Regular Episode
#143 – GRIMOIRES—PART II
Part II picks up the thread and ranges widely — from the Voynich manuscript to Pennsylvania hex murders to chaos magic and the Church of Satan — all while asking the same underlying question: what does it mean that humans have always treated the written word as a source of special power?
📜 The Written Word as Magic
The conversation opens with the relationship between grimoires and coded sacred texts like those studied through the Kabbalah. Jerry draws a sharp distinction: most grimoires — especially the Anglo-Saxon leech books and later folk magic manuals — were deliberately transparent, meant to be read and practiced. It’s the Kabbalistic, Gnostic, and alchemical texts that court opacity and mystification.
The group lingers on a bigger idea: writing has historically carried authority that speech cannot match, simply because of its permanence. Jerry ties this to why major world religions have survived — Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism all have rich written traditions, while Mithraism, the Celtic druidic faith, and the old Germanic Woden religion left almost nothing in their own words. The speculative Q Source — the hypothetical sayings document underlying the Synoptic Gospels — comes up as perhaps the single most consequential lost manuscript in Western history.
🔍 The Voynich Manuscript: Medieval Hoax or Natural Language?
Jerry has spent years running the Voynich manuscript through professional cryptanalysis software (the same tools used in signals intelligence). His considered view: the manuscript probably does not contain natural language — a conclusion he reaches by comparing it to known ciphers like the Beale ciphers (which also appear to lack natural language) versus the Zodiac Killer ciphers (which do follow English grammatical patterns).
His working hypothesis is that it’s a medieval hoax — an illuminated fake crafted to be sold to a wealthy collector as a recovered ancient text, possibly attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. The Italianate architecture visible in the manuscript’s illustrations hints at a northern Italian origin. The Codex Gigas (the so-called “Devil’s Bible”) comes up as a parallel case — a spectacularly oversized book probably created so a monastery could have a showpiece for its library.
🌿 Cunning Folk, Leech Books, and Pennsylvania Hexenmeisters
Jerry traces a continuous folk magic lineage from the Anglo-Saxon leech books through to the American frontier. He notes that researchers (he believes at the University of Sheffield) have tested some leech book poultice recipes and found genuine antibiotic properties sitting right alongside fairy-lore incantations — a reminder that pre-scientific medicine was a mix of trial-and-error empiricism and sympathetic magic.
That lineage runs through Pow-wow magic and The Long Lost Friend — the foundational manual of the Pennsylvania German Hexenmeisters. Jerry has a personal connection here: his great-grandfather and aunt practiced from the same Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses tradition used by the Pennsylvania Dutch.
The darkest chapter in that tradition is the York County Witch Murder of the early 20th century. John Blymire — a hexenmeister who believed himself cursed — killed Nelson Rehmeyer, who lived in what is now known as Hex Hollow (then Rehmeyer’s Hollow) in York County, Pennsylvania, and burned his copy of The Long Lost Friend. The case was a nationwide scandal and drove the Hexenmeister community underground virtually overnight — though Jerry reports the tradition persists quietly in York County to this day. He also mentions Margaret Murray‘s influential but heavily criticized 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe as an early (if flawed) attempt to document this surviving folk tradition.
✨ Esoteric Orders, Chaos Magic, and the Theosophy Revolution
Jerry holds up his personal copy of 📚 The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic 💵 by Israel Regardie — eight volumes bound in one, roughly the thickness of a bulletproof vest — as the closest thing to the grimoire people actually imagine when they picture a grimoire. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Thelema, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and Freemasonry (particularly the ritual reforms of Albert Pike) all get discussed as modern inheritors of the grimoire tradition.
The pivot point, Jerry argues, is Theosophy and Helena Blavatsky‘s core gift to Western occultism: the idea that you don’t need an ancient manuscript to transmit ancient wisdom — you can channel it directly. That insight seeded what Jerry calls chaos magic, associated with figures like Jack Parsons and filmmaker Kenneth Anger: the ritual itself matters less than the will channeled through it. The tulpa comparison connects neatly to the MonsterTalk Slenderman episode.
😈 LaVeyan Satanism, Wicca, and the Psychodrama of Ritual
Anton LaVey‘s Church of Satan gets a sympathetic read as essentially atheistic psychodrama rooted in the same “animal magnetism” / will-to-power current running through 19th-century Spiritualism and recycled in books like The Secret. The Satanic commandments, Jerry notes, are in practice a fairly reasonable libertarian ethics of consent and personal sovereignty — it’s the branding that puts most people off.
Wicca gets an equally generous treatment: a late 19th / early 20th century tradition that wants ancient roots those roots simply weren’t written down, so modern practitioners have had to construct them from scratch. The rituals function less as sympathetic magic and more as a form of community-building and what Jerry compares, without condescension, to structured psychotherapy. The figure of the all-powerful solitary Magus on the Rider-Waite tarot card is itself, he points out, a Theosophical invention — in earlier decks the same figure was the Mountebank, the street-corner fraud.
💣 Secrecy, Community, and the Nuclear Parallel
The conversation closes on a genuinely interesting structural argument: esoteric secrecy has always been as much about community formation as about the content being protected. Blake shares a story from his days in the U.S. Navy’s nuclear power program — where textbooks required top-secret checkout protocols while a nearby college library displayed more detailed reactor schematics in its public foyer. Jerry extends the analogy: Q clearance (the Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons information tier) functions the same way occult lineages do — “I have something you don’t have” is the real payload.
The upshot: prior to the Enlightenment, alchemy, Bigfoot, sea monsters, and nuclear-style natural philosophy all occupied the same intellectual shelf. The hard boundary between “objectively real” and “occult” is, historically speaking, a very recent innovation.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic 💵 by Israel Regardie
– 📚 The Magus 💵 by Francis Barrett
– 📚 The Long Lost Friend 💵 by John George Hohman
– 📚 The Grand Grimoire 💵 (anon.; various editions)
– 📚 Petit Albert 💵 (anon.; French folk magic compendium)
– 📚 Grand Albert 💵 (attributed to Albertus Magnus)
– 📚 Language, Myths, Mysteries and Magic 💵 by Karen Stollznow
– 📚 The Witch-Cult in Western Europe 💵 by Margaret Murray
🔗 Related Links
– Voynich Manuscript (Wikipedia)
– Anglo-Saxon Leech Books
– Hex Hollow / Rehmeyer’s Hollow, York County, PA
– Pow-wow (Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Magic)
– Codex Gigas (“The Devil’s Bible”)
– Beale Ciphers
– Q Source (hypothetical synoptic sayings document)
– Mithraism
– Chaos Magic
– Helena Blavatsky and Theosophy
– Hermetic Order
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
MonsterTalk continues its series on Magic with Part II of its coverage of Grimoires. We continue our interview with researcher Jerry Drake, and focus on the view of magic books in various magical traditions of Western Europe.
Of Interest
- The Magus, by Francis Barrett
- Enochian Language
- The Book of Enoch
- Mishnah
- Incunable
- Grand Albert (Translated from French)
- Petit Albert
- The Grand Grimoire
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
MTArchivist
0