The Grimorium Verum Conjuration: A Historical Account

The Grimorium Verum, "the true grimoire", is a short French book of demonic magic that presents itself as translated from Hebrew and published by "Alibeck the Egyptian" at Memphis in 1517. It sets out a hierarchy of spirits under Lucifer, Beelzebuth and Astaroth, their seals, the instruments needed to call them, and the conjurations themselves, followed by a miscellany of "secrets". It became one of the best-known grimoires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Spellbook presents it as history only, because it is a manual for summoning demons and includes animal sacrifice.

How it was done§

The first part of the book introduced the spirits. Three chiefs ruled the infernal world: Lucifer, said to govern Europe and Asia; Beelzebuth, Africa; and Astaroth, America. Each had two principal subordinates, Satanachia and Agaliarept under Lucifer, Tarchimache and Fleurety under Beelzebuth, Sargatanas and Nebiros under Astaroth, and under them a further eighteen spirits with special offices, from teaching sciences to discovering secrets. Each spirit had a "character", a seal that the operator was to draw and use to call it.

The second part described the preparations, closely modelled on the Key of Solomon. The operator was to make a knife, a lancet and other instruments at prescribed times, sprinkle them with consecrated water using an aspergillum of herbs, and perfume them with incense. Seals were to be drawn on "virgin parchment" prepared from an animal that had been ritually killed, and the book gave prayers for consecrating the instruments and the parchment. Such sacrifices are recorded here only as a feature of the historical text.

The conjurations followed: invocations addressed to the chief spirit, invoking divine names and the authority of Solomon, then calls to the particular subordinate whose help was wanted. The spirit was expected to appear and perform its office, sometimes in exchange for a small offering rather than a full pact, and was then given leave to depart. The book ends with collections of secrets of natural and "curious" magic: tricks, charms for love and gambling, and recipes of the kind found in older books of secrets.

Origins and history§

The imprint "Memphis, 1517" is a fiction, as is the translator "Plaingière". Bibliographers date the earliest French editions to the second half of the eighteenth century or the early nineteenth century, and Italian versions, Il vero Grimorio, were printed in 1868 and 1880. Joseph H. Peterson's edition (2007) compared the French and Italian texts with manuscripts and showed that the work draws heavily on a family of Italian Solomonic manuscripts, known as the Clavicula Salomonis de secretis or "Secrets of Solomon", one copy of which was confiscated by the Venetian Inquisition in the seventeenth century. The Grimorium Verum's hierarchy was in turn shared with the Grand Grimoire.

The book belongs to the wave of cheap printed grimoires that reached a wide readership in France and Italy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, discussed in Owen Davies's Grimoires (2009). A. E. Waite summarised it in The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts (1898), treating it as a degenerate offshoot of the Key of Solomon. In the twentieth century, through Waite and later editions, its spirits and seals entered modern occultism and popular culture, and some contemporary practitioners have worked with it, notably in "goetic" and traditional-witchcraft circles. Jake Stratton-Kent's The True Grimoire (2009) is one such modern practitioner's commentary.

Historians read the Grimorium Verum as evidence of how learned Solomonic magic was simplified and made more frankly demonic as it moved into popular print, and as a mirror of what readers hoped magic could deliver: knowledge, love, luck and wealth.

Why this is presented as history§

The Grimorium Verum is a manual for summoning demons, and its preparations involve killing animals. The Spellbook gives no instructions for either. It is included because it is a key document in the history of grimoires and of European ideas about the demonic.

Safety and good sense§

Historical texts like this are not guides to practice. Anyone frightened by thoughts of demons, curses or possession should talk to a doctor, counsellor or a trusted religious adviser, and be wary of anyone who charges money to remove supposed curses.

Sources and further reading§

• Grimorium Verum: A Handbook of Black Magic — Joseph H. Peterson, 2007
• The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts — A. E. Waite, 1898
• Grimoires: A History of Magic Books — Owen Davies, 2009
• The True Grimoire — Jake Stratton-Kent, 2009
• Magic in the Middle Ages — Richard Kieckhefer, 1989