Grimoire: Occult Books and the Magic of Writing

We're all familiar with such fictional grimoires as "The Necronomicon," but what about the rich legacy of occult books and cryptic tomes that preceded its invention? Robert and guest host Christian Sager investigate and maybe summon a demon or two.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. That forthwith you come without tarrying, and
fulfill my desires and command, and persist until the end,

(00:25):
and according to my intentions, And I conjure you by
Him whom all creatures are obedient unto, and by his
ineffable name, of which be heard. The elements are overthrown,
the air is shaken, the sea runneth back, the fire
is quenched, the earth trembleth, and all of the hosts

(00:45):
of celestials, terrestrials and infernals du tremble and are troubled
and trouble founded together eight together together. Hey, welcome to
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. Hey,
I'm Christian Sega. Christian is joining us from brain Stuff

(01:07):
and you may be familiar with them as well from
the House Stuff Works video channel. Obviously, we kicked off
this episode a little different than normal. You. Generally, we
don't reach out into the ether and attempt to summon
any kind of extra dimensional forces. Yes, exactly, and that
reading was a direct quote from a conjuration spell within

(01:30):
a grimoire called the Lesser Key of Solomon. But for
your protection. I only read one paragraph from it, so
that no demons will manifest upon your listening to this podcast.
That's right. The last thing we want to do is
crash and the servers with demonic activity. Now, I think
a lot of people have some degree of pop culture

(01:51):
interface with this topic, if nothing else. We've all seen
movies with magical books in them. Um, I mean, how
often is the Necronomicon shown up in various horror property. Yeah,
I'm I'm wondering where it first showed up, but I'm
assuming my first film interaction withhe it was probably Evil Dead.

(02:11):
But it's obviously a go to staple now. I think
even cartoons reference it now, Like I believe Adventure Time
and and and shows like that even have like kind
of wink wink nods to the Necronomicon. Yeah, if you
don't have the Necronomicon, you do some sort of um
take on it, right, Yeah, exactly, it's just this go
to dark forbidding manuscript from who knows where they contains

(02:35):
all sorts of secrets, contains all sorts of of power
and uh, and is the the gateway for for mortal
readers and users of the text. Yeah, and even Uh.
I think the Harry Potter movies books that were kind
of like that. They didn't call it the necronomicon or anything,
but wasn't like one of their books for class was
like a living book that like could bite you and

(02:58):
like lived under your bed or so. I think that
was the Monster Manual. The Monster Manual was itself a
monster yea, which which is is wonderful because I feel
like those Harry Potter examples played directly into a lot
of what we're going to talk about here, these books
of magic, these uh, these these highly fetishized tons and
then how we think about them, Yeah, exactly, And what's

(03:21):
really fascinating is that they actually existed. These books are
a huge part of real history. Uh, and specifically today
we're going to talk about their history mainly around the
medieval period. But you know what what a grimoire is,
what it means, what what people used them for, and uh,
sort of the political and historical purposes of them. Indeed,

(03:45):
I mean that's the really fascinating thing about this is
that you have this You have the fictional and fantastical
element here certainly, but but when you follow the threads
they lead, they lead back into history, and they lead
back into just how we interact with the written word. Yeah. Absolutely,
and so like starting off with that, do you think
this is a good point to start talking about the

(04:06):
etymology of the word grimoire, the actual the written wordmore
what what does it? What does it mean? Well, so
there's there's a couple of different interpretations. And I should
say that most of our our information here comes from
a book called Grimoires, A History of Magic Books, which

(04:26):
is written by a guy named Owen Davies, and it
came out in two thousand nine, and uh seems to
be from our research, like the go to book on
the history of these things. There are a couple of
books that came out earlier, but they weren't as completest
as this. And he does a really good job of
covering the the overall history, and a lot of what
we're gonna talk about today is really only from like

(04:47):
the first the introduction in the first chapter maybe and
he he keeps going with it down the road, but
we're mainly focus on the early period. Yeah, if after
this episode you want to deeper dive into that topic,
be sure to check out um Davy's book. I'll include
a link to it on the landing page for this episode.
So Davies has this uh. He says grimoire has been

(05:08):
interpreted as coming from the Italian word romario, which is
a word that means a book of rhymes or Bible verses,
but that there's also an interpretation which I found in
another source as well, that says that it's actually based
on the French word grammaire, which is, as we know it,
grammar referring to a work written in Latin. Specifically, these

(05:30):
books were almost always written in Latin at the time
that they were uh pretty popular, although they were influenced
by other languages and cultures, as we'll see as we
go through this. Now, those those fictional magic books we
we mentioned earlier are probably a good way to think
about what a gramoire uh consists of. But but really,
when we break down exactly what a gramore is, generally

(05:53):
we're talking about a few different attributes, typically a lot
of strange symbols, right, um, A lot of a lot
of the grim moore is just the sheer appearance of
the volume, particularly how it might appear to two individuals
who stand outside its tradition or in in in fact,
a literates who are looking at it and are just

(06:16):
impressed by the overall uh visual knowledge of the thing. Yeah. Absolutely,
In fact, there were M. Davies designates there being two
forms of these books. There's a small format kind, which
is around twenty to fifty pages, and he calls them
like pocketbooks basically because these weren't like generally like the

(06:36):
long texts. Uh So, yeah, twenty fifages for those. But
then there are also these large, massive folios that were
in a manuscript form. They're probably handwritten or copied from handwriting, uh,
and they're kind of fascinating le large and made of
strange materials or purported to be made of strange materials

(06:57):
like animal or human skin or the written in blood. Um,
and some of them actually were. But yeah, there's there's
fascinating kind of what what defines a grimoire, what what
makes it? And essentially it's it's an alternative library to
the Bible and that acts as a source for all

(07:19):
these different magical traditions that sort of spun out of
culture and superstition and the occult over the years. Yeah.
So you're talking of everything from recipes for for various
uh healing potions of you will or treatments um to
more supernatural ideas such as the conjuring of of demonic

(07:40):
forces or angelic forces, etcetera. Yeah, there seemed to be
a specific obsession with almost categorizing and naming demons and
angels and what each of it. It It was like the uh,
the the Handbook to the Marvel Universe of the medieval times,
where they like they listed all of their their names

(08:00):
and powers and the special things that they could do,
and how to summon each particular one and what they
could tell you at the end of the day. Most
of these books had one goal for their reader, which
is to give them hidden knowledge, to give them secret
knowledge that no one else had access to. I found
it interesting you mentioned some of you mentioned that the
large volumes and the smaller ones, the smaller ones being

(08:22):
the more mobile. Yeah, and there's one in particular where
the binding is has a longer fabric on it. You
can be tucked into your belt, so the mobile version
of the text that you would carry about during your
daily life. It's like an iPad case. Yeah. Yeah, they
are fascinating, and there was sort of an assumption about

(08:43):
them that you had to have a certain amount of
training or academic acumen to be able to even understand them,
and that if you didn't, there were rumors that you
would you know, there were traps intentionally laid into the
text that would cause curse is or somehow maligned the
person who is reading the book, but they didn't have

(09:05):
the you know, the expertise or skill to to harness
its power. In a way, this reminds this idea of
there being a trap in the in the manuscript. And
and if you think of these spells as kind of programs, uh,
it kind of lines up with if one is attempting
to illegally download something today, you'll you you might get

(09:25):
the file that you're looking for, but you might get
a little something extra there. And if you are informed
enough to uh to work around that curse, you can
still get exactly what you want. Yeah, exactly. It's and
and I think we'll get into this as we're going along,
but there is a a connection between those two things
throughout human history of the written word, and there being

(09:48):
something both powerful about the written word and uh potentially dangerous.
Oh indeed, um In in his book, Davies says, quote,
but glamors also exists because the very act of itiding
itself was imbued with occult or hidden power. Um. You know,
it's important to to keep in mind that it only
in recent times has the means to preserve written texts

(10:09):
become something that's cheap and accessible to everyone. For the longest,
literate cultures only utilized paper for extremely important texts, often
often magical or religious significance involved, and paper especially was
an expensive product, prized preserved for special occasions and religious rituals.
For instance, during the sixth century, Buddhist monks introduced paper

(10:33):
to Japan, and as in China, it became a rare
and expensive product, something he prized and reserved only for
these just highly specialized occasions. Yeah, and they that lended
more value to this idea of the written word as
being magical and powerful, that that paper was rare, and

(10:53):
maybe inc was rare at that time too, and certainly
literacy was rare, so being able to understand what was
even it much less have the quote unquote expertise to
navigator on magical trash. I mean, just to to sort
of step outside of our our current interaction with it
and think you really almost making an outrageous overstatement of
the obvious, like when you write something down, you're able

(11:14):
to to completely preserve the steps to carry out a
right to create a UM you know, a particular dish,
I mean, you name it. You're able to take uh,
something that is otherwise kind of ephemeral and subject to
forgetfulness and change, and you're able to to set it

(11:34):
in stone. And and it's it's like reaching into your
brain and taking something out of it and saying, here
it is. Here is the idea. Yeah. And I think
there's obviously a connection to this, to beyond magical grimoires.
I mean, early UH religious movements had access to the
clergy within Christianity. For instance, they had access to the

(11:58):
written version of the Bible and that they for a
long time were the only ones who could read it
and understand it and then subsequently pass on the word
of God to their congregation, UH, which in a way
was a kind of magic of its own at the time. Indeed,
UM Davies also points out that writing was primarily of
tool magic for the attack. There's a various ethnic groups

(12:20):
u UM that lived in modern day Sumatra dating back
a thousand years or so, and UH they would preserve
all of their their rights, religious rights more faithfully obviously,
and the written word versus the oral tradition. So the
art of writing was that was the domain of their
their datu priest magicians who wrote in magic books that

(12:41):
were unfolded strips of bark. Yeah, So this gets us
into this area where like, what you're writing on two
has has significance, right, So they wrote on bark, and
then I believe there are examples of of other um
cultures writing on particular kinds of food, and then subsequently

(13:02):
even with grimoires or sort of like early versions of
them that were just like one sheet of paper with
some magical incantation written upon them. There was a consumption
aspect to this that if you ate the writing, that
it would somehow affect you. Yeah. One of the things
I love about the Gramore subject here is that you

(13:22):
see so much the fetishization of books and the idea
that I've taken this idea, I've written it down, and
the book has become physical, and then I'm able to
interact with the physical embodiment of these ideas, of this
sacred knowledge, etcetera. Uh, in various ways. One way, of course,
it's just to have it on a shelf to impress people,

(13:44):
which you would see with magicians back in the day,
which you see in a modern day like lawyer's office,
or even academics like I remember when I was in
grad school, like the professors sort of had this unspoken
challenge amongst themselves of who had the large bookshelf space
in their office, and they were envious of one another

(14:04):
over who had the largest collection that they could display
and subsequently lend to students or other professors. Yeah. Yeah,
and ze still carries on today obviously. Um, despite the
popularity of e books, I don't know there's any professors
with just a one E reader sitting on their desk.
I mean, that's one of the things about e readers,

(14:25):
And one of the things I miss is being able
to sort of casually show off what you're reading to
other people if you're reading it, not because you want
to start, you know, to show off or or anything,
but occasionally you would strike up a conversation with someone
about the book the read and now it's yeah, yeah,
I mean I suppose that's a different topic for another time.
But there are attempts, I think from the electronic book

(14:45):
industry of trying to make them share able and social.
But it's not. It doesn't work the quite yet the
way that it used to, in the way that you
just hand like a tattered book to somebody and are
more difficult to eat. Yes, exactly, an e reader would
not grant you magical powers or even Uh. It's within

(15:05):
the Bible that there is a section about the consumption
of this. It's in numbers five from the Old Testament. Uh.
And this is I don't believe that this is from
the actual verse, but it says a woman who is
suspected of adultery can be brought to a priest and
made to undergo the trial of bitter water. And what
they mean by this is that the priest writes inside

(15:26):
of he writes curses inside of a book, and he
takes the book and he blots them out with water,
and then he makes this woman drink this water, and
it subsequently will tell if she's guilty or not by
causing her belly to swell and her thighs to rot.
So that's how you know whether or not somebody has
been adulteress by forcing them to drink dirty water, dirty

(15:48):
ink water. Fans to see this is amazing because it's
the again, the the idea has taken physical form, and
then you're able to interact with this physical embodiment of
the the idea or the or the faith uh in
the most primitive ways possible by consuming it, by drinking
waters from it. And you see a lot of this
just you know, to your point with the Bible itself.

(16:11):
I mean it, look look at the way that it is.
It has been used and continues to be used, held
up as a sort of gramore. It's not it's the
Bible is is not more. But you see some of
the same attributes applied, uh, such as you see Bibles
placed under the under pillows to protect people from evil spirits.
Even today it's touched, you swear an oath on it.

(16:33):
Obviously there's this is about the magical properties of the
physical text. And what was kind of fascinating to me,
like diving into their research on this subject of grimoires,
is that, uh, I'd never realized how deeply intertwined they
were with the history of the Bible, and that a
lot of what we think of today as being sort

(16:53):
of uh magical, whimsical, almost fantasy type ideas, they can
you can trace their origins back to the Bible and
back to the beginning of Christianity. Uh. And it's just
kind of fascinating. But there was even more of that
kind of ingesting of books and inks and holy writing

(17:16):
back in medieval times. I say that like medieval times,
like we're going to a Renaissance fair or something. But
but but yeah, it's just kind of fascinating that that
begins in this Old Testament area. I'm sure there were
probably origins of it before then, uh, and then trace
their way up, you know, five years later, have multiple

(17:37):
cases of the Holy Word being either written on something
edible and then consumed uh to treat illnesses to you know,
other cases of rinsing the manuscript and drinking the water
from it. Um. Yeah. Again, in all of this we
see the fetishization of the written word, language made fixed
uh in a way that it captures meaning, procedure, and story,

(17:59):
and it becomes the physical embodiment of idea made into
matter that can be utilized in both physical and imagine
spiritual means. Yeah. And and so you know, not to
uh the labor the point, but the ingestion of these
books that wasn't the only thing that people did with them.
It's fascinating to us now to kind of look back

(18:19):
and they go, wow, people just ate these books and
thought they were getting getting powers or or expelling curses
or something, but they you know, obviously they were using
them for magical rituals as well. But then there's this
also kind of fascinating area in the fourteen hundreds and
fifteen hundreds where there were treasure hunters, kind of Indiana
Jones types, and they were accused by I believe the
clergy at the time of using grimoires and other kinds

(18:42):
of quote unquote magic to control spirits or demons who
guarded wealth. So they were like, you know, breaking into
the Temple of Doom and using these books and just
you know, some way to to make it safe for
them to get through to get the buried treasure or whatever.
It all sounds like a D and D adventure, but
you know, it was at the very least, uh, something
that was It was a propaganda that was that was

(19:04):
used against the such kind of bounty hunters or treasure
hunters or whatever. But ultimately we're talking about magical thinking
and magic here and and this is magic with the
capital m uh. The idea of there being distinct distinctions
in schools. Again very Harry Potter, very Dungeons and Dragons

(19:24):
um that these different books had aspects to them of
certain types of magic that they would teach you or
that they would give you control over. So some of
the ones we're gonna encounter and here natural magic, obviously,
demonic magic, necromancy, and then there was an idea of
astral magic too, that you were somehow harnessing the powers

(19:46):
of the celestial bodies. This is obviously before astronomy really
took right, but the idea of using those as magical powers.
And one of the most infamous grimoires that does this
is a book called The Picked Arrks. I believe is
how it's pronounced um, and it was. It was very influential.
It's also referred to as the aim of the Sage.

(20:08):
Now with natural magic um in this, we're we're getting
into almost science the magic, right about interacting with natural
processes in the world. Yeah, So natural magic was sort
of like if you're familiar with like the Dungeons and
Dragons breakdown, they were sort of like the druids as
compared to the wizards or sorcerers. They were more interested

(20:28):
natural magicians were more interested in using herbalism and finding
a inner magic within flora and fauna. But you know,
ultimately what that meant was kind of, uh, exactly like
a science to the natural world around them and what
they would they would share this knowledge within these books.
It wasn't as much here is such and such demons name,

(20:52):
he's the ruler of this level of hell. If you
say his name three times backwards, he'll show up and
give you a piece of gold. Right. It wasn't anything.
It was more of out especially within the Christian tradition,
it could be seen as exploring God's creation rather than
trying to enact unnatural control over exterior forces. Yeah. So

(21:12):
it's kind of fascinating that all of these different things,
things that we now think of as being science of
you know, uh, biology or astronomy or chemistry or physics,
were at the time considered magic. And we're lumped together
with things like summoning demons and listing angels and being
able to raise the dead. Uh, and you know, maybe

(21:34):
we just haven't uncovered the scientific appropriation of that just yet.
And of course we also see the influence of Jewish
mysticism with the Book of Razziel and the Book of Mysteries.
You have these situations where Jewish Spanish scholars bring these
into the more tradition from the Torah. Yeah. In fact,

(21:55):
there's this really interesting story that I believe was in
Davis book about how in Cairo there was a stash
of of grimoires that were discovered, uh inside basically somebody's
abandoned home, I think. And it included the Kabbalah, which
we we know today as being you know, a type
of Jewish mysticism. Um. And this was sort of like

(22:18):
an interpretation of the Torah as being like actually the
using Hebrew as the language of God, right, and that
it had its own magical combination. Uh. If you move
the letters around you could you could create different effects
basically well, um, lining up with the if I remember correctly,
with the golem, Yeah, it was the word life and death. Uh.

(22:41):
I forgot which one, but there was a word that
would you would put on the forehead and if you
change one letter, it would spell death and that would
the activate Yeah. I believe the golem legend is check maybe. Um.
I remember being in Prague and there was a lot
of golem tourism around it. But um, but yeah, I

(23:01):
think that that's right, that that that the idea behind
that kind of magic for making a homunculous like that
was just by being able to manipulate the letters of
Hebrew language. And there's also this really interesting influence later
on on these these types of books from Scandinavia. Uh.
In fact, Iceland was part of this as well. And

(23:21):
the idea was that the runs from their language and
from from their religion were also used as magical symbols
and seen as they were things that uh, Europeans didn't understand.
They didn't even once they started to become more literate.
Then you saw, you know, Hebrew or uh or these

(23:42):
these these Nordic runes, and they had a mystery about them.
You didn't quite know what they meant, and they still
had power to them more than than you know, the
Romantic alphabet, I guess, uh. But you start seeing later
in the in the medieval era, these different languages get
incorporated into these grimoires that are about summoning demons and

(24:02):
are largely in Latin. So as we try to dive
into the deep history of grim wars, I mean, obviously
there's a lot that's lost to the mists of time
here and to you know, frankly, a lot of destruction
of books over religious wars basically when it comes down

(24:24):
to it. But a lot of these books were lost
to us, to history and to understanding because they were burned,
um for being against whatever was kind of the status
quo culture and theological interpretation of the time. Yeah, particularly
the more scandalous volumes or demonology themed as opposed to

(24:46):
the natural magic, which which again can often be uh
at least viewed in terms of being in keeping with
with with Christian standards. Yeah. In fact, let me see
if I can find it in my notes here. But
there's thisascinating part of during the Inquisition. I'm jumping a
little bit ahead here, but um that that during the

(25:07):
Inquisition there were actually, uh, there was less attention paid
to those natural magic books. In fact, in twelve fifty eight,
Pope Alexander the Fourth told inquisitors, look, just ignore books
that are about divinations, natural magic, that kind of stuff.
What we're looking for is quote unquote manifest heresy, praying

(25:28):
at the altars of idols to offer sacrifices, consult demons,
or to elicit a response from them, so they actually
ignored a lot of occult traditions that didn't necessarily challenge
their own religion or dominance. And it's kind of fascinating
because when you can go back, even with these demons

(25:50):
summoning uh magic books, there is a tradition that goes
all the way back to the beginning of Christianity from
these So so when you look at, according to Davies,
the history of Grimoire is the very first person who's
who's supposed to have written down magic is this astrologer
from four A d b c E. Who was named

(26:12):
I believe this is Austin Fenny's Austin Fanny's. I don't
I might be pronouncing this wrong. My my ancient language
pronunciation isn't that great. But he was. He was basically
like a courtier to King Xerxes. Xerxes and Uh in
an attempt to conquer Greece. They they, you know, purportedly

(26:34):
used these magic books. He's been described as being someone
who tried to infect the world with his quote hideous craft.
I like that. It's interesting that that charge would be
be leveled in an environment where one people's attempting to
conquer another engaged in in full blown out warfare with
all of its bloody consequences. Yeah, and then you know,

(26:57):
we go from there to supposedly the Dead Sea Scrolls
talk about the Books of Enoch, which or you know,
could possibly be a lost book from the Bible, uh,
circulated around the time of Christ, and it was largely
a book that was filled with astrological and angelic lore.
And in fact, there was this idea with a lot

(27:18):
of these books that angels actually either gave these books
to men, like handed these books to men, or came
down and uh spoke the words to man and and
man transcribed them from an angel's voice. So that's where
we initially gain this magical insight from, is that these
these beings came and and and delivered it to us. Right,

(27:41):
And with that, you're, I guess, depending on how far
you go with it, you could certainly get into heretical waters.
But to a certain extent, you're kind of playing it
safe because you're like, well, an angel brought it to him.
You're not going so far to say that God came
or that Jesus showed up, but but some sort of
angelic into decay. Yeah, there's the potential out there if
you're if you're caught. And and this is where it

(28:02):
gets into like the real uh tight connections with the
Bible is that one of the most popularized ideas within
these gramars was that Ham, known as the son of
Noah uh and brother of Shem, was one of the
main people who was responsible for writing these books of

(28:23):
conjuration and magic. Um. He Uh supposedly invented magic with
the help of demons, and then he taught his own son,
whose name was Kanan, to write these down in thirty volumes.
But that after Kanan wrote these thirty volumes down, that
there was a large battle and these books were burned, Uh,

(28:44):
but maybe some of them made their way out there
into the world. You know. That's how these these legends
of occult toms begin. So it's a real fascinating that
there's this direct connection between Noah, his family, the sort
of uh resurgence of humanity and magic. Yeah, that it's
interesting and certainly that's people we're talking about a time

(29:07):
and in a particular myth here that plays into not
only Christian and Jewish traditions, but also early religions like Zoroasternism,
also flowing into Asian and Egyptian beliefs to a certain extent. Yeah,
and by and large they all had one thing in common,
which was that these manuscripts were used to give financial, sexual,

(29:30):
or even social gain to their users. It was ultimately
about power. Um, whether it came from Ham or a
demon or an angel or whoever. Uh, these books were
by and large used to have power over other people,
or at least give the illusion of it. The exact
same topics that you might buy books of tape on

(29:52):
in the the eighties, you might buy any kind of
self help manual today was essentially the domain of the
gramoire in ancient times. Yeah, and it's interesting, so like, uh,
then you get you get, So it goes from Ham
to Moses. Um. Moses was actually seen as being a
magician because of the stories that are in the Old
Testament about turning throwing down like they're yeah, it's like

(30:16):
a contest of who can turn a staff into the
greatest snake exactly, and that because his God was more
powerful than their magic, he was seen as being this
incredibly powerful wizard. Essentially, he was the Gandalf of the
Bible to some people. Uh. And um, there's this interesting
idea that there were hidden books of Moses, that Moses

(30:36):
actually wrote books of the Bible that that didn't make
it into the final content that we know today as
the Christian Bible. Uh. And that within those is where
you would find this information about whatever, summoning demons, or
having magical powers, being able to turn water into blood,
all these kinds of things. Um and Moses is sometimes

(30:58):
conflated with or or maybe somewhat pitted against, the idea
of the great Egyptian magician Hermes Trismegastus. I don't know
how to pronounce his last name, but he's also known
as as as Tough, the god of wisdom and and
and and sometimes confused with the Greek god Hermes. There's

(31:19):
a lot of magical insight and uh power and knowledge
that supposedly flows out of the tradition of Hermes and
top And then of course you have Solomon, another another
character from from the Bible that has a lot of
a lot of superstition and occult um information woven around him.

(31:39):
This is the son of David, and the Testament of
Solomon is the first book attributed to him, showing up
at some point during the first five years of the
Common era. Yeah, And what's fascinating about the Testament of
Solomon and these other books that are supposedly written by
him is that they have this this common story and
you see this the book that I read from at

(31:59):
the beginning, The Lesser Key of Solomon is related to
the Testament of Solomon. Uh. The the idea was that
Solomon received a ring from the archangel archangel Michael, and
this ring had a symbol on it, which we now
refer to as the Seal of Solomon UH, which he
used to bind demons because these demons were attacking the

(32:21):
Holy Temple that he was building, and he was able
to control these demons so they would stop hampering the
construction of the temple and then make them help build
the temple, which is kind of fascinating. Uh. This is
the Temple of course. That how's the ark of the
Covenant and the seal. Today we think of it as
being the pentagram or sometimes a hexagram, but basically this

(32:44):
symbol that has become you know, largely associated with the
cult and Satanism and stuff like this. But in these
books we see Solomon using it to control demons actually too,
and that it's given to him by angels. By Heaven.
I love about this this account is that it sounds
very lazy on the angels part, like the angels is
supposed to be working security. Now, I look, we don't

(33:06):
have time for this. Here, here's the thing that I
was going to use. Just use it responsible, don't go crazy.
It's just the ex mock and a book of solom
He's like, well, I could just drive the demons away,
or heck, I could make them build the thing for me.
I'll just borrow it a little while longer. And he
also ends up using it, you know, after after his
practical reasons are done in the temple is finished, he

(33:28):
forces these demons to identify themselves. And this is where
we get this sort of encyclopedic knowledge of demons from
what their powers are. But he basically makes them all
tell them his name, tell him their names, and then
tell him what are your powers? And he lists them
all and what are weaknesses in case somebody else encounters
you down the road. Like so, for example, there was

(33:50):
a demon supposedly named uh An. These names are so
hard to pronounce a Junian, I believe, and he was
known for laying among babies swaddling clothes and causing mischief.
So I imagine that this is like the the demon
of dirty diapers apparently is what it sounds like. Um,

(34:11):
but if you wrote the word like her ghos on
a leaf, you could make him flee and run away
from the baby's swaddling clothes. So these are like Solomon
sort of interpretations of how to use magic to make
all these various demons. Was just sound to me like
kind of like everyday problems, like cleaning your baby's diaper.

(34:32):
Uh there was. It reminds me too of the lay
we already mentioned, like the the the inclination to name
every angel as well to the catalog those guys. I
think this is one that has been created partially out
of satire. Was a particular angel whose sole job perhaps
was to go around the monastery and if any particularly

(34:53):
the older monks, fell asleep during the service, he would
cause that monk to fart, and you know, as just
punishment for for for nodding off. Man, I wonder what
the fart angel's name is? Yeah, and how don't you
get that we need a ring to force him to
tell us all of his secrets? Uh? Well. The interesting

(35:14):
thing about the Testament of Solomon though, is that Solomon's
story in this I believe differs from the Bible. I
don't know. My Old Testament isn't that great. But supposedly
he lost the ring and these powers that were given
to him because he actually kind of turned away from
God and made human sacrifices to Uh, an older god

(35:35):
from you know, Canaanite times I believe named molok Uh
because Solomon wanted to sleep with a woman Uh. And
he built temples to other gods or demons. That Rafa
was one of them. In Bile is another one that's
a common name that you see pop up in these
grimoires as being a demon name. Um. So it's just
interesting that these tropes kind of like make their way

(35:57):
through many later grimoires that are so puposedly written by Solomon.
But there's this long story of that. You know, he
had the power, he was able to get all this
information out of these demons. He got it from angels.
But then he lost it because like like man, of course,
he let it go to his head. He had powerful
life hacks at his disposal, dangerous life hacks. Um. He

(36:21):
went away, but those life hacks are still out there,
if only we can we can claim him? Right? Yeah, yeah, exactly,
And that's it is that the idea is that they're
out there somewhere, uh, and not everybody has access to them,
but if you can find them, then you will also
have the power that he had, and maybe this time
you will be the human being who who doesn't fall

(36:42):
prey to his own ego. Perhaps, um, but yeah. There
are other books that were supposedly written by Solomon. So
there's one called the Rs Notorio, which is is pretty
famous that translates into the Notary Arts, which doesn't exactly
sound super a cult or or brutal to me nowadays,
but but I suspect that notarization carried a lot more
weight to it back then. Some of the titles of

(37:04):
these books at times kind of sound like the fake
names they send off out with the reels for for films. Yeah,
kind of blue harvest type stuff. Because there was one
that I was reading called the Sacred Book of the
Cow I believe, and it included some some very very
fascinating instructions on how to create a homunculous and then

(37:24):
of course the things you can do with the homunculus
once you've created it, to do things like walk on water, etcetera.
But yeah, that the title Sacred Book of the Cow.
It is kind of like the notary. It's kind of
burying the lead. Yeah, it should be called like homunculous
one on one exactly. Or you know, when you're talking
about a lesser Key of Solomon, like that sounds great,

(37:46):
that sounds like secret knowledge, the key to knowledge. Yea.
And in fact, the Lesser Key of Solomon is actually
like I guess you could call it a sequel because
there was the Key of Solomon as well, which is
also known as the Clavical of Solomon in some cases,
which I think is kind of interesting. But you know, ultimately,
it's about conjuring and performing rituals that will provoke people

(38:07):
to love you, or punish your enemies, or make you invisible.
So it's kind of all the things that you know
you could wish for if you're like a fourteen year
old boy. Yeah, I'm imagining Solomon like an infomercial late
at night. So would you like to meet women? Would
you would you like to be better at your at
your job? It's ultimately what these kind of these these

(38:27):
grimmars sort of work. Yeah, I think the like comparison
to self health books is somewhat interesting. But uh, the
idea that someone has this knowledge of how to live
a better life than the one I'm living right now,
and I'll I I will pay them tie to have
access to even a sliver of that knowledge. Yeah, and
then of course to to partake in a ritual, and

(38:48):
I mean any kind of ritual, like so you know
so much of the power and it is that you're
kind of you're giving up your own will for a
little bit to follow these particular instructions to become one
with this particular right and uh, and you Inrod something
just very attractive in and of itself there. Yeah. And
so of course we see these connections between Solomon and

(39:10):
Moses and Ham and these other religious figures, especially from Christianity,
in this sort of history of where they came from,
this mythology, I guess you could call it. But then
they're actually started to be a real history between Christianity
and these books in between these magical traditions that conflated

(39:32):
how how we understood them, and of course we talked
about ultimately destroyed many of these books. But what's fascinating
to me is that there was basically this battle for
influence of culture, for sort of understanding of the world
between these books and these traditions and early Christianity. Yeah,
and then plus you throw in influences from from Arabic

(39:54):
texts that are going in. Always reminds me of the
Umberto Eco line about the books speak with other books
and having conversations with each other across the ages. Yeah,
this is absolutely in a Umberto Echoes wheelhouse. I think
if you if you've ever read the novel fucos Pendulum,
it's it deals highly with the idea of these magical
ideas traced back to through libraries of the ages and

(40:17):
archives and secret knowledge cults all that kind of stuff. Yeah.
Uh so there's this I uh you know, it's actually
mentioned in the Bible about this this this sort of
battle going on between Christianity and and Grimoires. Uh So
it refers to it in Acts nineteen saying that they

(40:37):
were burning these kinds of books, and it actually gives
monetary value to these things, saying that they paid fifty
thousand silver for those that were burnt in the I
believe as the city of epsiasts Um. And so to
give you sort of a comparison. At the time, one
silver was the equivalent of a day's wage, so we're

(40:59):
talking about fifty thousand days worth of wages in these books.
These books had value to them even though they were
also reviled in some cases. And the Leach books are
the ones that I'm really fascinated with. Two is because
not only was Christianity at war with magical books and

(41:19):
and and literature and texts, but they were also using them.
Um that the clergy at the time had access to
these books. I think we now call them Leech books,
but they're basically like medical manuals, and they had it
was some of that natural magic we were talking about before,
so they were like ideas of of of herbalism in there.

(41:39):
But there was also spells for healing and protection. Again,
so for the D and D comparison, these would be
like the clerics, uh and and and there were actual
rights of exorcism within there as well too, so how
to banish a demon? Well. Of course you see this
throughout the history of Christianity, right as it spreads into
a new area and new people and a new culture. Um,

(42:00):
it's it's fighting against existing traditions but also absorbing existing
traditions and with with a hybrid to some degree. Yeah, exactly,
a lot of And that's a really interesting point too,
is that that's sort of like, um, mysticism of Christianity
is from incorporating other cultures as it spread around the world. Um.

(42:22):
But yeah, so there's that, there's that aspect. But then
this is really interesting to me that that, uh, some
people at the time started turning the the sort of
negative influence of grimoires back at Christianity. So there is
this point in time where there there were rumors that
popes and saints were actually behind closed doors delving into

(42:46):
these magical arts. And there's actually a book that's called
The Grimoire of Pope on Arius, which was largely basically
a smear campaign against this pope, persecuting him as being
a magician. Uh. And the idea was that maybe that
the papacy, because they protected the Knights Templar and the

(43:07):
Knights Templar, were associated with sorcery, or that there was
this idea that popes were actually summoning and controlling demons themselves.
But ultimately it all came out of this propaganda campaign
by Protestant reformers against the Catholic Church. It's kind of
fascinating that they sort of their pr campaign was to

(43:27):
incorporate hate a cult text into it and say, oh, well,
you think these books are bad, the Pope is actually
responsible for them, and he's written his own book on
how to summon demons. Yeah. I mean, you would see
anti Catholic propaganda. And the weird thing is you can
if you look in the right places, you can still
see this kind of like anti Catholic propaganda from other

(43:47):
Christian sex today where they essentially label Catholicism as some
sort of form of sorcery, especially in UH. I would say,
you know, there's there's a tradition of American uh distrust
of Catholicism, especially in politics. But that's probably going down
a different road. But yeah, So the monks and clergy

(44:10):
themselves were accused of you know, using these books and
writing these books and transcribing them, largely because you know,
like we were talking about earlier, they were the people
who could read and write uh and so of course
they would be the only other people who would have
access to these books. Uh. And and in fact, there
is historical evidence that they did have have some of
these books in their collections. Uh. There's a guy named

(44:32):
Friar John erg Holme, and he was found to have
three hundred occult volumes in his library. Uh. And there
was also uh infamous, not infamous, famous Franciscan Friar Roger Bacon. Uh.
And he actually at the time was a very critical
of the way that these books were sort of mythologized because, uh,

(44:54):
their writers were claiming that they were written by Solomon
or Moses or somebody else, so they could you know,
apply kind of magical significance to them. Uh. And what's
funny is, three hundred years after his death, people started
writing books of necromancy and claiming that they were secret
books that he had written. Uh. And so he gets

(45:14):
pulled into this whole thing, even though he was totally
against the idea of this mislabeling of the author within
these magical texts. Yeah, it's interesting to see the just
just hoew these books sort of cascade through time, but
of course various texts informing each other and then uh
and then the the the various attributed authors popping up
again and again almost like some sort of almost like

(45:36):
the like fan fiction following through the ages, spilling off
of organized religion and an older ritual magic. Yeah, exactly.
It would be like that the characters from the Bible
were like the Avengers of the time, and people were
writing their fan fiction about what kind of things they
got up to between the lines of the book. Yeah. Um. Unfortunately, though,

(46:00):
in a lot of cases, women were not allowed to
be uh you know, responsible for these texts or or
to even interact with them in any way. Uh. And
it's interesting, before the sixteenth century, they were very rarely
accused of even being involved with them at all, of
using them or writing them, any of these kinds of things.
Basically because this kind of magic was associated with masculinity,

(46:24):
and the idea was most of the men that were
using these books, we're doing it so that they could
figure out how to entice women or again, like turn invisible.
I'm just imagining those medieval version of porkies where they're
like turning invisible and trying to sneak into a locker
room or something like that. But but yeah, essentially, the
advice within these books was not only do these um,

(46:48):
are these the purview of men, but do not associate
with women when you're conducting these kinds of rituals because
perhaps something could go wrong there. Yeah, I mean you
see the division between sorcery and witchcraft, where, uh, with sorcery,
you're talking about learned men using these ancient texts to
communicate with demons, to bind generally masculine demons to their will.

(47:13):
Um and from a very sexy standpoint, that you would
not attribute that to women in the age, the idea
that this woman is going to uh enslave a male demon,
you know, or would have the knowledge to read one
of these texts. Yeah, witchcraft was sort of more about
the demons were seducing the women, the email emotions and yeah,

(47:35):
falling under the power of these demons. Yeah it. Well,
this is another fascinating statistic from the Davis book. He says,
before fifty over seventy of those people that were accused
of using magic and courts were men. But by the
time of the fifteenth century, so we're getting into witchcraft persecution,

(47:57):
then sixty to seventy percent of them were email and
that women had largely supplanted the sort of grimoire cultural
community from being male magic because of this, So the
inquisition ultimately kind of flips flips the gender roles there,
and of course throughout the Witchcraft persecution era you have
witchcraft theorists who are fighting the good fight, if you will,

(48:20):
against the witches. But in doing so, they are creating
their own grimoires. They're creating their own manuals of what's
going on, uh in the world of demonology, and all
of it's coming out of the testimony from from these
for these women and men and in some cases children
obtained via torture and the inner recesses of their own
mind and their own expectations. Yeah, and and and ultimately, uh,

(48:45):
it's all they're all kind of getting at the same
thing that within And this is where we've come full
circle here from what we were talking about the beginning,
is that within the written word, whether it be these
grimoires or the Bible or the manuals for was the
malifest Alphacarum, Yeah, the Hammer of the Witches. Yeah, books
on how to deal with witches and how to torture

(49:05):
and get witches to confess. These written words were they're
sort of understanding of the world. It was a way
for human beings to sort of limit the chaotic occurrences
around them so that they could, you know, kind of
kind of put a box around it and make some
sense of it. And that sense wasn't always uh necessarily positive,

(49:31):
had a lot of dangerous and and uh unfortunate effects,
I think. All right, So, so here's the questions we've
been talking about. In many cases, these uh, these painstakingly prepared,
handwritten tons of arcane knowledge, um. And then these have
traveled through the ages. They've been they've been translated, they've

(49:51):
been transcribed into new volume, they've been burned out of existence,
and they've been secreted away. But then you enter the
age of the printing press. And to what extent does
that destroy the mystique and the power of the grimoire? Yeah,
I mean, I think from from Davies book, uh, my
understanding is that it didn't destroy it, that it's still

(50:14):
continued on any and we even we still have versions
of these books today and they're largely popularized by different
movements at the beginning of the of the twenty century.
But um, but there was a certain kind of aura
to these books when they were handwritten and made uh
made of certain kinds of materials rather than mass produced. Um.

(50:37):
That is somewhat lost when they're mass produced. But there's
still something alien, something kind of uh foreign about not
understanding the thing considered within them, whether it's because you
don't read Latin, or you don't know what particular Nordic
runs mean or Jewish Hebrew letter forms mean. Uh, there's

(51:04):
there's something about it that not just every person, even
those who are literate, can necessarily translate and understand fully. Right.
So it's it's it comes back to this idea of
this hidden expertise and hidden knowledge that you have to have. Yeah,
because even if it's mass produced, it's still a mass
produced riddle, it's still a mass produced puzzle. It's still
a mass produced um item that requires a certain degree

(51:26):
of of expertise and in tink running to master exactly. Yeah,
you can't just open the pages and have the secrets
of the universe unveiled to You have to go into
it with and this is another like kind of very
male dominant idea from the time, but you have to
go into it with the knowledge and the maturity to

(51:47):
be able to control those forces, you know. And of
course that leads into our modern era of v readers.
To what degree these texts still maintain their mystique? Uh?
In an age when you can pull up you know,
does and some dozens of them on your handheld device
around the computer screen. Yeah, it's especially interesting. We were
talking about this. The quote that I read at the

(52:07):
top was actually um obtained from a site called Esoterica Archives,
where many of these have been translated into English and
then transcribed into ht email, including scanned images of some
of the sigils that are within them. UM. And it's
obviously a very different experience when you're reading it off
of Google Chrome rather than opening up a book made

(52:30):
of human flesh. But I find that there is still
something a little hair raising about reading through it. Maybe
it's the grammar, going back to the original you know,
idea of where this this word grimoire came from. There's
something about the way that the words are laid out

(52:51):
and the symbols are sort of unknown, and you know,
why did they choose those particular lines and and curb
for being able to summon the demon again, you know,
rather than you know, another symbol um. Yeah, it's just interesting.
I mean it leads right back again into just the

(53:13):
power of written language, the idea you it allows us
to submit these ephemeral notions to to to to take
to take this these thoughts and these these rituals that
someone can sive in you know, centuries even millennia, go
and uh programming them into your own mind. It's a yeah,

(53:34):
it's yeah. I would I would agree that they still
they still hold a certain amount of power, um, if
you are in the mind to engage with them. Yeah.
So they have historical influence and they're still around today,
and they're they're They're definitely fascinating to look through. I
don't know that I necessarily would use them to conjure
a demon or try to turn invisible anytime soon, but

(53:58):
it's fascinating to look at the history of them in
conjunction with religious and historical movements and uh rise and
fall of of society is basically especially in Western Europe. Yeah,
and if I were to use one today, I would
hope that there would be sort of a turbo tax
in the same way that the Turbo tax or or

(54:21):
various other tax programs are kind of like a user
interface for a more complex tax code. Yeah, I would
want a nice user interface for a more complex That's
exactly what what we need is. Somebody needs to come
out with an appy, just like what kind of demon
do you want today? Okay, I'll go for the sex, yeah, exactly.

(54:41):
And then what attributes am I looking for? I don't
click these off? And done? And then it's just like okay,
go get your wormwood and mirror and and you're done,
built in t timer and you're gonna go alright. So
there you have it, uh, a little a little dive
into the world of grim Wars, their histor three, their
their interface with our modern world or modern lives are

(55:03):
modern fiction. Um. If you would like to learn more
about this topic, be sure to check out the landing
page for this episode at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. I'll include a links to related content as
well links out to materials that we've discussed here. You
would like to send us an email, you can email
us at stuff to Blow your Mind at how Stuff
Works dot com and Christian if they want to reach

(55:25):
out to you in particular, what the email address can
they reach you at? You can find me online, uh,
in my personal capacity at Christian Sager dot tumbler dot com.
That's where my personal works. Whether I'm writing about comic
books or grimoires and a cult texts, you can find
that stuff and largely, I will be found on the

(55:47):
brain stuff channel here at how stuff Works are general
science YouTube show. So yeah, we'll catch you next time.
In the meantime, check us out at stuff to Blow
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