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Liber XXVIII · Solomonic Magic

Liber XXVIII · Solomonic Magic · Chapter VII: Other Grimoires

The Book of Oberon: An Elizabethan Grimoire and Its 2015 Edition

The Book of Oberon (Folger MS V.b.26): an Elizabethan grimoire of spirits, fairies and treasure magic, its sources, its world and the 2015 edition.

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The Book of Oberon is the modern name of Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.b.26, a large handbook of ritual magic compiled in English and Latin by several anonymous hands around 1577–1583. Edited by Daniel Harms, James R. Clark and Joseph H. Peterson and published in 2015, it takes its title from Oberon, the fairy king who appears among the spirits it names, and has become one of the most widely read sources for the practice of magic in Shakespeare's England.

The Manuscript: Folger MS V.b.26§

The manuscript belongs to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., one of the world's great collections of early modern English books and manuscripts. It is a substantial volume written by more than one scribe, mostly in English with long passages of Latin, and illustrated with circles, seals, characters and drawings of spirits. Its editors date it to about 1577–1583 on the basis of its handwriting and internal evidence, although many of the texts it contains are older.

Nothing certain is known of its compilers. Their choices suggest people with some Latin, access to manuscript sources and a practical interest in results: the book is organised for use, not for display, and much of it consists of formulas to be spoken and figures to be drawn. Like many surviving magical manuscripts of the period, it was probably copied and extended over time by practitioners who saw themselves as Christian, whatever the law and the clergy thought of them. Its catalogue entry, The Book of Oberon, lists its principal sections.

Contents: Prayers, Circles, Spirits and Experiments§

The Book of Oberon moves between devotion and conjuration in a way typical of the Solomonic tradition. It opens with prayers and orations for obtaining power over spirits and for the purification of the operator, many of them invoking divine names in Hebrew, Greek and Latin forms. Liturgical texts such as the Creed and the opening of the Gospel of John appear in ritual settings, and some material reflects pre-Reformation Catholic devotion, including invocations of saints, even though the manuscript was copied in Protestant England.

There follow instructions for magic circles, pentacles, consecrations and exorcisms, and a long series of "experiments": short self-contained rituals for particular ends. These include calling spirits into a crystal or mirror to answer questions, discovering treasure and identifying thieves and stolen goods, becoming invisible, winning favour and love, and protection against enemies and weapons. Such aims were common across European magic of the period, and the book records them as its compilers understood them, not as reliable techniques.

A substantial part of the manuscript is a catalogue of spirits, each with a rank, appearance, powers and seal. It belongs to the same family as the lists printed by Johann Weyer in the Pseudomonarchia daemonum and later gathered into the Ars Goetia, though the names, numbers and details differ. The seals and characters for these spirits are discussed in the wider context of goetic seals and grimoire sigils.

Oberon and the Fairies in Elizabethan Magic§

What gives the manuscript its distinctive character, and its modern title, is its treatment of fairies. Alongside spirits from the learned demonological tradition, it contains conjurations addressed to Oberon, king of the fairies, to a fairy queen named Mycob and to other female fairy spirits, including figures called sisters of the fairies and a spirit named Sibilla. Oberon is treated as a powerful spirit, credited, as in other English magical manuscripts of the period, with knowledge of medicine, herbs and stones and with power over hidden treasure.

Oberon's name came from literature as much as from folklore. He appears as a dwarfish fairy king in the French romance Huon of Bordeaux, translated into English by Lord Berners in the 1530s, and he would soon become familiar to London audiences in Robert Greene's James IV and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, both of the 1590s. The Book of Oberon shows that the same figure was also addressed as a real spirit in magical practice, a striking example of exchange between literary and practical culture.

The fairy material belongs to a broader English pattern. Trial records and pamphlets show cunning-folk and accused witches claiming dealings with fairies, who could serve as teachers, sources of healing knowledge or guides to treasure. Emma Wilby has studied how such beliefs shaped the idea of the familiar spirit in early modern Britain (the witch's familiar). In the Book of Oberon fairies are handled with the same apparatus of circles, divine names and constraints as other spirits, showing how readily learned ritual absorbed native belief.

The Heptameron, Reginald Scot and Older Sources§

The manuscript draws on several layers of earlier magic. Long sections are closely related to the Heptameron, the ritual for conjuring the spirits of the air on each day of the week that was printed under the name of Peter of Abano in 1559 and that descends from the late medieval Lucidarium traced in Trithemius's Antipalus maleficiorum. The planetary angels and day spirits of that system are described in planetary angels in Agrippa and the Heptameron.

Other material belongs to the broad current of Latin necromancy that Richard Kieckhefer documented in the fifteenth-century Munich handbook, adapted for English users and partly translated into English. Several experiments resemble texts that Reginald Scot printed in The Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584, where he reproduced conjurations in order to expose them as fraud; the parallels suggest that Scot and the compilers drew on a common stock of manuscripts circulating in England. Scot's own magical material is summarised in the catalogue entry for the Discoverie of Witchcraft.

The compilation therefore sits at a crossroads: medieval Latin ritual, printed Renaissance grimoires, English vernacular charms and fairy lore. Its eclecticism is typical of working magical books, which seldom respected the boundaries modern readers draw between learned and popular, Catholic and Protestant, angelic and demonic.

Magic and the Law in Elizabethan England§

The book was compiled in a dangerous legal climate. The Act against Conjurations, Enchantments and Witchcrafts of 1563 made it a felony punishable by death to invoke or conjure evil spirits for any purpose, and imposed penalties for using magic to find treasure or stolen goods or to provoke unlawful love, with harsher punishment for repeat offenders. Prosecutions of such cases were relatively few, but the law meant that owning and using a book like this carried real risk.

At the same time, magic was widespread. Keith Thomas and Owen Davies have documented the cunning-folk who found lost goods, treated illness and protected against witchcraft in English towns and villages, and the educated amateurs who sought spirits in crystals or searched for buried treasure. John Dee's angelic conversations of the 1580s were the most elevated example of the same impulse to consult spirits. The Book of Oberon is the kind of manuscript from which such practitioners worked, and it shows how complex their religious world could be.

The 2015 Edition and Modern Reception§

The manuscript was little known outside specialist circles until Daniel Harms, James R. Clark and Joseph H. Peterson published The Book of Oberon: A Sourcebook for Elizabethan Magic in 2015. The edition presents a modernised transcription with notes, an introduction on the manuscript's sources and context, and reproductions of its circles, seals and drawings. Peterson and Harms also prepared a diplomatic transcription to accompany the Folger's digital images.

The edition was widely noticed, partly because of the Shakespearean connection, and it has encouraged the study of other English magical manuscripts, such as the two vernacular books edited by Frank Klaassen in Making Magic in Elizabethan England (2019). For historians it offers a rare, detailed view of how ritual magic was assembled and used in the age of Elizabeth I; for modern practitioners of grimoire magic it has become a source text in its own right. Its place in the longer story of medieval and early modern conjuring is set out in necromancy in the Middle Ages.

Frequently asked questions§

What is the Book of Oberon?§

It is Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.b.26, an Elizabethan manuscript of ritual magic compiled around 1577–1583. It contains prayers, conjurations, circles, seals, a catalogue of spirits and experiments for treasure, theft, invisibility and other ends, and was published as The Book of Oberon in 2015.

Why is it called the Book of Oberon?§

The title was chosen by its modern editors after Oberon, king of the fairies, who is among the spirits the manuscript conjures. The original manuscript has no single title.

Who edited the Book of Oberon?§

Daniel Harms, James R. Clark and Joseph H. Peterson edited the manuscript, publishing it in 2015 as The Book of Oberon: A Sourcebook for Elizabethan Magic. The edition includes an introduction, notes and reproductions of the manuscript's figures.

Is the Book of Oberon connected to Shakespeare?§

There is no direct connection. The manuscript is roughly contemporary with Shakespeare and belongs to the Folger Shakespeare Library, and its Oberon is the same fairy king who appears in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but both drew independently on older romance and folklore.

Sources and further reading§