Here’s another example of me typing up a common discussion
for the archives. Hope everyone is enjoying the turning of the secular year,
and had a gladsome solstice season.
Readers here will know that I’m fetished for magical books.
Stand back, oh ghosts of Caesar’s Druids, who turned nose-up at sacred writing.
I’m using the tech I have to preserve the lore I need, and for me that has
meant creating various handwritten books of my own collected and constructed
magic. As I’ve said, that phase may be over now, as I font-whore my way through
creating self-designed printed personal books with a keyboard.
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| A pile of typeset personal spellbooks. |
There is a trend in modern magic to discard those portions
of the old methods that may seem outdated or unpleasant. I’m a moderate traditionalist
in such matters, but one thing I recommend to any serious student of magic is
the keeping of a personal, preferably handwritten, spellbook. The intimacy of
the tool, the body-reality of the writing, and the undeniable symbolic link of
pen and flat-stuff that leads back through ancient magic all recommend it. The
introduction of literacy produced such amazing new powers in humans that letters
and written or drawn symbols have remained central to the practice of magic
ever since.
This tradition does actually seem to continue in modern
popular occultism. The symbol of the Book of Magic is so powerful in our
culture – as central as the broomstick witch or the thrown fireball – and is
something that can be achieved by any diligent student. I encourage students to
copy out any ritual they intend to work, painful as that may be when one has a
well-contructed modern ritual book.
Just to say so, I do consider typing something in to be the rough equivalent,
though typing will never have the neuro-somatic component of handwriting. The
ability to doll-up a page with graphics using modern type methods is hard to
argue with. Composing an evocative page of type seems a reasonable wizard’s
skill in our day.
There are several terms floating around occult-land for this
custom. Most commonly one hears of Books of Shadows, or grimoires. The terms
are used loosely, and can cause confusion. As usual, I’ll try to parse some of
these terms. First let me paraphrase a famous quote and say that there are
books about magic, and books of magic. Books of magic are those which are the
tools of magicians, rather than the tools of scholars. There is some crossover,
but note that no custom of handwriting bits of Levi or even Crowley has really
happened. Books of magic are tools of magical work. My basic analysis divides
traditional books of magic into three types: The Book of Secrets, the Grimoire,
and the Book of Shadows. All three of these are commonly kept and transmitted
in handwritten form – certainly so until the modern wave of type.
• The Book of Secrets: This is the most common type of
handwritten magician’s book. Once literacy reached most households it became
common for the literate person (often the housewife) to keep personal books
containing everything from kitchen, brewing and distilling ways to healing
charms, charms for recovering lost objects, and occasionally more occult
material. These were called Recipe Books (recipe is spelled ‘receipt’ until the
20thc. or so) and, more evocatively, Black Books, the latter
especially in Scandinavia.
To be a magician of any note almost certainly meant literacy. The magician’s
Book of Secrets is a general
repository of collected occult lore. The examples we
have are filing-cabinets without the organization – ‘experiments’ in magic
designed and tried, occasional bits of theory or aphorisms copied out, and the
copying out of whole ‘books’ of magic circulating at the time. (Think of those ‘books’
as the lengths of biblical ‘books’ – chapters.)
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| Pages from a Magician's Book of Secrets |
This is probably the most common kind of personal spellbook among
solitary students today. I have two or three from my earlier days, filled with
everything from veves to Taoist magical diagrams that I don’t understand to
this day. Nevertheless I collected them, and have them. A handwritten book
never becomes unsupported.
• The Grimoire: ‘Grimoire’
is from the French for ‘grammar’. A grimoire is a grammar – a schoolboy text of
magic, intended to allow a student to bypass years of personal collecting and
go straight for magic that works. The tradition of magical books picks up steam
in Europe as literacy begins to extend beyond the church, say in the 1400s and
onward. While there are a very few organized instruction manuals from before
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| Grimoires were the first popularly-published books of magic |
We are in a period of new grimoire construction. Those who
have spent the last decades collecting and experimenting are putting out their
synthesized instructions. That bodes well for the future of magic.
• The Book of Shadows: This term was created by Gerald
Gardner to name the book of practices of his witch-cult. His original Book of
Shadows – the first to be named as such – contained the laws and rules of his
sect, methods for making and consecrating the tools of ritual, a group-meeting
ritual that included both festive games and the chance for operative magic, and
invocations and lore for the eight-fold annual round of witches’ Sabbaths. It
also contained some organized instruction in various forms of practical magic.
This
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| One of the more popular modern compromises is the magical three-ring binder... |
So a ‘Book of Shadows’ is the grimoire, if you will, of a
specific cult of witchcraft or Pagan sorcery. Now, some students go right ahead
and produce one for themselves – that’s a fine experiment, though it takes a
year to work one’s way through the exercises. Often this lore is just part of a
Book of Secrets – at least until someone goes to the trouble to reorganize and
edit it into a more usable form.
As a couple of end notes let me begin with the notion of ‘talismanic
books’. Traditionally, any of these books of collected or synthesized magic
were themselves viewed as powerful objects, by virtue of the many words and
symbols of power contained in them. At the most specific, we find the ‘Liber
Spiritum’, which contains both the rites for summoning spirits, and the pages
of their ‘signatures’ and the ‘pacts’ made by the mage. This is the full
extension of the book as operative magical tool. This notion was supported by the churches,
which treated magical books as portals of demonic power, occasionally burning
them with their owners. Later the Protestants applied the same superstition to
Catholic prayer-books and other examples of ‘idolatry’.
However some grimoires recommend formally consecrating book,
pen and ink for the personal copying of rituals and to house the signs and
details of the magician’s ally spirits. The personal working book of a magician
is a consecrated tool. That is rather different from the modern fashion for
talismanic books. In that case the writer/publisher undertakes to formally
consecrate each copy of a book to some spiritual power or purpose connected
with the book’s subject. This is a new occult venture, and an interesting one.
Let’s watch…
Finally let me mention a category of handwritten book that I exclude from any
of the above – the personal journal. One cannot say that ‘journaling’ is simply
not a part of the magical tradition; more specifically, the keeping of journals
is quite separate from the preparation of a book as a tool of magical
performance or teaching. I seem to recall that it was with Starhawk and the
rise of therapeutic spirituality that journaling became part of what Neopagans
now often call a Book of Shadows. Some degree of personal observation and
record of events is common in household Books of Secrets, but traditional
magicians commonly separated their personal journals, even their records of
experiments, from their ritual and lore text collections. I recommend the same
to modern students. Keep your personal processing separate from your collection
of magic.
I hope these categories help make thinking about magical texts a little
clearer. Again, I recommend the keeping of handwritten (or, sigh, handtyped) personal books as a
valuable part of a magician’s training.
3 comments:
As a HPS in the Gardnerian trad, I just wanted to validate your assumption on Gardnerian BOS, using your definitions it is both a book of secrets and a Grimoire.
I love the handwritten spell book, and I agree with the body-knowledge that builds up. I think it was Gordon White's Rune Soup that first pointed out to me that there's a very frail, porous grid of lines between books of magic, books of medicine, books of mathematics, books of religion and books of divination or of astronomy, Accordingly, I am working on a book of geometry, a book of astronomy, a book of beasts, a book of medicine, and a book of spirits as both scribe and magician. But truth be told, they're really all much the same thing. Geometrical play keeps my mind active, medicine and cooking keeps my body active, astronomy awakens my wonder of the world, and spirits awaken my sense of poetry and mystery. And the books themselves awaken these powers in others.
hi could you tell me what the book's name is for the grimoire? I cant find it and its driving me crazy. Thanks my name is Anthony and my email is bamphaknee@hotmail.com
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