A couple new additions to the Library arrived today from Ouroboros Press.... Zoroaster's Telescope and Giordano Bruno's Cantus Circaeus. I'm looking forward to reading them.They are, of course, very nicely produced volumes.
Also in the news.... I recant my criticisms of Magic That Works. There is something powerful in this book, and its effect on me was frankly startling. Now, I can't guarantee everyone will have the same sort of results I did, but I'm going to be digging into this system more.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Arabic Grimoires in Translation
One of the things that struck me, when I got started collecting grimoires, is that there seemed to be a peculiar void in the ones available. You see the same books over and over again.... The Keys of Solomon, The Arbatel of Magic, Abramelin.... and it always seemed peculiar to me that these seemed to be the only grimoires out there.
Well.... the thing is, they aren't. There is a wide world of grimoires out there that for whatever reason have simply not been translated into English. My very first experience with this was in attempting to find an English copy of Le Grand et Petit Albert. Then I ran into it again with El Libro de San Cipriano.
Even these, however, are somewhat easy to find in their native languages. It is easy to puzzle out the titles of these works because of their similarity to English and use of Roman characters. What about those that aren't?
I've recently gotten interested in Arabic magic, and discovered, much to my frustration, that most of the original materials have never been translated. The Picatrix is the notable exception, and I own both volumes of the Ouroboros Press edition. I've seen the Warburg Institute translations into German and English, and have a copy of their Latin edition.
But what about Shams al-Maarif by al-Buni? Its on Dan Harms' Grimoire Wishlist as well as my own, and there seems to be great difficulty in getting it translated, despite it being one of the most important works on magic in the Arab-speaking world. I have an English translation of the Birhatiya Conjuration oath from that work, and what seems to be a Spanish language version translated as a doctoral thesis. But there are no full English editions at all.
And while there still isn't a translation of that important work, there is at least one publisher who is trying to make Arabic grimoires available to an English-language audience: Ishtar Publications.
Ishtar and author Nineveh Shadrach have started releasing some formerly Arabic language only books of magic into English. Thus far, their offerings include Red Magic and The Forbidden Grimoire of Harut and Marut by "Egyptian Sorcerer Al-Toukhi", The Grand Key of Solomon the King, and more recently, one that interests me greatly, Berhatiyah. Even Shadrach's other works, such as the innocuously titled Magic That Works draws heavily on Arabic sources which he cites.
The problem I have, which is one Dan Harms cites as well, is that there is no real commentary on the material, so it is impossible to put into context. It is only through a vague search, for example, that I discovered that al-Toukhi worked in the early 20th Century. Other than that, I have found out little about him.
Annoyingly, Shadrach seems to have editorialized some of the material. For example, in the section on Elemental Magic in Magic That Works, he makes mention of deriving the names that are inscribed on the Elemental Rings as being "derived from an ancient formula found in the rare occult text known as Tayseet al-Mataleb by Abu A'abed Allah al-Kufi." All well and good, but then he explains that he tested the names, formulas, and chants, and decided that they were TOO effective, and so decided to not include them in the book, and included a different set of names for the rings. This is quite frustrating, to me, at any rate, since I would like to see and reference the original source material whenever possible.
There are other omissions that are equally frustrating. I was going through the exercise to discover the name of my 'Holy Guardian Angel', and discovered that Shadrach omits a key piece when developing the name using Hebrew characters. While the Arabic example he uses works just fine, he fails to explain how to create a Hebrew letter correspondence for the number 1000, which is key. Digging through other books on Gematria and Numerology, I *think* I discovered a way to calculate it, but I'm not sure if it is correct or not.... that method being the placement of 2 characters, in this case Yod (10) followed by the multiple that arrives at the number of thousands, in this case Qof (100).
Nevertheless, its fascinating to finally get a chance to see some of these less-than-common works, and it gives some insight into a world of magic that we've seldom gotten a chance to glimpse at before.
Well.... the thing is, they aren't. There is a wide world of grimoires out there that for whatever reason have simply not been translated into English. My very first experience with this was in attempting to find an English copy of Le Grand et Petit Albert. Then I ran into it again with El Libro de San Cipriano.
Even these, however, are somewhat easy to find in their native languages. It is easy to puzzle out the titles of these works because of their similarity to English and use of Roman characters. What about those that aren't?
I've recently gotten interested in Arabic magic, and discovered, much to my frustration, that most of the original materials have never been translated. The Picatrix is the notable exception, and I own both volumes of the Ouroboros Press edition. I've seen the Warburg Institute translations into German and English, and have a copy of their Latin edition.
But what about Shams al-Maarif by al-Buni? Its on Dan Harms' Grimoire Wishlist as well as my own, and there seems to be great difficulty in getting it translated, despite it being one of the most important works on magic in the Arab-speaking world. I have an English translation of the Birhatiya Conjuration oath from that work, and what seems to be a Spanish language version translated as a doctoral thesis. But there are no full English editions at all.
And while there still isn't a translation of that important work, there is at least one publisher who is trying to make Arabic grimoires available to an English-language audience: Ishtar Publications.
Ishtar and author Nineveh Shadrach have started releasing some formerly Arabic language only books of magic into English. Thus far, their offerings include Red Magic and The Forbidden Grimoire of Harut and Marut by "Egyptian Sorcerer Al-Toukhi", The Grand Key of Solomon the King, and more recently, one that interests me greatly, Berhatiyah. Even Shadrach's other works, such as the innocuously titled Magic That Works draws heavily on Arabic sources which he cites.
The problem I have, which is one Dan Harms cites as well, is that there is no real commentary on the material, so it is impossible to put into context. It is only through a vague search, for example, that I discovered that al-Toukhi worked in the early 20th Century. Other than that, I have found out little about him.
Annoyingly, Shadrach seems to have editorialized some of the material. For example, in the section on Elemental Magic in Magic That Works, he makes mention of deriving the names that are inscribed on the Elemental Rings as being "derived from an ancient formula found in the rare occult text known as Tayseet al-Mataleb by Abu A'abed Allah al-Kufi." All well and good, but then he explains that he tested the names, formulas, and chants, and decided that they were TOO effective, and so decided to not include them in the book, and included a different set of names for the rings. This is quite frustrating, to me, at any rate, since I would like to see and reference the original source material whenever possible.
There are other omissions that are equally frustrating. I was going through the exercise to discover the name of my 'Holy Guardian Angel', and discovered that Shadrach omits a key piece when developing the name using Hebrew characters. While the Arabic example he uses works just fine, he fails to explain how to create a Hebrew letter correspondence for the number 1000, which is key. Digging through other books on Gematria and Numerology, I *think* I discovered a way to calculate it, but I'm not sure if it is correct or not.... that method being the placement of 2 characters, in this case Yod (10) followed by the multiple that arrives at the number of thousands, in this case Qof (100).
Nevertheless, its fascinating to finally get a chance to see some of these less-than-common works, and it gives some insight into a world of magic that we've seldom gotten a chance to glimpse at before.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Disappointing Grimoires
I have a fair sized collection of grimoires, although nowhere near the neighborhood that Dan Harms has. If you count my electronic copies as well (which I do), I've got a HUGE collection. And in any large collection there are bound to be some 'less-than-stellar' examples.
I can point to one in particular that got my hopes up, and then dashed them all. This is The Spellbook of John Fian released by Robert Blanchard and IGOS.
IGOS stands for "International Guild of Sorcery", run by Blanchard. I don't know exactly how successful they are, but they charge exorbitant amounts for their books. When I was first starting out collecting grimoires, and foolish, and had more disposable income, I thought "What the heck?" and ordered a couple of them... The Stone Missal and The Spellbook of John Fian.
When they arrived, my heart sank.
The Stone Missal was a cheap photostatic copy in a flimsy plastic binder. Its provenance is highly suspect, and does not seem in keeping with traditional beliefs regarding gargoyles, but as it was the cheaper of the two, and only of mild interest, I didn't mind so much. It had some value to me as a curiosity at least.
But the other.... The other was promisingly hardcovered, in either cheap or simulated leather. But very, very thin. It was stiff to open, and once opened, I could see that it was the same cheap photostats that were in the other book. And as I began reading through it, my anger grew. It was a double-spaced typed manuscript. There were photos and artwork that appeared to be photostats of copies or copies, rendering then all but incomprehensible. And the content...
This was NOT the true spellbook of the notorious Scottish witch. This was a poorly researched essay, at just over 80 pages in length. While it tried to pass itself off as being written concerning the 'original' spellbook of Fian, nothing in it seemed to come from the early modern era in which he lived.
This was a half-assed attempt to create an 'old tradition' of witchcraft based on nothing more than a name and lot of the worst cliches of modern Wicca. There are references aplenty to 'The Burning Times' (a notion long since cast into doubt by many serious scholars) and bare-faced lies about how Fian worshiped "Herne, the Horned God". (Herne, at this time, was considered nothing more than a ghost story about a huntsman.)
There ARE spells, but they are childish in nature. Divination by using dice and playing cards, for example. Rituals for which there is no historical precedent are given as a matter of fact, echoing Margaret Murray's discredited theory of primitive holdover cults becoming witch covens in later centuries.
I'm quite familiar with Fian and his escapades. He played a large role in my graduate research into Early Modern witchcraft beliefs in England. The most famous pamphlet he figures prominently in is called Newes from Scotland and it has been reprinted countless times since its first appearance in 1591. The pamphlet actually details several of the spells Fian was accused of casting. These spells either do not appear in the IGOS work, or they are glossed over lightly.
For example... the chief crime that Dr Fian was arrested and executed for was using witchcraft to raise a storm in an attempt attempt to sink the fleet in which James II was travelling with his new bride, from Oslo. While the subject of raising storms is mentioned in the book, it is waved away as simply a sub-aspect of general weather magic. The author, Blanchard. seems to suggest that making rain was more important to Fian than making storms, in order to help the local crops, which is all well and good, except Fian was no country farmer, he was a schoolmaster living in the city of Edinborough! Nor do the primary sources even suggest such a benevolent aspect to his magic, to say nothing of the highly imaginative rites described to make it rain... involving a mysterious Coven of 13 witches dancing in a circle around the fields while naked.
Another example is the citation in Newes from Scotland of a love spell that Fian had supposedly cast... a spell which involved obtaining 3 pubic hairs from the target of the spell. There are a great many love and lust spells listed in the book, but tellingly, none involve using anything remotely like this. Instead the spells were what you would find in any given mass market paperback at your local big box book store.
The bibliography is quite sad, consisting of only 6 entries... including multiple editions of Newes from Scotland, dropping the actual research content close to nil. Then there is a 'Recommended Reading' section.... which has more books listed than the actual bibliography, and which are ALL IGOS publications. Please note that none of these volumes he recommends have to do with 16th and 17th century witchcraft.
Needless to say, I was furious about this book, and what a waste of money it was. I've since avoided IGOS publications, and those of Robert Blanchard.
So... Caveat Emptor for those of you looking for real grimoires out there.
Much better is The Grimoire of Arthur Gauntlet, edited by David Rankine, which is a genuine cunning-man's spellbook from this time, and which gives a much clearer view of folk magic workings. Its flavor is *very* different from Fian's purported 'spellbook', the magic involved is far more involved and interesting, and makes no attempts to invent a tradition of magic from whole cloth.
I can point to one in particular that got my hopes up, and then dashed them all. This is The Spellbook of John Fian released by Robert Blanchard and IGOS.
IGOS stands for "International Guild of Sorcery", run by Blanchard. I don't know exactly how successful they are, but they charge exorbitant amounts for their books. When I was first starting out collecting grimoires, and foolish, and had more disposable income, I thought "What the heck?" and ordered a couple of them... The Stone Missal and The Spellbook of John Fian.
When they arrived, my heart sank.
The Stone Missal was a cheap photostatic copy in a flimsy plastic binder. Its provenance is highly suspect, and does not seem in keeping with traditional beliefs regarding gargoyles, but as it was the cheaper of the two, and only of mild interest, I didn't mind so much. It had some value to me as a curiosity at least.
But the other.... The other was promisingly hardcovered, in either cheap or simulated leather. But very, very thin. It was stiff to open, and once opened, I could see that it was the same cheap photostats that were in the other book. And as I began reading through it, my anger grew. It was a double-spaced typed manuscript. There were photos and artwork that appeared to be photostats of copies or copies, rendering then all but incomprehensible. And the content...
This was NOT the true spellbook of the notorious Scottish witch. This was a poorly researched essay, at just over 80 pages in length. While it tried to pass itself off as being written concerning the 'original' spellbook of Fian, nothing in it seemed to come from the early modern era in which he lived.
This was a half-assed attempt to create an 'old tradition' of witchcraft based on nothing more than a name and lot of the worst cliches of modern Wicca. There are references aplenty to 'The Burning Times' (a notion long since cast into doubt by many serious scholars) and bare-faced lies about how Fian worshiped "Herne, the Horned God". (Herne, at this time, was considered nothing more than a ghost story about a huntsman.)
There ARE spells, but they are childish in nature. Divination by using dice and playing cards, for example. Rituals for which there is no historical precedent are given as a matter of fact, echoing Margaret Murray's discredited theory of primitive holdover cults becoming witch covens in later centuries.
I'm quite familiar with Fian and his escapades. He played a large role in my graduate research into Early Modern witchcraft beliefs in England. The most famous pamphlet he figures prominently in is called Newes from Scotland and it has been reprinted countless times since its first appearance in 1591. The pamphlet actually details several of the spells Fian was accused of casting. These spells either do not appear in the IGOS work, or they are glossed over lightly.
For example... the chief crime that Dr Fian was arrested and executed for was using witchcraft to raise a storm in an attempt attempt to sink the fleet in which James II was travelling with his new bride, from Oslo. While the subject of raising storms is mentioned in the book, it is waved away as simply a sub-aspect of general weather magic. The author, Blanchard. seems to suggest that making rain was more important to Fian than making storms, in order to help the local crops, which is all well and good, except Fian was no country farmer, he was a schoolmaster living in the city of Edinborough! Nor do the primary sources even suggest such a benevolent aspect to his magic, to say nothing of the highly imaginative rites described to make it rain... involving a mysterious Coven of 13 witches dancing in a circle around the fields while naked.
Another example is the citation in Newes from Scotland of a love spell that Fian had supposedly cast... a spell which involved obtaining 3 pubic hairs from the target of the spell. There are a great many love and lust spells listed in the book, but tellingly, none involve using anything remotely like this. Instead the spells were what you would find in any given mass market paperback at your local big box book store.
The bibliography is quite sad, consisting of only 6 entries... including multiple editions of Newes from Scotland, dropping the actual research content close to nil. Then there is a 'Recommended Reading' section.... which has more books listed than the actual bibliography, and which are ALL IGOS publications. Please note that none of these volumes he recommends have to do with 16th and 17th century witchcraft.
Needless to say, I was furious about this book, and what a waste of money it was. I've since avoided IGOS publications, and those of Robert Blanchard.
So... Caveat Emptor for those of you looking for real grimoires out there.
Much better is The Grimoire of Arthur Gauntlet, edited by David Rankine, which is a genuine cunning-man's spellbook from this time, and which gives a much clearer view of folk magic workings. Its flavor is *very* different from Fian's purported 'spellbook', the magic involved is far more involved and interesting, and makes no attempts to invent a tradition of magic from whole cloth.
Friday, February 7, 2014
Newton's Alchemical Work
So, looking around on the web, I found some more digital resources to add to my collection.
Indiana University at Bloomington has a fantastic website called The Chymistry of Isaac Newton which contains scans and transcriptions of nearly all of the great scientists works on Alchemy and Chemistry.
The URL is http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/
It contains 66 works of Newton which include his copy of The Emerald Tablet, The Secret Book of Artephius, and "Out of Bloomfield's Blossoms", notes taken from Avicenna, Nicholas Flammel, George Ripley, Sendivogius, Raymon Lull, Sir Edward Kelley and Elias Ashmole, among others... as well as several works on the Philosopher's Stone, and excerpts of several other famous alchemical works such as Atalanta Fugiens, A New Light of Alchymie, and Theatrum Chemicum, and many many others.
Each has a scan of the original manuscript, save perhaps 2 which are short and have .JPGs available for each page in the works. Each has 2 transcriptions available, one Normalized and one "Diplomatic". The Diplomatic one contains all of the crossed out notes and shorthand notations that were in the original, while the normalized removes the excised material and expands the shorthand (except for alchemical symbols, which it thankfully retains).
But if that weren't enough, the site also has a lovely glossary of alchemical terms, a nice unicode font based on Newton's unique symbol system, a handy symbol guide, a nicely hyperlinked copy of Newton's Index Chemicus Ordinatus in dictionary format, experiments, articles, semantic analysis tools,Multimedia Lab, and a lot of other goodies out there that are just fasciating.
I've downloaded all the scans, and made copies of the Diplomatic Transcriptions... I I'll still need to do the Normalized ones.
But, all in all, a FANTASTIC addition to the Magus' library....
Indiana University at Bloomington has a fantastic website called The Chymistry of Isaac Newton which contains scans and transcriptions of nearly all of the great scientists works on Alchemy and Chemistry.
The URL is http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/
It contains 66 works of Newton which include his copy of The Emerald Tablet, The Secret Book of Artephius, and "Out of Bloomfield's Blossoms", notes taken from Avicenna, Nicholas Flammel, George Ripley, Sendivogius, Raymon Lull, Sir Edward Kelley and Elias Ashmole, among others... as well as several works on the Philosopher's Stone, and excerpts of several other famous alchemical works such as Atalanta Fugiens, A New Light of Alchymie, and Theatrum Chemicum, and many many others.
Each has a scan of the original manuscript, save perhaps 2 which are short and have .JPGs available for each page in the works. Each has 2 transcriptions available, one Normalized and one "Diplomatic". The Diplomatic one contains all of the crossed out notes and shorthand notations that were in the original, while the normalized removes the excised material and expands the shorthand (except for alchemical symbols, which it thankfully retains).
But if that weren't enough, the site also has a lovely glossary of alchemical terms, a nice unicode font based on Newton's unique symbol system, a handy symbol guide, a nicely hyperlinked copy of Newton's Index Chemicus Ordinatus in dictionary format, experiments, articles, semantic analysis tools,Multimedia Lab, and a lot of other goodies out there that are just fasciating.
I've downloaded all the scans, and made copies of the Diplomatic Transcriptions... I I'll still need to do the Normalized ones.
But, all in all, a FANTASTIC addition to the Magus' library....
A couple new grimoires for the collection this Christmas...
I now have hard-cover copies of The Grimoire of St. Cyprian: Clavis Inferni and Practical Angel Magic of Dr. John Dee's Enochian Tables: Tabularum Bonorum Angelorum Invocationes , both edited by Stephen Skinner and David Rankine.
And before anyone says, yes, I'm aware of some of the questionable scholarship that Rankine has been accused of, but frankly, he's doing a service to some of us by getting editions of these rare works published. I'll let you know what I think later on when I read them.
Speaking of Rankine... I recently had call to reference another of his works, on a case I was working on. The Grimoire in question was The Book of Gold: or Livre d'Or. This is an odd book, but its fascinating nevertheless. Its a rather minor work, but what it entails is a collection of the magical uses of the Psalms.
One of the more interesting things it has was Rankine's comments associating the various Psalms with their other uses throughout other sources. There is a remarkable consistency in their uses.
I now have hard-cover copies of The Grimoire of St. Cyprian: Clavis Inferni and Practical Angel Magic of Dr. John Dee's Enochian Tables: Tabularum Bonorum Angelorum Invocationes , both edited by Stephen Skinner and David Rankine.
And before anyone says, yes, I'm aware of some of the questionable scholarship that Rankine has been accused of, but frankly, he's doing a service to some of us by getting editions of these rare works published. I'll let you know what I think later on when I read them.
Speaking of Rankine... I recently had call to reference another of his works, on a case I was working on. The Grimoire in question was The Book of Gold: or Livre d'Or. This is an odd book, but its fascinating nevertheless. Its a rather minor work, but what it entails is a collection of the magical uses of the Psalms.
One of the more interesting things it has was Rankine's comments associating the various Psalms with their other uses throughout other sources. There is a remarkable consistency in their uses.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Genesis
Between both paper and digital books, I have a library that would be the envy of any 16th or 17th Century Magus.... which would be great if I actually lived in the 16th or 17th Centuries, but, alas, here I am in the 21st and there just isn't as much call for the services of a wizard or a cunning-man in these modern days.
Nevertheless, I find them fascinating, and interesting to read, for the most part. Some, I'll admit, are really difficult going. I'm still trying to slog my way through Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy. I did a small dance of joy when I finished all 4 books of The Picatrix, and frankly, Sepher Raziel makes my head hurt just trying to understand the grammar in it.
But, I figured I would post here some of what I've read, and some of the interesting things I've found.
Nevertheless, I find them fascinating, and interesting to read, for the most part. Some, I'll admit, are really difficult going. I'm still trying to slog my way through Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy. I did a small dance of joy when I finished all 4 books of The Picatrix, and frankly, Sepher Raziel makes my head hurt just trying to understand the grammar in it.
But, I figured I would post here some of what I've read, and some of the interesting things I've found.
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