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Subject: H-Net Review Publication:  'The Magic Words'
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Owen Davies.  Grimoires: A History of Magic Books.  Oxford  Oxford
University Press, 2010.  384 pp.  $17.95 (paper), ISBN
978-0-19-959004-9.

Reviewed by Adam Jortner (Auburn University)
Published on H-Albion (June, 2011)
Commissioned by Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth

The Magic Words

Owen Davies begins his latest history of the uncanny by quoting
Richard Kieckhefer's observation that "'a book of magic is also a
magical book'" (p. 2).[1] A history of grimoires, therefore, must not
only recount the contents and ideas found in self-proclaimed spell
books, but also uncover how those books were used. Such a problem,
however, is one Davies has met in previous works on ghost stories and
witchcraft--which also exist both as theories and tools.

_Grimoires _represents the broadest chronology Davies has yet
attempted. Magical books date back almost to the invention of
writing; this volume stretches from Moses and the Hebrew Bible to
Anton LaVey and _The Satanic Bible _(1969)_. _Practically, however,
the story begins with medieval efforts to appropriate and interpret
ancient magic, through the fifteenth-century rise of hermeticism, and
into the democratizing effect of the printing press. Davies makes
much of the expanded reach print gave to grimoires, and hence most of
this account deals with the early modern and modern use of printed
magical books by esoteric gentlemen and treasure-seeking rabble
alike. Even if, as Davies argues, print did not eliminate handwritten
grimoires, the print revolution created more grimoires and more
stories about grimoires--the intellectual back and forth and
anecdotal evidence that provide the two evidentiary supports of this
study.

Rather like a magus himself, Davies weaves telling details from
grimoires throughout his narrative, vignettes of magic or advice that
convey a sense of the work and the context under consideration.
Medieval Christian grimoires often used Hebrew characters in the
belief that Hebrew letters had magical properties, and if authors did
not know how to write Hebrew, they simply made up letters that looked
close enough. Icelandic rune books featured curses that inflicted
ceaseless farting on victims. Nineteenth-century American oneiromancy
manuals advised those who dreamed of ants to bet on the numbers two,
seven, and forty-one.

Davies handles the vast scope of the book well, moving
chronologically by chapter and geographically within each era.
Britain (and its grimoires) do not figure prominently in the text,
perhaps because England seems to have preferred astrological texts to
practical spell books. Nevertheless, Davies weaves several English
thinkers (Reginald Scot in particular) into the broader debates on
magic. Indeed, the scope of Davies's work suggests that it is in the
Americas where the grimoire tradition thrived in the twentieth
century. Chicago--the home of William Delaurence's publishing
empire--was the center of grimoire publishing and esoteric practice
in the modern age. Kardecism--one of Brazil's enduring religious
traditions--derived from grimoire hermeticism coupled with
Spiritualist teachings. Mexico provided a home for Spanish grimoires
during the interwar years, which in turn transformed the local
healing traditions of _curandismo _(folk healing). The number of
examples and stories from the former colonies of Europe (rather than
Europe itself) underscores Davies's contention that whereas the
history of the grimoire in the modern West has often focused on "the
esoteric philosophies, personal relations, and internal tensions" of
a small number of Western occultists, "certain products of the
Revival reached far beyond the parlors of Paris and London" (p. 185).

None of these stories are, in themselves, new discoveries; indeed,
almost the entire book is synthetic, as any broad study must be.
Certainly as regards Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, Davies has debts (which he acknowledges) to Ronald Hutton
and Alex Owen. But most readers will search in vain for any extended
historiographical quibbling, except for a well-argued aside on the
sensitive topic of the grimoire tradition and life of the Mormon
prophet Joseph Smith Jr. _Grimoires_ is not necessarily written for
the layperson, but neither is Davies writing for academics alone. The
book could well form the foundation for an upper-level collegiate
class on grimoires and magic. Rather than posit transhistorical
theories about "the" nature of magical books, Davies seems content
with extensive documentation--but documentation is not explanation.

And yet, if showing the number and influence of magical books in
Western history is Davies's objective, then in showing volume, he
makes an implicit argument: fully two-thirds of his world history of
grimoires involves books published _after _the onset of the
Enlightenment. The rise of printing, the spread of literacy, and the
rediscovery of ancient Near Eastern cultures led to the creation (and
re-creation) of many more grimoires in the years since 1700 than had
ever before existed. Davies's nineteenth-century predecessor, Arthur
Edward Waite--who wrote an extended history of magic books in
addition to designing tarot cards--noted the "remarkable
bibliographic fact that such texts were issued, and on so great a
scale, in the last decade of the nineteenth century" (p. 181).[2]
Seen from the perspective of the grimoire, magic is a thoroughly
modern phenomenon--not a survival or a retention.

This latter point represents an important piece of the argument for
those who study magic, witchcraft, and esoterica; unlike many other
subfields, historians of the supernatural often need to demonstrate
the ubiquity and extent of their subject matter to convince
colleagues and committees of the validity of their work. Several
works in the last decade (some of them by Davies) have shown that
magical, mystical, and esoteric thought _thrived _in the modern age,
yet an older sociological predilection still persists that treats
magic and miracle as exclusively premodern ideas that existed only as
holdovers in the twentieth century. If _Grimoires _is correct,
however, the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries provided
the ideal environment for magical thinking. Magic is very modern.
Other books have made a similar point, but it is a point worth
hearing more than once, particularly when written with Davies's
élan.

Note

[1]. Richard Kieckhefer, _Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of
the Fifteenth Century_ (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997),
4.

[2]. Arthur Edward Waite,_ Shadows of Life and Thought _(London:
Selwyn and Blount, 1938), 137.

Citation: Adam Jortner. Review of Davies, Owen, _Grimoires: A History
of Magic Books_. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. June, 2011.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32409

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.