Grimoire for Conjurations (Grimoire pour les conjurations)

This French manuscript grimoire belonged to Marie-Anne de La Ville, a Parisian practitioner of magic whose activities fall in the aftermath of the Affair of the Poisons, the scandal of the 1670s and 1680s in which fortune-tellers, priests and aristocrats at the court of Louis XIV were accused of poisoning, sacrilegious masses and black magic. The opening pages are lost, and what survives is a working manual of spirit conjuration of the kind that police and judicial records describe in the hands of Parisian diviners and treasure-hunters. It contains formulae for commanding spirits and their princes and dukes and for dismissing them, a weekday table assigning spirits and hours to each day, lists of spirits in two arrangements with powers over wealth, hidden treasure, love, justice and hunting, instructions for tracing a protective circle with blessed chalk or hazel and sprinkling it with holy water, and an especially strong conjuration to force demons guarding treasure to reveal and surrender it. Much of this parallels the Grimoire of Pope Honorius and related French texts. Joseph Peterson transcribed it in 2019, keeping the original spelling, and his notes link one conjuration to a manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale. The document offers a rare look at an actual practitioner's book, rather than a collector's copy, and it complements the historical accounts of Anne Somerset and Lynn Wood Mollenauer on magic and crime in Louis XIV's Paris.

What it contains

• Formulae for summoning and dismissing spirits
• Weekday table of spirits and hours
• Two lists of spirits and their powers
• Circle of blessed chalk or hazel and holy water
• Strong conjuration to compel treasure-guarding demons