Demonic Magic: A History from Antiquity to the Grimoires

Demonic magic is the name historians give to rituals that claim to call up, question and command demons, as opposed to magic that works through the hidden properties of nature or through prayer to God and the angels. It has an unbroken history in the West from late antique spirit-binding texts through the clerical necromancers of the Middle Ages to the printed grimoires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and for most of that history it was regarded by the Church as the most serious form of magic, because it seemed to involve dealings, and perhaps a pact, with the enemies of God.

What historians mean by demonic magic§

Medieval writers did not use the phrase "demonic magic". They spoke of nigromantia (necromancy, literally "black divination", a medieval reworking of the Greek nekromanteia, divination by the dead), of ars magica, or simply of conjuring spirits. Modern scholars, following Richard Kieckhefer and others, distinguish broadly between natural magic, which exploits occult virtues in stones, herbs and stars; astral or image magic, which draws down celestial influences into talismans, as in the Picatrix; and demonic magic, in which the operator addresses personal spirits and attempts to make them appear, answer questions or perform tasks.

The boundary was always contested. Practitioners usually claimed to compel demons by the power of God's names, not to worship them, and many rituals mix prayers to Christ, the Virgin and the saints with conjurations of named spirits. Critics, on the other hand, argued that any request made to a spirit implied a bargain with it. That disagreement — between magicians who saw themselves as pious exorcists and theologians who saw idolaters — runs through the whole history of the subject and is examined in detail in how theologians and inquisitors judged demonic magic.

Ancient roots: binding spirits in Solomon's name§

The Hebrew Bible forbids consulting the dead and familiar spirits, and the Gospels show Jesus casting out demons by command. Between these poles a practical tradition grew up in the eastern Mediterranean of naming and binding hostile spirits. Jewish incantation texts, Greek magical papyri from Roman Egypt and Christian amulets all use divine names, angels and lists of demons to protect, heal or harm.

The Testament of Solomon, usually dated between the first and fifth centuries CE, is the key text for what followed. It presents King Solomon interrogating a long series of demons with a ring given by the archangel Michael, forcing each to reveal its name, its activity and the angel that defeats it, and setting them to work on the Temple. Here, in narrative form, are the elements of later demonic magic: a catalogue of spirits, a hierarchy of power, a divine seal and the idea that a righteous man can command evil spirits without being corrupted by them. The legends of Solomon and Asmodeus and of Solomon's ring carried the same image into Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition.

Augustine and the theory of the pact§

The decisive theological framework came from Augustine of Hippo (354–430). In On Christian Doctrine and The City of God he argued that magical signs and words have no natural power; they work only because demons recognise them as signals agreed between themselves and human beings. Every magical practice, even an apparently harmless amulet, therefore implied a "pact" or compact with demons, whether spoken or merely tacit. The argument is examined in Augustine's City of God on magic.

Augustine's theory had enormous consequences. It meant that the magician's own understanding of what he was doing — compelling a spirit by God's power — was irrelevant: objectively he had entered into communication with the Devil. Medieval canon law, scholastic theology and eventually the witch-hunting manuals all built on this foundation. The story of the cleric Theophilus, who was said to have signed a written contract with the Devil in sixth-century Asia Minor, gave the theory a narrative form, and the pact became the central image of demonic magic, as described in the Devil's pact in history and legend.

Medieval necromancy and the clerical underworld§

From the twelfth century, translations of Arabic works on astrology and astral magic, together with the revival of Solomonic and Hermetic texts, gave ritual magic a new learned prestige. At the same time the Church produced an ever larger body of literate men in minor orders, many without secure benefices. Kieckhefer called the milieu that resulted a "clerical underworld": priests, students and clerks who knew the liturgy of exorcism and could adapt it to conjure rather than expel spirits.

Their handbooks survive in a small number of manuscripts. The most famous is a fifteenth-century Latin collection in Munich, now known as the Munich Manual of Demonic Magic, which contains experiments for illusions, divination and the manipulation of other people's minds, all worked through named demons. Related works include the Sworn Book of Honorius, the Key of Solomon in its earliest forms and the Lucidarium attributed to Peter of Abano. The broader story is told in necromancy in the Middle Ages.

The authorities answered with prohibitions. Pope John XXII, deeply concerned with sorcery at his court in Avignon, condemned the invocation of demons in the 1320s, the inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich classified it as heresy in his Directorium inquisitorum (1376), and the theology faculty of Paris in 1398 condemned twenty-eight propositions defending ritual magic.

Catalogues of spirits and the Solomonic grimoires§

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonic magic became increasingly a matter of lists. Manuscripts circulated with inventories of spirits, each with a rank (king, duke, prince, marquis, president, earl), a number of legions under its command, an appearance and a set of powers. The Protestant physician Johann Weyer printed one such list in 1577 as the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, precisely to expose its absurdity; Reginald Scot translated it into English in 1584. A mid-seventeenth-century English compiler expanded it into the seventy-two spirits of the Ars Goetia, the first book of the Lemegeton, adding a seal for each.

The structure of these catalogues reflected learned demonology. Demons were imagined as fallen angels who kept their former orders and formed a parody of a royal court, with kings of the four quarters of the world and great officers beneath them. The same habit of classification appears in the witch-hunting literature, where demonologists listed demons by function and by sin, and later in Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire infernal.

The printed grimoires and the popular Devil§

From the mid-eighteenth century French publishers, especially those producing the cheap chapbooks of the Bibliothèque bleue, printed small grimoires with false dates and exotic imprints. The Grand Grimoire, with its Prime Minister of Hell Lucifuge Rofocale, and the Grimorium Verum, with its three infernal chiefs Lucifer, Beelzebuth and Astaroth, are the best known, alongside the Grimoire of Pope Honorius, the Red Dragon and the Black Pullet. Unlike the medieval manuscripts, these books openly centre on the Devil and on the pact, and they promise treasure, love and power to a readership of artisans, peasants and soldiers.

Owen Davies has shown how these books spread through France, Belgium, Italy and the Americas, how they were feared by clergy and sought by treasure-hunters, and how cunning folk used them as symbols of authority. Their German counterparts were the Faust books and Höllenzwänge, and the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses.

Demonic magic in the modern occult revival and in scholarship§

Nineteenth-century occultists approached the grimoires with mixed feelings. Éliphas Lévi condemned "black magic" while writing about the Grand Grimoire and the pact with relish; A. E. Waite's Book of Black Magic and of Pacts (1898) edited the main texts with ironic commentary. Mathers' edition of the Goetia, published by Aleister Crowley in 1904, reintroduced the spirit catalogue to occult practice, and twentieth-century authors reinterpreted the spirits psychologically. Modern currents of theistic Satanism and Luciferianism have their own relationships to this literature.

Academic study of demonic magic began in earnest with Lynn Thorndike's History of Magic and Experimental Science and has flourished since the 1990s, through the work of Kieckhefer, Claire Fanger, Frank Klaassen, Jean-Patrice Boudet, Owen Davies and others. Historians now read the texts as evidence for clerical culture, for the reception of learned magic among ordinary people and for the long argument between Christian theology and its unofficial rivals, rather than as either superstition or secret wisdom. For the place of these texts in the wider history of harmful magic, see black magic history.

Frequently asked questions§

What is the difference between demonic magic and black magic?§

"Black magic" is a broad, often polemical label for any harmful or illicit magic. "Demonic magic" is a more precise historians' term for rituals that address demons directly. Much demonic magic was not aimed at harming anyone; it sought knowledge, treasure or illusions, but theologians condemned it because of the spirits involved.

Who practised demonic magic in the Middle Ages?§

The surviving manuscripts and trial records point overwhelmingly to literate men, especially clerics in minor orders, students and priests. They had the Latin, the liturgical knowledge and the access to books that the rituals required.

Did magicians believe they were making a pact with the Devil?§

Most medieval practitioners claimed the opposite: that they commanded demons by God's power, as Solomon had done. The idea that all such magic involved a pact came from theologians following Augustine. Only the later printed grimoires, such as the Grand Grimoire, make an explicit pact a central part of the procedure.

Is the Ars Goetia a medieval text?§

No. The Goetia in its familiar form dates from the mid-seventeenth century, although it draws on the sixteenth-century catalogue printed by Weyer and on older Solomonic material.

Sources and further reading§

• Magic in the Middle Ages — Richard Kieckhefer, 1989
• Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth Century — Richard Kieckhefer, 1997
• Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic — Claire Fanger, 1998
• The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance — Frank Klaassen, 2013
• Grimoires: A History of Magic Books — Owen Davies, 2009
• Entre science et nigromance: astrologie, divination et magie dans l'Occident médiéval — Jean-Patrice Boudet, 2006
• Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe — Stuart Clark, 1997
• The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts — A. E. Waite, 1898