Grimoires: A History of Magic Books
by Owen Davies
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Book Summary Information
Author: Owen DaviesEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-05-15
ISBN: 0199204519
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of Grimoires: A History of Magic Books
Book Review: The Magic Never Stops
Summary: 5 Stars
If you thought you were outside the realm of magic, think again. There has been _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ on television, for instance, with magic books central to some of the plots. When the program was popular, Owen Davies used to get e-mails from teenage girls asking about specifics of casting spells. "They had seen my personal website," writes Davies, "presenting my historical studies on witchcraft and magic and assumed I was a practitioner." Who knows if some of those inquiries were from your neighborhood teens with queries against you in particular? And even if Davies couldn't help the petitioners, and even if magic is all bogus and never works, it is still intimately associated with orthodox religions and has been since those religions began. In _Grimoires: A History of Magic Books_ (Oxford University Press), Davies gives a full and authoritative look at magic books, their origin, and their influence. There is plenty of history here, but magic continues into the current day. Grimoires still cast their spell.
Magic had plenty of specific uses beyond bringing blessings or curses. One was treasure hunting. You could go out and dig for treasure, and there wasn't anything heretical about that, but some treasures were kept hidden by ghosts and demons. "Who were you going to call?" jokes Davies. "Why, the priests and monks who had access to the grimoires which instructed on how to conjure, exorcise, and control them." (This was the sort of work that Joseph Smith and his father did, using seer stones, magic circles, and talismans to find treasure, until Smith used some different sort of magic to be given the golden plates from which he could translate the Book of Mormon.) Sexual magic was popular, whether to help in a sexual conquest or to improve sexual performance. Magic was also used for medical treatments, often jointly with religious healing. Exorcisms of illness demons could be combined with ordinary prayer as well as with using charms that might or might not be Christian versions of pagan amulets. Doctors might have recommended such remedies. Davies shows that although grimoires and magic lore were used by clerics and doctors, when the Renaissance came, and printed books became widespread, anyone who was literate could follow a grimoire's recipe. You didn't have to be literate to get a grimoire's benefit; just owning it could help you. _The Long Lost Friend_, printed in America in 1856, showed the blend of magic and Christianity when it proclaimed, "Whoever carries this book with him, is safe from all his enemies, visible or invisible; and whoever has this book with him cannot die without the holy corpse of Jesus Christ nor drowned in any water, nor burn up in any fire, nor can any unjust sentence be passed upon him."
_Grimoires_ is no grimoire, but it does include samples of wisdom from many books of magic and descriptions of magic practice. For instance, a monk in France in the sixteenth century was sentenced to life imprisonment after being tortured to confess that he exerted control over women by offering to the Devil wax puppets that contained his saliva and the blood of toads. A skeptical modern reader will be amazed that this sort of nonsense was ever thought to have any power. We have Viagra now, and we have metal detectors that are better for finding treasure than spells will ever be, and we have antibiotics, but still the call to understand the universe by means of the supernatural seems overwhelming for many. Magic, often yoked to better-accepted religions, never seems to go away. Incense, for instance, has for centuries often been used for magical purposes, and certain types were marketed for certain spells. For people concerned about incense smoke setting off their smoke detectors, aerosol sprays with the same magic potency are now manufactured for ritual use. The _Necronomicon_ was a fictional book of occult wisdom that fantasist H. P. Lovecraft used in his horror tales, but that has not kept "real" Necronomicons from being published and put to use by those who fancy "Lovecraftian" magic. You can get the latest on how to conjure up a demon on the internet. Davies's review is big and entertaining, and will serve up a good dose of dismay for those who think we ought to be done with the silliness of the supernatural.
Summary of Grimoires: A History of Magic Books
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.Alternative Medicine Books
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