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Liber XXVIII · Solomonic Magic

Liber XXVIII · Solomonic Magic · Chapter II: Demonology

Antipalus Maleficiorum: Trithemius's Catalogue of Magic Books

Trithemius's Antipalus maleficiorum (1508): the abbot's treatise against sorcery and its famous list of necromantic and image-magic books he judged dangerous.

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The Antipalus maleficiorum ("Adversary of Sorceries") is a Latin treatise against harmful magic written in 1508 by Johannes Trithemius, the Benedictine abbot of Sponheim and later of Würzburg. It explains how sorcerers and witches were believed to work harm and how Christians could defend themselves, but it is best known for a chapter in which Trithemius lists the books of necromancy and image magic he had seen, including the earliest known reference to the Elucidation of Necromancy attributed to Peter of Abano. That list is one of the most important surviving witnesses to the late medieval magical library.

Trithemius, Witchcraft and the Year 1508§

Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516) was a reforming Benedictine, a historian and one of the most celebrated book collectors of his age, who had built the library of Sponheim into one of the largest in Germany. He was also fascinated by occult learning, and his reputation suffered after a letter of 1499 describing his Steganographia, a cryptographic work disguised as angelic conjuration, was read by others and taken as proof that he trafficked with spirits. The story of that work and its decipherment is told in Trithemius and the Steganographia.

In 1505–1506 Trithemius left Sponheim after conflict with his monks, spending time at the court of Joachim I, elector of Brandenburg, before becoming abbot of St James in Würzburg. In 1508 he wrote several works that dealt with the dark side of the occult: the Liber octo quaestionum, answering questions put by the Emperor Maximilian I, including questions about witches, and the Antipalus maleficiorum, a manual against sorcery. Both appeared a generation after the Malleus maleficarum (1486), and both share its conviction that witches were real and dangerous (Malleus maleficarum).

Historians such as Noel Brann have suggested that these works also served Trithemius's own reputation. By writing as a stern opponent of demonic magic, and by distinguishing it clearly from the pious and natural magic he admired, he could answer critics like the French philosopher Charles de Bovelles, whose denunciation of the Steganographia was published in 1510.

Structure and Purpose of the Antipalus§

The Antipalus is divided into four books. The first describes the different kinds of sorcerers and the harms they were believed to cause, such as illness, impotence, the loss of livestock and possession, and explains how such harms could be recognised. The remaining books turn to remedies, which Trithemius insists must be lawful: confession and the sacraments, prayer, exorcism, blessed objects and other remedies approved by the Church. He firmly rejects countering sorcery with further sorcery, a practice that was common in popular magic and that theologians repeatedly condemned.

The title is a learned coinage. Antipalus is a Latinised Greek word for an opponent or adversary, and the work presents itself as a weapon in a spiritual battle. It belongs to the broad genre of late medieval and early modern writing on maleficium, the harmful magic attributed to witches and sorcerers, whose wider history is traced in maleficium, curses and protective magic. Trithemius accepted the reality of such harm and supported the prosecution of those he regarded as witches, a position that places him among the harder voices of his time.

The Catalogue of Necromantic Books§

The section that made the Antipalus famous is the third chapter of Book I. Here Trithemius, having explained that sorcerers learn their art from books, lists the magic books he had encountered, often describing their contents and giving their opening words so that they could be identified. He presents the list as a warning: these are the books whose possession and use mark a person as a necromancer. Joseph H. Peterson's annotated edition and translation of the chapter, summarised in the catalogue entry for the Antipalus maleficiorum, identifies surviving copies for many of the titles.

The main section, of around forty titles, comprises explicitly magical books, many of them Solomonic. They include versions of the Clavicula Salomonis, the ancestor of the Key of Solomon, the Almandal, a Solomonic ritual of a wax altar on which angels were called, the Sepher Raziel, and the Liber iuratus, described in the Sworn Book of Honorius. Trithemius also lists the Summa sacre magice of the fourteenth-century Catalan magician Berengar Ganell, a vast compilation that survives in a single later manuscript, and books of spirits, rings, seals and conjurations circulating under the names of Solomon, Hermes and other authorities.

A second section lists works that Trithemius considered suspect rather than openly demonic, chiefly books on astrological images, rings and talismans. This division echoes the classification of the Speculum astronomiae two and a half centuries earlier, which had separated image magic that worked by invocations and characters from images that supposedly acted through the heavens alone. Like its predecessor, the Antipalus uses a bibliography as a tool of moral judgement.

The Lucidarium and Peter of Abano§

Among the titles in the catalogue is an Elucidarium or Lucidarium of necromancy attributed to Peter of Abano (c. 1257–c. 1316), the Paduan physician and philosopher who had a posthumous reputation as a magician. Trithemius's reference is the earliest known mention of this work. For centuries it was assumed that he meant the Heptameron, a ritual for conjuring the spirits of the air on each day of the week, printed under Abano's name in 1559 with the spurious Fourth Book of Agrippa.

Peterson has since identified a fuller Latin text, the Lucidarium artis nigromantice, in a sixteenth-century magical anthology now in St. Gallen, and has argued that the printed Heptameron is a condensed and reordered version of it. His edition, published in 2021 as Elucidation of Necromancy, and the catalogue entry for the Lucidarium show how Trithemius's list can be used to trace the passage of medieval ritual texts into print. The later influence of this material is discussed in planetary angels in Agrippa and the Heptameron.

Neither the Lucidarium nor the Heptameron is likely to be by Peter of Abano. Like Solomon, Hermes and Honorius, Abano served as a name of authority, lending a borrowed pedigree to anonymous ritual texts.

Why the List Matters to Historians§

Trithemius wrote at a hinge in the history of magical books. Within a few decades printing would bring a selection of magical texts to a wider audience, from Agrippa's De occulta philosophia (1533) to the Heptameron and the Fourth Book. His catalogue records what circulated in manuscript just before that change, as seen by one of the best-read bibliophiles in Europe, and it allows modern scholars to date, locate and connect texts that survive only in later copies.

Richard Kieckhefer, Frank Klaassen and other historians of necromancy in the Middle Ages have drawn on the list to reconstruct the late medieval tradition of learned demonic magic. It shows the range of the genre, from Solomonic conjurations and books of spirits to Hermetic and Arabic image magic, and it indicates which works were already regarded as classics. It also shows that ecclesiastical critics could be among the best-informed readers of the very books they condemned, a pattern visible from the Speculum astronomiae and Roger Bacon to later demonologists.

The list must be read with caution. Trithemius sometimes describes books only briefly, some titles cannot be identified, and he had polemical reasons to present himself as a hostile witness. Nonetheless, scholars generally treat his descriptions as reliable reports of texts he had actually seen.

Publication and Afterlife§

The Antipalus remained in manuscript for nearly a century. It was printed in 1605 among Trithemius's minor works, at a time when witch-hunting in German lands was approaching its height, and it was read alongside other demonological treatises as an authority on the signs of witchcraft and the remedies against it. Its catalogue of magic books, meanwhile, was quarried by bibliographers and later by occultists searching for lost grimoires.

Today the treatise is valued less for its demonology than for its bibliography, and for the light it throws on the ambivalence of its author: a monk who condemned necromancy in strong terms while collecting, reading and describing its books with evident fascination. The broader story of how churchmen evaluated such texts is told in how theologians judged demonic magic.

Frequently asked questions§

What is the Antipalus maleficiorum?§

It is a Latin treatise against sorcery written by the abbot Johannes Trithemius in 1508. It describes kinds of harmful magic and lawful Christian remedies, and includes a famous annotated list of magic books.

Which books does Trithemius list in the Antipalus?§

He lists around forty explicitly magical works, including versions of the Clavicula Salomonis, the Almandal, the Sepher Raziel, the Liber iuratus, Berengar Ganell's Summa sacre magice and a Lucidarium attributed to Peter of Abano. A further group consists of suspect books on astrological images and talismans.

Why is the Antipalus important for the history of grimoires?§

It records the magical books circulating in manuscript just before printing changed their transmission, as described by one of Europe's leading book collectors. Many titles can be matched with surviving manuscripts, helping scholars date and connect them.

Did Trithemius practise magic himself?§

He wrote on angels, ciphers and what he regarded as a pious natural magic, and his Steganographia made him suspected of necromancy. Whether he practised ritual magic is debated, but in the Antipalus he condemned demonic magic in strong terms.

Sources and further reading§