On Grimoires - And The Power of Magic
Thursday 11 March 2010 at 11:41 The history of magic has attained a new respectability. University departments now exist dedicated to the study of the history of the esoteric at Exeter and in the Netherlands. Oxford University Press, amongst others, now regularly publish works on the subject.
A recent book on 'grimoires' by Owen Davies, Professor of Social History at the University of Hertfordshire, is typical of this output. In essence, grimoires are books of magical spells and incantations. They may seem irrelevant to our time and place but this is not necessarily so.
Grimoires & Human Greed
At one level, the history of grimoires is the history of human cupidity. Such books for the bulk of human history have served little purpose other than personal aggrandisement in an age of poverty and lack of welfare provision. At such times, men and women have also had every reason to clutch at straws.
One common theme, from earliest times until quite recently. has been the use of such texts to discover treasure by calling up demons and dark spirits and then binding and interrogating them to reveal its whereabouts.
The Elizabethan magus John Dee's famous graveyard excursion to ask a dead spirit for treasure was not novel. He was in a very long line of 'magical practitioners' who wanted a fast track to wealth - or to sexual pleasure or even just good health and a bit of happiness in a grim world.
The spiritual content of these early modern books is thus minimal despite the attempts of later generations to read back their own spiritual searchings into an often grubby grab for power and money by what probably amounted (no doubt with exceptions) to a succession of charlatans.
Fraudsters, small time criminals and half-educated cunning folk determined on magic in order to prey for profit on the unhappiness of the masses - perhaps an over-simplification but it will serve as a corrective to romantic notions of past sorcery.
The only person in our era to have got this magical past right may have been that inveterate rascal Anton LaVey whose Church of Satan used the tropes of popular 'high' magic to sell a hedonistic mix of Californian-style individualism and cynicism.
This was the same carnival gulling of country folk, in the tradition of medieval hucksterdom, that underpinned the eighteenth century French bibliotheque bleue.
On The Other Hand ...
This is not to say that some of the original sources of the grimoires of Early Modern Europe were not of considerable spiritual importance or that grimoires did not prove vital to the creation of modern alternative spiritualities in providing ready-mades for spiritual interpretation.
The Hebrew cabbalistic tradition and pagan hermeticism as well as alchemy and possibly the tarot - alongside attempts to come to terms with the demonic lore of the religions of the book - were all sincere paths for the exploration of consciousness and alternative realities.
Later, the equally sincere researches of Eliphas Levy, the creation of the Order of the Golden Dawn, the experimentation of Crowley and the 'invention' by Gerald Gardner of Wicca all made use of the conceits of the grimoire in order to explore consciousness and 'spirituality' in new and imaginative ways.
Even between these time poles of sincerity, there are islands of genuine investigation into 'other forces' - Kelley may have been a fraud but Dee really does seem to have believed that he could talk with the angels.
Many others took demons to be really existing creatures who could be bound safely for service without threat of eternal damnation.
Repression & Social Order
The fears of the Church and the authorities were partly of the heretical and partly of new thinking but, on closer investigation, they were also related to the potential for grimoires to be used to separate peasants from their money and to promote unacceptable distance between community and church.
Immense efforts have thus gone into rooting out popular grimoires (including terminal force against sorcerers themselves) over the centuries.
The first relevant book burnings were of pagan writings by the newly assertive and somewhat totalitarian Christian communities of the late Roman Empire (although the Roman authorities were quite happy to burn books that defied state control of religion long before Constantine).
It is little known that book burnings continued in Germany long after the Nazis lost power. Instead of Jewish and liberal books, religious campaigners were burning books of magic.
Indeed, though they disapproved of magic (despite the fantasies of Western propagandists), the Nazis seem far less extreme in this matter than some fanatical Christian Democrats and Protestants.
Americans seem, sensibly, to have seen grimoire production as a branch of fraud, precursors to much modern 'new age' nonsense, rather than as some threat of a more fundamental kind.
What Grimoires Mean
It might be argued that the steady detachment of these texts from educated high society between the collapse of paganism and the destruction of the tolerant society of Muslim Spain, and their later survival out of that context, also detached them from their spiritual meaning and full folk purpose.
It degraded these texts into non-communal individualistic tools of power - personal weapons in life's struggle for ones own interest and against that of others.
Grimoires travelled from Europe into the New World and other Western colonies and back and forward across Europe, their influence linked to such practical factors as the availability of the printing press and the willingness and determination of the authorities to suppress them.
Levels of literacy were key in both permitting grimoires to flourish (they require someone to read them) and defining their acceptability and use.
Once a population got a taste for such books, these texts embedded themselves deep into some communities of migrants and former slaves - most often when literacy was combined with a low level of education and where entrepreneurs were able to provide sufficient cheap copies of 'classic works'.
Magical sub-cultures emerged that were both proponents of sometimes unutterable nonsense and the basis of a culture of resistance to a non-inclusive high culture that had nothing to say to the poor and uneducated.
Becoming Evil
This, one suspects, was very different from the highly cultured world of Toledo in the High Middle Ages where Jewish, Muslim and Christian traditions and thought mingled to create the radical thinking of which the early modern grimoires were but a pale reflection.
The later folk memory of Toledo as centre of dark sorcery came to reflect this cultural debasement of a high intellectual tradition. In successive totalitarian Christian reformations, magic became debased into a presumption of evil when all it really was was a challenge to the Church's intellectual authority.
Manuscripts got mangled, attributed inappropriately, given antiquities that do not stand up to scrutiny. Whether manuscripts or printed books, these texts became systematically degraded from their origins in a tolerant High Mediterranean Culture.
Perhaps some of the more genuine intellectual magicians were still being hunted to extinction as late as the early seventeenth century in Catholic Europe but the printed versions of their texts in the eighteenth century were little more than gobbledy-gook for cunning folk.
There are some wonderful tales of gullible treasure-seeking yokels being thoroughly done over by trickster 'sorcerers' in the chapter on the pre-revolutionary era in France and Switzerland in Davies' book.
Modern Transgressions
Davies' valuable book ends with a review of three 'fake' modern grimoires that have spawned their own intense followings -
- Lovecraft's wholly fictional Necronomicon (as used in Chaos Magick),
- Gardner's Book of Shadows (which is central to Wicca) and
- Lavey's cobbled together Satanic Bible (which is central to Satanism but which, of course, has nothing to do with Satan at all).
All three made use of grimoire lore. Before we get hyper-critical about their provenance, we might ask just how rational the claims of divine authorship of the books of the Bible or the Koran are if we really, really think about this instead of just automatically accepting claims on faith.
From this perspective, the leap of faith made by Chaos Magicians (who are just playing with belief quite knowingly) and Wiccans (who, in fact, are honest that each text is personal and to be recast by every practitioner in the light of their own needs) seems less absurd than that of their rivals.
Even the Satanists have no illusions that LaVey wrote their text. They know full well that Satan does not exist. The point is not to denigrate the religions of the book but to say that 'texts' meet needs and that faith is, truly, beyond reason and that it may be time that secular rationalists learnt to live with this.
Perhaps this may be one clue to the determination of the authorities to suppress the grimoire - in its cack-handed way, the grimoire says that no intermediation is required between the punter and his book. It is a text without an institutional structure to support it.
Grimoires as Rebellion
Any person with the power to interpret a grimoire (or, indeed, the Bible) can decide their own destiny in terms of sex, power and spirit. This is a standing challenge to all established priests, experts and intellectuals. It was the basis of the revolt of the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation.
At its worst, the grimoire is not merely obscurantist but dangerous, but not because it can conjure devils or perhaps give cause in extreme cases to murderous fantasy (of which there are cases) and has a proven history of fraud.
It is dangerous because, in truly ignorant hands, it can block the use of 'good' expert knowledge to deal with 'real' problems of sexuality, power relations, conditions of life, healthcare and spirituality. It is probably why socialists and progressives loathe it as much as any cardinal.
But, at its best, its use represents a revolutionary act under conditions where there is no power for the people, where sexual repression is normal, where conditions are poor and life is short and where religion represents social order rather than personal meaning. It says that ...
We the people will choose our own experts and our own ways of intermediation with life and matter. We will use magic because you have given us nothing or what you have given us is conditional on our acceptance of your standards and your 'morality' without you asking us what we want.
Irrationalism thus represents psychic resistance to the arrogance of the powerful. Magic as resistance will never go away except where it can be decisively crushed under the authoritarian boot of State and Church.
Communism could crush religion - or could it? It has returned in Russia, weakened admittedly, despite years of aggressive Soviet repression.
Magic In The 21st Century
Maybe aggressive repression will be the eventual solution of many liberal intellectuals. Certainly many liberal intellectuals in the West have taken a cynical neo-conservative turn on religion in despair at the masses' inability to be 'rational' but their path seems a price too high in terms of liberty for the majority.
An alternative may be to permit or even encourage a degree of healthy irrationalism within a culture that is based on open communication and general welfare provision, one where grimoires (as symptom) have no cause to be used for fraud or criminality because their function in society has changed.
Under new conditions, they may be used, as they increasingly are being used in the modern West, for fun and for spiritual growth rather than for the assertion of power by the powerless over their material circumstances and the even less powerful.
Davies makes a very profound point - most of us in the West no longer need magic in our lives. Economic development, mass education and technology provide our magic because magic is nothing more nor less than a means of empowerment.
If we see magic re-emerging today (albeit mostly in the spiritual and social sphere), it is because we (or many of us) need it again. The new religions are actively transforming persons and cultures where old systems have failed.
This is a process is likely to accelerate under the influence of the internet. As Davies suggests, magic and grimoires are unlikely to disappear from our culture very soon.
Grimoires: A History Of Magic Books by Owen Davies was published by Oxford University Press in 2009. The interpretation in this posting is wholly that of TPPR and anyone interested in the subject or in Owen Davies' own views should buy the book which was last priced as a hardback at £14.99.