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Magic in the Modern World: Strategies of Repression and Legitimization – Edited by Edward Bever and Randall Styers

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Categories: magick, shamanism, thelema, witchcraft, Tags:

Magic in the Modern World coverMagic in the Modern World is another entry in Penn State Press’ ever reliable Magic in History series and brings together eight essays with contributions from Egil Asprem, Erik Davis, Megan Goodwin, Dan Harms, Adam Jortner, and Benedek Láng, as well as editors Edward Bever and Randall Styers. Beyers and Styers divide the contents into two sections, beginning with Magic and the Making of Modernity, which could be broadly said to reflect a foundational theoretical approach with broad strokes outlying the interactions between magic and modernity. This leaves the second half, Magic in Modernity, to explore some fun case studies with more of a focus on the idea of legitimisation in magical practice.

One of the two core themes of this collection is how modernity has been defined in explicit opposition to magic and superstition, but with a counterargument that sometimes the role of disenchantment in the modern world has been greatly overstated, and as a result, much like the perennial punk battle cry, magic’s not dead. Styers set the stage to this in the opening Bad Habits, or, How Superstition Disappeared in the Modern World, documenting how superstition was increasingly framed in psychological terms through the various stages of modernity until it attained the status of a delusion that was an inherent threat to the order of society.

As in another reviewed title from Penn State Press, Frank Klaassen’s Making Magic in Elizabethan England, Max Weber’s concept of Entzauberung and its assumed totality is swiftly undone. In Descartes’ Dreams, the Neuropsychology of Disbelief, and the Making of the Modern Self, Bever discusses the three pivotal dreams that René Descartes experienced on a November night in 1619, and thereafter believed that a divine spirit had revealed to him a new philosophy. That Cartesian thought, that most rational of philosophies, emerged from an irrational, spiritual event, underscores how the rational cannot be so easily separated from the mystical.

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For his contribution Benedek Láng explains, in the words of the title, Why Magic Cannot Be Falsified by Experiments, beginning with a question as to why scribes and collectors of grimoire did not see that some of the more ridiculous spells and operations couldn’t possibly work, whether it’s becoming invisible with certain herbs, or expelling all scorpions from Baghdad. Ultimately, Láng’s essay is a questioning of the whole idea of crucial experiments, be they in matters magical or the science laboratory.

The final essay categorised as Magic and the Making of Modernity is Adam Jortner’s Witches as Liars, which looks at the relationship between witchcraft and civilization in the Early American Republic. He argues that the rationalist response to concepts of magic and witchcraft was fundamental in the development of the political and social structures of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian United States, with the irrationality of magic being seen not only as antithetical but as a direct threat to the nascent order of social democracy.

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The four entries gathered under the heading of Magic in Modernity are a diverse bunch, covering off Enochian magic, Jack Parsons and rocketry, Seidr in contemporary Norse paganism, and Simon’s Necronomicon. That’s truly something for everyone, and Egil Asprem starts things off with Loagaeth, Q Consibra A Caosg, which navigates what he defines as the contested arena of modern Enochian angel magic. He provides a potted history of Dee and Kelley’s Enochian revelations, showing how the magical system broadly fits within Dee’s version of natural philosophy, before breaking down how these foundations have been built upon and interpreted by subsequent practitioners, ultimately taking the material far from its roots. This is familiar territory for Asprem, having written the previously reviewed Arguing With Angels, which pursued similar concerns, but with a considerably higher page count. For this outing, Enochian magic makes a suitable area for considerations of legitimisation, not just because of the inherently suspect origin of the system (transmitted by angels to a known forger in Edward Kelley) but because of the way in which subsequent adoption of its elements (or a veneer thereof) have required mental gymnastics to justify their diversions from the source.

In Babalon Launching: Jack Parsons, Rocketry, and the ‘Method of Science,’ Erik Davis considers the intersection between Parsons’s magical work and his career in rocketry, two worlds he largely kept separate. This an enjoyable read, with Davis effectively giving a brief overview of Parson’s life, focussing on particular moments and showing how the scientific model interacted with the magical one. Parsons becomes an example of how romance and rationalism are not compartmentalised or balanced in occultism, with Davis arguing that modern occultism, specifically its Thelemic strands, does not simply seek to re-enchant the world but is instead an aggressive performance of pluralism with a structural ambiguity founded on deconstructed notions of belief.

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Megan Goodwin enters the world of contemporary Norse paganism with Manning the High Seat, exploring how the magical technique of Seidr is used and how its implicit associations with gender and sexuality are navigated by male practitioners. Goodwin presents a brief historical overview of Seidr before exploring the perspectives of two people, Jenny Blain and Raven Kaldera. Blain’s significant role in the promotion of Seidr in Norse Neopaganism ensures her presence here, with Goodwin crediting her with making an important contribution to the scholarship or gender and magic, and providing a thorough review of her understanding of Seidr, particularly its relation to sexuality. As Goodwin notes, though, Blain’s perspective never moves beyond the binary, employing rather basic dichotomies of straight and gay, male and female, and with none of the queer ambiguity and multiplicity that is implicit in the definition of Seidr as ergi. The ergi is plentiful in Kaldera’s definition of Seidr, though, and Goodwin appears to have a lot of sympathy for him in the presentation of his approach.

In the final essay, Dan Harms is well ensconced in his Lovecraftian wheelhouse with a consideration of the strategies of legitimisation used in the presentation of the trade paperback version of the Necronomicon by the mononymic Simon. There’s probably no other work in occult publishing that has a greater need for legitimisation than Simon’s Necronomicon, not just because it purports to be the non-fiction version of a fictional book, but because it always had an air of inauthenticity about it, right down to the cliché origin story with the mysterious monk revealing the manuscript before disappearing into unverifiable oblivion. It also seemed to be such a product of the occult scene of the 1970s New York, especially with how Herman Slater’s Warlock Shoppe was so central to its mythos, along with all those familiar scene names. Despite the transparency of the deception, Harms doesn’t descend into invective or scorn (as he is sometimes wont to do when discussing such matter on his more informal blog), but rather presents a considered analysis of each of the strategies used by Simon within the book and in marketing. There are a couple of classic strats here, as one would expect, with the most obvious being appeals to authority through comparisons to a bricolage of religious and mystical traditions, employing reduction to simplify these and enable pattern recognition to an uninformed audience.

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In all, Magic in the Modern World is an interesting read, particularly in the second half where the four entries all offer something different. Body copy is devoid of any illustrations with the text set in Minion Pro by Coghill Composition Company, and presented in the consistent Magic in History style.

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Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy – Marla Segol

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Kabbalah and Sex Magic CoverWith its provocative title, Kabbalah and Sex Magic makes for an intriguing entry in Penn State University Press’ Magic in History series. Marla Segol shows how the cosmology that underpins much of Kabbalah is inherently sexual and corporeal, being based on the interaction between human and divine bodies. Drawing on a diverse wealth of texts spanning the fifth to the twelfth centuries from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France, she argues that in its fully developed medieval form, Kabbalah represented a ritualised mythos of divine creation through sexual reproduction. In Jewish mysticism, to study through reading was an intimate and embodied undertaking, with the act of seeing being perceived as a form of touching in which sexuality was the paradigmatic form of interembodiment.

Segol is the Director of Undergraduate Studies at Buffalo University and an Associate Professor in its Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, with a particular interest in sexuality and the body in Jewish mysticism and contemporary New Age religion. This is very much evident in the chapter divisions employed here, and in Segol’s other published work; as parts of this book have been previously published, most notably her 2012 Word and Image in Medieval Kabbalah: the Texts, Commentaries and Diagrams of the Sefer Yetsirah.

Despite what the title might suggest, Segol’s focus is limited to only certain areas of Kabbalah and is by no means comprehensive. Indeed, it is worth reiterating that many of the texts here can be classified as proto-Kabbalistic, predating the modern emergence of Kabbalah in the twelfth century; fulfilling the promise of the subtitle that describes this as a mythical-ritual genealogy. As a result, her discussion of Kabbalah’s foundational text, the thirteenth century Zohar, is somewhat cursory, as is any consideration of the Lurianic Kabbalah of the sixteenth century. Although both of these fare better than the Kabbalistic interpretations of the Frankist, Sabbatean and Hasidic movements, which are not mentioned at all.

In her first chapter, Segol focuses on the oldest text considered here, Shi’ur Qomah (‘The Measure of the Body’), a midrash which dates from between the fifth and seventh century CE and which combines a visionary experience with an exegesis on the Song of Songs (5:11-16). Segol describes it as “the most important Jewish esoteric text for the study of divine embodiment and thus for the study of kabbalistic sex magic today,” and indeed, much of what she considers later in this title has a grounding here. It is a remarkable work in which the angel Metatron reveals to the tanna Rabbi Ishmael a vision of the cosmic body of God, intimately naming and measuring each divine body part and describing the Hebrew letters that are inscribed on them. Segol shows how the text’s midrashic intersection with the Song of Songs highlights the fundamentally erotic nature of this visionary encounter; somewhat justifying Maimonides’ belief that it was a work so heretical that it warranted burning. Segol argues that this text and its encounter with an inscribed and bejewelled divine corporeality serves a theurgic function via the conventions of amulets and magic seals, protecting and transforming the operator, and imagining the relationship as an aestheticized and sexualized one.

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Although she doesn’t give a textual analysis of the entire Shi’ur Qomah (and by the end of chapter resorts to mere summaries of some of its sections, sans any direct quotes), Segol does a thorough job showing the eroticism inherent in the text. Although, it must be said that, given the veiled, circumspect and ambiguous quality of the language used in this midrash, it can sometimes feel as if almost anything is ripe for a sexual interpretation, one quite a odds with conventional ideas about Judaism and Christianity. This use of erotic metaphor can lead to some bizarre imagery, like divine testicles filled with wax and fire.

In the following chapter, Segol builds upon the themes found within Shi’ur Qomah by considering two thematically and functionally diverse texts, both of which date from around the same period: the medical handbook Sefer Refuot and the cosmological and mathematical Sefer Yetzirah. The Sefer Refuot is once again concerned with corporeality, adopting a microcosmic model to imagine the human body as a mirror of the divine body, allowing the former to harness the power of the later in order to heal. The Sefer Yetzirah, meanwhile, gives an account of creation in which both the microcosm and the macrocosm are products of the mystic combination of 32 characters, including the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the Ten Numbers, meaning the Sefirot. The language of the Sefer Yetzirah genders and sexualizes these components, with the sefirot being gendered as either male or female, depending on the verse, and the primary Hebrew letters being celebrated as “mothers, from which all else is born.”

In her third chapter, Segol continues her focus on the concept of the microcosm and shows how it was developed in the tenth and eleventh century through three texts that adapted what had been established by scripture, Shi’ur Qomah, the Sefer Refuot and the Sefer Yetzirah. One of these works, Shabbetai Donnolo’s Sefer Hakhmoni (Book of Wisdom), comes from the tenth century, while Gabirol’s Tikun Midot HaNefesh (Improvement of the Moral Qualities) and Bahya ibn Paquda’s Torat Chovot HaLevavot (Duties of the Heart) are from the eleventh. As with some of the other previously considered texts, these works combine Judaic metaphysics with concepts from Greek myth and cosmology, providing a method for practitioners to emulate God and access divine power, thereby impacting the cosmos itself.

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Segol devotes her final section of textual analysis to the Sefer HaBahir, a composite work dating variously from the tenth and twelfth centuries; although apocryphally credited to the first century rabbinic sage Nehunya ben HaKanah. The Sefer HaBahir contains several literary layers, denoting different authors and periods of composition. This is a style that is emblematic of a work that defies the kind of order that scholars inevitably seek to impose on it, often by ignoring the “instability of its imagery, nonbinary genderings” and its “good-natured confounding of cognitive categories,” as Segol wonderfully terms them.

In her concluding chapter, Segol moves through the medieval period and into the modern, comparing the precedents she has covered with what contemporary practitioners are doing. However, from the offset, this is a strained comparison, as medieval kabbalists share little with modern wellness and New Age self-help gurus who are covered here. Space is given to the so-called America’s Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, to Kelle Sparta (a “spiritual coach and transformational shaman” who calls herself The Spirit Doctor™), and to self-described “international love and intimacy expert” Robyn Vogel. Most egregious of all is the inclusion of the Kabbalah Centre and its former co-director, Yehuda Berg, who was removed from the position for sexual assault. In a quote referenced here, Berg claims to regard selfish sexuality as the original sin which caused a separation between the human and the divine, but his actions stand in stark contrast to such lofty and disingenuous White-Knighting.

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Another matter of distinction between such modern practitioners and their predecessors, and one which Segol could have interrogated further, is that there is a distinct queerness in the eroticism of the source texts, one that destabilises heteronormativity and its attendant hierarchies, embracing, instead, an atmosphere of divine gender fluidity. In contrast, Berg and his modern ilk conceive of sex within a deeply conventional and frankly boring framework, one that is dull in both its heteronormativity and its adherence to the binary, and whose bland inevitable fruits can be seen harvested in the criminal charges against Berg. In a similar manner, Rabbi Boteach centres the male experience (with the female as mere sexual muse), while Vogel expresses an enervative and reactionary trad-wife gender essentialism that seems indicative of the inherently conservative spine that underlies so much of the entrepreneurial wellness movement. Rather than focus on the likes of Berg and Vogel, it would perhaps have been considerably more interesting to consider the inheritance of the Shi’ur Qomah in earlier Frankist and Sabbatean thought, given the core notion in those movements that intercourse in the human realm could stimulate intercourse in the cosmic realm. Further, the antinomian corporeality so thoroughly covered throughout this book has obvious mirrors in the Sabbatean and Frankish belief that rituals of transgressive sex, which they viewed as imitations of unrestrained relations in the divine world, could lead to cosmic redemption. Similarly, it would have been interesting to draw comparisons with Hasidism, and its idea of transforming mundane human impulses into elevated spiritual ones, such as the Ba‘al Shem Tov encouraging the use of sexual desire as an instrument to achieve a closer union with God, or the likening of swaying during prayer to the act of intercourse with the shekhinah.

Kabbalah and Sex Magic runs to 166 pages, with an additional 43 for notes, references and an index, but given its dense, textual subject matter, it does not feel short. Despite the slight sense of a misleading title, and gaps in what could have been covered, this is a valuable work that brings the eroticism inherent in the Shi’ur Qomahi and other proto-Kabbalistic texts to prominence. It is presented as a hardback with a glossy dustjacket.

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Alchemical Belief: Occultism in the Religious Culture of Early Modern England – Bruce Janacek

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Alchemical Belief coverIn this unique title, Bruce Janacek explores alchemy in early modern England, but not from a scientific or even necessarily occult perspective. Instead, this is a consideration of how the art was contextualised within the lives, beliefs and philosophies of otherwise religious men for whom an interest in esoteric matters might seem incongruous. In so doing, Janacek shows how the aspirational and hopeful principles that underlie alchemy provided a language and methodology for restoring order, in either a political or religious context, to what was perceived as a disordered world. Janacek divides his books into five chapters, each focusing on one of the major examples of this intersection betwixt religion and alchemy: Thomas Tymme, Robert Fludd, Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Elias Ashmole.

The first of these men, Thomas Tymme, was a sixteenth-century minister, making him perhaps the most unlikely of advocates for an occult science such as alchemy. Janacek shows how Tymme’s primary concerns was the schisms within Christendom, specifically in post-Reformation England which had seen the emergence of Protestant dissenter groups who separated themselves from the Church of England, including Brownists, Puritans, Familists and Presbyterians and others. For Tymme, such factions were leading England to ruin, and constituted an enemy within that was far more dangerous than any foreign power. Such ecumenical concerns dominated Tymme’s initial run of publications, which Janacek documents fully, but following a largely silent decade between 1592 and 1602, Tymme turned somewhat unexpectedly to alchemy, publishing three treatises over the course of the following decade. He began with A Light in Darkness, a commentary on John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica, in which he traced the origin of esoteric tradition to the Postlapsarian world and gave Tubalcain a prominent role as an antediluvian alchemical figure, referring to him as “that Vulcanical Abram Tubalcain the astrologian and great arithmetitian.” As with this retelling of biblical history, the two periods of Tymme’s writing have a through line in the theme of spiritual harmony, with Tymme seeing the unity that he sought within Christendom as an emulation of divine oneness, a state that was, for him, illustrated by alchemical processes. Essentially, the universe was a divinely-ordered place and alchemy revealed its order.

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Robert Fludd seems a more obvious alchemical fit given his proximity to similar subjects as a Paracelsian physician and defender of Rosicrucianism. Like Tymme, Fludd’s promotion of alchemy was tied to a natural theology that saw nature in all its forms, including alchemy, music and mathematics, as a revelation of God’s presence: nature was essentially a testament to God’s hand that could be read as easily as inerrant scripture. Fludd also shared Tymme’s concerns with unity, though rather than the ecclesiastical irenicism that would have brought Christendom together, he sought one that removed the boundaries between philosophical systems, integrating religious, philosophical and occult traditions. It is Frudd’s natural theology and its relationship to alchemy that Janacek focuses on here, particularly in contrast to the tutor and author, Patrick Scot, who, though accepting of alchemy as allegory, found it anathema to see it and any efficacy as a sign of God’s hand. Janacek illustrates this divide by analysing Scot’s refutation of alchemy, The Tillage of Light, and Fludd’s unpublished response to it, Truth’s Golden Harrow, showing how the difference of opinion between the two men reflected wider philosophical divides, in particular the orthodox distrust of the emerging spirit of Pyrrhonic scepticism. This highlights one of the joys of Janacek’s writing here, how he effortlessly contextualises everything within the mores and shifting beliefs of the time, whether it is alchemy’s relationship to scepticism, or in another instance, how Fludd’s coadunative motivations embraced and aligned with Cabalism’s search for divine union.

Interestingly, of the five figures discussed in this work it is Francis Bacon who emerges as the most unlikely of alchemists, more so than even the Reverend Tymme, with Janacek focussing for most of his chapter on the father of empiricism’s published distain for the art. Bacon was withering in his treatment of alchemists, diagnosing them as being infected by their imagination, and calling Paracelsus, in the sickest of burns, the ‘adopted son of the family of asses’ and someone whose writings were the mere braying of a person possessed of a conspicuously braggart air. But Janacek attributes much of this invective to Bacon’s practiced dissimulation, an essential skill as a courtier for both Elizabeth I and James I, where one’s longevity could be assured through the judicious allegiances and the circumspect giving and withholding of advice or opinions. Drawing on Paolo Rossi’s ground-breaking 1957 rehabilitation of Bacon’s association with magic, Janacek shows how Bacon’s core ideas, as expressed in his Novum Organum, such as the spiritual quality of matter and its potential for mutability, were shared with alchemists.

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Amongst the esteemed Protestants considered by Janacek is a lone Catholic, the courtier, diplomat and natural philosopher Sir Kenelm Digby. Like his contemporaries, Digby shared a concern with religious harmony, although for him, this was to be found in Catholicism, which, as embodied in the miracle of transubstantiation, stood for unity, inclusiveness and perfection; unlike the division and discord of Protestantism. For Digby, the miraculous process of transubstantiation was mirrored in alchemy and Janacek shows how this facilitated a vision of alchemy that tacked closely to Catholicism, with, in one instance, a particular emphasis on the theme of resurrection as an analogue of alchemical process. Digby’s last alchemical text, the posthumously-published Chymical Secrets, stands as a testament to this amalgam of religion and occult science, with a preface that acts as an apologetic for both alchemy and Catholicism, arguing that the Catholic doctrine of free will was a crucial element in the alchemical process. In this process Digby found a manifestation of the Trinity, with the stages and materials in the act of transmutation marking out the Creator (“Soul”), the Incarnation (“Body”) and the Holy Spirit (“Spirit”).

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Janacek’s concluding chapter concerns the antiquary and politician Elias Ashmole who is justifiably immortalised in the University of Oxford museum that bears his name, a site that is the fullest realisation of his life-long collecting of naturalia, artificialia, as well as heraldic, astrological and alchemical manuscripts. Janacek shows how Ashmole’s dedicated pursuit and publication of alchemical manuscripts aligned with the hopes for unity that underscored the philosophies and goals of his predecessors Tymme, Fludd, Bacon, and Digby. Ashmole identified himself as a priestly figure and envisioned his collecting and publishing of knowledge as sacred work, something which Janacek shows was not an uncommon practice at the time, with similar acts of agglomeration being visualised as vehicles for Edenic renewal. Ashmole’s publication of Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum is exemplary of this motivation and his belief that alchemy was key to acquiring prelapsarian wisdom and freeing humanity from the corruption wrought by the Fall of man. By compiling, as it did, alchemical texts by Thomas Norton, George Ripley, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John Lydgate, John Dastin, Abraham Andrews, William Backhouse and various anonymous authors, this British chemical theatre could essentially be seen as a devotional work, a testament to alchemy’s transformative potential.

Alchemical Belief runs to a mere 164 pages, followed by a significant wad of endnotes and references, but it by no means feels short, with the small point size cramming a significant word count into each page, and illustrations being kept to a minimum. In addition, Janacek has a writing style that if not dense could be considered comprehensive, often straying from the respective main subject into broader but relevant areas. This never feels egregious, and indeed it is always in the service of providing valuable context. For example, a discussion of Ashmole’s interest in botany and gardening (simultaneous with his exploration of alchemy) evolves into a larger discussion of how the use of collecting as an aide to Edenic renewal extended to formal gardens. A garden that incorporated numerology, cabalism or biblical symbolism into its design extended such a locus from its purely botanical function to one that created a new vision of the relationship between humanity and nature. As a result, the reader expecting a book simply about alchemy may find themselves knowing significantly more about the broader concerns of early modern England, both mundane and esoteric. Janacek ultimately succeeds in his brief, showing how alchemy was not, as one could superficially view it, a mere occult science (or pseudoscience), but was instead something that intelligent men could integrate into their religious world view, often with little effort or regret.

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Making Magic in Elizabethan England: Two Early Modern Vernacular Books of Magic, edited by Frank Klaassen

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Categories: folk, grimoire, Tags:

Making Magic in Elizabethan England coverIn 2019’s Making Magic in Elizabethan England, Frank Klaassen uses two anonymous manuscripts of magic from Elizabethan England to consider the wider intellectual culture surrounding the practice of magic in the early modern period. He explores how this milieu, in drawing on currents from the Renaissance, the Reformation, and new developments in science, as well as the birth of printing, impacted on the practice of magic, creating an enduring influence on the formation of modern occultism. Though untitled when written, the works are now known as the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. The former is concerned with treasure hunting, healing, and protection, and blends medieval conjuring and charm literature with excerpts drawn from Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft. The Boxgrove Manual, meanwhile, is a consideration of ritual magic that synthesises material from and credited to Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and related medieval works concerning the conjuration of spirits.

Key to the importance attributed to the notebook and the manual is their interstitial status as post-Reformation works. As products of their time, they evince how occultists had to contend with a Catholic legacy in a newly-Protestant England. Up until then, magic had been inherently Catholic in form, employing the religion’s rituals and hagiographic mythologies, not to mention the fundamental idea that divine could be entreated using such systems and drawn into the world. Under Protestantism, these formulae and the very ideas behind them were forbidden, making the occult a doubly illicit practice, both theologically and politically: it was wrong for simply being magic as proscribed against in the bible, but also wrong for retaining elements of, and implying a sympathy for, Catholicism, and with that, a potential vulnerability to the machination of foreign Popish forces.

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Klaassen uses these two titles as a counter to the idea that post-Reformation Protestant theology and the emergence of secular science initiated a process of entzauberung or disenchantment within modernity, in which the previously omnipresence of the supernatural was removed from the world. Instead, Klaassen argues that the Reformation did not so much disenchant the old consensus about magic as to break it apart, allowing for it to be reassembled with new definitions that were increasingly divorced from the previous reliance on traditional religion. The Protestant author of the Boxgrove Manual had, for example, removed any explicitly Catholic content from his source material, but rather than creating a Protestant form of magic in its stead, the book represents not just a break with Catholicism, but a separation from religion itself.

In addition to this general overview with which he opens the book, Klaassen provides specific introductions to both texts, giving their history and an analysis of not only the content but its creators, assessing their intent and methods. The text themselves are presented in a thorough manner, with Klaassen using a preface before each one, explaining the physical characteristics of the manuscript in question, an explanation of the sources he cites, and a setting out of editorial principles. His translations are categorised as semi-diplomatic editions, producing an intermediate version of the manuscript text, largely faithful to how it was produced, but with some minor alterations for readability, with abbreviations expanded, and a few forms of punctuation standardised.

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The two works are extensively annotated by Klaassen, marking out amendments in the editing process but also providing valuable commentary both minor and extensive on matters that arise in the text. Due to the length of some of the digressions, these are understandably formatted as endnotes, rather than footnotes, which is still a shame, as their worth is such that it would aide reading to having them as an accessible adjunct on the same page as the body, visible at a glance, rather than necessitating the flicking between the here and now and the end of each chapter.

Despite their relatively shared provenance, these are two distinct works, in both style and subject matter, with the Antiphoner Notebook being arguably the less interesting of the two. Its focus is almost entirely on charms, perhaps the dullest and yet most popular form of occultism, with all the usual dubious cures for a variety of ailments, as well as dealing with that most perennial of problems, thieves. Many of these are common charms, many of which are drawn from Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, and they do tend to dominate in the latter half, but there are also some interesting rituals and procedures, such as divination with a crystal, and a very long procedure for exorcising demons guarding a treasure. One instance tellingly shows how the grip of orthodox religion was loosening in magic, with the compiler including a guide for creating a wastcote of proofe, the process of which involves thread being spun in the name of the devil. The verbatim source for this was Discoverie of Witchcraft, but unlike its use there as part of Scot’s sceptical exposé of superstitious beliefs in witchcraft, in the Antiphoner Notebook it is included as something that could be readily employed like any of the other entries. Klaassen notes that this explicit use of the devil’s name, as well as other formulae in which both demons and angels are directly invoked, would have been beyond the pale of even later medieval necromancers who may have conjured demons but only did so in the name of Jesus.

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With its reliance on works by and attributed to Agrippa, and its focus on matters invocatory, the Boxgrove Manual makes for an immediately more interesting book than the Antiphoner Notebook. It opens with a Pentacle of the Apocalyptic Christ before continuing into a set of planetary seals and a guide to creating lamens for calling spirits, with both good and ill ones being listed. The manual is heavily indebted to Agrippa’s three volume De Occulta Philosophia as well as the apocryphal fourth book pseudonymously attributed to him as Liber Quartus De Occulta Philosophia. The compiler of the Boxgrove Manual clearly believed Agrippa to be the author of Liber Quartus, and draws from it throughout, but he also credits him with authorship of the Heptameron, which is usually credited, again pseudonymously, to Peter de Abano.

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Klaassen concludes the section on the Boxgrove Manual with a brief but valuable appendix, providing the sources for each of the manual’s entries, thereby showing the debt owed to the Heptameron, and to Liber Quartus in particular. In all, Making Magic in Elizabethan England, is a valuable title, not only for the versions of the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual but for the way in which Klaassen contextualises them within post-Reformation England. He writes with a deft, knowledgeable hand that makes for a joy to read.

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The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia – W. F. Ryan

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The Bathhouse at Midnight cover Yet another entry in Pennsylvania State University Press’s expansive Magic in History series, the peculiarly-titled The Bathhouse at Midnight is a rather weighty and encyclopaedic tome, running to over 500 pages, albeit with a significant slice of this page count being inflated by the large selection of endnotes with which each chapter concludes. William Francis Ryan explains in an introduction that the work builds upon material that they began collecting for their 1969 doctoral dissertation on Old Russian astrological and astronomical terminology, as well as a series of articles on the history of science and magic text in Russia. Suffice to say, it seems that Ryan collected quite a bit of material during this career-spanning hunt, now distilled into fifteen chapters covering off almost every field of magic conceivable.

These chapters broadly divide Russian magic and divination into various subcategories, beginning with popular magic, and followed by considerations of different wizards and witches, systems of divinations, omens, predictions from dreams and physiological phenomena, spells, talismans, materia magica, bibliomancy, numerology, geomancy, alchemy, and astrology. Ryan concludes with a chapter on the relationship between magic and the church, the law and the state, and includes a roster of witchcraft cases that the Synodal court dealt with in the eighteenth century.

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Ryan begins this trip to the bathhouse at midnight with an historical outline, a large part of which is effectively a literature review, albeit not of comparable scholarly dissertations, but of the source texts upon which much of Russian occultism was based. Ryan shows how a considerable body of material imported into Russia was influential on later occultism, with streams coming from an older Byzantine textual tradition, a corpus of translation from Hebrew that were originally made in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as well as more obvious Western influences. In so doing, the Russian tradition is situated within a broad occult context, wherein the confluence of similarities between indigenous and exotic practices and influence makes it hard to determine what exactly constitutes something that may have originated in native practice.

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The next two chapters focus on practices and the practitioners of magic respectively, beginning with a comprehensive discussion of various types of popular magic, categorised into sections on the evil eye, malefic magic, entities such as ancient gods and evil spirits, prophylactic magic, festivals and other propitious times or dates, magical places and directions, and finally religious parody and inversions. This amounts to a covering off of all the usual areas that one might find in a contemporary practical magical text, but in this instances, there’s a lot more detail and provenance, with Ryan meticulously referencing all his sources. With the following chapter’s focus on the practitioners of this magic, Ryan provides a catalogue of these various types, dedicating usually at least two pages to discuss the Volkhv, the Koldun, the Ved’ma, the Znakhar’, and the Vorozhei. These are only the main designations, and Ryan follows with an additional section exhaustively documenting all the words used for both types of magic and their practitioners. As elsewhere, this is no perfunctory list, and Ryan lists sources, derivation and context.

This is a formula that Ryan uses throughout, everything is so detailed and draws from a wide range of sources, all tied together with an expert voice and clear familiarity with his subject. Evidence of this is the consideration of materia magica, in which Ryan provides a lengthy and useful roster of plants, both real and fantastic, used for magic rites and in Russian folk medicine, where herbs dominated. There are nine pages here, with 49 plants described with varying levels of details, some with botanical names identified, and others with merely the places they are mentioned and their purpose.

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With his background as a president of the Folklore Society and an emeritus professor and honorary fellow at the Warburg Institute and the University of London, Ryan is well equipped to not only deal with the subject of this volume but to authoritatively draw comparisons with Western magic, as well as its classical roots. This makes for a comprehensive work, one that is thorough in its specificity but is aware of a broader context within the occult milieu. Because of Ryan’s readable manner, The Bathhouse at Midnight can be read sequentially from cover to cover, but is also clearly organised in such a way that allows for simply dipping in as a reference.

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The Bathhouse at Midnight is formatted in the academic style one would expect of a publisher like Penn State Press with a small but readable typeface throughout and an even smaller point size for the references and index, suggesting that with less frugal formatting it could have been a work significantly longer that its 504 pages. At first glance there is one exception to the quality of the layout with a distractingly small safety area on the top margins on each page, meaning that the page title and page numbering in the header sit a mere 3mm from the edge of the page. The digital preview version on Amazon features a more comfortable margin and a closer inspection shows that printing is provided by print-on-demand service Lightning Source, whose lackadaisical quality control has resulted in a tiny top and a big bottom. Therefore it is worth bearing in mind that this book may be printed on demand and so the results may vary, for the fault, dear Brutus, is not in the layout but in the printing.

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Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic – Edited by Claire Fanger

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Categories: esotericism, goetia, grimoire, magick, middle ages, Tags:

Conjuring Spirits coverPart of the expansive Magic in History series from Pennsylvania State University Press, Conjuring Spirits is an academic work that calls to mind Scarlet Imprint’s more experientially-orientated compendiums Howlings and Diabolical, in that it brings together essays on various magical texts and manuscripts, albeit from an entirely scholarly perspective. The contributions in Conjuring Spirits are divided into two sections, Context, Genres, Images and Angelic Knowledge, with the latter focussing on just two texts, the Sworn Book of Honorius, and John the Monk’s Book of Visions. Presenting both general surveys and more specific analyses are Michael Camille on two examples of the Ars Notoria, Robert Mathiesen on the Sworn Book of Honorius (also discussed alongside the Liber Visionum by Richard Kieckhefer in a separate entry), John B. Friedman on the Secretum Philosophorum, Elizabeth Wade on Lullian divination, while Nicholas Watson and editor Claire Fanger each separately discuss John the Monk’s Book of Visions of the Blessed and Undefiled Virgin Mary, Mother of God. Finally, this book also includes Juris Lidaka’s edition of the Osbern Bokenham-attributed Liber de Angelis, and an overview by Frank Klaassen of late medieval English ritual manuscripts.

It is Klaassen’s survey of late medieval English manuscripts with which the proceedings open, being an appropriately broad grounding in the genre, even if not all of the works discussed in this book come under that category. Lidaka’s translation of Liber de Angelis follows, being introduced with a brief essay in which he gives a history of this manuscript, establishing early on that the attribution to the Augustinian friar and poet Osbern Bokenham is incorrect, and that the Bokenhan to whom authorship is credited may actually have been one William Bokenham. Liber de Angelis is not a single liber and instead consists of extracts from at least three texts, as evidenced by the demarcation into sections on making rings for each of the planets (ordered from Sun to Saturn), followed by Liber de ymaginibus planetarum, in which instructions are given for creating images of the planets but with the spheres in a different order to the rings, and ending with Secreta  astronomie de sigillis planetarum & eorum figuris in which the planets are ordered differently once again in a guide to creating planetary magic square. Given some of the errors in the original text of Liber de Angelis, such as the numbers in some of the magic squares not calculating correctly and the names of planetary angels differing from other sources, Lidaka argues that the texts were transcribed by an enthusiastic amateur, someone with a general interest in magic though less concerned with slavishly getting everything right.

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John B. Friedman’s consideration of the Secretum Philosophorum is a rather dry and technical history of the text, feeling a little out of place given its focus not on ritual magic but on tricks and experiments demonstrating various aspects of the seven liberal arts. Friedman does argue that the text is an example of ‘safe magic,’ using the appearance of sorcery, with its diagrams and occasional acknowledgement of hermetic authority, to give a theoretical matrix to technology and convey ideas of power and learning. Elizabeth Wade also makes a diversion away from grimoires to discuss a fifteenth century German divination device found in a large paper codex catalogued as Cod. Guelf. 75. 10 Aug. 2°. Said fragmentary device is not necessarily the entire focus here and Wade uses it as a starting point for a broader primer on Lullian and pseudo-Lullian forms of mechanical divination, as well as their medieval analogues.

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Robert Mathiesen’s essay on the Sworn Book of Honorius focuses not on its use as a Solomonic grimoire for ceremonial magic, and instead on one of only two magical operations to survive in its six known, and presumably partial, manuscripts. While the second (and according to Mathiesen, less interesting), of the operations is for the summoning to appearance of an angel, spirit or demon, the first is a byzantine ritual for attaining the beatific vision, effectively creating a shortcut to the eschatological goal of Christianity. Mathiesen begins with a preamble giving the history of the sworn book, and then a summary of the rite itself, which still runs to several pages despite not being presented in its entirety. There’s little analysis of individual components of the rite and Mathiesen concludes with a discussion on the efficacy of such complicated ritual formulae (he seems pretty assured that it would get some kind of result), and thereby suggests that the rite’s potential to undercut the religious foundation of the medieval world would account for William of Auvergne’s description of the Sworn Book of Honorius as the very worst book of magic in circulation.

Two essays from Nicholas Watson and editor Claire Fanger are unique in that a hitherto unknown manuscript version of their subject, John the Monk’s Liber Visionum, had, at the time of writing in 1998, been recently discovered at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada; while several other full and partial manuscripts have since been found in various European archives. It is worth mentioning that Flanger has subsequently shown that, as per John the Monk himself, the work should be more accurately called Liber florum celestis doctrine, with only its first, autobiographical section being called the Liber visionum, but for the sake of consistency and the convention established by this volume, we’ll keep the archaic naming in this review. With the McMaster version of the Liber visionum being uncovered by Watson and then translated and thoroughly documented by Fanger, there’s a personal feel to the considerations here. Watson discusses the relationship between the McMaster manuscript and another one discovered in Munich, as well as contextualising the work in terms of the broader devotional and mystical tradition upon which it draws. Watson is exhaustive in his analysis, resulting in the longest entry in Conjuring Spirits, running to 52 pages, aided and abetted by extensive endnotes and several appendices: structural analyses of the McMaster and Munich manuscript, as well as individual summaries of both versions. After that, Fanger shows that there’s still more to be said about John the Monk’s text with her own essay in which she considers its relations to the Ars Notoria on which it is modelled. For her own appendix, Fanger provides a synopsis of a prologue from a version of the Liber visionum from the University of Graz library.

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John the Monk makes another appearance in Michael Camille’s consideration of examples of ars notoria imagery from various manuscripts, which opens with a vituperative quote from the Grandes Chroniques de France in which the monk of Morigny is pilloried for his wish, through his curiosity and pride, to renew the heretical and sorcerous notary art under another name. John the Monk’s own Marian 0figures are not the focus here, though, and Camille considers the notae from the thirteenth century Turin manuscript (MS E. V.13) and the fourteenth century Paris BN lat. 9336. The images are recipients of detailed discussion, with Camille bringing to them an art historian’s focus by tracing provenance and making comparisons with other examples of medieval pictorial and diagrammatic content. Photographic examples of the notae, as well as their analogues, are included, many at full size, though the quality of reproduction is not the greatest, with a blurry murk and a lack of contrast.

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Conjuring Spirits concludes with Richard Kieckhefer’s The Devil’s Contemplatives, in which he considers the two titles already exhaustively discussed within this volume: the Liber Iuratus Honorii (aka the Sworn Book of Honorius) and once again, John the Monk’s Liber Visionum. Kieckhefer’s point of difference, though, is analysing how both texts are evidence of the Christian appropriation of various elements from Jewish occultism. He emphasises the way in which both the Liber Iuratus and the Liber Visionum focus less on the typical goetic summoning of demons and rather on a form of devotional mysticism; an approach, he argues, that has little precedent in Western occultism and is instead drawn from Kabbalah, particularly the vision-rich Merkabah tradition. The previously-discussed ritual for attaining the beatific vision from the Liber Iuratus is an obvious example of this, as is John the Monks devotional reverence towards the Virgin Mary. While the attitude of these Western and Kabbalistic systems is circumstantially similar, Kieckhefer has no smoking gun, with the closest being a version of the Liber Iuratus that includes the Shem HaMephorash, Kabbalah’s secret name of God, in the design of a seal used for acquiring a dream vision.

Despite this book’s title, there’s relatively little that concerns itself with the conjuring of spirits here, with far greater focus on the devotional and reflective elements seen in works such as the Sworn Book of Honorius and Liber Visionum, and even in considerations of the mental self-improvement and memory aides showcased in the Ars Nortoria and the Secretum Philosophorum. With John the Monk looming over many of the contributions here, Conjuring Spirits is a valuable resource on the Liber Visionum, being the largest consideration of the text at the time of publication; though now rivalled by Fanger’s 2015 book, Rewriting Magic: An Exegesis of the Visionary Autobiography of a Fourteenth-Century French Monk, also published by Pennsylvania State University Press.

Conjuring Spirits, like other titles in the Magic in History series, appears to be available in two editions. One of them features the classic, sombre and refined Penn State Press Magic in History cover template, whilst the other, reviewed here, has a cover design that is slightly more in keeping with an Inner Traditions or Weiser mass market title, all green gradient, low opacity goetic sigil and large drop-shadowed type. In at least this copy, apparently printed-on-demand by Ingram, there is a printing error, where the cover has skewed a couple of degrees off base, meaning that the spine print is noticeably misaligned, with a crooked sliver of the cover’s green gradient creeping into the spine, and a corresponding slice of black spine sneaking round onto the back matter. This same on-demand printing may account for the poor quality reproduction of images.

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Origins of the Witches’ Sabbath – Michael D. Bailey

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Categories: witchcraft, Tags:

Origins of the Witches' Sabbath coverThe second entry in the Sourcebook series from Pennsylvania State University Press’s wider Magic in History collection, Origins of the Witches’ Sabbath brings together translations of the five earliest accounts of the witches’ sabbath, as well as the records of two witch trials from the same period. The works compiled here are Hans Fründ’s Report on Witchcraft in Valais, Claude Tholosan’s So That the Errors of Magicians and Witches Might Be Made Evident to Ignorant People, Johannes Nider’s Anthill, and two anonymous pieces, the Errors of the Gazarii and The Vauderie of Lyon. The trial records, meanwhile, are those of Jubertus of Bavaria (who was tried by Tholosan) and Aymonet Maugetaz of Epesses (whose evidence may have informed some of the unique content of the Basel version of the Errors of the Gazarii).

Michael D. Bailey is Professor of History at Iowa State University and the founding editor of the journal Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft. In his introduction, he describes these documents, all written during the 1430s and in locations clustered around the western Alps, as the evidence of a remarkable conceptual transformation. Prior to this burst of sabbatic creativity, while witches could be perceived as workers of maleficia, and thereby a danger to society, they were largely imagined as individuals, working in isolation. These five fifteenth century works changed that, creating the idea of a network of witches, a vast diabolical occult conspiracy that gathered together, engaged in infanticide and cannibalism, cast spells and brewed potions, and most strikingly, foreswore their Christian faith and fornicated at the behest of a very real demonic master. In so doing, the witch became a greater threat, effectively being a member of a shadowy, unruly, alternative society that ran alongside the conventional twin of the ordered Christian world. In this way, the actual spells and rituals of witches were of less concern to the authors of these texts, and instead it was the very act of removing oneself from society and joining an inverted counterpart that proved more unnerving, especially with the concern that the appeal of such an idea could spread like a contagion. In Report on Witchcraft in Valais, for example, Fründ says that the witches’ numbers were so great that they optimistically thought that in a year they would be able to raise up their own king and appoint their own courts. At the same time, allegations of witchcraft by the state also provided an opportunity and justification for their own political and judicial expansion, with the secular judge Peter of Bern seeking to extend his city’s judicial reach into the Alpine hinterland, or Tholosan working on behalf of the French crown in the independent Dauphiné.

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With the exception of Nider’s relatively well duplicated Anthill, the texts here survive in just a few copies, or are, so far, entirely unique. The true value of Origins of the Witches’ Sabbath is that despite their centrality in the forging of the image of the diabolical sabbath, these five texts have not previously received complete translations into English, appearing only in scattered form and often as brief excerpts. Bailey acknowledges a debt to Martine Ostorero, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Kathrin Utz Tremp, and Catherine Chène’s L’imaginaire du sabbat, which brought these five texts together in a modern French translation in 1999. It is from their work that he bases the bulk of his translation, though he does diverge from their template, replacing an excerpt from the fourth book of Martin le Franc’s poem Le Champion des Dames with The Vauderie of Lyon, and choosing to include only some of Tholosan’s So That the Errors of Magicians and Witches Might Be Made Evident to Ignorant People, limiting the translation to the first section and avoiding the “long slog” of dense legalese that is the rest.

Bailey does an admirable job of noting the similarities and differences across these five accounts in an introductory chapter that considers how each one deals with, elaborates or minimises various elements of the Sabbath narrative: demonic assemblies, night flights and revels, entering the Devil’s service, cannibalism and infanticide, as well as a dual discussion of sex and gender. He then builds upon this introduction with individual prefaces before each text, giving further background about their provenance, biographies of their author, when known, and other information of interest.

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On the whole there are remarkable through lines that permeate these texts, speaking to concerns that were obviously at the forefront of people’s mind at the time. The most striking of these is a profoundly corporeal focus, with the writers turning time and again to bodies (particularly those of children) and their destruction. The theme of infanticide and its attendant cannibalism is found in all of the accounts, proving more popular than ideas of night flights to the sabbat or even pacts with the devil, and it is rendered in a purple prurience that recalls the fantasies of 80s era Satanic Panic and more contemporary gibberish about diabolical paedophile pizza parlours. Nider reported that thirteen babies had been devoured by presumably very hungry witches in a relatively short time, while Errors of the Gazarii stated that all new witches had to pledge to the devil to kill as many children as they could and bring their corpses to the Sabbath to be roasted or boiled. Fründ repeated similar claims but added an extra element worthy of modern urban legend and moral panics, describing how witches would smear poisonous material on their hands and secretly touch children, causing them to wither away. Perhaps the most visceral account of corporeal anatomisation comes from Errors of the Gazarii but for once doesn’t involve children, and instead tells how witches would find a redheaded person, strip him naked and bind him to a bench to be bitten all over by venomous animals. Like a scene from a death metal album, once dead, the unfortunate redhead was hung from his feet so that impurities and poisons flowed from his mouth and other orifices and could be collected in a bowl to be turned into a deadly unguent. Fun times.

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Other than this exercise in body horror, perhaps the most intriguing element found in these accounts is the varying description of the devil. For Fründ, the devil appeared as various black animals such as a bear or a ram, but also in a terrible evil form, which Tholosan appears to echo when describing how the devil appears as a man but partially translucent. This numinous, almost wondrous and Luciferian incarnation of the devil had a body like glass that would not block the sun and would cast no shadow, suggesting a being whose ephemerality is the one thing that diverges from the fleshly, corporeal concerns of these sabbat accounts. It is The Vauderie of Lyon that takes the monstrosity of the devil to an excessive degree, describing a figure whose chimeric syncretism piles one horror upon the other, making him sound more like a sabbatic Gruffalo instead of a classic horned god. While Julia Donaldson’s creation may have “terrible tusks, and terrible claws, and terrible teeth in his terrible jaws… knobbly knees, and turned-out toes and a poisonous wart at the end of his nose. His eyes are orange, his tongue is black, he has purple prickles all over his back,” the devil of Lyon is a horned black figure covered with hair and bristles, with bulging and rolling eyes that emit flames, ears that are likewise fiery, a large crooked nose, a gaping mouth, an elongated neck, a chest and belly that are “inconceivably deformed,” hands and feet that end in terrible claws, and hooks and long spikes running up and down his hands and arms. It’s not clear if, like the Gruffalo, this devilish creature’s favourite food was owl ice cream or scrambled snake, though the author of The Vauderie of Lyon does not seem to recommend the dining options at his demonic table, with slimy meat and a black and heavy bread, all washed down with “a certain black, tasteless and horrible beverage.”

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The two witch trials records that conclude this volume act as germane examples of how the evidence presented could be incorporated into the published sabbatic narratives; or how the latter could have influenced the content of the former. They are by no means as detailed as the published texts, but familiar elements appear here and there, with suggestions of infanticide, miraculous transportation to the sabbat, and both ritualised and everyday repudiations of the cross and Christ.

Origins of the Witches’ Sabbath would be an invaluable resource if it simply brought together its English translations of these important texts, but Bailey’s editorial voice adds so much more, combining erudition and familiarity of the subject matter with a clear love of the field and even the occasional spark of humour. Recommended on both accounts.

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