Learned necromancers and lascivious witches: magic and misogyny through the ages

Curses, conjurations, magic circles, incantations, abracadabra, gobbledygook… Why would any serious historian want to write a history of magic books?

 Owen Davies issues a robust defence: magic is as old as human history, while a study of grimoires is a study of the book itself and its changing format over time. Through the lens of the grimoire (a book of magic spells and invocations), the parallel histories of religion and science are shown in an eerie new light. Perennial human desires, anxieties and aspirations for love, money and protection from harm bring people of the far past close to anyone today who reads a newspaper horoscope or consults the Tarot. At the very least, magic books continue to cast their spell over popular culture in countless films, novels, games and across the internet.

A professor of social history and the president of the Folklore Society, Davies has form. In 2009, his Grimoires: A History of Magic Books was published byOxford University Press, an entertaining yet scholarly title printed on indifferent paper with a limited, monochrome plate section. Art of the Grimoire could be seen as the coffee-table version with vastly expanded, colour plates and boiled-down text. It’s a far more beautiful production: a typographic and calligraphic treat as treasurable as a rare magical text itself. Almost every page is filled with wonder.

Davies begins his account with Sumerian clay tablets inscribed with protective formulae against sickness, demons and ghosts. Magic and medicine were not yet separate disciplines. Stone stelae inscribed with appeals to the gods were used in practical magic: water poured over the inscriptions was then drunk for health and good luck. Later, Neolithic axes were inscribed with spirits’ names, clay pots were decorated with demonic images, threatening boundary stones warned off intruders, soldiers scratched curses on lead tablets, while the wealthy sported gold amulets.