Recommended Witch Books:
Tag: grimoire
Three Books of Occult Philosophy
Review:
Illustrated, archaic, authentic, essential: De Occulta Philosophia (Three Books of Occult Philosophy) is the most influential book on magic ever written. Agrippa was a Renaissance German knight, theologian, feminist philosopher, and defender of witches who wandered the courts of Europe learning about and advocating for magic as the true synthesis of religion and science. His celebrated and persecuted grimoire and textbook on magic was an inspiration for The Goodly Spellbook. Editor Tyson's well-researched explanatory notes and illustrations more than make up for Freake's awkward 17th-century translation from the original Latin, which unfortunately remains the only available version in English of all three volumes.
Tags
- celestial
- astrology
- ceremonial
- authentic
- of color
- daimons
- of weekdays
- entities
- magical alphabets
- deities
- European
- Western
- grimoire
- planetary squares
- philosophy
- herbs
- spheres
- magic
- numerology
- planets
- occult
- moon
- art of correspondences
- nature
- archaic
- natural
Witchcraft Basics
Necronomicon
Review:
Marketed as real but utterly fake, the Necronomicon ("Book of Dead Names") existed only in H.P. Lovecraft's horror fiction, and even there only by allusion to its eldritch-sounding title. But if you're a Lovecraft fan like *Diuvei, you'll want to have it on your bookshelf just for its own sake — and to observe who does or doesn't recognize it for what it is.
Tags
Witchcraft Basics
Long Lost Friend
Review:
A goodly scholarly treatment and reprinting of the most famous American book on spells and herbal remedies — the authentic, early 19th-century Pennsylvania Dutch grimoire The Long Lost Friend. Edited with added spells from alternative versions by anthropologist Daniel Harms, and a foreword by Esoteric Archives curator Joseph H. Peterson.
Tags
Witchcraft Basics
Greek Magical Papyri
Review:
The title word “Demotic” isn’t a typo of demonic: That material is Coptic. The illustrated main corpus is a collection of 2nd-century B.C.E. to 5th-century C.E. Egypto-Greco-Roman magical spells, rituals, and invocations from ancient papyrus spellbooks, many of them found in the tomb of a magic man in Thebes. Also known as the Papyri Graecae Magicae, or PGM.
Tags
Witchcraft Basics
Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft
Review:
The famous "blue book" features illustrated, authentically traditional magic authored by the first Gardner-trained Third Degree Witch to publish such material in America. However it cannot, as promised, impart the reader “the equivalent of Third Degree.”
Tags
- healing
- covenwork
- herbalism
- scourging
- gods
- magic
- solitary practice
- goddesses
- occult
- Gardnerianism
- paganism
- Olde Religion
- American
- circle: casting
- Witchcraft
- athamé
- esbats
- Priest
- channeling
- nonfiction
- divination
- dream-work
- ritual
- European
- robe
- sabbats
- grimoire
- spells