Regular Episode
#142 – GRIMOIRES—PART I
The conversation covers a lot of ground — from ancient Mesopotamian incantations to the democratizing effect of the printing press to why magical thinking remains stubbornly human even when we know better. Blake also flags that a future episode will tackle Jack Parsons — the rocket scientist who fused early JPL history with Aleister Crowley‘s sex magic and somehow also L. Ron Hubbard — so Jerry may be back.
📖 What Is a Grimoire?
The word grimoire derives from the Old French grammaire — originally just a word for any Latin text. By the mid-to-late 18th century it had narrowed in French to denote books of magic: recipe books for spells and occult rituals. The word entered English through Francis Barrett‘s 1801 compendium 📚 The Magus 💵, which drew heavily on Agrippa‘s Three Books of Occult Philosophy and various Solomonic manuscripts, translating them into English in a style Jerry likens to the King James Bible. Barrett’s book is widely credited with igniting serious interest in occult practice in Britain and, later, the United States.
Jerry distinguishes two broad categories: folk or natural magic texts (cure books, leech books, books like The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses and The Long Lost Friend) and diabolical grimoires — the Necronomicon-style books most people picture. Genuinely diabolical grimoires are actually quite rare; the closest real-world equivalent is The Grand Grimoire (also called The Red Dragon), published in France in the early 19th century though claiming a 14th- or 15th-century manuscript source. Jerry owns a later copy. He also tried using it once. It didn’t work — because, as he cheerfully notes, the bad news about magic is that it doesn’t work.
🏛️ Ancient Roots: From Mesopotamia to Medieval Europe
The tradition of sympathetic magic — using an unseen force to create an effect from an unseen cause — likely predates writing itself. Jerry points to rolled-up curse tablets found in the Roman baths at Bath, England, to the Mithraic Temple in London, and to the possibility that Paleolithic cave paintings were themselves acts of sympathetic magic.
The magical traditions that eventually crystallized into European grimoires drew from several deep wells:
– The Egyptian magical tradition of Heka, absorbed into Hellenistic Gnosticism after Alexander’s conquest.
– Pre-Islamic Arabian magic centered on the djinn, which survived into the Islamic period alongside influences from Judaism, Hellenism, and Zoroastrianism.
– The Jewish Kabbalistic tradition, rooted in the Mishnah and the Book of Enoch, which gave rise to what we call Enochian magic.
These streams converged in medieval scholastic Europe, primarily in Spain, where Jewish scholars, Arabic texts, and Latin-reading churchmen all mixed — which Jerry notes is no coincidence: the Inquisition began in Spain partly as an attempt to suppress precisely this kind of knowledge. Crucially, the monks and educated laity who compiled and copied these texts did not consider themselves to be doing anything diabolical. Most medieval ritual magic explicitly invoked the Holy Spirit and divine authority to compel demons — a framing that only became scandalous during the Renaissance and Inquisition.
✍️ Before and After the Printing Press
Before movable type arrived in Europe, grimoires circulated the same way all medieval books did: hand-copied by monks and educated laity, translated into Latin or local vernaculars, and stored in monastery and church libraries. Many of these survive — Jerry notes that even the University of Texas library holds at least one illuminated manuscript dedicated to magic, and the Library of Congress has a massive collection.
One of the most important early texts is the Picatrix — a Latin translation (c. 1256) of the Arabic Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (“The Goal of the Wise”). The name Picatrix itself is a garbled transliteration of Buqrāṭis, the Arabic rendering of Hippocrates — lending the book a false ancient-Greek authority. Jerry highlights the Picatrix as containing arguably the first draft of a medieval understanding of the scientific method in popular form, even while being riddled with what Roger Bacon would have called illegitimate knowledge. Bacon — often credited as a father of the Western scientific method — was alert enough to spot forged ancient texts and argued they should not be allowed to circulate.
When movable type spread through Europe, the occult book market exploded. Books printed before 1501 are called incunabula (from the Latin for “swaddling clothes”). Among the very earliest: a 1486 book on demonology and exorcism held at MIT’s Vail Collection. By the Renaissance, no serious private library was complete without an occult section — owning these books was a mark of being a well-rounded, humanistic thinker.
🕯️ Famous Grimoires: A Who’s Who
Jerry walks through some of the most significant titles in the tradition:
– Petit Albert and Grand Albert — often bound together; the Petit Albert is notable as the earliest known source for the Hand of Glory spell (yes, the one Draco Malfoy has in Harry Potter).
– The Magus (1801) by Francis Barrett — the book that introduced grimoire into English.
– The Grand Grimoire — the closest the tradition comes to a genuine diabolical text; contains instructions for summoning the devil.
– Clavicula Salomonis (Key of Solomon), the Black Pullet, and the Grimoirum Verum — part of an 18th-century explosion of texts, most claiming ancient authorship by Solomon, nefarious popes, or Jewish patriarchs.
– The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses and The Long Lost Friend — folk magic texts that were in everyday use in Jerry’s family’s Tennessee River Valley community well into living memory.
🔬 Magic, Science, and the Problem of Falsifiability
One of the episode’s richest threads is Jerry and Blake’s discussion of why the split between magic and science is much more recent than most people assume — roughly 200 years old, post-Enlightenment. Isaac Newton wrote more about the Bible and alchemy than about gravity or optics; his later career was consumed by attempts to transmute lead into gold and to decode biblical prophecy. That’s not a quirk — it reflects a world where the mechanism of operation for everyday phenomena was genuinely unknown, making a rigorous hypothesis-test-generalize loop (Popperian falsifiability) not yet a meaningful intellectual tool.
Blake connects this to a recurring theme on the show: magical thinking isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. He cites Bruce Hood‘s research on supernatural thinking in children and his famous “serial killer’s sweater” experiment — the finding that most people, regardless of stated beliefs, recoil from wearing a garment associated with a violent criminal, as if evil were contagious. Writing things down preserved a vast quantity of pre-scientific ideas, but — crucially — without any mechanism for filtering out which ones actually worked.
🌎 The 19th-Century Occult Revival
Perhaps counterintuitively, the bulk of grimoire production doesn’t come from the ancient or medieval world — it comes from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Egyptian revival sparked by Napoleon’s campaigns, the discovery of Tutankhamun‘s tomb in the 1920s, and the unearthing of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945 all fed successive waves of occult interest. In the United States, the locus was upstate New York’s so-called “burned-over district” — the same revival-scorched region that produced Mormonism and Spiritualism. The Freemasons were avid collectors; Jerry notes that the Grand Lodge of Texas, which he inventoried in 2007, holds a grimoire library that would surprise most modern Masons. The tradition we think of as ancient is, in practice, largely Victorian.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 The Magus 💵 by Francis Barrett (1801) — the book that introduced grimoire into English
– 📚 Grimoires: A History of Magic Books 💵 by Owen Davies
– 📚 The Grand Grimoire (The Red Dragon) 💵 — the diabolical grimoire discussed in the episode
– 📚 Petit Albert 💵 — source of the Hand of Glory spell
– 📚 The Long Lost Friend 💵 by Johann Georg Hohman — Pennsylvania Dutch folk magic, still in print
– 📚 SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable 💵 by Bruce Hood
🔗 Related Links
– In this episode MonsterTalk continues its special series on Magic as it examines the history of Grimoires in Western culture. State Department Archivist Jerry Drake, PhD, discusses the history of magic books, magic writing and how it fits into the history of science. This is the first of a two-part interview.
Mentioned in this Episode
- The Magus, by Francis Barrett
- Enochian Language
- The Book of Enoch
- Mishnah
- Incunable
- Grand Albert (Translated from French)
- Petit Albert
- The Grand Grimoire
Music
- Intro Music: The Magic of Bamboo by Siddhartha
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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