Art of the Grimoire: An Illustrated History of Magic Books and Spells
We have reached the best month of the year, October, fall is officially under way, and this weeks book is Art of the Grimoire: An Illustrated History of Magic Books and Spells by Owen Davies.
So, when I bought this book, I’m not sure what I was expecting. I browsed through it before buying because I knew I did NOT want a “how to make a grimoire” guide. I can read those for free at a dozen different websites. This book was better than I expected. Davies starts by defining magic, explaining how the Greek magoi performed mageia, who in turn inherited the magical practices from Chaldea, aka ancient Babylon, specifically going back to the 9th century BCE.
So, there is a VERY long history of belief in unseen forces and magic. Like…it pretty much grew and spread as humanity grew and spread. Which makes sense, atheism being a fairly modern development. Even Marcus Aurelius, cited belief in the gods in Meditations. I’m sure atheists existed along with the believers, but atheism as a popular movement is very…20th century.
So, having laid that out, Davies then says, “The global history of magic shows, in fact, how magic, religion, and science have always been interlinked.” Well…. ok, agree to disagree there. I think they were all linked up to a point, but as Brian Muraresku laid out in The Immortality Key, the Catholics certainly played a fair part in suppressing both science and magic in favor of religion.
Anyways, that is not the topic of this book.
This book traces magical writings, from Babylon and Sumeria up to the digital age. This book focuses on the Eurasion continent, part of Africa, and America specifically, as Europeans spread across the North American continent. It does not address magic as seen and practiced by Native American tribes of north or south America, does not cover Australian aboriginal artwork and beliefs in magic. So, it is primarily focused on the spread of magical writing through a central European base and with early contact with Europeans, like China, Japan, India. And I think this is because primarily he’s looking for written documentation of the magical beliefs. And as we learned from reading Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods, any written beliefs of the South American and Native tribes were pretty much wiped out when the Catholic Spanish rolled through and conquered those lands.
So, Davies starts with cuneiform of Sumeria, and one of the outstanding features of this book are the pictures. There’s a picture of the Sumerian cuneiform table that outlines magical stones and healing stones. So, for those who follow crystals as a magical path, you’re in good company, it goes back to Sumeria, the one in the book was dated to approximately 1000 BCE.
He includes incantation bowls for the purposes of exorcism from the 5th century BCE, commissioned by a Jewish Babylonian…so yes, if you were wondering, that’s at least how old Judaism is. And grimoire magic progresses forward from clay tablets to ceramic bowls, to bronze amulets, to sheets of lead, birch bark scrolls, bone amulets. And since all of these resources were not as easy to come by as a 21st century college ruled notebook, magic and those that practiced it was a finite resource. Because not everyone had ready access to the resources needed to cast the spells. Or rather, they might have access to bone shards. But they may not know that certain bones for certain animals are best used for certain castings. Or that this stone is best used for that healing. And that knowledge would have been handed down via oral tradition, due to there just wasn’t a good way to transmit the written instruction. What would be a 50-page pamphlet in the 21st century would be stone tablets weighing in total 120 pounds if carved out in cuneiform on clay tablets.
But, gradually, over time, this changed, as humanity used science to progress magic, and used magic to progress religion, and the unanswered questions in religion would then advance science further. See, science, gave us papyrus, and eventually parchment, and eventually paper, and the printing press.
And once there was easier ways to write out the knowledge, we started getting tomes of magic, calling on angels to protect humanity from demons. So…science advances magic, which advances religion.
So, this book covers a range of spiritual beliefs and how those beliefs fed magic and magic fed back into spiritualism. And all through a series of fantastic pictures. No joke, I was about halfway through the book when it dawned on me that this book reads like walk through a museum of occult and magical studies. Truly, there’s an intro to each chapter, followed by a series of pictures, each with a wonderful annotation of what you’re looking at, mid-chapter breaks for continuing theme, and more pictures. And most of the pictures are of truly stunning artwork. Like…look at this!
Magical Steal (c. 360-343 BCE). From Davies, the stela records the following spell:
"Don't fear, don't fear, my son Horus! I will be around you as your protection and drive all evil from you and any man who is suffering as well."
And also, this:
Dharani woodblock print of ink on paper (980 CE, Northern Song Dynasty), produced in Dunhuang.
Now, you can’t do a book about grimoire’s and not discuss the burning times. Because as magic and grimoire’s spread, so did fear of witches, as pushed by the church. Science…. magic….religion.
As all three spread around the globe, the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries have seen crazy advances in all three, and this is explored in this book, but most especially the magic. Because…Grimoire. Which is famously the witch’s magical text from which they draw their power and into which they record their spells. This is famously shown in Hollywood with Charmed, where I think the Halliwell Sisters book of magic was shown in every episode for 8 seasons. Practical Magic, the Owens sisters refer to the aunts’ book to bring the dead back to life. In The Craft, the girls read from magical books to heighten their own power. These ideas are as old as humanities written texts. It’s just that those texts have become A LOT more prolific as the means to communicate ideas have spread globally via the world wide web. Davies even includes a picture of grimoire page you can print out and use to write your own spells. Because science feeds magic…which feeds religion. Hence the rise of Wicca as a recognized religion. And as more is learned about humanities past with magic, there is a surge of interest in OTHER religions.
Now, I don’t discount the possibility of real magic…not illusion, not sleight of hand, but REAL magic. Because I do believe there are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And judging by the book sales from publishers over the last 100 years, I am not alone in that belief. And maybe I’m a fool for that. But I am a happy fool for my belief in the unseen, then most atheists are in their belief that the unseen does not exist.
I quite liked this book. Like I said, it reads like a personal walk through a museum, the curated artwork is absolutely beautiful, and it was fascinating to see what we all believed 100, 1000, 10000 years ago.
