Vampires & Werewolves & Others [information]

Grimoire info

"Many of those [in Ephesus] who believed [in Christianity] now came and openly confessed their evil deeds. A number who had practised sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly. When they calculated the value of the scrolls, the total came to fifty thousand drachmas. In this way the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power."

Acts 19, c. 1st century

Israelite King Solomon was a Biblical figure also associated with magic and sorcery in the ancient world. The pseudigraphic Testament of Solomon is one of the oldest magical texts. It is a Greek manuscript attributed to Solomon and likely written in either Babylonia or Egypt sometime in the first five centuries A.D., over a thousand years after Solomon's death. The work tells of the building of The Temple and relates that construction was hampered by demons until the angel Michael gave the king a magical ring. The ring, engraved with the Seal of Solomon, had the power to bind demons from doing harm. Solomon used it to lock certain demons within jars and command others to do his bidding although eventually, according to the Testament, he was tempted into worshipping "false-gods" like Moloch, Baal and Rapha. Subsequently, after losing favour with God, King Solomon wrote the work as both a warning and a guide to the reader.

Notwithstanding the accounts of Biblical figures like Moses, Enoch and Solomon being associated with magical practices, when Christianity became the dominant faith of the Roman Empire, the early Church frowned upon the propagation of books on magic, connecting it withpaganism and burned books of magic. The New Testament records that St. Paul had called for the burning of magic and pagan books in the city of Ephesus; this advice was adopted on a large scale after the Christian ascent to power. Even before Christianisation, the Imperial Roman government had suppressed many pagan, Christian, philosophical and divinatory texts that it viewed as threats to Roman authority, including those of the Greek mystic and mathematician Pythagoras.

Medieval period

In the Medieval period, the production of grimoires continued in Christendom as well as amongst Jews and the followers of the newly foundedIslamic faith. As the historian Owen Davies noted, "while the [Christian] Church was ultimately successful in defeating pagan worship it never managed to demarcate clearly and maintain a line of practice between religious devotion and magic," and the use of such books on magic continued. In Christianised Europe, the Church divided books of magic into two kinds; those that dealt with "natural magic" and those that dealt in "demonic magic". The former was acceptable, because it was viewed as merely taking note of the powers in nature that were created by God, for instance the Anglo-Saxon leechbooks which contained simple spells designed for medicinal purposes were tolerated. However the latter, demonic magic was not acceptable, because it was believed that such magic did not come from God, but from the Devil and hisdemons - these grimoires dealt in such topics as necromancy, divination and demonology. Despite this, "there is ample evidence that the medieval clergy were the main practitioners of magic and therefore the owners, transcribers, and circulators of grimoires" while several grimoires were actually attributed to various Popes.

With the increase in contact between Christians and Muslims through the Crusades and theMoorish occupation of Spain, various magical ideas and concepts originating in the Islamic world made their way into European grimoires. In particular, astral magic, involving invoking and praising the powers of celestial bodies into talismans and amulets was introduced to significant effect. One such Arabic grimoire devoted to astral magic, the 12th century Ghâyat al-Hakîm fi'l-sihr, was later translated into Latin and circulated in Europe during the 13th century under the name of the Picatrix. However, not all such grimoires of this era were based upon Arabic sources; the 13th century the Sworn Book of Honorius for instance was, like the ancient Testament of Solomon before it, largely based upon the supposed teachings of the Biblical king Solomon, and also included ideas such as prayers and a ritual circle, with the mystical purpose of having visions of God, Hell and Purgatory, and gaining much wisdom and knowledge as a result. Another was the Hebrew Sefer Raziel Ha-Malakh, translated in Europe as the Liber Razielis Archangeli.