Grimoire Armadel. Actual title: Liber Armadel seu totius cabalae perfectissima brevissima et infallabilis scientia tam speculativa quam practiqua
Translation (Latin): The Book of Armadel, or the whole Cabala, a most perfect, brief, and infallible science, both speculative and practical
It has long been a dream of mine to publish the Grimoire Armadel with all the additional elements and restructuring needed to make it a completely usable grimoire. I would consider it to be the highest achievement amongst all the books I have published and will publish. I decided this last autumn to try to make this dream a reality. Mathers had translated this manuscript from around 1897 through 1899, when he submitted the Book of Abramelin to be published, but this work was never published until around 1980, when his various papers and manuscripts were supposedly acquired by Gerald Yorke, and he and Frances King published a hardcover edition with an introduction through the publisher Samuel Weiser. A later edition, published in 2001, by Weiser, had a soft cover and an introduction by William Keith.
Here is a link to the edition that was published by Weiser.
First and foremost, I wanted to find an original digital copy of this manuscript from the Arsenal Library in Paris, France, to begin my work. I didn’t have a clue how to go about requesting that file, and a friend and neighbor said she would try to help me out, since she was an accredited academic. She was, unfortunately, not successful. The reason why I wanted a digital copy is to validate and verify the work that Mathers did, and to what else might be lurking in the pages. I also felt that what was published was either missing some parts, or was structured in some peculiar manner that made it difficult to use as a working grimoire. While I had extracted some seals from the grimoire to use in my gateway icons, and I found them to be very powerful indeed, I felt a strong desire to get the original manuscript, since it had some mysteries that I wanted to resolve.
As for the manuscript, the original version was likely written in the early to middle 17th century, likely part of a family of German Faustian grimoires, which was the veritable golden age of magical grimoires. The actual manuscript that I was looking for in the Arsenal Library was a translated copy penned in the late 17th century and was supposedly confiscated by the famous and first Lieutenant General of the Paris Police (Gabriel Nicholas de la Reynie) who led a purge of cunning folk, alchemists, poisoners, divinators, diabolists, abortionists, and sooth-sayers from the Paris area, who made it a business catering to the gullible whims and dark fancies of the upper class men and women attending the King's court in Versailles.
This pogrom was triggered by the notorious and infamous Affair of the Poisons scandal (1677) that rocked the court of Louie XIV. De la Reyine, as head of the police, aggressively pursued this perceived social menace for several years, so it went on for seven years until it quietly ended in 1684. It was, in many ways, a kind of Witchcraft persecution, since most of the victims were women, accused of heresy and poisoning, and several were burned as such. I believe that this grimoire was likely part of the larger confiscated hoard that these cunning folk possessed, and they ended up in the possession of de la Reyine. Additionally, De la Reynie's large collection of books, which contained many costly and rare papers and manuscripts written in Greek and Latin, were later purchased by d’Argenson (who became the next Lieutenant General of Police) another wealthy book collector, and that massive library ultimately ended up in the Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal collection, and then into the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BNF).
No other version of this grimoire has turned up amongst the collections and libraries examined by academics who now are studying this literature. While it is rumored that there might be a German copy in some other place or location, which is possible, it has not appeared amongst any of the writings or reports from those academics who are studying them. It might be that the original German version was lost or destroyed. I believe that there are other copies or versions of this grimoire yet to be discovered, but none have surfaced so far. Since the Armadel was only known to a few French antiquarians and occultists like Mathers, it had little notoriety, Since a translated version only appeared in 1980, it likely that this obscure grimoire may exist in other libraries or collections and fail to be noticed by academics. However, a companion manuscript in the same set of book in the Arsenal Library, the Book of Abramelin, was found to exist in German, and it was an earlier and more complete copy than the French version. Some authors have commented that the tradition of the Armadel has more affinity to German grimoires than the French versions, and others have disagreed.
I have written a blog article about this grimoire and you can find it here.
So, to continue with my story, I was at a loss on how to find this manuscript. I searched the internet, but was not able to find any mention of the actual source. I found out that much of the Arsenal library had been digitized and was part of the BNF collection, but looking for it seemed like a fool's errand, since I found that the public face of the online BNF was not very helpful, especially for someone who doesn't speak French. I only lucked out when I had adjusted my web search to Liber Armadel (instead of the Grimoire Armadel) and found this web page, which had the BNF documents hyperlinked. It was a review written by Dan Harms (Papers Falling from an Attic Window) of the book Editions du Monolithe edition of the Armadel, although it was called Liber Armadel in the text.
Curiously, the manuscript number that I possessed was incorrect, and the link in the article shows two manuscripts as the source and not one, as I had originally thought. These are the BNF manuscript numbers MS #826 and MS# 2494. I then proceeded to download these two large PDF files of the BNF manuscripts, just as anyone else could do. These two manuscripts were available to the public without any kind of protection, other than a copyright disclaimer embedded in the documents, and pages of the manuscripts were stamped with the Arsenal imprint.
What I discovered is that the source of Mather’s translation consisted of two manuscripts and not one. MS #826 contains just the Liber Armadel with four pages of text added after the manuscript end vignette, the text of which was never translated. These I set out to translate them myself with my rudimentary skills, but my wife used ChatGPT to translate them from the cursive straight into English. That astonished me, but I am not very trusting or willing to rely on that approach and I wanted to find someone who has the time and can read French and Latin to help me. The other manuscript contains the Liber Armadel grimoire in the first set of pages, but the rest of the manuscript contains another lengthy ad hoc grimoire not associated with the Armadel material.
No one knows who the author or authors of the Aramdel were, nor what was the original source text, but the manuscripts appear to have been professionally scribed by local artisans for a fee. Still, I could imagine that the manuscripts had once belonged to Abbe Etienne Guibourg, or maybe Adam Lesage, two men out of the 32 mostly women who were the primary victims of the prosecution. Guibourg was a corrupted, debauched, and defrocked priest who reputedly performed several black mass rites; Lesage was the magician and spell caster of the accused group. These individuals were part of the informal group that the principle suspect, called La Voisin (Catherine DeShayes), ran as a profitable underground business. They, unlike many of the women, were not executed, but lived the rest of their lives imprisoned through the legal artifice “lettre de cachet.”
I have already started examining the manuscripts, and as I stated, translated the four pages after the end of the Armadel MS #826, and I have carefully looked over that text and found some remarkable things. The last four pages of this book were never translated by Mathers in his manuscript, which was published finally in 1980. The amazing great seal of the Uriel Operation was published, but not the accompanied text. Of course, all this appears after the end of the book, and it was not deemed important enough for Mathers to translate and include in his book. That omission turned out to be an incredible mistake, since those four pages in MS # 826, (129 - 132), contained the whole key to the grimoire. As it turned out, those four pages, translated by AI, were the key to the whole grimoire, and that surprised me. I am sure that it will astonish my readers as well, since this is the key that unlocks the process of activating the grimoire. I will keep that article from the public for now, but it will be an important part of my own rendition of this grimoire.
By a most curious turn of events, I have managed to teamed up with a French translator, Eric Gazano, who also happens to be a French national and lives just outside of Marseilles. We met on my author's Facebook page, where he introduced himself. I have shared the two online documents with him, and we have shared messages with each other. I won't be using ChatGPT to translate the manuscripts. That was just a one-time deal, and what it translated will be checked over by Eric. There isn't actually a lot of translation work to be done, because Mathers did a respectable job of translating the two manuscripts, at least the Liber Armadel part. Also, the second manuscript has a lot more material that is completely outside of the my target grimoire, which is of doubtful interest to me.
Here is one of the books that Eric has published.
Still, I want to compare the two manuscripts with the English translation that Mathers has done, looking for any text that was omitted that would be useful for building a modern grimoire. That is my sole purpose to writing this book. However, MS #2494 is a full grimoire manuscript with Armadel enclosed within it, but additionally, it has many pages of untranslated and never published material. There is obviously two different hands writing this larger book, and some of the pages in the middle are very difficult to read because the ink has faded so badly. I have told Eric that translating and publishing this unknown material would impress the English occult audience, thus making the contents of MS #2494 more accessible. I promised to get him some needed contacts to do this task, and some of my friends could help as well.
One question that I do have is what sections from the two manuscripts were used by Mathers to produce his manuscript, or if only MS #826 was the sole source as some have speculated, and that's where a translator will come in handy. We can also see if Mathers made any translation mistakes or omissions, and where the two manuscripts differ from each other. I am not able to pay Eric for his work, since he has the option of translating the bulk of the second volume, which has a hundred or more extra pages of an eclectic period grimoire to examine, translate and publish if he wishes. I will put his name on the future book as the translator when it is published, and give him some useful PR, and help him publish his work in the U.S., depending on what he has to offer. Getting publishers to publish occult books in France these days without academic credentials is tough for someone who doesn't have the right connections, unlike the U.S. in that regard. At least that is what Eric has told me during our conversations.
My plan is to take the translation that Mathers has already made, including material that he did not include in his work, and produce a modern magical grimoire that can be used by pagans, witches and ceremonial magicians in the English speaking world. Right now, the translated book that was first published in 1980, and later, a second publisher came out with a new version that was practically the same. Both were eminently fascinating, but was not very usable. In other words, it requires someone to develop a methodology for working magic with the incredible seals found in that book. So, it not only requires translating and deciphering, but also organizing and structuring so that it fits into a modern system of magic. I have my work cut out for me.
All of these occurrences, discovering PDFs of the manuscripts online, connecting with Eric, and getting a lot of support from my publishers seems to be telling me that now is the time for me to start working on this project. This is so exciting and it will be one of my life's long ambitions to publish a workable version of the Liber Armadel for English speaking occultists and magical practitioners.
Here and here are the links to the two BNF manuscripts:
Frater Barrabas
