The Element Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Complete A–Z for the Entire Magical World
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This is the definition of Books of Shadows as taught by Gerald Gardner, who claimed to have learned of the tradition when he was initiated into a long-secret coven. Gardner wrote his own Book of Shadows together with Doreen Valiente and Aleister Crowley, and this book is among the bedrock on which Gardnerian Wicca is formed.
Since Gardner, Books of Shadows are an integral part ofWiccan religion, manifesting in various ways.
In this sense Books of Shadows transcend spells. They are books of ritual. If one belongs to a specific spiritual or witchcraft tradition, this sacred book is where the laws, rituals, spells, and crucial information of that tradition are written.
This notion of the historical Book of Shadows grounded in the witch-hunts is controversial. Academics specializing in witchcraft often object to it, convinced it didn’t exist. Many believe Gerald Gardner created the concept himself and only claimed that the tradition was old, similar in fashion to the way grimoires authored in the eighteenth century claim to be based on ancient manuscripts. Because so few ancient magical or Pagan texts survived, it’s impossible to verify—or disprove—these claims.
Scholarly objection stems mainly from the fact that the type of witch Gardner describes tends to be female and is generally believed to be at best functionally illiterate. However, this is assumption and incredibly difficult to prove, one way or another.
Witch-trial records do show that when witches were burned, books were burned with them. However because the books were burned there is little if any evidence of what was burned. It’s an old political trick: first burn the evidence, then say the evidence didn’t exist. And maybe it didn’t. Maybe the scholars are right. But maybe they’re wrong—at least some of the time. Secrets have a way of emerging from the shadows: one historical reference survives. According to seventeenth-century Venetian Inquisition records, charges of witchcraft were levied against a woman named Laura Malipero. When the agents of the Inquisition searched her home they discovered a copy of the banned grimoire The Key of Solomon, together with a private, hand-written book of spells and rituals into which Laura had copied portions of that classical grimoire. Laura Malipero was obviously not illiterate. Her handwritten book fulfills Gerald Gardner’s concept of the individual witch’s Book of Shadows and straddles the fine line between them and medieval grimoires.
And whether Gerald Gardner or someone else made up the notion of Books of Shadows may be irrelevant; it is a beautiful tradition. The completed books (and some are never complete, perpetual works in progress) are beautifully embellished works of art, power, magic, and spirituality. Some are written in magical scripts; some are illustrated. No two are exactly alike.
Wiccan Books of Shadows are traditionally kept secret. Many covens administer an oath of secrecy to initiates. You have to enter and commit yourself to that twilight world of shadows to gain access.
In 1971, the American Wiccan Lady Sheba (Jessie Wicker Bell, died March 25, 2002) was the first to publish an entire Book of Shadows, under the title Lady Sheba’s Book of Shadows. Lady Sheba was a pioneer of Wicca as a public religion. She was among the first to officially register her religion as Wicca at a time when many people were ignorant of Wicca and associated it with Satanism. (The United States armed forces now acknowledges Wicca as a religious option, something not afforded to various Native American or African-derived spiritual traditions.)
Lady Sheba’s Book of Shadows was published to tremendous interest but also tremendous animosity. By publishing her personal Book of Shadows Lady Sheba ignited a firestorm, not from outsiders but from within the Wicca community. Many felt betrayed and believed that she had violated her oath of secrecy. She was accused of making precious spiritual secrets public. (This was a time when comparatively few metaphysical works of any sort were published.)
In addition, many misunderstood the concept of a Book of Shadows being a compilation of earlier material and traditions. Because her Book of Shadows was published under her name, many accused her of claiming to be the author of the material in her book, some of which was traditional. However, other material in her book had been composed by Doreen Valiente, Gerald Gardner’s High Priestess and co-author of Gardner’s Book of Shadows. Because it was never entirely clear exactly how much of Gardner’s material was old and traditional, and hence in the public domain, and how much was created to fulfill the needs of a new spiritual tradition, various issues of copyright infraction, on the ethical level if not also on the legal, were raised.
Lady Sheba’s response to this controversy and the hostility engendered was that the time of secrecy was over and that she had never claimed that the material was original. She was merely passing on the Gardnerian tradition as she had received it. The book remains in print. It is not a book of magic spells but of Wiccan ritual and theology.
Dream-books
Dreams are often understood to contain encoded symbolic meaning. The problem inevitably is cracking the code. Dream-books are guides that allegedly help you do just that. It is an ancient genre that retains its popularity today. The concept is found around the world.
Dream-books aren’t psychological studies of dreams; instead they’re mainly tables of interpretations. If you dream of something, what does it really mean? They’re books of codes. For instance, if your head turns in a dream, this might indicate a change of location in your future. Eventually dream-books began to fulfill another important purpose: treasure hunting. It was believed (and still frequently is) that your dreams hold the clue to your fortune. Any dream symbol can be assigned a number; if you’ve got the right numbers, you might just win the lottery. The implication is that everyone has the right numbers although only a few can decipher them and put them to good use.
Although dream-books do not evoke the hostility of spell-books or grimoires, they were greatly discouraged by the Christian authorities during the Middle Ages. (Later on, they’d just be disparaged as foolishness and superstition.) Games of chance derive originally from sacred arts and it is a very small step from believing numbers are imbedded in your dreams to appreciating that benevolent guardian spirits placed them there. In fact, various Italian and Chinese spells invoke spirits to help provide winning numbers.
In a dream-book all components of a dream, anything envisioned or experienced, is assigned a number. For example, according to Aunt Sally’s Policy Players Dream Book and Wheel of Fortune should you encounter a woman named Clara in your dreams (or even just see or hear the name) you might want to play 13, 36 or 42. Everything may be assigned a number and the better books are quite comprehensive, inventive, and fun.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, inexpensive Hoodoo-oriented publications were marketed with romantic titles like The Mystic Oracle or The Gypsy Dream Book and Fortune-teller. Many were sold in conjunction with dream incense. The incense was burned before bedtime to stimulate clairvoyant dreams and then the book would help you figure them out. Aunt Sally’s Policy Players Dream Book, published in the 1890s and still in print, features a cover illustration of a thin gap-toothed black woman with gypsy-style earrings pointing to some lucky numbers with a knowing look. The implication is that she is a conjure woman; she wears a head wrap tied to display horns of power. Aunt Sally’s and many other modern dream-books oriented toward the hoodoo trade are believed to incorporate material from much older sources.
Grimoires
In 1277, the Archbishop of Paris issued a condemnation of “books, rolls or booklets containing necromancy or experiments of sorcery, invocation of demons or conjuration of demons, or conjurations hazardous for souls.” In other words, grimoires.
The term “grimoire” is the name given to the genre of books of magic spells and rituals. Grimoire is a French word and is most usually pronounced “grim-wahr.”
Variants exist in other languages like Latin (grimorium) or Spanish (grimorio) although an English variant does not exist, the French version being used instead. In general, the grimoires were a European phenomenon. Many of the classical grimoires weren’t translated into English until well into the nineteenth century (S. L. MacGregor Mathers, founding member of the Golden Dawn, is responsible for some of the earliest translations).
The closest English word to grimoire is “grammar,” meaning a textbook or, more specifically, an instructive manual teaching correct construction of language. At their simplest, grammars are spelling books and so are grimoires. They just teach different spelling skills.
The first thing one must understand about grimoires, if one wants to understand the genre at all, is that they were illegal. These aren’t merely textbooks of magic and magical ritual; they’re forbidden textbooks; to be precise, forbidden texts of forbidden practices. Back in the Middle Ages, if you were caught with a magical book, punishment was dire. You’d be arrested and arrest almost inevitably led to torture. Oh, you could confess voluntarily to every charge but it gained you little. It wouldn’t earn you a faster, more painless death because voluntary confession was rarely enough. Inquisitors were convinced that arrested witches and sorcerers were always hiding something; it was in the nature of witches to be cleverly evasive and secretive. So they’d torture you until they deemed that what you confessed under pain, terror, and duress was sufficient. Only then would you be burned alive with your magical book at your feet, lest you forgot what got you into this mess in the first place. The book prominently displayed and burned was also a warning to others to stay away at all costs from forbidden texts. There are very excellent reasons why until recently you couldn’t openly buy any sort of magical work in a regular bookstore.
Historically, however, no matter how many have been willing to kill for a forbidden book of magic or spirituality, many more have been willing to risk their lives and die for these books and the knowledge they contain.
Grimoires are based on awareness of how precious and endangered magical and spiritual traditions were and how difficult they were to access. Persecution of witches and the destruction of their books pre-date Christianity. Roman authority, although pagan, feared and wished to suppress magical information; they destroyed works by the thousands too.
There were always people, however, who regretted this loss and attempted to forestall and prevent it, albeit usually secretly. Fragments, pieces and individual pages of these magical texts were saved and preserved. Those who had read them sometimes attempted to recreate them. A black market for these invaluable suppressed magical texts soon sprang up, as did forgeries.
Magical texts, even in fragments were treasured. People copied them by hand from other people’s copies. These copies, each perhaps slightly different, were circulated and copied again and again.
Few knew what to expect from these books because by definition they were scarce and mysterious. Few could understand or even read them: many texts were in archaic or unrecognizable scripts. Some are written in obscure foreign languages. And for a population that was largely illiterate, perhaps any writing is obscure and mysterious. Those little details didn’t stop people from copying them and making attempts at translation. Some early manuscripts are written in several languages at once; your speculation as to why is as good as anyone else’s. As to whether these manuscripts were authentic or whether translations were anywhere near accurate, there was rarely anyone to ask. Even if there was someone, who could trust that that person wouldn’t inform the Inquisition of your curiosity, especially if they’re arrested and tortured themselves?
The results of these hand-written magical manuscripts are the medieval grimoires. Pretty much across the board, they’re a garbled mess. Some are believed based upon genuinely ancient magical texts. Others may contain fragments of these texts, while still others may be forgeries, written to discredit sorcerers or despised ethnic groups or just to earn small fortunes on the black market. Some are a combination of all of the above.
Grimoires as we know them began to appear in the twelfth century. Authorship is generally unknown. New editions were made by handcopying old ones at great personal risk. It is a dream-like genre. Books were written in code, so that only adepts could understand what they were really saying. Some grimoires are attributed to famous names from the past like King Solomon, Albertus Magnus, and various occult masters. (Many are largely cribbed from the works of Cornelius Agrippa although this is rarely acknowledged.) Inevitably attributed authors are long dead and gone for obvious reasons: dead men tell no tales; dead men can’t be prosecuted for witchcraft. Did these famous authors write the entire grimoire? Definitely not. Did they write some or any of the book? Maybe. It can’t be conclusively determined.
In general, with few exceptions, these books are compilations of materials from varied sources, often reflecting very different and even contradictory traditions. Some may be “made up”—an attempt to gouge money from book collectors. Sometimes however even in a book that seems 99 percent invented, a glimmer of genuine occult wisdom suggests that at some point something was real.
For a living person to actually take credit for authoring a grimoire would have been tantamount to suicide, so inevitably they are always “found” manuscripts. An old trunk was opened and an old book discovered within. Or more frequently the story is that someone was minding their own business when a mysterious stranger handed them the text and disappeared. Are these stories true? Maybe. Books were hidden away in chests; someone transporting an illegal magical text probably wouldn’t stop for a chat, tell you where they came from or give you enough information to find them later. On the other hand, maybe these mysterious stories are the required excuses needed for possession of a magical book, or maybe the person telling the story was really the one who first produced the book.
The exclusively male orientation of this genre may be appreciated when one considers that magical books are attributed to Enoch, the Angel Raziel, the Egyptian deity Thoth, and the master magician King Solomon as well as his arch-rival, the master demon Asmodeus. Even a pope is credited with a grimoire. Why then are there no grimoires attributed to such legendary sorceresses as Isis, Circe, Medea or Morgan le Fay?
Grimoires frequently begin with an explanation of who wrote them, where, and why. Conjurers inevitably conjure up glamorous pasts and reputations for themselves. They were trave-ling in Egypt; they met a holy man in India. Are these stories true? Maybe.
The printing press was invented and popularized in Europe during the era of witch-hunting. Magical texts remained forbidden and illegal, however the new technology offered the possibility of making these texts more accessible. After the invention of the printing press, grimoires were published and circulated in secret. Surviving classical grimoires seem to have been printed and standardized between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries although they preserve older material within their pages, although by the time a work was published in a standard edition, it often bore little relation to the original manuscript upon which it was based.
Several versions of the same book may exist, frequently in different languages. It may be impossible to determine which was published first or whether all derive from a now missing source.
Medieval grimoires are in general not books of practical magic. They reflect the predilections, needs, and desires of their intended readers: educated male sorcerers, many with a background in Christian theology.
The grimoires were inspired by various sources. Any one grimoire may include spells and rituals based on one or more of the following:
In general the grimoires emphasize a school of magic known as Ceremonial Magic or High Ritual magic. Further details explaining this school of sorcery may be found in MAGICAL ARTS: Commanding and Compelling. However, the basic premise is that the magician attempts, via a series of often lengthy rituals, to summon spiritual beings and command them to perform various actions on their behalf.
There are three components to this style of magic:
1 Spirits, frequently identified as demons, must be summoned or compelled to come to you.
2 Once you have them, you have to tell them what to do and enforce their compliance.
3 Finally, at the appropriate moment the spirits must be banished or compelled to leave.
The orientation is almost exclusively male. Angels and demons are summoned but not to reveal spiritual secrets, or at least not for the sake of mere knowledge. They’re called upon to locate treasure or forcibly deliver the woman (frequently someone else’s wife) who’s already rejected you. There is relatively little herbal magic (some grimoires contain remedies, although these tend not to be practical or based on established herbal medicine), which was considered the province of women. Sorcerers weren’t interested in this type of magic. Instead, grimoires are handbooks of magic for personal satisfaction, often rooted in selfish desire, rather than for the magical worker who serves her community.
As a whole, the medieval grimoires are not representative of modern witchcraft practices, Wiccan or otherwise. Those who are unfamiliar with them will likely be shocked. To describe them as mean spirited is an understatement (however this is true of many old magical documents, especially surviving texts from Alexandria). Although few if any are literally diabolical, many advocate brutal animal cruelty, magical rape, theft, and murder.
The most important surviving manuscripts from the Middle Ages and Renaissance are preserved in the British Museum in London and the Arsenal Library in Paris.
A sampling of the most famous grimoires follows. Also included in this list are a few books that are not medieval grimoires but were consciously written to follow in the tradition.
Aradia or The Gospel of the Witches
Although Aradia or The Gospel of the Witches is a relatively modern book devoted to magic and witchcraft, it is surrounded by an aura of mystery and controversy as powerful as that of any medieval grimoire.
Charles Godfrey Leland (August 15, 1824–March 20, 1903), who is credited as Aradia’s author, was an American folklorist, author, and journalist, and a respected authority on magic and witchcraft. A wealthy, cultured, well-traveled man, he went to Italy where he employed fortune-tellers and witches to serve as sources and teach him about their traditions. Leland came to believe that Italian witchcraft was deeply rooted in ancient Etruscan and Roman traditions. When he heard rumours about a mysterious manuscript setting forth the ancient doctrines of Italian witchcraft, Leland was determined to obtain it.
Among his sources was a fortune-teller named Maddelena whom he allegedly met in 1886 when he began employing her as a source. He nagged her to help him find this manuscript and, eventually, apparently she did. (How much he pressured her is subject to debate. Leland paid his sources; whether what they told him and brought him was true or was intended to please a wealthy patron is also subject to debate.)
Maddelena brought Leland the manuscript that would serve as the basis for Aradia or The Gospel of the Witches on New Year’s Day, 1897. It was not an ancient manuscript. An older version (or any other version) of Aradia has never been found. Nor did Maddelena bring him the original but had copied it in her own hand, similar to the tradition of Books of Shadows and of medieval grimoires. Leland himself confessed that he did not know how much of Maddelena’s handwritten manuscript was copied from another book and how much was based on oral traditions.
Having delivered the manuscript, Maddelena disappeared. Leland never saw her again, nor was he ever able to produce her in order to verify his story. He translated the Italian manuscript. Aradia is mainly devoted to the deity Diana, Queen of the Witches. It describes a version of her mythology and also includes a compendium of charms, spells, incantations, rituals, and folk magic. Leland added a commentary and published the work in London in 1899. (The part that he claims is derived from Maddelena’s manuscript is in Italian with an English translation; Leland’s own additions are solely in English.)