imperial transmission of magical works looks in some detail at the legacy of French chapbooks in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean colonies as indigenous folk traditions absorbed imported ideas. The luminary occult publisher William De Laurence (1886-1936) capitalised on an innate demand for occult insights found within the African American diaspora through newspaper advertising and mail order.

Concluding with a review of more recent developments – whether lurid black magic pulps, republican Chinese prediction books (shushu) or the vying traditions and parallel universes of the Golden Dawn and Austin Osman Spare – Davies celebrates the scope of human invention and imagination in mapping the realms beyond our comprehension to the present day.

A tremendous volume with high production values and scholarship that will not disappoint. ★★★★★