There is something almost irresistible about a book you have been told not to read.
Lock it in a cupboard and we want to know what is inside. Write it in cipher and somebody will spend the next century trying to decipher it. Tell us that its pages contain dangerous knowledge and we immediately become considerably more interested in the dangerous knowledge. Books have always carried a peculiar sort of power. They preserve voices after their owners have died. They allow knowledge to travel across centuries. They can teach medicine, astronomy and mathematics, but they have also taught people how to summon spirits, discover thieves, find treasure, cure disease, compel love and speak with angels. Some of those books still survive. Not fictional grimoires created for horror films, but grubby, annotated manuscripts written and used by people who apparently expected the instructions inside them to work.
Others are mysterious for a different reason. The Voynich Manuscript has survived for centuries covered in strange writing that nobody has convincingly deciphered. It has inevitably attracted claims involving alchemy, magic and secret societies, although the truth is considerably simpler and perhaps more tantalising. We do not know what it says.
The dangerous book therefore comes in several forms. There is the book that contains forbidden knowledge, the book that claims to give its owner power, the book authorities would rather people did not possess and the book whose secrecy exists simply because nobody can read it. Perhaps the most dangerous sentence ever written was not a spell at all. Perhaps it was: Do not open this book.
Today’s card has turned –
XIX – The Book
The word grimoire has acquired a wonderfully theatrical quality. It suggests black leather, strange symbols, candles burning at midnight and something regrettable happening shortly after page 237. Historical grimoires are both stranger and more ordinary than that. They were practical books. They contained procedures. A person consulting one might be looking for buried treasure, healing, protection, information, love, revenge or communication with supernatural beings. The distinction between religion, magic, astrology, medicine and natural philosophy was not always as tidy as later generations might like it to have been.
One extraordinary English example survives at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Manuscript V.b.26, generally called the Book of Oberon, dates from around 1577 to 1583. It contains detailed instructions for invoking spirits and performing magical operations. The Folger notes that its workings offered such things as curing sickness, catching thieves and finding love. Folgerpedia This was not apparently a pristine book made for display. It was used. Successive readers added marginal notes. Somebody numbered pages in blue ink. Parts subsequently disappeared, and when the Folger acquired the manuscript in 1958 it was incomplete. Thirty missing pages resurfaced and were purchased at auction in 2007. The opening fourteen pages remain missing. Folgerpedia
Already it sounds like the beginning of a horror story. But what survives is far more interesting than any invented cursed book. Oberon himself appears in the manuscript as Oberyon, king of the fairies. The conjurer could supposedly summon him using prayers, magical circles, inscribed images and particular materials. He was credited with revealing the properties of plants, stones and metals, locating treasure, granting invisibility and telling the magician about past, present and future events. Folgerpedia
The manuscript combines elements that modern readers might expect to belong to entirely separate worlds. Christian prayers and psalms exist alongside spirits, magical circles and conjurations. Folger material describes its mixture of Christian material, occult invocation and other magical traditions. Folgerpedia
That may surprise you. We sometimes imagine historical magic as an alternative to religion. For many practitioners, it could instead borrow religion’s language, authority and sacred names. The magician did not necessarily think he had stepped outside a Christian universe. He thought he had discovered ways of operating within it. And there were plenty of books offering instructions.
The British Library’s manuscript collections contain works attributed to perhaps the most famous magical authority of all: King Solomon. Solomon became attached to an enormous body of magical literature, despite the texts being written many centuries after the biblical king could possibly have composed them. The association gave them antiquity and authority.
British Library Sloane MS 3648, for example, contains a Lesser Key of Solomon dated 1572 alongside later material associated with Agrippa and Paracelsus. Other manuscripts preserve versions of the Clavicle of Solomon and related magical works. British Library Archives
The British Library also holds something with an irresistible title.
The Sworn Book of Honorius. Royal MS 17 A XLII contains an English translation of this medieval magical text. Its own legendary origin story claimed that eighty-nine masters gathered following condemnation of magical books and compiled their knowledge into a work associated with Honorius of Thebes. British Library Archives That story expresses one of the central fantasies surrounding forbidden books. Someone is trying to destroy the knowledge. Therefore the knowledge must be important. Attempts to suppress information can give it power. A book nobody cares about can disappear quietly. A book publicly condemned becomes interesting. The reader begins wondering what somebody does not want them to know.
In early modern Britain there were very real reasons for keeping certain magical texts private. Folger scholars note that some grimoires circulated in manuscript partly because their contents could put their owners in serious trouble. Folger Shakespeare Library Yet books of magic were copied, collected and preserved anyway. John Dee provides a particularly wonderful example.
Dee was mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, scholar and adviser to Elizabeth I. He was also deeply involved in attempts to communicate with angels. The British Library preserves Sloane MS 3191, described in its catalogue as the only surviving book of ceremonial magic in Dee’s own hand. It includes the forty-eight Angelical Keys received during his activities in Kraków in 1584 and a Book of Earthly Knowledge, Aid and Victory dated 1585. British Library Archives That alone should destroy the comforting modern assumption that serious scholarship and occult interests belonged to entirely different sorts of people. For Dee, they did not. The library and the magical chamber occupied the same intellectual universe. Books were instruments for exploring it.
And that brings us to one of the strangest books ever placed in a library. The Voynich Manuscript.
If ever a manuscript looked as though it ought to contain forbidden knowledge, Voynich does an excellent impression of one. Its pages are covered in unidentified writing. There are peculiar plants, astronomical and astrological diagrams, bathing figures, cosmological illustrations, roots, containers and pages of uninterrupted mysterious text. Nobody knows who wrote it. Nobody has produced a generally accepted reading of it. Cryptographers have attacked it. Linguists have attacked it. Historians, computer scientists and enthusiastic amateurs have attacked it. The book remains stubbornly unimpressed.
The manuscript entered modern public attention after rare-book dealer Wilfrid Voynich acquired it in 1912. It is now Beinecke MS 408 at Yale University. Yale describes its script as unidentified and its meaning as unresolved, while scientific analysis is consistent with manuscript materials from the fifteenth century. Yale Library Its illustrations provide tantalising hints. Yale divides them broadly into botanical, astronomical and astrological, bathing or balneological, cosmological and pharmaceutical material, followed by text that may represent recipes. Yale Library
It all sounds tantalisingly occult. But we need to be careful. We do not know that the Voynich Manuscript is a magical book. Its mysterious script does not prove secrecy. Its strange plants do not prove alchemy. Its astronomical imagery does not prove astrology was being practised magically. And our inability to understand something certainly does not prove that its author intended it to be forbidden.
This is where The Book becomes particularly interesting. Mystery attracts explanation. When a manuscript refuses to tell us what it is, we start telling the manuscript instead. Secret society. Lost language. Alchemical manual. Elaborate hoax. Medical textbook. Cipher. Artificial language. Meaningless text. Every generation seems convinced that somebody is about to solve it. Yale remains considerably more restrained. It is undeciphered. Yale Library
Sometimes we do not know is the most accurate sentence available. And perhaps that frustrates us because books normally surrender when opened. A locked room keeps its secret because we cannot enter it. A sealed box keeps its secret because we cannot see inside. But Voynich sits open in front of us. High-resolution images are publicly available. We can look directly at the words. We simply cannot understand them. The knowledge, if knowledge it is, is simultaneously accessible and inaccessible.
There is something almost magical about that without requiring any magic whatsoever. And it exposes a misconception hidden within the idea of forbidden knowledge. Knowledge does not have to be supernatural to be dangerous. Books have preserved political ideas, religious arguments, medical information and scientific discoveries that threatened established authorities. They have been banned, burned, hidden, smuggled and censored because somebody feared what might happen if another person read them.
But there is another side to this. Knowledge really can have consequences. Instructions can be misused. Beliefs can cause harm. False information can travel just as efficiently as truth. A book can preserve wisdom for five hundred years. It can preserve nonsense for exactly the same length of time. Age does not make a claim true. Handwriting does not make a spell work. Latin does not make an instruction profound.
A manuscript surviving in a respected library does not mean the librarian believes what it says. It means somebody thought the object was worth preserving. And thank goodness they did. Because books such as the Book of Oberon allow us to encounter historical magic without relying entirely upon accusations made by frightened neighbours or hostile prosecutors. Here are the instructions themselves. Here are fingerprints of use. Here are corrections and additions. Here are people writing down what they thought could be done. That is extraordinarily intimate.
A trial record tells us what authorities believed somebody had done. A grimoire tells us what somebody believed might be possible. There is power in that distinction. Perhaps this is why the forbidden book remains such an enduring object in folklore and horror.
It makes knowledge physical. Danger has pages. Secrets have bindings. The unknown can sit quietly on a shelf until somebody reaches for it. And unlike a haunted house, mysterious lake or creature in the woods, the book requires our participation. It cannot whisper its secret unless we open it. It cannot teach us unless we read.
The final act is ours.
Which is presumably why every warning written on a mysterious book throughout human history has suffered from one catastrophic design flaw. It assumes we won’t turn the page.
We always turn the bloody page.
XIX – The Book
The Book is the card of knowledge, curiosity, responsibility and the price of understanding something that cannot afterwards be unknown.
When it appears, there may be more to learn before you act. Look beyond the obvious explanation. Read further. Check the source. Ask who wrote it, who repeated it and what may have been lost between the two.
But The Book also carries a warning against collecting knowledge merely for the satisfaction of possessing it. Understanding creates responsibility. Once you know something, you must decide what to do with it, whether to share it and whether you have understood it well enough to act at all.
It can also indicate secrecy. Someone may be withholding information, but do not automatically assume sinister motives. Privacy, uncertainty and deception are not the same thing.
Most importantly, The Book asks you to remain teachable.
What you already know should never prevent you discovering that you were wrong.
When The Book appears, ask yourself: Do I actually want the truth, or do I only want confirmation of what I already believe?
Then turn the page.
Just don’t complain to me if something answers.
Sources
Folger Shakespeare Library, Manuscript V.b.26, Book of Magic, with instructions for invoking spirits. The sixteenth-century manuscript commonly known as the Book of Oberon. The Folger’s material documents its spells, spirit invocations, history of use and missing and recovered leaves. Folgerpedia
Explore the Book of Oberon at the Folger Shakespeare Library
British Library, Sloane Manuscripts. The collection preserves substantial early modern material relating to ceremonial magic, Solomon traditions, alchemy and occult practice, including the Lesser Key of Solomon material in Sloane MS 3648. British Library Archives
British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue
British Library, Sloane MS 3191, John Dee’s notes on ceremonial magic. Especially valuable because the manuscript is in Dee’s own hand and contains his Angelical Keys and material connected with his attempts to acquire supernatural knowledge. British Library Archives
John Dee’s ceremonial magic manuscript
British Library, Royal MS 17 A XLII, The Sworn Book of Honorius. An English witness to an influential medieval magical tradition, complete with the text’s own legendary account of threatened magical knowledge being preserved. British Library Archives
The Sworn Book manuscript record
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Beinecke MS 408. The authoritative home of the Voynich Manuscript. Yale provides its provenance, physical description, scientific analysis and digitised manuscript while remaining appropriately cautious about claims to have deciphered it. Yale Library
Explore the Voynich Manuscript at Yale
