Nine Grimoires That Actually Exist and What Each One Demands of You

There is a genre of book being sold right now, illustrated and beautiful, with a leather cover and a title in gold, that is not a grimoire. It is a journal with moon phases printed in it.

That is fine. Buy one. But it is worth knowing what the word actually points at, because the real books are strange, specific, badly behaved, and mostly free, and almost every one of them wants something from you before it will work.

Nine of them, and what each one asks.

1. The Key of Solomon

Clavicula Salomonis. Manuscripts from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century.

The most copied ceremonial grimoire in Europe. Circles, pentacles, exact days and hours, and page after page on how to make and consecrate every single tool before you are permitted to use any of them.

Here is what surprises people: most of the Key is not spells. It is preparation. Purification, timing, the making of the knife, the making of the circle, the correct hour for each. The magic is whatever is left standing after the preparation has been done correctly, which is why so few people who own this book have actually used it.

It demands: precision, and the willingness to spend three months making a knife.

2. The Lesser Key of Solomon

Book One, the Goetia. Compiled in the seventeenth century, published in English in 1904.

A catalogue of seventy-two spirits with names, seals, ranks, and offices. It reads like a corporate directory because functionally that is what it is. This one has a rank, that one teaches astronomy, this one commands thirty legions.

The fact almost nobody knows: a great deal of it was lifted from Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum of 1577. Weyer was a skeptic. He published his list to argue that the whole business was superstitious nonsense and that accused witches should not be burned for it.

His debunking became the source text. Four hundred years of magicians have been working from a list compiled by a man trying to prove there was nothing there.

It demands: a clear request, a clear boundary, and the discipline to want only the thing you actually asked for.

3. Three Books of Occult Philosophy

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, printed 1533.

This is the system underneath the other systems. Natural, celestial, and ceremonial magic in three ascending books, with the tables of correspondence that nearly every later grimoire quietly copied without mentioning where they got them.

Agrippa drafted it around 1510, in his early twenties. Then he spent the rest of his life ambivalent about it. In 1530, three years before the Three Books finally reached print, he published a different book arguing that all human learning, his own emphatically included, was vanity.

It demands: reading. Then more reading. Then the discovery that the tables are not a lookup chart. They are an argument about how the world is put together, and you are allowed to disagree with it.

4. Picatrix

Ghayat al-Hakim. Arabic, around the eleventh century. Translated into Latin in 1256.

The great book of astrological talismans. Images made under elected hours, suffumigations, and a cosmology that treats the sky as a machine you can time rather than a mood you can feel.

It was translated at the court of Alfonso X of Castile, from Arabic, which had drawn on Greek, Persian, and Indian sources before that. Nothing about this book belongs to one tradition, and the people who insist it does have not read it.

It demands: an ephemeris, patience, and the humility to wait for the hour instead of forcing it into your calendar.

A practical note: the good modern English translations are in copyright and are not free. Buy one. They took years and they are worth the money.

5. The Book of Abramelin

German manuscripts, around 1608. English translation 1897.

One long instruction. Purify, pray, withdraw, for months, alone, until you meet your Holy Guardian Angel. Only afterward are you given the word squares, and only then do they work.

The mistake at the center of it: Mathers translated a French copy that was missing part of the original German, including the correct length of the retirement. Generations of magicians performed a shortened version of the rite without knowing it had been shortened for them, and reported results, and taught it to others.

Take from that what you like. There is at least one reading in which it does not matter at all.

It demands: six months, or eighteen, depending on which manuscript you are holding. Every morning. Without exception.

6. The Arbatel of Magic

Printed at Basel, 1575.

Short, plain, and strange. Aphorisms rather than rituals. Seven Olympic spirits. And a repeated, almost irritated insistence that magic is meant for use in the world and not in a locked room.

It is often credited with the first printed use of the word theosophy in the sense later occultists took up. The whole book runs under fifty pages.

It demands: honesty about what you would actually do with power. It is the least secretive grimoire ever printed and that turns out to be the hardest thing about it.

7. The Long Lost Friend

John George Hohman. Reading, Pennsylvania, 1820.

A folk healing book of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Charms for burns, for bleeding, for fever, for sick cattle, for safe travel. Printed by a working man for working people who needed something to do at two in the morning when the fever would not break.

Hohman claimed that the book protected whoever carried it, which is either the humblest or the boldest sentence ever printed in a grimoire.

Its reputation: it surfaced in the 1929 hex murder trial in York County, Pennsylvania, and has never recovered. The charms had been used quietly and usefully for a hundred years before that, and quietly and usefully since.

It demands: almost nothing. Which is the point of it.

And: if you use one of these, call the doctor anyway.

8. Le Petit Albert

First printed 1668, falsely attributed to Albertus Magnus, who had nothing to do with it.

The household grimoire. Recipes, charms, love philters, luck for fishermen, and the notorious Hand of Glory. Sold cheap for two centuries to people who could barely read it.

In rural France and in Quebec, owning a copy was thought dangerous enough that people buried the book rather than throw it out. Throwing it out was believed not to work.

It demands: very little, which is exactly why respectable magicians have always sneered at it, and exactly why it outsold all of them.

9. The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses

Circulating in German by the early 1800s. Printed in America from the 1880s.

A book of seals and spirit names claiming to be the operations Moses suppressed. Rejected by every scholar who has ever looked at it. Adopted wholesale by American folk practitioners through the mail order trade.

Its real life is not European. It traveled to the United States, the Caribbean, and West Africa, where it shaped living working traditions that long outlasted the book's own credibility. The academy dismissed it and it went on to matter more than most of the books the academy approved of.

It demands: discernment. Much of the text is garbled Hebrew and recopied plates, and the book will not tell you which parts.

Where to start

Not the Goetia. Everybody starts with the Goetia, because it has the best pictures and the most spirits, and it is the wrong door.

Start with the Arbatel. It is under fifty pages, it is free, it is in plain language, and it will ask you, roughly on page nine, what you would actually do with power. Answer that honestly and you will know whether you want any of the other eight.

Then read Agrippa. Not to use. To understand what the other books are quoting.

Nine books. Ten questions. The shelf is not neutral, and it picks.