One of my biggest pet peeves with modern analyses of historical texts is when an author states – with authoritative confidence – they have decoded the true meaning of a text, and that it is something only tenuously implied by the text itself.1 And this happens all the time with magic and occult topics. Things that don’t immediately make sense are explained away as blinds – falsehoods deliberately included to mislead the unworthy – or elaborate metaphors, rather than being taken at face value as something the original author of the text was actually trying to convey.
I’ve previously written about my second axiom of magic: magic is. Magic is a real and active force, generating real-world effects. We should expect the outcomes of our magical work to be wondrous, inexplicable, and strange. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, and all that. Why, then, are we so quick to dismiss the words of past magicians as deception or metaphor, instead of taking them as genuine accounts of their work?
Let’s take, as an example, invisibility. How many historical grimoires include spells or spirits noted as conferring invisibility? A heck of a lot. How many modern magical authors believe in achieving literal invisibility through magic? I’m struggling to come up with one. Many go to great lengths to explain what invisibility spells were really about: how they were about becoming less memorable, or going unnoticed in crowds, or achieving invisibility on the astral plane (whatever that means). Short of talking to them, how could anyone possibly know for certain what the original authors of those grimoires intended? Why would we assume when they said “invisible” they didn’t actually mean invisible?
Let’s take a single example, drawn from the Grimorium Verum.2 This specific experiment lays out instructions for taking seven black beans and placing them in every orifice of the head of a dead man, tracing a spirit’s seal on the head, and burying it in the earth. It is then watered with brandy for nine days, and some interactions with the spirit are expected to occur. The key detail for this discussion appears in the final paragraph:
…On the next day, which is the ninth, when you return you will find that the beans are germinating. Take them and put them in your mouth, and look at yourself in a mirror. If you can see nothing it is well. Test the others in the same way, either in your own mouth, or in that of a child. Those which do not confer invisibility are to be reburied with the head.
Now one could argue this spell was copied from some other source and not personally tested by the author of the Grimorium Verum. One could argue the original author took creative license to end up with a more sensational book to sell.3 One could argue, as Jake Stratton-Kent does, that spells for physical invisibility were corruptions of an earlier tradition referencing spiritual invisibility for the magician when visiting the underworld. And to be clear, all of those things could be true. But given the instructions provided for testing the beans, I find it hard to believe that the author of the Grimorium Verum didn’t intend for this spell to be interpreted as conferring literal, physical invisibility.
This spell involves the use of materia not readily available in the modern day (a dead guy’s head), and creates a host of hygienic concerns (putting beans that have been sitting for over a week in a dead guy’s head into your mouth). I haven’t personally tested this as written, and don’t know of anyone else who has either. And given that, it seems an incredible act of hubris to dismiss it as impossible right out of the gate.
The Lemegeton’s Goetia includes a spirit noted as having the power to cause earthquakes, which many modern practitioners interpret as symbolic – that this spirit can “shake things up.” However, John R. King IV relates a story in which he conjured the spirit and asked it to cause a small earthquake. Not only was there an earthquake at the location and time requested, it was of the precise magnitude specified.4 I know of another magician who conjured a spirit – I believe it was Sabnach, whose office is listed as the building of “high Towers, Casteles and Citties” – for help finding a new apartment; she subsequently found an apartment, and it just so happened to be in a refurbished castle. Again a very literal interpretation of the office of the spirit.
Nowhere is this trend of tenuous interpretation more egregious than in alchemy. When alchemical texts discuss turning lead into gold, modern interpretations tend to assume this is a metaphor for spiritual growth – turning our own base prima materia into a spiritually sublime “gold.” Israel Regardie explains at great length how alchemical discussions of the elixir of life were elaborately coded instructions for sex magic.5 And in some texts that was likely the case. But many prominent alchemists were also the scientists of their day – Paracelsus was a physician, John Dee was a mathematician and astronomer, Isaac Newton pioneered the field of physics. These men would have been intimately familiar with the use of alchemical apparati in an actual lab setting, and likely candidates to write about it. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a crucible is just a crucible.6
When I first got into magic I was given the advice to try spells and rituals as written first, before deciding what to expect from them. If I gave something an honest effort and it didn’t work, then I hadn’t wasted anything beyond a little time. If it did work then great! I’d have a new tool in my arsenal. I would extend that advice to historical texts as well; try a magical or alchemical operation as written, before deciding what results are possible through it. For those we aren’t going to attempt as written (say, those involving eating beans out of the head of a dead man) let’s admit our lack of direct experience and refrain from grand statements about what the author intended or what the outcome would be.
I have done some work in both herbalism and alchemy. I have only a rudimentary understanding of chemistry, and even less understanding of biology, and in most cases cannot even guess at the mechanisms involved. But my lack of understanding of the mechanism does not prevent me from following a procedure set down by someone else and finding success thereby. When it comes to magic, even hazarding a guess about the mechanism strikes closer to religious philosophy than science, but the same principle holds true. Those procedures validated experimentally don’t need to be understood in order to be useful. As Aleister Crowley put it so succinctly: success is thy proof!
- I have issues with being certain about anything ever, as a general principle, but doubly so when it comes to magic. ↩︎
- Stratton-Kent, J. (2022) The True Grimoire. Scarlett Imprint. ↩︎
- The Grimorium Verum is one of the pulp grimoires of the bibliothèque bleue period, so this is a definite possibility. ↩︎
- Eth, A. (Host). (2019, January 20). #031 – The Magical Renaissance with John R. King IV (Imperial Arts) [Audio podcast episode]. In Glitch Bottle. https://www.glitchbottle.com/podcast/2019/1/20/031-the-magical-renaissance-with-john-r-king-iv-imperial-arts ↩︎
- Regardie, I. (1991). The Tree of Life: A Study in Magic. Samuel Weiser. ↩︎
- The actual quote attributed to Freud refers to cigars, which – as the story goes – he claimed did not always have to be subconsciously phallic. There is also no verified source that Freud ever said this. ↩︎
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