My Problem With Grimoire Purists and Strict Traditionalists

"My wand is better than your wand!"

There seems to be a never ending argument between those who espouse the literal adaptation of Grimoires as they currently exist and those who follow a path of eclecticism, experimentation and creative adaptation. Neither point of view has any kind of absolute correctness or truth about it, because in many ways both approaches have their own virtues and failings. What bothers me about those who are strict followers of tradition and who declare that the old grimoires are the only pure source of magical lore is their smug certainty and absolutism. If someone wants to use the methodologies and tools as they are depicted in one or several of the old grimoires then that is wholly their own choice and personal obligation. If they honor a particular traditional path through their unstinting adherence to every detail and nuance then that is clearly their chosen path, and I say more power to them. However, the moment someone says that their path is the only legitimate way to practice ceremonial or ritual magick then they have completely lost me.

I have written about this issue in previous articles where I have discussed what I consider to be the actual issues facing anyone who wants to use one of the old grimoires. I have also talked about the obvious fracture in the community between those who are engaging in a creative adaptation against those who advocate a strict adherence to the old traditions. You can find those articles here and here.

The real issue here is whether the magic that one practices actually makes a difference in the life the magician. The core question is whether the magician is competent at working magic and that he or she can produce tangible and verifiable results through their magic. In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter if one is using a grimoire in an exacting and precise manner. It doesn’t matter that his or her magical tools are perfectly fashioned according to the dictates of the tradition or that the rites and liturgy employed are accurate and valid. What is important is whether the methods and tools employed by the magician are executed with the magician’s full intention, realization, and personal empowerment; that they ultimately produce the intended results.

What I have found in over 40 years of working magic and sharing lore with many magicians is that magic is a very individualized phenomenon. That magicians can employ many tools and techniques whether from traditional sources or modern inventions and still get the same comparable results. Whether the wand was made out of alchemical gold engraved with rare arcane symbols and glyphs or it was just an unusual stick found in the woods, the magic generated doesn’t seem to vary much. Esthetics are a good mechanism for refining tools and techniques, but still, a competent magician makes do with whatever he or she can afford to buy or make themselves. Just to make certain that my point is completely understood by everyone, esthetics, by itself, doesn’t produce better magic. There is no point in arguing how much better your wand is than someone else's, not to mention that it sounds a bit like grotesque posturing.

One of the more popular tropes going around these days is the grimoire-only purist or traditionalist approach to performing forms of spirit invocation and evocation. The argument goes something like that the magicians of the previous age knew what they were doing and the grimoires that they wrote represent a true tradition of magic, and that now, after centuries of neglect and omission, we should pick up what they unwittingly passed down to us and use that above all other methodologies or techniques to work magic. In fact, it has been implied that we would be better served if we tossed out all of the current magical lore collected over the last hundred years or so and started fresh with one of the more older grimoires.

It is believed by these pundits that the older grimoires represented a purer time when magic wasn’t so encumbered by the corruption and fallacies of our modern times. In fact, I have heard it said that the better magician is one who didn’t bother to learn any of the modern systems of magic. They say, start with one of the old grimoires and master it over time, and only then you will be guaranteed to be competent, powerful and masterful in all things. Well, that is the ideal, but in my humble opinion it falls quite short of producing the awesome results that some have said it would. Why is that? Is there something more to mastering magic than just mastering one of the old grimoires?

That is an important question, in my opinion. If you follow the supposed traditional lore, how could you possibly go wrong? Well, I believe that you would be missing quite a bit, since the culture and mind-set that produced that grimoire has long since vanished from our world. We can attempt to approximate that culture and mind-set, but then we are entering into the debatable world of reconstructionism instead of actually attempting to learn how to work magic in this current time and age. That is a problem, but it is only one of many problems.

The grimoires available to us today are translations from original manuscripts or in some cases, rare published documents. The manuscripts can include additional or appropriated materials not part of the archetypal original, and some of early published books are sometimes distillations of several manuscripts. The fact is that there wasn’t one definitive version of a grimoire. There were hundreds of variations of a specific titled grimoire, and many of these variations didn’t survive to the current age. What we have today is only a small fraction of the actual grimoires that were available to savants in the 16th and 17th centuries. We know this is true because the notables who collected books and had their own libraries often employed someone to compile lists of the books that they possessed, and these lists varied over time. From these lists of books library historians today have been able to determine that over one third of the books owned by notables in that time had something to do with the occult. (A smaller number were hard-core grimoires.)

So today, we have only a small portion of that written expertise, and from that small fraction of lore we are supposedly capable of reconstructing a culture and world-view that has been gone for over five centuries? It is hard enough to derive meaning and significance from occult books written in the 19th century. Attempting to do this with books written in academic Latin from the 16th century would be a daunting challenge. I know that I am not skilled enough to do this, and I doubt that most magical practitioners are either. A few of us might have this skill, but in the end, I think that it won’t make up for all of the missing cultural beliefs and the mind-set of the time. That, I believe, is lost to us forever, and it is one of the more important keys to being able to reconstruct the grimoire tradition from the previous age.

If reconstruction to that degree of viability isn’t possible then what is? It doesn’t matter what you do to learn how to practice magic nor does it matter what tradition or technique you use; you will have to spend a considerable amount of time developing, practicing and experimenting. It doesn’t matter how much material, knowledge, expertise you or your mentors might possess. In the end it is simply and clearly necessary for you to practice and experiment, and to do this intensively and consistently for a period of several years. Over time you will discover what works for you and what doesn’t work. You will discard things that are unworkable or clearly wrong and you will pick up ideas from your own experimentation or from books or other magicians. Your early years will be frustrating and you will likely experience many more failures than successes. Clearly, whatever intentions or ideals that you brought into this enterprise will change over time, and it is more likely that they will change quite a lot. When you finally build up a competent practice of magic, you might not even recognize the lore that you started out with.

What I am saying is that in order to master any system of magic you have to first learn how to practice it. Another important point is that each magician is tasked with developing a magical system that works for them, and this is, as I have said, an evolving process. I believe that we, as magicians, are tasked with making our magic relevant, workable and effective in this post-modern world that we live. We learn, we adapt and we evolve our own system of magic, even if we are engaged in a traditional path, or we are learning experientially by the seat of our pants. This is a process that has been a part of the regimen of learning and mastering the art of magic for a long time, and it has probably been that way since the very beginning or origin of magic itself.  

Therefore, with these important points in mind, it does seem foolish for someone to claim that all magicians must practice their magic using a specific approach or by adopting a methodology that was used in the previous age. What is important is engaging in a system of magic that works and is relevant to our current epoch. We can’t go back in time to try to determine how people thought, believed and practiced their magic back in the 16th century, so we might as well admit that our modern approach is to adapt, evolve and develop something that is actually new and different than what has been practiced in the past. I think that admitting this common approach to all forms of magical mastery is not only important, but it is also honest and inclusive. There are no absolute rules associated with a competent practice of magic and I think that chaos magicians have shown this to be abundantly clear.

That being said, if someone seeks to use one of the old grimoires then there will be some substitutions and adaptations that one will need to make in order to successfully perform the operations listed in it. Of course, this is where one’s own particular spiritual perspective comes into play. If you are a Christian then you will can take the prayers and the spiritual hierarchy found in the grimoires at face value. I do think that Christians who evoke demons and deal directly with the various Infernal Princes and Chiefs is likely compromising their faith, but that’s just my opinion. I am not a Christian nor a monotheist. Thus I wouldn’t approach any of these entities in the same supposedly hostile manner that adherents of the Abrahamic faith would have to in order to maintain their religious integrity. Giving offerings and making deals with various spirits is a necessary part of the magic that I do when fully engaged with the Spirit Model of magic.

However, I don’t have much spiritual affinity with Satan, the Devil, or any of the other many names that this entity has been labeled over the millennia. My religion doesn’t have an dualistic archenemy who must ultimately be vanquished, so I don’t believe in the Devil. I also don’t think that the name Lucifer signifies what either present day Christians and/or grimoire traditionalists believe that it signifies. As a Witch, I have reserved the name Lucifer to be understood using the actual Latin translation of “Light Bearer” and therefore would consider it to be an alternative name for the Sun God. When I encounter the name Lucifer or Lucifuge Rofocal in a grimoire, I am not convinced that the entity's name is synonymous with Satan. I also think that the name Beelzebub sounds kind of silly and I would have a hard time trying to summon that entity without laughing out loud, but I digress from my topic.

When it comes down to the names of the Infernal Princes, I find that these entities are more silly and childishly bugaboo than dark, evil, scary and awesome spiritual intelligences. Many would disagree with me on that particular point, and it is after all, just my opinion. Still, if these entities represent the kind of spirits that you want to engage then that is your business and it is none of my business. Just don’t tell me that what I am doing is not being true to the magic of the grimoires, or spirit magic writ large, if I happen to pass up dealing with those entities. If that is the basis to your magic then so be it. You can treat them like demigods or as hostile and evil intelligences, but it will not affect me nor what I do. We can just agree to not agree and move on with our collective work.  

One point that I will make about engaging with these entities as they were depicted and perceived in the 16th and 17th centuries and written about in the various contemporary black magic grimoires is that they seem to perpetuate and glorify what I believe to be the ignorance and superstitions of those times. To push this theme forward and to lionize it as an important part of the work with old grimoires is, in my opinion, perpetuating the vices and blindness of the previous age. I believe that what we should be doing is basing our work on a foundation of modern thinking and scholarship. We should not promote the superstitions and absurd notions of a previous age, however legitimate they might contextually seem to be. I think that those who have taken this approach would be better served if they instead questioned what is authentic and real in these books regarding our present post-modern world.

Once you have to actually work magic and engage with the spirits found in the old grimoires then you end up being schooled on what is real vs. what is legitimate. This is one of the many ongoing battles between pragmatic and creative practitioners of the magic and those who seem to have a more scholarly and reconstructive bent, but I think that there really isn’t any battle since both methods appear to produce useful and workable systems of magic. The difference is that no system of magic performed today by magicians is like what was practiced in the previous age.

Thus I feel that the snobbery of traditionalist, grimoire-only practitioners and purists is completely unwarranted and exaggerated. Their swagger and smugness is only a pretentious and shallow act hiding their obvious insecurity and likely incompetence. Let us not give them any more credence than what they actually deserve, which is none.

Frater Barrabbas

Some Issues Regarding Grimoire Magick

Persecution of Heresy - Beginning of the Great Divide Between the Old and Modern World

Every day there seems to be another grimoire manuscript that is being published by some high quality book publisher, and it would seem that the volume of published and available material hasn't in any way diminished the demand. It would appear that an important factor for the popularity of the old grimoires is vested in the magical idea that somehow we should emulate the magical practitioners of the late middle ages and early renaissance. In fact, there is a movement within the practice of ceremonial magick that stipulates that all anyone really has to do is to choose an appropriately antique grimoire and practice it exactly as it was written, with no substitutions or revisions.

There is also the mind-set that such works were written by masters of their craft, and that they should therefore be wholly adopted without any changes or revisions. Thus, in the discipline of high magick, we seem to be overrun these days with individuals who are purists and nearly fundamentalistic in their approach to working with the old grimoires. Happily, I can state that I am not one of them, and I think that such an attitude is problematic at best and an insufferable arrogance at worst. Let me explain what I mean by this loaded and opinionated statement.

It’s my opinion that these purists are the occult absolutists in our field of magick. They are the ones who vow a strict adherence to their sources and who condemn others who are not so strict, in other words, those terrible gadfly revisionists - of which I am a proud member. I believe that flexibility and mutability are the hallmarks of true creativity, and their opposite are often the sign of a complete lack of imagination and creative insight. This is quite an unusual state of affairs in the annals of magick because I believe that each magician must create his or her own magical practice from whatever material and lore is available. Certainly, we have an abundance of materials available now that weren’t available just a few decades ago, yet to be hidebound to any one single source is to be, in my opinion, quite self-limiting.

I suspect that the magicians of the previous epoch had no problem borrowing their lore from multiple sources, and the diversity of antique grimoires even with the same title is a remarkable testament that this was so. With ever greater resources at our disposal, we live in a time when we can craft our own system and technique of magick from many different and diverse sources. Doing so is nothing more than following an age old technique of borrowing and appropriating the occult lore and practices of a previous age. I suspect that the magicians of the past age, both great and obscure, borrowed and appropriated their lore from whatever sources they had available to them. Should we be so different? (Of course, this presupposes that one knows enough about magick to be able cobble together a magical system, but that is another topic altogether.)

There are at least three different approaches that one take to utilizing the material found in the old grimoires, and four, if we count the approach of not using them at all. These approaches can be labeled traditionalism, reconstructionism and revisionism. I have talked about these three different approaches several times before, but I want to discuss them in context of the old grimoires. Of these three, the traditional path is the most problematic, since only if one has access to an initiatory lineage that incorporates this lore would it be possible to call oneself a traditional grimoire magician. Nearly all of us must rely, one way or another, on the public materials available. We can attempt to develop a magical practice based on the best historical information available and through that method, we can approach the full employment of one or more of the antique grimoires. There are a lot of problems with this approach, but it should be noted that grimoire reconstructionism is based on an assumption that whatever is unknown or omitted in that lore can be developed using modern sources or one’s creative imagination.

One other key point is that the further we go back in time, the less details that we know about the culture, people’s basic beliefs, basic language used, assumed religious practices and a myriad of other minutiae. Reconstructing a magical system must also include reconstructing the cultural matrix from that specific time period in order to be really effective, and even with the most painstaking research, only fragments exist for cultures that existed merely half a millennia ago. Therefore, reconstructionism, by definition, must always be incomplete and filled out with suppositions and even one’s creative imagination. Thus they become more like an “as if” proposition rather than a perfect reflection of what once existed.

This is why I consider revisionism to be a much better and simpler prospect than attempting to reconstruct an antique practice. You can even start out with a tradition, like for instance, the Golden Dawn, and upon that foundation, build and add appropriate various materials, techniques, themes, tropes and practices from the old grimoires.  A magician needs to know and understand what is needed to build out a new magical functionality, and armed with this knowledge, then choose the appropriate grimoire and harvest from it whatever is needed. In this manner, material is extracted and placed into a proper occult discipline where it will become more or less redefined and used appropriately within of the context of an already established magical practice.

The reason why I am much more inclined to taking a revisionist perspective to all magical lore from the middle ages and the renaissance is that I believe that there is a massive gulf that lies between us, who are living in the post-modern age, and those who lived in the previous epoch. That gap has made a powerful difference between not only how one works magic today versus those previous times, but it also makes a great difference between the post-modern magician and the magician of middle ages and early renaissance. Our beliefs, expectations, approach to religion and spirituality, and our cultural determinants are all completely and radically different. Thus, a modern magician is not at all like his or her peer from the earlier epoch, nor is the world that we live in and our cultural matrix in any manner similar.

If we were to go back in time to the period of the late middle ages or early renaissance when the grimoire system of western magick was being formulated, we would find ourselves in a much different world. Roman Catholicism would be the dominant and primary faith, and all its beliefs and practices would be commonly known and engaged in by nearly everyone, from serf to the highest aristocracy. The whole notion of a secular approach to governing or to a knowledge of the world would not yet exist. So, too, would the notion of an existential individuality and self-determination. The Pope would be the absolute spiritual authority throughout most of Europe, and it some cases, he would also be a temporal authority. The aristocracy would be just beginning to exercise their independent authority, but no one would be foolish enough to directly countermand episcopal dictates. The lords who ruled the various kingdoms and principalities owed their temporal authority to the church, who sanctioned their rule through the artifice of their various offices. This was not too surprising, since these lords were from the same dynastic families that also held positions of power in the church. It was often prudent for the aristocracy to promote their offspring into positions of temporal power as well as within the church hierarchy.

The world of the greater Catholic domain was a complete, seamless and total world view, encompassed by an annual festive calendar and dominated by a monolithic religious belief system promoted by continuous and periodic religious practices. Nearly everyone participated in it, and it would be mostly inconceivable for anyone to exclude themselves from participating. It was considered a universal faith and practice, which is what the word “Catholic” literally means.

So, what would the typical literate magician of the late middle ages or early renaissance be like? First off, he would be a devout Catholic and fairly conservative in his religious beliefs. He would see visions of angels, demons and experience the powers of the saints first hand and it is also likely that his piety and zeal would have pushed him into the study and practice of ceremonial magick. Since he was literate (and often in more than one language), then he was either a member of the upper class or a trained cleric, since literacy had a certain power, mystery and prestige all by itself, especially to the greater masses of the population who were illiterate. He would have had access to enough resources to be able to equip himself and to acquire the privacy to be able to work his rites alone and unobserved. A poor man would have neither had the time nor resources to practice magic, and certainly, being alone and unsupervised would have been something of a great privilege. To outsiders, the ceremonial magician would have appeared to be no different than anyone else, he would have been the very model of religious piety and class privilege, and therefore typically beyond suspicion in regards to impious or heretical behavior.

A magician from that period would have been proficient in the inherent disciplines of discursive meditation, contemplation, the Holy Office with its eight daily periods of prayer and meditation, and the use of special mass rites to charge and empower his regalia and fortify his work. He could do all of these things, including ceremonial magick and likely get away with it because he was a member of a protected and privileged elite. Even Agrippa was a member of the (petty) nobility and no commoner. He had certain privileges and responsibilities associated with his station. His life, with its service to liege lords, training and social expectations associated with his class (from social etiquette to military training), his religious education and continuous engagements with a pious religious practice, all of this, would be quite foreign to us today.

It is also my opinion that an educated man living in that time would have been easily able to attribute to his life and its various occurrences as being the outer manifestation of the grace or doom of God and his saints, angels or even, the Devil and his minions. A magician would have made use of the Catholic liturgy (including the techniques of reversed exorcism used for invocation) and the monastic discipline to be able gain the proper mind-state necessary to see and thereby command the spirits to be found nearly everywhere in the world. The domain of Spirit was not difficult to access for the average person and in fact, it wasn't seen as a separate world at all. So the methods used to fulfill the need for the first stage of an evocation (spiritual purification) were simply a variation of what was already practiced in the typical monastic discipline.  

My point is that the world that the magician of the previous epoch lived in was one where magick flourished, and the many varieties of grimoire magick had their origin in those times. According to the sparse historical data available, everyone seemed to practice some kind of religious based magic, which later would be considered to be steeped in religious superstition, but at the time, religious faith was a very powerful element in the world. Science and religion were interwoven in a manner that would be strange to us today. A magician in the previous epoch could easily employ one of the many grimoires secretly available and he would also know how to activate the spiritual practice behind the book, since he could merely perform the religious rites and practices already available to him, and it would be sufficient. However, this is no longer true, and there are some compelling reasons why that is so.

The first thing that happened that began to radically change the European culture was the reformation. Over a period of fifty years, beginning early in the 16th century, the entire religious perspective permanently changed with the advent of Protestant Christianity. Catholics, faced with such a challenge, zealously promoted what became known as the counter-reformation, and the periodic but constant warfare between Protestant and Catholic ideologies indelibly changed both religious traditions. Suddenly, Catholics and Protestants alike became highly intolerant of any kind of spiritual deviance, heresy or assumed apostasy. It became a dangerous time for anyone to practice ceremonial magick, still the books were still clandestinely produced, circulated and elaborated upon despite the risk. However, piety and conservative opinion, which would have tolerated a certain amount of magical practice, now had no tolerance whatsoever and this resulted in the persecution and execution of many who once were a part of the protected elite. What this ultimately did was to purge from both traditions of Christianity many of the techniques and tropes that were used in ceremonial magick, transforming the typical magical practitioner into anything but a pious and conservative religious adherent. It also had the effect of removing all magic from the practiced liturgy, a process that continues today. 

Still, we can assume that ceremonial magick was likely practiced by some individuals, even though there is scant proof of that. However, from a more realistic perspective, it would seem that the literature itself had a certain sensational vogue amongst savants and affluent collectors who helped to spread it all over Europe. Over time, the social calamity of the reformation began to lose its passion on both sides, and the power of the Catholic church began to diminish while the power of temporal authority slowly became greater. By the end of the 17th and through the middle of the 18th century, it is likely that ceremonial magick was being practiced by a greater population of select individuals, most of whom would be considered more like occultists (or eccentric antiquarians) as found in our modern age than pious exponents of the religious status quo.

Even so, while ceremonial magick was having its own kind of renewal during this period, two more events occurred that made the gap between the previous epoch even wider, and these were the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, to be quickly followed by the Age of Science in the 19th century. By the end of the 19th century, only occultists had an interest in the magical writings and practices of the previous age, and the materials that they studied became ever more rare and difficult to acquire. The rest of the European world had become secularized, literate, educated and indoctrinated into science and socially empowered by democracy, and in the process, the late medieval mind-set of ceremonial magick and its cultural context were irreparably lost. It became the provenance of individuals like Mathers, Westcott, Crowley, and Fortune to resurrect the art and practice of magick, but what they derived from their studies and experimental practices was something that was quite new and infused with modern sensibilities.

While the times have profoundly changed from the previous age, magick has once again become relevant. However, the mechanisms and techniques of performing evocation now require a considerably greater effort to achieve the proper initial mind-state. Thus, we modern practitioners are forced to adopt a regimen of mind control that is considerably more elaborate, deeper and engaging that what the practitioner of the past age would have employed. In fact, to engage the Spirit world, we are forced to adopt ecstatic methodologies more reminiscent of shamanism than the merely pious practices required of the magicians of the previous epoch. Times have changed, and so has the discipline and practices of the ritual or ceremonial magician. So it would seem logical that in order to appropriate the lore of the old grimoires, we must first have developed and mastered a modern tradition of magick. It would also seem to be folly to expect that the old grimoires can be effectively practiced as they once were, given all that has happened in the last five hundred years.

Frater Barrabbas