Product Description

No books have been more feared than grimoires, and no books have been more valued and revered. In Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Owen Davies illuminates the many fascinating forms these recondite books have taken and exactly what these books held.
At their most benign, these repositories of forbidden knowledge revealed how to make powerful talismans and protective amulets, and provided charms and conjurations for healing illness, finding love, and warding off evil. But other books promised the power to control innocent victims, even to call up the devil. Davies traces the history of this remarkably resilient and adaptable genre, from the ancient Middle East to modern America, offering a new perspective on the fundamental developments of western civilization over the past two thousand years. Grimoires shows the influence magic and magical writing has had on the cultures of the world, richly demonstrating the role they have played in the spread of Christianity, the growth of literacy, and the influence of western traditions from colonial times to the present. Through his enlightening and extraordinary account, we see how these secret books link Chicago to ancient Egypt, Germany to Jamaica, and Norway to Bolivia, and grasp how the beliefs of Alpine farmers became part of the Rastafarian movement, how a Swede became the most powerful wizard in early America, and how a poor laborer from Ohio became a notorious villain in his own country and a mythical spirit in the Caribbean.
Despite religious condemnation and laws barring their use, the grimoire has survived to the present day, and not just in Harry Potter films and Broadway's Wicked. Here is a lively and informative history of a genre that holds a powerful fascination for countless readers of the occult.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #155263 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780199204519
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review

"Among the many pleasures of reading Davies' book is the simple, shiver-producing enjoyment of scanning the rich, ominous-sounding titles that he catalogs in the course of charting their historical development."--Nick Owchar, Los Angeles Times
"The history of superstition becomes, in this excellent and nuanced volume, a history of the uses of disdain...True bibliophiles will enjoy Davies' erudite tracing of the grimoires tradition through two millennia of faked dates, spurious authorship and pretended translations from the 'original' Latin or Hebrew or even Chaldaean. Other readers may skip ahead to Davies' fascinating account of the 'democratisation' of grimoires in the 19th and 20th centuries."--Michael Ostling, History Today
"An amazing achievement, not just for its depth of research but its breadth, from Massachusetts to Martinique to Mauritius. It must become the classic work on the subject."--Ronald Hutton, author of The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Pagan Witchcraft
"In Grimoires, British social historian Owen Davies examines magical texts from Babylonia through Buffy the Vampire Slayer, finding connections between conjuration, religion, science and politics...In a work of cogent synthesis, Davies shows that grimoires have played a role in everything from murder to imaginative fiction, anti-colonial movements to quack remedies."--David Luhrssen, Shepherd Express
"The extent of Davies' study is impressive, countering assumptions a curious reader might have taken for granted."--Newark Star-Ledger
"You will adore Owen Davies' Grimoires and hang on his every word as you journey with him through the long history of magical works as they evolved from clay tablets and scrolls, to hand written manuscripts, and eventually into printed books. Grimoires: A History of Magic Books is extremely valuable as an historical work covering the lesser known histories of the authors, publishers, and practitioners of magic who influenced the evolution of magic explaining the origins of all the differing types of magic practiced today."--Pagan Bookworm

About the Author

Owen Davies is Reader in Social History at the University of Hertfordshire. He has written extensively on the history of popular magic, witchcraft, and ghosts.

Customer Reviews

An Entertaining Historical Overview of Grimoires
Davies has written an entertaining survey of grimoires, surpassing in different ways Christopher McIntosh's earlier and shorter text on the subject The Devil's Bookshelf (1985), which is still a well-informed although limited introduction to the topic. The subtitle of Davies' book needs clarification. This is not a history of magic books in general, but a history of a specific type of magic book. As Davies states in his introduction, "grimoires are books of magic,... but not all books of magic are grimoires, for as we shall see, some magic texts were concerned with discovering and using the secrets of the natural world rather than being based on the conjuration of spirits, the power of words, or the ritual creation of magical objects". Although his history is limited primarily to "grimoires" as he understands them, he does touch on magic texts in general and looks at their relationship to the magical aspects of writing itself, including the ritual use of materials in book production and the eventual democratizing of literary magic through print and cheap productions, leaving only illiteracy as an obstacle.

Davies' approach is strictly that of a social historian writing a popular history, not a practitioner of magic. He is more concerned with the social influence of grimoires and any controversies surrounding them than their content (which is generally and lightly touched on) and effectiveness, and he considers the "lineage of magic" as "dubious" (page 11). At the top of his list in terms of "the greatest influence on the modern world of magic and religion" is The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses followed by "the most enduring, influential, and notorious Solomonic book," The Key of Solomon (pages 11 & 15). Other grimoires discussed include the Picatrix, the Sworn Book of Honorius, the Little Albert, the Grand Grimoire (and a version of it called the Red Dragon), the Book of St Cyprian, the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, Francis Barrett's The Magus, the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin, and Gerald Gardner's Book of Shadows among others. However, some may be disappointed by the low degree of coverage of certain texts. The American book pirate L. W. de Laurence and his publishing influence, on the other hand, receives ample coverage. Some may also be surprised to find Simon's Necronomicon, which Davies calls "a well-constructed hoax", treated as "no less 'worthy'" as a piece of magical literature than other grimoires. Of this and other Necronomicons he states: "Like other famous grimoires explored in this book, it is their falsity that makes them genuine" (page 268). These type of statements show that although false authorship and fictive elements are used in many grimoires, Davies lacks the discerning eye of a skilled practical magician and more careful scholar of magic.

Given the above caveats, Davies' text is still an enjoyable and informative read. It will certainly introduce some readers to grimoires they did not know existed and provide a historical context for them. For further context, Davies highly recommends Michael D. Bailey's Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present (2007) as "an ideal companion" (pages 286 and 291 [Note 4]). Like Davies' text, it too has its weaknesses, but each book is strengthened by the other if used together. In addition to being well bound with an attractive dust jacket, Davies' book also contains 27 illustrations, 17 plates on glossy pages, a six-page Epilogue, as well as chapter notes, an index, and a useful Further Reading section.

Engrossing yet scholarly account of American magical tradition
Grimoires: A History of Magic Books

Writing in similar vein to his "Cunning Folk: Popular Magic in English History", Davies has penned an enjoyable yet scholarly account of the evolution of magical spellbooks from earliest times to the present day, opening up new territory in his exploration of their development and proliferation in the United States by following a murky thread of tradition, complex borrowings and multiple piratings. In this, Davies' book splendidly supplements the work in European fields first undertaken by E. M. Butler, and now more recently, by Kiekhefer, Fanger, Luck, Klaassen, Peterson, Mathiesen, and Hutton. Well illustrated with previously unpublished material such as Francis Barrett's handwritten title page of his manuscript for "The Magus", Davies' book should be of as much interest to the student of the occult as to the historian.

Excellent history of transmission
Owen Davies book on the history of grimoires is an excellent source for the history of these books. The author seems very knowledgeable if somewhat cold to the subject of ceremonial magic. I particularly enjoyed his attempts to track this genre into the 21st century. All-in-all it's a good read.