Beginning
Conjuration and Spirit Magic pt 1: Books
A
few months
back a brother from a neighboring body reached out to ask for
recommendations for people looking to get into conjuring spirits and
grimoire magic. Rather than give a simple quick answer I figured it
would make more sense to put together a list of book recommendations
and post them because others might benefit from it too. Unfortunately
for the last couple
months
some stuff has gotten in the way of blogging for the most part, so
I'm a little behind, but we're going to get started...with that book
list. In thinking on it though, there's other stuff we can talk about
than just books. So we'll do a few posts going over some practices
and skills as well.
In
thinking about what books to read you probably want to also think
about what kinds of spirits you want to conjure as well as what
skills you'll need to develop to work with them. A lot of basic
beginner magic books don't really teach traditional magic or the
worldview or practices involved therein. Instead
they teach
stuff
like developing
mental awareness, capability scrying, an understanding of
correspondences, the elements, talisman construction, and basic
ritual techniques. While a lot of elements of modern magic are used
for different purposes and in different contexts than in traditional
magic, a grounding in modern magic can be useful.
Israel
Regardie's Tree of Life, and The Golden Dawn, along with Crowley's
Liber E, and Liber O will provide a lot of the basic modern
foundation that you'll find useful. Norman Kraft's Ogdoadic Magic
will give a bit more accessible approach to describing modern magic.
More to the end of developing as a ritual magician, and one which I
enjoyed as a teenager, is Steve Savedow's Magician's Workbook. Steve
also wrote a book on modern Goetia based on working with the Goetia
of Solomon, and released an edition of Sepher Raziel HeMalach. So his
approach to Golden Dawn style magic was at least focused towards the
kind of ritual magic that fit a Golden Dawn interpretation of the
grimoires, even if some of his interpretations of spirit work aren't
perfectly aligned with traditional magic.
As
for actually looking into spirit conjure work or the grimoires...
Angel
Magic by Geoffrey James (who also released Enochian Evocation of Dr.
John Dee) was a significant influence on me
as a teenager. His book is a survey of ideas and history surrounding
the conjuration of angels. It introduced me to understanding some of
the mechanics of talismanic work that I later found described more
fully in alchemical philosophy and the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.
This book won't teach you to conjure spirits but it will introduce
some useful ideas and stories.
For
more on gaining a grounding in the ideas and ideological context of
grimoire work, the books in the Magic in History Series are
incredibly useful. With these it really depends on how deep you want
to get into exploring grimoire tradition and the history of magic as
to how many of these you should read. If you mostly want to get into
practice, I'd recommend checking one of these out, preferably one
containing a grimoire, but you probably don't need more than that. If
you want to develop a full sense of how grimoire magic developed and
various forms of traditional magic, exploring as many of these
history books as you can would make sense.
Some
options for Magic in History books...
Forbidden
Rites by Richard Kieckhefer
Ritual
Magic by Elizabeth Butler
Conjuring
Spirits by Claire Fanger et al
Invoking
Angels by Claire Fanger et al
For
books for actually developing as a grimoire magician...
1.
4th
Book of Occult Philosophy by Agrippa et al, edited by Stephen
Skinner
The book is not actually a sequel to three books of occult philosophy. Most of it is not written by Agrippa. On Magical Ceremonies may have been written by him and is largely a practical summation of the information provided in Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Three Books of Occult Philosophy essentially presents the system of magical thought from the grimoire period, but it is a pretty large book and takes a lot to get through. If you want to get started, On Magical Ceremonies is a lot more accessible.
The
collection also contains The Heptameron and The Arbatel. I definitely
would recommend the Heptameron as a baseline for looking at the
grimoires. It contains a lot of the grimoire orations and
conjurations which appear in other popular grimoires. It presents a
lot of important correspondences for spirit magic which also show up
in later texts.
The
Arbatel is one of the simplest approaches to spirit magic. The
Olympic Spirits are powerful and interesting spirits. They also are
very eager to work with magicians who approach them correctly. There
really isn't ritual or tools or a ton of correspondences involved.
Work with the Olympic spirits could be one of the easiest ways to get
started.
2.
The Magical Calendar
The
Magical Calendar includes a lot of correspondences used in the
grimoire tradition broken down into numerical tables. Three Books of
Occult Philosophy contains similar tables, which are more extensive,
in Book Two. These correspondences can help you with picking spirits
with which to work, or determining how the various spirits relate to
each other and to various situations and times and locations.
3.
A Treatise on Angel Magic by Dr. Rudd edited by Adam MacLean or The
Keys to the Gateway of Magic by Dr. Rudd edited by Skinner and
Rankine
These texts collect together manuscripts by the somewhat mysterious Dr. Rudd. Rudd most likely was around a generation or so after Dr. John Dee. Like Agrippa and the Magical Calendar Rudd's work explains many correspondences useful in medieval/renaissance spirit magic. It also has Rudd explaining various concepts of magic such as talismans and image magic, explaining various types of spirits, various symbols of astrological magic and other similar topics. Rudd also presents info on spirits less commonly addressed in modern approaches to spirit magic, and he is a good example of linking Scholastic Image Magic with Grimoiric Ritual Magic. Rudd's work also includes Rudd's own grimoire and his approach to blending Enochian material into grimoire magic.
These texts collect together manuscripts by the somewhat mysterious Dr. Rudd. Rudd most likely was around a generation or so after Dr. John Dee. Like Agrippa and the Magical Calendar Rudd's work explains many correspondences useful in medieval/renaissance spirit magic. It also has Rudd explaining various concepts of magic such as talismans and image magic, explaining various types of spirits, various symbols of astrological magic and other similar topics. Rudd also presents info on spirits less commonly addressed in modern approaches to spirit magic, and he is a good example of linking Scholastic Image Magic with Grimoiric Ritual Magic. Rudd's work also includes Rudd's own grimoire and his approach to blending Enochian material into grimoire magic.
4. Art of Drawing Spirits into Crystals by Johannes Trithemius
This is a pretty short text which you can get online. This presents a very simply form of crystallomancy or conjuring a spirit into a crystal. It's based on working with the seven planetary spirits but the system can be used for any sort of spirits. It uses very few tools, and not a lot of rituals, just a few simple prayers. In particular it is a very good introduction to how an altar has specific elements for manifesting spirits in grimoire magic. For a lot of magicians this work inspires their standard means of working with spirits.
5. The Clavis or Key to the Magic of Solomon by Sibley and Hockley edited by Peterson
This book is pretty big and expensive. But it is fricken beautiful. It has images of the original manuscript pages, and these take up the bulk of the book. The manuscript pages have beautiful illustrations of the talismans and the book is printed on a really nice glossy paper. On the negative end, the actual “critical edition” of the text is only a very small portion of the otherwise huge book. That said, the book is essentially a pair of grimoires, with a handful of spirit conjure rituals sandwiched between them. The section by Sibley is very useful because unlike most grimoires which just collect prayers and descriptions of tools, Sibley is writing something halfway between a grimoire and a book about grimoire magic. Sibley was writing only a few generations before the occult revival that produced the Golden Dawn, so by this point books about magic, as opposed to simply books of magic, were starting to appear so Sibley gives a much more accessible series of instructions than we find in a lot of grimoires.
6. The Key of Solomon the King edited by S.L. MacGregor Mathers
This isn't the best version of the Key of Solomon available but it was the standard version everyone had for a long time. This was what I used for my first formal approach to spirit conjuration. It provides talismans for a lot of different purposes, and clear instructions for making tools and putting together your ritual. This is kind of the baseline of Solomonic instructions.
7. The Veritable Key of Solomon edited by Skinner and Rankine
This is probably the best version of the Key of Solomon currently available. This collects several different variants of the Key of Solomon. In addition to providing a full exposition of how to create the tools and how to do Solomonic Magic, but more importantly it provides several ritual instructions aside from the main conjuration method, and provides several different purposes for the system far beyond what one might generally connect with Solomonic magic at first consideration. It shows the breadth of Solomonic magic as a system.
So, in addition to these, again, I would recommend Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy. But don't let that slow you down in getting started. Read a handful of these, especially the ones that are easily accessible, and then start doing the work. As you do the work, keep studying and reading and expanding on how you work. Look into other traditional forms of magic like the Papyri Graeco-Magicae. Traditional Witchcraft, and traditional forms of European and Caribbean syncretic sorcery because these can also present ideas that are useful for consideration in spirit conjure and sorcery.
