Introduction

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The continued interest in and copying of late medieval texts of learned magic, such as the Liber sacer, Clavicula Salamonis, and Ars notoria, is well evidenced in the early modern period (see Page’s contribution in this issue for crucial developments in the medieval history of learned magic, 2023). With regard to Britain, for instance, Frank Klaassen has listed a provisional figure of twelve manuscripts of ritual magic surviving from the fifteenth century, twenty-two from the sixteenth, and even more from the seventeenth century (2013b, 159; see also Klaassen and Hubbs Wright 2021). On the continent the trade in manuscripts was brisk, particularly in Catholic countries where the papal Indexes of Prohibited Books produced from 1559 onward and the work of the inquisitions, as well as secular legislation more generally, suppressed nascent sources of print magic in the age of the press. Even with the boom in printed Renaissance magic in Switzerland and Germany, the late medieval tradition of learned magic remained ingrained in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century magical practice across Europe. The Leipzig collection sold in 1710 provides a valuable insight into the trade (Bellingradt and Otto 2017). But change and innovation was happening through the process of creating vernacular manuscripts, the growth of literacy amongst the professional, merchant and trades strata of society—including women—and the influence of print as a medium. Together they add up to what can be described as the democratisation of learned magic in the early modern period. To explore this phenomenon, I focus on two print books, one from late sixteenth-century England and the other published two centuries later in France; both reflect these democratising trends in learned magic in different ways, shaped by different political, social and cultural contexts.

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The role of early modern print culture in defining the post-medieval Western tradition of learned magic has received relatively little scholarly attention. The interest in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books has primarily been concerned with derivations and lineages to late medieval magic text traditions, and the modern practitioner’s interest in the rituals themselves (see Davies 2009; Gordon 2018). But print forms of learned magic present fascinating possibilities for exploring the socio-cultural dimensions of the transmission of magical knowledge, the relationship between magic and advancements in media technology, and the relationship between print and writing in the physical act of performing learned magic.

Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft: England’s First Print Grimoire

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In the first half of the sixteenth century, Latin predominated in the manuscript books of magic that circulated principally around religious establishments (Page 2013), but the vernacular was starting to have an impact. The Cambridge Library manuscript MS Additional 3544, described simply in the modern catalogue as “A Book of Magic,” is still two-thirds in Latin, but significant portions are in English (Foreman 2015). Sloane 3853 is similarly a composite Latin-English hybrid manuscript, parts of which date to the late sixteenth century. It includes extracts from a Latin version of the Liber iuratus (on which see also Page 2023 in this issue) but also “a boke which is callyd the Dannel” and conjurations for locating treasure, descriptions on the use of magical circles, and advice on drawing “a spryt in a glasse whych shall tell you the trewthe of stollen good” (Chardonnens 2015). They indicate the nascent widening of the pool of grimoire users, but it was a print version of one of these late sixteenth-century composite grimoires that begins our entangled history of English print magic.

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Around 1580 the English gentleman and surveyor Reginal Scot began to read voraciously around the subject of witchcraft and magic in preparation for a book that critiqued and condemned the arguments for the persecution of suspected witches, and also condemned and sought to undermine those who espoused magical powers. As a good Protestant, his critical arguments against the practice of magic were also entwined with his anti-Catholicism. His hope was that the book would ultimately benefit the poor, the aged and the simple, saving them from accusations of witchcraft and the depredations of cunning-folk and cheats. He listed some 212 continental Latin publications and twenty-three English books, most of which attracted his criticism (Almond 2014). From these sources he culled and published a wide range of charms, talismans and magical recipes from a variety of European cultures. Scot’s research also led him to consult with practitioners of legerdemain and illusion and brought him to transcribe or purchase a manuscript book of magic in English entitled the Secretum secretorum, “The secret of secrets.” There were many books in manuscript circulation that bore this title, and while their contents varied considerably, most but by no means all were books that contained a range of information about the healing properties of stones, plants and animals, household recipes and sometimes the secrets of chemical reactions and metal working (see Eamon 1994). Scot’s ‘Secret of Secrets,’ however, contained a series of conjurations and magical rituals belonging to the genre of late medieval manuscripts attributed to Solomon and Honorius, and in structure and content it was akin to the composite English magic books noted above (on Solomonic magic, see Véronèse 2019). When put together with the many other charms and spells in The Discoverie you have a highly effective work of practical magic. Frank Klaassen has understandably referred to The Discoverie as “entirely unlike any medieval book” in that, as a Protestant text, it deliberately conflated Catholicism with magical practice in order to denounce both. It was unusual as a miscellany bringing together popular magic with late medieval learned magic, the ‘secrets’ of nature, and legerdemain (Klaassen and Phillips 2006, 142).

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Scot made two references to the authors/owners of the manuscript. He first notes that it was “the work of one T.R. written in fair letters of red & blacke upon parchment, and made by him, Ann. 1570.” It apparently bore the introductory statement that it was for the ‘maintenance of his living, for the edifying of the poore, and for the propagating and inlarging of Gods glorie’ (1584, 393, 431). A few chapters later, he expands a little and states that it was also in the hands of one John Cokars, implying that he (Cokars) had augmented T.R.’s manuscript. T.R. and Cokars were almost certainly cunning-folk serving a local or regional population with their magical services, as well as probably being magical treasure hunters (Davies 2003, 125–6). One of the distinctive aspects of their manuscript is the emphasis on the spirit ‘Bealphares.’ Chapter 18 consists of a lengthy “experiment of Bealphares” and the following chapter concerns the binding of ‘the spirit Bealphares, and to lose him againe.’ Bealphares is not one of the demons listed in the influential Pseudomonarchia Daemonium, a list of spirits, similar to those included in some late medieval manuscripts, which was added to Johann Weyer’s sceptical treatise Praestigiis Daemonium (1563) (see Boudet 2003). Neither is it in Scot’s slightly adapted list of spirits, which is based on the Pseudomonarchia in Weyer’s book. This suggests the Bealphares conjurations were from T.R.’s manuscript, as I cannot find any prior source, although the actual rituals are familiar enough from late medieval texts. The name ‘Beallphares’ does appear briefly, however, in another English magical manuscript of the 1570s or 1580s housed in the Folger collection (V.b.26). A note inserted in a list of spirits by a different hand to the rest of the Folger manuscript explains that

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Beallphares or beallphare, an excelent carier. He tellethe of hidden tressuers in the earthe or of thinges stolne or loste and is trewe in all his doinges. He cometh forthe out of the east, for so he hathe bine called from the east & he appered very dewtifully to Gods pepell & his serwantes. (Peterson, Clark, and Harms 2015, 93)

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It is possible that this addition was inspired by a reading of Scot’s Discoverie.

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T.R.’s “experiment of Bealphares” begins by describing the spirit as the “noblest carrier that ever did serve anie man upon the earth” and explains that “he will appeare unto thee in the likeness of a faire man, or faire woman, the which spirit will come to thee at all times. And if thou wilt command him to tell thee of hidden treasures that be in anie place, he will teel it thee.” The rest of the experiment includes instructions for wearing a girdle of lion’s or hart’s skin, the use of a knife bearing the holy word ‘Agla’ on one side and several magic symbols on the other, and the creation of ‘Solomons circle’ within which the conjurer operated.

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While Scot’s scepticism about the witch trials was not well received by the religious and secular authorities, his Catholic bashing was referenced supportively in the decades after. More to the point, it was not long before evidence appeared of its influence in shaping the vernacular tradition of learned magic. There are surviving manuscripts, like the Folger example, which suggest some second-hand copying from Scot, or at least some common source or sources in English rather than further translations from earlier Latin manuscripts or continental sources (Klaassen 2011, n15). The Antiphoner notebook (Additional MS B.1) in the Bodleian contains charms and rituals clearly copied from Scot (Klaassen and Phillips 2006). Its author was not particularly interested in the material from T.R’s manuscript regarding conjurations, though, and he mostly transcribed pious healing and protective charms and prayers from the rest of Scot’s book, suggesting he was less interested in learned magic and more in day-to-day practical magic for a clientele. As Klaassen notes, “the scribe’s inability in Latin rendered some of the prayers and invocations nonsensical,” making the printed translations provided by Scot all the more desirable (2019, 6). The scribe clearly had an interest in conjurations and the exorcism of demons and their role in treasure hunting.

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The contents of this handful of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century vernacular texts are collectively distinctive and related with regard to their interest in the conjuration of fairies (though Latin texts also included fairy conjurations, see Klaassen 2013a). The instructions for binding and releasing Bealphares in T.R’s manuscript concludes with an image of the conjuring circle as well as the instruction that the fellow or fellows should sit back to back within it when calling the spirit, and then states “and for the fairies make this circle with chalke on the ground, as is said before” (Scot 1584, 420). Scot also includes the “maner of binding the fairie Sibylia at hir appearing.” The Folger book of magic V.b.26 describes the spirit Oberyon “kinge of the fayries” as a great physician and “sheweth wher hiding treseuer is & how to obtain thesaime he telleth of thinges present paste & to comm.” It also mentions Mycob as the “queene of the fayres.” Folger MS Xd 234, another English manuscript, dating to around 1600, consists of several conjurations for binding and releasing the fairies (Peterson, Clark, and Harms 2015; Harms 2018; Bain 2012; see Johannsen 2023 for the continuation of the fairy queen motif in nineteenth- and twentieth-century learned magic).

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Dutch editions of The Discoverie appeared in 1609 and 1637, presumably due its affinity with the ideas of Johann Weyer (Davies 2013, 383). Then a second edition in English was published in 1651, perhaps due to an upsurge in intellectual interest in witchcraft after the recent spate of trials and executions influenced by the activities of Matthew Hopkins in East Anglia. But the motive for the publication of a third edition of the Discoverie in 1665 was clearly very different. It was published by Andrew Clark, who mostly published sermons and religious works, as well as a couple of astrological almanacs. It included new material described “as succedaneous to the former, and conducing to the compleating of the whole work,” namely “an excellent Discourse of the Nature and Substance of Devils and Spirits,” and an additional nine chapters at the beginning of Book Fifteen containing practical magic. Their purpose was clear—to further supplement and enrich the Discoverie as a grimoire and not to reinforce the book as an intellectual critique of witchcraft and magic. The thirst for vernacular learned magic was still there, and perhaps even growing as literacy expanded further. A second edition of Scot’s Discoverie held in the Bodlean, for instance, contains a note at the front, “s[p]ent on this & Agrippa 5s . . . June 1655.” At the back of the copy is a personal index focussed on the magical rituals such as speaking with spirits contained within (Davies 2013, 394). One can imagine the note maker would have savoured the third edition of the Discoverie. Furthermore, between the publication of the second and third editions of the Discoverie, in the middle of the Interregnum and the flourishing of radical print literature it enabled, there had been a small flurry of English translations of printed Renaissance occultism. The Cambridge-educated astrologer-physician Robert Turner published a series of translations of well-known occult and magical books produced by continental publishers in previous decades. They included pseudo-Paracelsian texts with sigils and lamens, and a version of the Ars Notoria (1657). In 1655 he also put together the first English edition of the falsely attributed Agrippan text, the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, and added translations of the Heptameron: or Magical Elements, spuriously attributed to Peter d’Abano, and the Arbatel of Magick (for recent practical engagement with this particular grimoire, see Otto 2023 on Frater Acher’s Arbatel experiences in this volume).

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Scot’s Discoverie continued to come under attack during the mid-seventeenth century by those who saw criticism of the belief in witches and ghosts as a broader attack on miracles and Biblical evidence. The philosopher and clergyman Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680) dismissed the Discoverie for being packed with “odd tales and silly Legends,” and further stated that Scot’s thinking was “trifling and childish” (Glanvill 1668, 76). In his Treatise Proving Spirits, Witches, and Supernatural Operations (1672), the Oxford scholar Meric Casaubon (1599–1671) also attacked Scot’s scepticism, linking it with irreligion, but confessed never having actually read the Discoverie. “I have found it by chance, where I have been, in friends houses, or Book-sellers shops; and, as the manner is, cast my eyes, here and there; by which perfunctory kind of taste, I am sure, I had no temptation to read much of him” (Casaubon 1672, 40). But it found a new audience further down the social scale. Its subsequent influence on popular magical tradition through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was because, unlike other renaissance grimoires, it was full of anti-witchcraft spells to be used and adapted in new creative ways (Davies 2003). The printing of the third edition with its extra content was certainly important for ensuring the enduring influence of Scot’s Discoverie on the democratization of magic. It meant that, for a reasonable second-hand price during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the secrets of vernacular learned magic were available to cunning-folk and the small band of middle-class occultists who practised spirit conjuration and angel scrying as intellectual pursuits. As I have explored elsewhere, though, apart from those engaged in treasure seeking, cunning-folk rarely used Scot to conduct full-blown ritual conjurations in the medieval and renaissance tradition (Davies 2003, 2009). Rather they plundered it for holy and demonic names, phrases, and images from which to construct often nonsensical written charms that looked or felt magical to their clientele. Ritual conjurations were fragmented, broken into constituent parts and repurposed: They became ritual bricolage as part of the democratising process. This was not a unique phenomenon, though, but rather an expression of the broader creative responses to the writing and performance of magic that has also been identified in the medieval period (see Véronèse 2003; Page 2019). This type of usage of learned magic also confirms Otto’s observations regarding the process of “complexity reduction” with regard to the purpose of magic, and in particular the servicing of a general clientele who had practical problems that needed solving (2016, 212–15).

From Cheap Print Grimoires to Manga

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Vernacular French manuscripts proliferated and circulated in early modern France just as English ones did in Britain. Their owners included a similar range of occult philosophers, treasure hunters, ritual magicians servicing the wealthy, and educated cunning-folk operating in town and country. But in the eighteenth century something happened that diverged sharply from the British experience of democratisation (Davies 2009). French printers decided that there was a potential market for ritual magical advice lower down the social scale, despite the authorities forbidding such publications. Small, cheap, crudely printed chapbooks and booklets containing ballads, tales, proverbs, astrological advice, and the like had proved popular, selling in their tens of thousands. Now they could obtain knowledge for a few sous that had previously been highly restricted by law, price, availability, and education. In Britain, by contrast, there was no such publishing industry in cheap magic books in the same period. The reasons why are difficult to fathom. There was a massive trade in fortune-telling books, some of which included a few items of advice on love magic, and astrological almanacs were hugely popular, so the lack of practical magic is something of a mystery (Davies 1999, 120–67).

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The Petit Albert was the first in the genre and has received the most interest from scholars. It is largely a work in the ‘secret of secrets’ tradition and contains no conjurations other than a ritual for making the now notorious Hand of Glory. During the second half of the century, though, cheap works of spirit conjurations appeared. The Gremoire du Pape Honorius, for instance, with its spurious publication date of “Rome 1670,” contains numerous conjurations for calling up spirits for each day of the week, as well as invisibility spells and the like. But it also included a whole range of receipts of use to the peasant and farmer, such as how to ward off rabbits, remove fleas and banish hemorrhoids. All concerns of the medieval period as well, of course, but unlikely to feature in early manuscripts of the Ars Notoria, for instance. The likes of the Gremoire du Pape Honorius mimics, instead, the composite style of vernacular manuscripts that we see emerging in increasing numbers through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and probably were print versions of manuscripts that, in turn, had been compiled from earlier printed works of learned magic and books of secrets. We see a similar phenomenon with German print magic and ‘secrets’ in the seventeenth century (Bellingradt and Otto 2017).

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The treasure conjuration known as the the Poule noire (full text below) is one of the more intriguing of the rituals published in this popular literary genre, appearing in a cheap print publication entitled the Grand Grimoire or the Dragon rouge. It is prefaced with a discovery narrative and accompanied by a woodcut depiction of the ritual being enacted and the appearance of a spirit. The first of the conjurations to be uttered, ‘the prayer’, was kept in Latin and entitled ‘Citatio Prædictorum spirituum.’ This prayer was, in fact, first printed in Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia daemonum, and Scot included a translated version in his Discoverie, presumably derived directly from the Pseudomonarchia or from a copy of the conjuration in T.R.s ‘Secretum secretorum’ (Scot 1584, 393–5). Latin and vernacular versions of the same conjuration text can be found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscript copies of the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis and related texts. It provides a clear sign of the long lineage by now of print influence, with Weyer and Scot as originators. A truncated version of the Poule noire, taken from the Dragon rouge, but minus the Citatio Prædictorum spirituum, was translated into English during the late nineteenth century by Edward Waite and published in his book, much thumbed by modern magical practitioners, The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts (1898). “I have so modified the procedure,” noted Waite, “that, in case it should be tried by a fool in these more civilised days, he will have only his pains for the trouble – by the hypothesis of the ceremonial art. This is therefore a word to the fool” (Waite 1910, 133).

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The initial magical words beginning the Poule noire ritual are, ‘Eloim, Essaim, frugativi et appelavi’, which appears in no other magic text or ritual of which I am aware. They provide us with further striking examples of the bricolage process and the deep entanglement of Western magic over time and in a global sense (see Otto 2016, esp. 201). These five words constitute a well-known phrase for Japanese Manga fans, appearing in the Akuma-kun films and live-action television series during the 1980s and 1990s. Akuma-kun (Devil boy) is the nickname of a young boy, a world messiah figure, who, under the instruction of his mentor Dr Faust, learns the power of summoning demons in order to make the world a better place. One of the summoning rituals requires standing in front of a magic circle and uttering: “エロイムエッサイム、我は求め訴えたり’ (‘Eloim, Essaim, frugativi et appelavi’).” Akuma-kun was created by the master Manga artist and historian Shigeru Mizuki (1922–2015) and first appeared as a comic in the 1960s. No doubt influenced by Akuma-kun, Naoshi Arakawa’s manga drama Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso (Your Lie in April) (2011–2015) also uses the “Eloim, Essaim” phrase (my thanks to a peer reviewer for this reference). Mizuki was inspired by the rich folklore regarding yōkai or demons and the old yōkai encyclopaedias that described their powers and characteristics, not unlike the Pseudomonarchia daemonum in this respect, but crucially with artistic representations of each Yōkai. The most influential of these encyclopaedias was The Illustrated Night Parade of One Hundred Demons (1776) by the Edo-era artist Toriyama Sekien (1712–1788). His visual style, as well as the way in which the yōkai were catalogued, inspired Mizuki and numerous other twentieth-century Japanese authors and artists (Sekien 2016; Papp 2010, 65–66; Foster 2009). There was the akanamé or ‘filth licker’, a creature that licked the scum out of dirty bathtubs, for example, and the yamauba or ‘mountain hag’, who brought the snows in winter and blossom in spring. While there had been catalogues of yōkai in previous centuries, the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works by Sekien and others broke new cultural ground by using the technology of the book rather than scrolls as before. There was one page for each demon, but there was no linking narrative at all. Each image told its story, and, as described by Foster (2009), each image can be seen as an independent unit of knowledge for subsequent authors and artists to repurpose: “They come to have a certain degree of manoeuvrability: they can be shuffled and manipulated as separate entities by those who have mastered them” (2009, 31).

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But Mizuki the scholar cast his creative net wide and drew upon folklore, art, and magic traditions from beyond Japan (Shamoon 2013), just as Manga more generally has, from its early days, been receptive to and drawn upon the worlds of Mediterranean ancient history and European myth in time-travel stories. Red River, by Suzuki Yūri, for instance, concerns a Japanese school student who is magicked back to the ancient world by the curse of a Hittite empress (Scilabra 2019). When stationed in Papua New Guinea during the Second World War, Mizuki became fascinated with the local folklore and claimed to have had his own encounter with a yōkai in the jungle. In a series of articles for a Manga magazine in the 1960s, he plotted yōkai from around the world on a large map and included European variants such as Dracula, werewolves, wizards, and Medusa. Mizuki perhaps came across the Poule noire and the Faust legend while doing this research. It is highly likely he borrowed from the truncated, translated version of the ritual given in Waite’s Book of Black Magic and of Pacts (1898, 129) rather than an original French publication. It is also worth noting that the second edition of Waite’s book, re-entitled The Book of Ceremonial Magic (1910), curiously included a slightly different version of the call: “Euphas, Matahīm, frugativi et appellavi.”

Conclusion

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The Akuma-kun books and films have apparently never been released outside of Japan, and very few works of western ceremonial magic have been published in Japan. The author’s Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (2009) is one of the very few European histories of the subject to be published in Japanese. But through Manga and anime, Japanese culture has clearly become wittingly and unwittingly entangled with the history of European magical tradition. In his wide-ranging and critical consideration of ‘western learned magic’ in historical context, Bernd-Christian Otto made the important point that it “was (and is) ever-changing in a vast range of domains” (2016, 224). To research the topic in all its complexities requires, as he suggests, the formation of a new coherent corpus of source materials from across time and continents as well as cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary approaches. The two examples presented here of Scot’s Discoverie and the Poule noire represent one of the ways of understanding these processes of transmission. They show how coherent learned texts of magic were, through the democratising processes of vernacularisation, print, and the spread of literacy, broken down into units of simple information and symbols for reuse in novel contexts and formats—just as Foster argues for the enduring influence of the yōkai encyclopaedias. In this sense, there is a shared history, then, between Scot’s Discoverie, the magic book publishers and cunning-folk of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the Manga impresarios of the twentieth century. The western learned magic tradition continues its history of adaptation and invention, extending beyond the West, the book, and the learned.

Appendix: Primary Sources