Aries – Journal for the Study

of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

ARIES
brill.com/arie

Historicising ‘Western Learned Magic’

Preliminary Remarks

Bernd-Christian Otto*
Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies,
University of Erfurt
bernd.otto@uni-erfurt.de

Abstract

This programmatic paper conceptualises a research topic that has emerged in aca-
demic research over the past decades—‘Western learned magic’—and provides a the-
oretical foundation for its historicisation to come. Even though a large amount of spe-
cialised findings on this topic have been brought forward in recent years, a diachronic
and cross-cultural overview of the history of ‘Western learned magic’ that reconstructs
possible red threads through the manifold material is still an urgent desideratum.
Based on the observation that most classic definitions and theories of ‘magic’ are irrel-
evant to the history of ‘Western learned magic’—as these have been deduced from
anthropological sources and theorising—this article raises a range of theoretical issues
that need to be taken into account in the course of its historicisation: continuity,
changeability, hybridity, deviance, morality, complexity, efficacy, and multiplicity. By
means of this novel theoretical setup, historians will be able to work towards a method-
ologically sound history of ‘Western learned magic’ that takes into account the recent
criticism against a second-order category of ‘magic’ while, at the same time, revealing
out-dated stereotypes and master narratives on the topic.

Keywords

magic – history – discourse – ritual – dynamics – Western Esotericism

* I am grateful to numerous colleagues from the Max Weber Centre, and in particular to
Marco Pasi, Michael Stausberg, Peter Forshaw, and Wouter Hanegraaff, who have read and
commented upon different versions of this article.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/15700593-01602001

162 otto

1 Introduction

(How) Is it possible to write a coherent and theoretically sound history of

‘magic’? This question, which forms the focus of the present article, is addressed
in a sceptical manner by Wouter Hanegraaff in a forthcoming contribution
to Glenn Alexander Magee’s The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism
and Esotericism. Hanegraaff argues that ‘magic’ is a ‘wretched subject’ that ‘has
caused so much confusion and frustration among scholars, because it seemed
to resist all attempts at defining its exact nature, thus causing serious doubts
about whether it referred to anything real at all—or if so, in what sense.’1 After
discussing the impact of the concept of ‘magic’ in several Western sources and
discourses, Hanegraaff holds that ‘because of its status as the “other” both of
religion (read: Christianity, or more specifically, Protestantism) and science
(read: a mechanical worldview with atheistic implications), the category of
“magic” since the eighteenth century has become a favorite projection screen
for Western hopes and fears. Far from actually recovering or reconstructing
any observable or structural reality existing “out there” (in the past or in the
present, or on other continents), it constructs such a reality on the basis of
normative and ideological assumptions and agendas’. He concludes that from
a ‘strictly historical point of view, any attempt to write a “history of magic” is
therefore misleading in principle: it can only lead to anachronistic distortions
that prevent us from perceiving what has actually been going on’. Accordingly,
Hanegraaff claims that ‘there is no such thing as a history of magic’ and that
it is only ‘possible to write a history of the discourse of magic’, which should
be focused on a ‘detailed analysis of terms and concepts as used in their own
context, and a precise investigation of their continuous transformations under
the impact of changing historical circumstances’.
While such arguments are, in general, grist to my mill—I have dealt with
the concept of ‘magic’ precisely in this manner in several previous publica-
tions2—Hanegraaff’s final evaluation of the possibility of writing a coherent
‘history of magic’ may be too pessimistic. In my view, a thorough historicisa-
tion of the concept of ‘magic’ on the basis of a discourse theoretical approach
does not lead to its mere deconstruction, but rather to the (re-)construction of
several novel and promising domains of research: (1) The historicisation of the
concept may reveal important insights into processes of ‘othering’ and iden-

1 All following quotations refer to Hanegraaff, ‘Magic’.

2 See Otto, Magie; Otto, ‘ “Magie” beweisen?’; Otto, ‘Zauberhaftes Ägypten—Ägyptischer Zau-
ber?’; Otto, ‘Towards historicizing “Magic” in Antiquity’; Otto/Stausberg, Defining Magic.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 163

tity formation in Western history (particularly in the framework of what I have

called ‘discourse of exclusion’ or ‘Ausgrenzungsdiskurs’);3 (2) the identification
of ‘magic’s’ numerous semantic nuances may ultimately lead to its disentan-
glement as a second-order scholarly category, thereby arriving at a more differ-
entiated and less fragile and ethnocentric conceptual apparatus (‘patterns of
magicity’);4 (3) the growing research into what I have heretofore dubbed ‘dis-
course of inclusion’ (or ‘selbstreferentieller Magiediskurs’)5 reveals a fascinat-
ing and largely under-explored Western ‘tradition’ of ritual texts and practices
which used to belong to the domain of private, occultist historians (with a few
exceptions), but has today—finally—made it into Academia.
While all of these domains can (and should) be explored with equal right,
this article will continue to focus on the third domain only. In fact, justified
as Hanegraaff’s (and, previously, my own) critique against a nonreflective use
of the concept of ‘magic’ may be, the last decades have witnessed an unprece-
dented research boom into an ever-growing number of textual sources com-
posed, read and/or used by Western ritual specialists who often applied the
concept of ‘magic’ as a term of self-reference and self-valorisation. Out of count-
less examples, I shall only mention a few for the time being,6 namely, the late
ancient Papyri Graecae Magicae,7 the vast corpus of Coptic ritual texts stem-
ming from medieval Egypt,8 ritual texts from the medieval Arabic-Islamic,9
Jewish,10 Byzantine,11 or European (Latin) realm,12 early modern humanist

3 See Otto, Magie, especially ch. 6–8; Otto, ‘ “Magie” beweisen?’; Otto, ‘Towards historicizing
“Magic” in Antiquity’; see on ‘magic’ as a conceptual ‘othering’ tool also Styers, Making
Magic; Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 164–177; Bogdan, ‘Introduction: Modern
Western Magic’.
4 See Otto/Stausberg, Defining Magic, particularly 10 f., and the discussion in Asprem, ‘Pat-
terns of Magicity: A review of Defining Magic: A Reader’.
5 See Otto, Magie, foremost ch. 9–11; Otto, ‘A Catholic “magician” historicises “magic”’; Otto,
‘A discourse historical approach towards medieval “learned magic”’.
6 All following references are exemplary and refer to editions/translations of primary texts.
7 See Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri.
8 See Meyer/Smith, Ancient Christian Magic.
9 See on the Picatrix, Ritter, Ġāyat al-ḥakīm; Ritter/Plessner, “Picatrix”. On Aḥmad ibn al-
Būnī’s Kitāb Šams al-Maʾārif al-Kubra, see Coullaut Cordero, El Kitāb Šams al-Maʾārif.
10 On the Sepher ha-Razim, see Rebiger/Schäfer, Sefer ha-Razim. On the Harba de-Moshe,
Harari, ‘The Sword of Moses’.
11 On the key text Hygromanteia Salomonis, see recently Marathakis, The Magical Treatise of
Solomon; Torijano, ‘The Hygromancy of Solomon’.
12 See on the Liber Iuratus Honorii, Hedegård, Liber Iuratus Honorii; on the Ars notoria, see

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

164 otto

works on ‘magia naturalis’,13 ‘Solomonic’ recipe books on the art of ‘conjuring

spirits’ that proliferated (roughly) between 1500 and 1800,14 works composed
by 19th-century European ‘re-sacralisers’ of ‘magic’,15 and foundational texts of
a vast array of self-referential ‘magic’ currents and groupings of the 20th and 21st
centuries.16 Heterogeneous as this material may appear at first glance, it now
seems fairly plausible to assume or at least prognosticate that these texts—
which are usually investigated separately in an array of historical disciplines
(such as Egyptology, Classical Studies, Medieval Studies, Arabic, Jewish and
Byzantine Studies, Early Modern History or the Study of Western and Con-
temporary Esotericism)—actually belong together, thus forming, at least to
a certain degree, a continuous and coherent textual and ritual ‘tradition’ that
might even deserve a proper label: ‘Western learned magic’.
As will be argued below in greater detail, this label—‘Western learned
magic’—is useful in several respects. Suffice it to say for now that the for-
mulation points to an important focus shift that has taken place in the aca-
demic study of ‘magic’ over the past decades. Well into the 1970s, the majority
of scholars who had been influential in the lively debate over ‘magic’ were
anthropologists who derived their understanding of said concept from the
study of (mostly) non-Western, ‘oral’ cultures and their rituals.17 In fact, the
inspiring sources of most scholarly definitions and theories of ‘magic’ that are
today regarded ‘classics’ were the Australian Aranda (Durkheim), the Melane-
sian Trobriand (Malinowski), the Sudanese Azande (Evans-Pritchard), or other
indigenous peoples that had been encountered in outer regions of the then

Véronèse, L’Ars notoria au Moyen Age; on the Almandal, see Véronèse, L’Almandal et
l’Almadel latins au Moyen Âge.
13 See on Marsilio Ficino’s De vita libri tres, Kaske/Clark, Three Books on Life; on Agrippa’s De
occulta philosophia, Compagni, De occulta philosophia.
14 See on the Clavicula Salomonis the uncritical edition by Peterson, ‘The Key of Solomon’;
on the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, see the uncritical edition by Peterson, The Lesser
Key of Solomon.
15 See, e.g., Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie; on material composed by the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, see, with caution, Regardie, The Complete Golden
Dawn System of Magic. On ‘re-sacralisation’, see below, section 4.5.3, and in greater detail
Otto, ‘A Catholic “magician” historicises “magic” ’, 423f.
16 See, very exemplarily, Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice; Gardner, Witchcraft Today;
Lavey, The Satanic Bible; Carroll, Liber Null & Psychonaut; Grant, Magical Revival. An
interesting contemporary practitioner’s overview can be found in Drury, Pathways in
Modern Western Magic.
17 See on early and mid-20th century anthropological definitions and theories of ‘magic’,
Otto/Stausberg, Defining Magic, parts ii and iii.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 165

world-spanning British Empire and/or other European colonies between the

late 19th and the mid-20th centuries.18 While ‘magic’ (or, synonymously, ‘witch-
craft’ or ‘sorcery’) is still addressed in some recent ethnographic works,19 the
anthropological debate on ‘magic’ seems to have lost pace and relevance over
the last decades. At the same time, ‘magic’ has taken on ever greater signifi-
cance in a range of historical disciplines20—the above list of (mostly) recently
edited or translated primary sources of ‘Western learned magic’ may serve as
only one indicator of this overall development.
This focus shift from (i) the study of (mostly) orally transmitted rituals in
indigenous cultures (accompanied by a purely ‘etic’ ascription of the concept
of ‘magic’ by modern anthropologists) to (ii) the study of ‘Western’ and text-
oriented or ‘learned’ ritual specialists or theorists (who have often used the
concept of ‘magic’ while referring to themselves or their works) has not yet
been properly recognised or described in the Study of Religion and/or ‘magic’.
Yet, it is crucial to become aware of this focus shift and to fully grasp its impli-
cations. Put bluntly, we are dealing with a novel—or at least very different—
research topic. In contrast to the older, anthropology-oriented debate, the
inspiring sources of the contemporary (that is, historically-oriented) study of
‘magic’ stem from people who were not only able to read and write, but were
often sophisticated authors; in other words, we are now dealing with a tex-
tual discourse on what might be dubbed ‘learned magic’. What is more, we
are confronted with authors who make use of Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Hebrew,
Old Castilian, Latin, and further European vernacular languages, that is, with
writers and practitioners influenced by a wide range of cultural and religious
heritages that take part in what could roughly be coined ‘Western’ history. The
label ‘Western learned magic’21 is therefore neither trivial nor purely pragmatic;
it helps to circumscribe the above-mentioned corpus of texts, while, at the
same time, demarcating this corpus from the inspiring sources of the older,
anthropological debate on ‘magic’.
There is another twist to it: if ‘Western learned magic’ is a novel research
topic, it might also require novel theoretical and methodological tools. In fact,
the classical arsenal of scholarly definitions and theories of ‘magic’—which had
mostly been deduced from anthropological sources and theorizing—appears

18 On the colonialist background of early academic theories of ‘magic’, see Styers, Making
Magic, 60f.
19 See, e.g., Taussig, The Magic of the State, Kapferer, The Feast of the Sorcerer, Glucklich, The
End of Magic, Meyer/Pels, Magic and Modernity.
20 See on this observation also Pasi, ‘Magic’, 1135, 1139.
21 On these notions see further below, section 3.2.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

166 otto

to be mostly useless for the study and analysis of ‘Western learned magic’ (for
a start, it provided substantial definitions of ‘magic’ which are mostly alien to
or even contradict most practitioner concepts of ‘magic’ in the above corpus
of sources). One of the goals of this article is thus to provide historians of
‘Western learned magic’ with a novel methodological and theoretical setup.
In this respect, while much effort has been given to specialised research on
specific ‘learned magic’ texts, practitioners and groupings in the past years,
there are still two major lacunae in the research literature. Firstly, even though
a multiplicity of text editions and conference volumes have been published,
and new scholarly journals (e.g., Magic, Ritual & Witchcraft) or book series
(e.g., Magic in History series) devoted to the historical study of ‘magic’ have
been launched, there are hardly any large-scale narratives that would aim at
reconstructing possible red threads through the manifold material. Secondly,
even those few works that have attempted historical surveys or overviews of
the history of ‘Western learned magic’ still lack a proper methodological and
theoretical basis and are thus prone to various distortions and shortcomings.22
It is those two lacunae that the present article foremost intends to address.
In what follows, it will be impossible to even tentatively sketch out the his-
tory of ‘Western learned magic’ (this would require a lengthy monograph).
Instead, I will focus on conceptualising and theorising said ‘tradition’ and sug-
gest plausible strategies for its historicisation to come. Particular attention will
thus be given to the following questions: What is the actual object of the history
to-be? Where are its borders (that is, on the practical level of historiography:
what sources should be included, what sources should be omitted)? In what
sense is ‘Western learned magic’ a coherent and continuous ‘tradition’?23 What
are its specific characteristics, compared to other religious traditions?24 Are

22 See especially Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe and Davies, Grimoires—on both
works see below.
23 On my understanding of ‘tradition’, see below, footnote 94, and particularly sections 4.1
(‘Continuity’) and 4.2 (‘Changeability’).
24 ‘Western learned magic’ is indeed understood as a religious ‘tradition’ in this article and
mostly interpreted from the perspective of the Western history of religions. I am aware
that there may also be good reasons for interpreting ‘Western learned magic’—at least
partially—from the perspective of the history of science, for example by highlighting its
impact on pivotal figures in the history of science, or by analyzing shifting concepts of
physical causation within selected sources. However, I consider a religious studies per-
spective to be the more adequate analytical framework for historicizing ‘Western learned
magic’ for two reasons: firstly, ‘Western learned magic’ has—from antiquity to today—
been fundamentally influenced by established religious traditions (i.e., by ancient poly-

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 167

there typical and/or overall historical dynamics that need to be addressed or

analysed? Do we need novel analytical tools to reconstruct and narrate the
history of ‘Western learned magic’?25

2 Recent Histories of ‘Magic’

Before plunging into the difficult task of properly conceptualising, theorising,

and historicising ‘Western learned magic’ it may be sensible to discuss some
recent histories of ‘magic’ in order to grasp the difficulty of the task at hand.
Naturally, I will not go into detail here with the plethora of (modern or pre-
modern) polemical ‘magic’ historiography that has, again and again, told the
stereotypical narrative of how human hubris, religious aberration, irrationality
and superstition have wandered through time and culture (either overcome by
religion or science or simply ineradicable). Most often, the authors of such nar-
ratives were unaware of or only rarely acknowledged the textual-ritual tradition
of ‘Western learned magic’.26 I will also not delve into the mass of identificatory
‘magic’ historiography that has been produced by ‘insiders’ (or practitioners) of
the art, often with the intention of strengthening their identity by construing
a wide-ranging ‘tradition’ to which they allegedly belong. These works often

theistic traditions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, to name the most important strands
only). Given these influences, ‘Western learned magic’ could well be interpreted as a
neglected or marginalised side-product or ‘spin-off’ of the Western history of religions (see
on this argument further Otto, Magie …, 617 f., and passim); secondly, I consider ‘religion’ to
be an appropriate overarching—or second-order—category for the historiographic object
of ‘Western learned magic’, despite its own conceptual and methodological difficulties
(see on this argument ibid., 28 f. and passim; Otto, ‘Towards historicizing “magic” in Antiq-
uity’, 321, particularly footnote 55).
25 My understanding of ‘historicising “Western learned magic”’ will unfold over the course
of this article; for a concise argument on ‘historicisation’, see below, ‘Conclusions’.
26 This type of ‘magic’ historiography naturally covers many academic works; consider, for
example, Keith Thomas’ acclaimed Religion and the Decline of Magic. Out of its 800+ pages,
not more than 10 are dedicated to a rough sketch of some early modern texts and practi-
tioners of ‘learned magic’ (see Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 264–274). In fact,
from the viewpoint of the history of ‘Western learned magic’ his narrative is counterfac-
tual: sources and currents of ‘Western learned magic’ gained steady pace and relevance
from the 18th century onwards, with a climax during the 20th and 21st centuries. See on
this observation, exemplarily, Hanegraaff, ‘How magic survived the disenchantment of the
world’, Asprem, ‘Magic Naturalized?’, Asprem, ‘Contemporary Ritual Magic’, or the special
issue Aries 12 (2012), ed. by Henrik Bogdan.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

168 otto

lack proper historical methodology (unsurprisingly, as we are not dealing with

professional historiographers) and, as a consequence, include a vast range of
fictitious elements,27 with the result that they often appear as ‘histories of truth’
(to use the words of Wouter Hanegraaff) rather than proper historicisations of
‘Western learned magic’.28 Finally, I will also bypass numerous edited volumes
that have been published in the last two decades and explicitly address Western
traditions of ‘magic’. Despite their catchy titles—such as the 6-volume Athlone
History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe (1999–2002); The Metamorphosis of
Magic: From Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (2003); Continuity and
Innovation in the Magical Tradition (2011); or, most recently, The Cambridge His-
tory of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present (2015)—
these volumes do not deliver what they promise. To begin with, none of these
volumes offers a convincing definition or conceptualisation of the ‘tradition’
that is allegedly addressed or historicised.29 As a consequence, such volumes
often include analyses of material that does (in my view, to be fair) not belong
to the history of ‘Western learned magic’ while they are, at the same time, not
at all exhaustive. Even more frustratingly, there is usually no red thread what-
soever (neither theoretical nor historical) across the various chapters as the

27 See Otto, ‘A Catholic “magician” historicises “magic”’, on the telling example of Éliphas
Lévi’s Histoire de la Magie (1860). Three interesting contemporary cases in point are
Magic and Witchcraft: from Shamanism to the Technopagans, published in 2003 by the
practitioner-scholar Nevill Drury; Joseph C. Lisiewski’s Ceremonial Magic & the Power
of Evocation (2004), with its curious proposition of seven eras of ‘magic’: ‘1. Hermetic
Era Magic; 2. Dark Ages Era Magic; 3. Medieval Era Magic; 4. Renaissance Era Magic;
5. Transition Era Magic; 6. Gothic Revival Era Magic; 7. Modern Era Magic’ (Lisiewski,
Ceremonial Magic & the Power of Evocation, 33; the eras are discussed on pp. 34–71); and
Rankine, ‘From Roots to Fruits: A History of the Grimoire tradition’. Likewise heavily
problematic from a historical point of view are, of course, Grant’s three ‘Typhonian
Trilogies’, on which see Bogdan, ‘Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian Tradition’.
28 According to Hanegraaff, the intention of a ‘history of truth’ is ‘to discuss the sources of
true knowledge and wisdom, trace the paths they had followed through time, and make
clear how those trajectories harmonized or coincided with the unquestionable truth’
(Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 5). As ‘magic’ is usually construed as ‘something
that is immutable and beyond change’ (ibid., 6) in the aforementioned ‘insider’ narratives,
these can—quite paradoxically—be perceived as a type of ahistorical historiography. See
on this observation also Otto, ‘A Catholic “magician” historicises “magic”’, 439. The objects
of such narratives are thus ‘invented traditions’, created ‘for claiming normative authority’
(Engler, ‘Afterword: Tradition’s legacy’, 363).
29 See, exemplarily, my critique in Otto, ‘Review: Continuity and Innovation in the Magical
Tradition’.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 169

contributors were not given the possibility to engage with each other’s pieces
(a bad habit in most scholarly article collections). The result is that notions of
historical ‘continuity’, ‘changeability’, or further large-scale historical dynamics
(on which see below, section four) are largely underexposed, even though these
should be located at the epicentre of any historiographic narrative on ‘Western
learned magic’.
Instead, I shall discuss two recent monographs that have reacted to the
aforementioned focus shift and whose choice of sources thus reflects recent
findings and perspectives on the textual-ritual tradition of ‘Western learned
magic’ as sketched out above, namely, Michael Bailey’s Magic and Superstition
in Europe (2007) and Owen Davies’ Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (2009).30
Of course, there is no room here to discuss these two works at greater length. I
will only focus on the fundamental questions posed above: What is the object
of these histories? Where are its borders—that is, on the practical level: Are
any relevant sources neglected? Are any incongruous sources included? Finally,
is ‘Western learned magic’ plausibly construed as a coherent and continuous
‘tradition’?
It is surprising to see that neither Michael Bailey nor Owen Davies pro-
vide convincing definitions or conceptualisations of ‘magic’ at the outset of
their works, with the result that the very object of their narratives, including
their choice of sources, is sometimes difficult to grasp. Bailey mostly adopts
what could be regarded a discourse-historical perspective (even though he does
not use this terminology) and narrates the history, semantics, and functions
of the concept of ‘magic’, taking both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ perspectives into
account. However, he often falls prey to a methodological bias which I have
elsewhere called ‘magiologisation’: he ‘miraculously transmogrifies someone
into a “magician” (or something into “magic”, respectively) in retrospect’31 who
would never have adopted the term for self-reference (as will be argued below,
this should be one of the main criteria for conceptualising ‘Western learned
magic’). Thus, one is left wondering about his ‘magiologisation’ of Nordic peo-

30 At a very late stage of preparing this article Brian P. Copenhaver’s Magic in Western Cul-
ture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015)
was published, alongside his reader The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlighten-
ment (London: Penguin 2016). While I consider the reader to be very useful, I find his
explicitly Frazerian interpretation of large parts of the pre-modern discourse on ‘magic’
rather unsatisfactory, if not anachronistic, given the apparent shift towards discursive
approaches in the academic study of ‘magic’ (on which see below, footnote 54), which
is completely faded out by Copenhaver.
31 Otto, ‘A Catholic “magician” historicises “magic” ’, 432.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

170 otto

ple,32 of practices of medieval instrumental religion,33 of the ‘shamanic’ benan-

danti34 (thereby following the disputed argument of Carlo Ginzburg),35 or of
the exorcisms of Johann Joseph Gassner,36 to give only a few examples. What
is more, as Bailey tends to focus on cultural stereotypes of ‘magic’ (e.g., in
poetry, theological discourse, or legislation), he omits a proper discussion of
the sources and ritual techniques of ‘Western learned magic’ in various chap-
ters (consider, e.g., the almost total absence of the Greek Magical Papyri in
chapter one entitled ‘Roots in the ancient world’).37 It is also interesting to
note that Bailey’s narrative ends with Gerald Brousseau Gardner’s ‘Wicca’ (and
recent ‘Neopagan’ authors such as Starhawk),38 whereby he ignores the wealth
of developments that have taken place since the 1960s (consider his omission
of ‘Chaos magic’, the ‘Temple of Seth’, the ‘Golden Dawn Inc.’, or the ‘Typhonian
oto’, to give only a few of many examples).39 Both shortcomings are, however,
comprehensible: as Bailey lacks a plausible conceptualisation or definition of
‘magic’ at the outset of his work,40 he includes sources that should (again: in
my view) be omitted, and omits sources that should be included, thus blurring
the very object of his historical narrative.
In contrast, Owen Davies’ Grimoires: A History of Magic Books is almost exclu-
sively focused on ‘grimoires’ (or ‘magic books’), thus shedding much greater
light on the textual-ritual tradition (and, partly, the practitioners and proce-

32 Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe, 59 f.

33 Ibid., 79f.
34 Ibid., 146f.
35 See Ginzburg, The Night Battles; Ginzburg, Ecstasies.
36 See Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe, 223.
37 Ibid., 9–42.
38 Ibid., 238–247.
39 See on some of these recent developments Asprem, ‘Contemporary Ritual Magic’; Gran-
holm, Dark Enlightenment; the special issue Aries 12 (2012), ed. by Henrik Bogdan; and,
from a practitioner perspective, Drury, Magic and Witchcraft; Id., Pathways in Modern
Western Magic.
40 See Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe, 4/5: ‘Rather than defining magic and supersti-
tion as theoretical abstractions and then looking to see whether and to what degree these
existed in the past, I approach the development and use of these categories as important
historical phenomena. My most basic criterion for determining what beliefs and prac-
tices to include in my exploration is whether a society or some significant segment within
it […] would have considered a given set of beliefs or practices to be magical or supersti-
tious. Since authorities often disagreed on the exact limits of these categories, however,
and since more popular understandings could be extremely fluid, I am fairly capacious in
my conception of the topic’.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 171

dures) of ‘Western learned magic’, particularly from early modernity on. With
its incorporation of a plethora of sources and its erudite reconstruction of
the translation and transmission history of a great number of ‘learned magic’
texts, it is undoubtedly a reference work for any future historicisation of ‘West-
ern learned magic’.41 Yet, again, due to a striking conceptual vacuum at the
beginning of the work (there are no criteria whatsoever to distinguish ‘magic
books’ from ‘non-magic books’),42 Davies sometimes tends to ‘magiologise’
texts and traditions that belong to the history of individual or instrumental
Western religions rather than to the quite narrow textual-ritual tradition of
‘Western learned magic’.43 What is more, the chapter on antiquity and the
Middle Ages is rather fragmentary,44 and numerous developments of the 20th
and 21st centuries are omitted (Davies ends his narrative with Anton LaVey’s
Satanic Bible),45 thus rendering only an incomplete picture of the history at
issue. Finally, as Davies focuses on the transmission of ‘learned magic’ texts and
their respective social contexts, the actual contents of these texts (i.e. the ritual
recipes, techniques and concepts of efficacy) are often under-represented. In
a similar vein, the complex intellectual background and development of core
figures of ‘Western learned magic’—such as Agrippa of Nettesheim,46 Éliphas
Lévi,47 Paschal Beverly Randolph,48 Aleister Crowley,49 or Anton LaVey,50 to
name only a few examples (note that Kenneth Grant is not even mentioned)—
is addressed only briefly and thus remains unsatisfactory.

41 Particularly for substantiating the notion of ‘continuity’, on which see below, section 4.1.
42 See Davies, Grimoires, 2: ‘Defining the meaning of magic is a far trickier task. For all
the time, paper, and intellectual energy spent on trying to do so, there is no overarch-
ing answer. Any useful understanding must be tied to the cultures of the people being
studied in specific periods and places. The boundary between religion and magic is cer-
tainly never clear-cut and changes over time and in relation to different religious belief
systems.’
43 See ibid., e.g. 22f. (where he refers to Medieval leechbooks), 76 (referring to Moriscan
alherces), 80f. (referring to the Prayer to Saint Martha and the cartas di voler bene), 114f.
(referring to the Spanish Libro de San Cypriano), 155 f. (referring to Caribbean indigenous
religions), 166f. (referring to ‘the Islamic folk magic tradition’).
44 Ibid., 6–43.
45 Ibid., 272–277.
46 Ibid., 47–48.
47 Ibid., 175–177.
48 Ibid., 177–179.
49 Ibid., 184–185.
50 Ibid., 272–274.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

172 otto

All in all, both works are steps in the right direction but suffer from basic
methodological shortcomings. In both cases, conceptual vagueness (i.e. the
absence of a convincing clarification of the object of the historical narrative)
leads to the inclusion of questionable material. At the same time, both schol-
ars neglect sources—e.g., from antiquity and the (e.g. Arabic or Jewish) Middle
Ages, but also from the extremely vital 20th and 21st centuries—51 that play(ed)
an important role in the history of ‘Western learned magic’. Finally, even though
both Bailey and Davies acknowledge the discursive ambivalence and concep-
tual multifacetedness of ‘magic’, they nevertheless tend to portray it as a stable
object of study that wanders through time and space. As will be argued below,
this alleged ‘stability’ or ‘homogeneity’ of ‘magic’ as a historiographic object is
one of the first ideas that must be tossed overboard in the course of its histori-
cisation.52

3 Conceptualising ‘Western Learned Magic’

None of the works discussed so far provide plausible criteria for deciding
what sources should be included, and what sources should be omitted, in the
course of historicising ‘Western learned magic’. Even though I have called into
question the possibility of properly defining ‘magic’ as a second-order scholarly
category,53 I am nonetheless convinced that there is a methodologically sound
way to conceptualise ‘Western learned magic’ as a coherent historiographical
object. In this section, I attempt to sketch out such an approach.

3.1 Setting Up the Corpus

In line with recent attempts to approach the concept of ‘magic’ from a dis-
course historical perspective,54 historiographers of ‘Western learned magic’

51 In this respect, it is interesting to note that a recent practitioner-historiography, namely

the one published by Nevill Drury (Magic and Witchcraft), offers a much more accurate
and detailed narrative on developments in the 20th and 21st centuries (see therein chap-
ters 8–12), despite its arbitrariness in various previous chapters. In fact, Drury’s dense
‘insider’ description of the Golden Dawn, Crowley, Gardner, LaVey and other figures pro-
vides a fascinating narrative that must be taken into account (critically) within any schol-
arly historicisation to come.
52 See on this point also Pasi, ‘Theses de magia’.
53 See esp. Otto, Magie, Otto/Stausberg, Defining Magic.
54 See, exemplarily, Styers, Making Magic; Stratton, Naming the Witch; Pasi, ‘Theses de magia’;
Otto, Magie; Bogdan, ‘Introduction: Modern Western Magic’; Hanegraaff, Esotericism and

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 173

should orientate themselves towards the conceptual history of ‘magic’ and thus
the historical usage of the term. There is no room in this article to even ten-
tatively sketch out the conceptual history of ‘magic’ that covers no less than
2,500 years of textual sources and transcends a wide range of geographical, cul-
tural and religious borders. In what follows, I will only focus on what I have
heretofore called ‘discourse of inclusion’, that is, on textual sources that include
an etymological derivate, linguistic equivalent or culturally established syn-
onym of ‘magic’ as a self-referential and thus identificatory term.55 Of course,
I am here also including precursors of the modern English term ‘magic’, be
it in Old Greek or Koine (μαγεία), in Latin (magia), including translations (of
the Greek or Latin term) into Coptic ‘hik’ (ϨⲒⲔ) and Arabic ‘siḥr’ (‫ )ﲮﺮ‬and
equivalences in further European languages (such as Old Castilian—magia—
or French—magie—or Italian—magia—or German—Magie). Odd as this cri-
terion may appear at first sight, it is hugely surprising to see how many pre-
modern (and, the more so, modern) texts from different cultural and religious
realms adopt a self-referential use of the concept of ‘magic’. In fact, from late
antiquity on, where we encounter the first genuine corpus of self-referential
‘magical’ texts (namely, the Greek Magical Papyri, which include the etymon
μαγ at least ten times),56 ‘learned magicians’ generated a stunning textual out-

the Academy, 164–177; Otto/Stausberg, Defining Magic; Granholm, Dark Enlightenment.

I will not discuss the method of historical discourse analysis in this article: see for that
purpose Otto, Magie, foremost chapter one; and Otto, ‘A discourse historical approach
towards medieval “learned magic” ’, for some related terminological clarifications (insider/
outsider; emic/etic; first-order/second-order). From the viewpoint of Moberg’s useful
distinction of First-, second-, and third-level discourse analytic approaches, the approach
outlined here corresponds to a third-level approach: see Moberg, ‘First-, Second-, and
Third-level Discourse-Analytic Approaches’, 19 f.
55 See also Otto, Magie, chapters 9–11; Otto, ‘A Catholic “magician” historicises “magic”’; Otto,
‘A discourse historical approach towards medieval “learned magic”’.
56 Cf. pgm i.127; pgm i.331; pgm iv.211; pgm iv.243; pgm iv.2082; pgm iv.2290; pgm iv.2319;
pgm iv.2450; pgm iv.2454; pgm lxiii.5. This finding corresponds to the second edition of
Preisendanz/Henrichs, Papyri Graecae Magicae, according to the Thesaurus Linguae Grae-
cae. There are further instances in the additional material presented in Betz, The Greek
Magical Papyri, and Daniel/Maltomini, Supplementum Magicum. Note that choosing the
pgm as a viable starting point for historicising ‘Western learned magic’ is not an arbitrary
decision. Certainly, these texts did not arise out of the blue but had ritual and/or textual
predecessors (on which see Brashear, ‘The Greek Magical Papyri’, 3390f. and 3422–3429,
and, e.g., the work of Joachim Quack, Heidelberg); however, the pgm appear to be the first
extensive corpus of sources where private ritual entrepreneurs have actually adopted the
Greek term μαγεία for self-reference.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

174 otto

put—57 given that they were almost invariably threatened by harsh polemics
and often legal prosecution (at least until the ‘crimen magiae’ was redeemed
from most European codes of law over the course of the late 17th and 18th
centuries).58
Note that I am proposing a philological criterion for putting up a corpus
of sources of ‘Western learned magic’. This criterion does not imply anything
that even vaguely resembles a substantial definition of ‘magic’, nor is this
criterion primarily focused on the contents of the texts in question (e.g., on
a specific set of ritual techniques or interpretation of ritual efficacy). As we
will see, even in texts written by ‘Western learned magicians’ over the last
(roughly) two millennia the semantics of ‘magic’ change so substantially that
one can hardly speak of a homogenous concept of ‘magic’—or a stable ritual
art—that would have been shared by its practitioners from antiquity to today.
In fact, it is precisely the other way round: the ongoing mutability of the
ritual techniques and concepts of ritual efficacy provided in sources of ‘learned
magic’ is one of the core characteristics of this ‘tradition’ and thus needs to
lie at the epicentre of any historiographical reconstruction (see below, section
4.2 on ‘changeability’). Whereas earlier historians of ‘magic’ often purported to
trace an immutable object through time and space, a methodologically sound
history of ‘Western learned magic’ should, in stark contrast, be a description of
historical change.
Simple as the above criterion for putting up a corpus of sources may appear
at first sight—one merely ought to determine whether the concept appears
in a self-referential and/or identificatory manner in a given number of texts
(in different languages, and including synonyms or derivates)—the procedure
proposed here faces various difficulties on the object level. First of all, while
we have a clear continuity (that is, transmission history) with regard to texts
in languages that partake in the conceptual history of ‘magic’ (i.e., we have
surviving self-referential ‘magical’ texts in late ancient and Byzantine Greek,
in Latin, and in various European languages that all include the etymon),
translations obviously complicate the matter. With respect to Arabic-Islamic
sources—the medieval Arabic realm has been most crucial in transmitting

57 I would go as far as to say that the greatest difficulty in historicising ‘Western learned
magic’ is the enormous mass of sources that has to be taken into account; any histo-
riographical narrative thus has to be highly selective and reductive, both with regard
to the amount of sources to be included as well as a large number of complex micro-
developments; see below, section 4.6 (‘multiplicity’).
58 Beginning with the French witchcraft edict in 1682; see Levack, The witchcraft sourcebook,
181–190.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 175

‘learned magic’ texts and techniques59—the translation of Greek (or Graeco-

Egyptian) ‘mageía’ (and, more or less simultaneously, Coptic ‘hik’) into Arabic
‘siḥr’ is quite easy to comprehend (as Egypt had been Arabicised in the course
of the 7th century ce), and Arabic ‘siḥr’ has even been re-translated into Latin
‘magia’ (or ‘necromantia’/‘nigromantia’) from the 12th century on.60 In contrast,
medieval Jewish (that is, Hebrew and/or Aramaic) texts of ‘learned magic’ (see
foremost the Sepher ha-Razim and the Harba de-Moshe, two highly systematic
ritual composites)61 do not apply common Hebrew translations of ‘mageía’
for self-reference—such as ‘kšp’ (‫)כשף‬, which is the main equivalent in the
Septuagint—, but less pejorative terms (such as ‫‘—עשה‬to serve, to work’).62
Thus, in such cases one must indeed take into account the textual (that is,
foremost, ritual) contents in order to determine whether these sources are
orientated towards prior self-referential ‘magical’ texts, and so belonging in the
same ‘tradition’ (see below, section 4.1 on ‘continuity’).
Another problem is that ‘learned magicians’ developed various coping (or
self-defense) strategies over the course of their millennia-long condemnation
and (at least partial) persecution by Western cultural and religious elites. One
such strategy, which is surely a concomitant of their overall desire (or necessity)
for ‘secrecy’, is the omission of the term ‘magic’ even when it lies in the concep-
tual or intellectual background of a given text. There are numerous examples
of such texts which clearly belong to the textual-ritual tradition of ‘Western
learned magic’ but do not attest a self-referential use of the term ‘magic’ (even
though contemporary and comparable texts do). One such example is Aḥmad
ibn al-Būnī’s Kitāb Šams al-Maʾārif al-Kubra (Large Book of the Sun of Knowl-
edge),63 an Arabic, early 13th-century compilation full of stereotypic ritual pre-
scriptions that would certainly have been subsumed under ‘siḥr’ by most other

59 See, exemplarily, Pingree, ‘The Diffusion of Arabic Magical Texts in Western Europe’; Bur-
nett, ‘The Translating Activity in Medieval Spain’; and recently Saif, The Arabic Influences
on Early Modern Occult Philosophy; see also the references in footnote 97.
60 See for example the Latin Picatrix, ed. Pingree, Picatrix, e.g., 83, 87, 96. See also Burnett,
‘Talismans: Magic as Science?’.
61 On Jewish texts of ‘learned magic’, see further Leicht Astrologumena Judaica, Bohak,
Ancient Jewish Magic.
62 Thanks to Gideon Bohak for this suggestion. This ‘neutral’ terminology, however, may
reflect the Greek terms πρᾶξις and πραγματεία (‘practice’, ‘work’), which often appear in the
Greek Magical Papyri: see Otto, Magie, 385f. See on Hebrew terminology in Jewish texts of
‘learned magic’ further Harari, ‘What is a Magical text?’.
63 See Coullaut Cordero, El Kitāb Šams al-Maʾārif, for an edition of the Arabic text and
Spanish translation.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

176 otto

medieval Arabic authors (both from the outside64 and the inside65), but are
here subsumed under the identificatory Sufi label ‘sīmiyāʾ’ (literally, ‘ilm as-
sīmiyāʾ’ means ‘art of the signs’). In a similar vein, the late medieval ritual text
Ars notoria deliberately avoids the Latin term ‘magia’ (instead, it uses formula-
tions such as ‘sacred art’),66 even though its evocation formulae are partly iden-
tical to those of a contemporaneous ‘learned magic’ text that indeed adopts
the term ‘magic’ for self-reference, namely, the Liber Iuratus Honorii (Sworn
Book of Honorius).67 Note that the argument to include such texts (which do
not include ‘magic’ as a self-signifier) is not based on their mere ‘similarity’ to
contemporaneous self-referential texts, but on the methodological necessity to
reconstruct historical ‘continuities’ with sufficient plausibility (by substantiat-
ing the inter-textual transmission of distinctive narrative or ritual patterns).68
Historiographers of ‘Western learned magic’ should therefore read through a
large number of sources from a given epoch in order to fine-tune their selec-
tion of texts and not fall prey to concealment strategies that may pervade their
very sources.
If this procedure for putting up a coherent corpus of sources of ‘Western
learned magic’ is already quite tricky (as it requires a lot of reading and language
skills), it becomes even more complicated with regard to the necessary step of
excluding sources that are often incorporated in existing histories of ‘magic’.
Again, the above criterion may serve as a guideline: (1) Polemical ‘outsider’
accounts of ‘magic’ should be taken into account only with great caution.
Sometimes, such texts can be useful, for example when they provide lists of
‘learned magic’ texts that have circulated in a given period.69 However, as a

64 See Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddimah, ch. 6, section 27 (see Rosenthal, Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqad-
dimah, 156–170).
65 See Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm, esp. book 1, ch. 1 with its threefold definition of ‘siḥr’ (Ritter/Plessner,
“Picatrix”, 6).
66 Cf. Véronèse, L’ Ars notoria au Moyen Age, 139 (version b).
67 See Hedegård, Liber Iuratus Honorii, e.g. 60, 66. See for a more complete survey of the
self-referential use of ‘magic’ in medieval sources, Otto, ‘A discourse historical approach
towards medieval “learned magic” ’.
68 On ‘continuity’ see further below, section 4.1. In Egil Asprem’s terminology, I am engaging
in ‘homological-diachronic comparison’: Asprem, ‘Beyond the West’, 22f.
69 See, e.g., Ibn an-Nadīm’s Kitāb al-Fihrist, book 8, chapter 2 (see Dodge, The fihrist of
al-Nadīm, 725–733), for the 10th-century Arabic realm, Ps.-Albertus Magnus’ Speculum
Astronomiae for 13th-century Western Europe (see Zambelli, The Speculum Astronomiae,
203–273), or Reginald Scot’s The discoverie of witchcraft for 16th-century Europe (first ed.
1584).

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 177

rule of thumb, Western authors partaking in the ‘discourse of exclusion’ tend

to simplify, distort, or—consciously or not—misunderstand the textual-ritual
tradition of ‘Western learned magic’.70 The lesson scholars should draw from
this is that ‘outsider’ accounts are usually not trustworthy for reconstructing
the ‘insider’ perspectives of practitioners of ‘Western learned magic’. I cannot
stress enough that the ‘insider/outsider-problem’—the discussion of which has
been crucial to the modern Study of Religion—must be properly acknowledged
in the academic study and historicisation of ‘Western learned magic’.71 (2) With
regard to the ‘discourse of exclusion’, it is also necessary to bypass many of
its descriptions of ritual practices ascribed to rural, illiterate and/or allegedly
backward people(s).72 For sure, the vast majority of these did not understand or
denote their practices as ‘magic’, and they rarely produced ritual texts, with the
result that their practices appear to be mostly short and simplistic (compared
to ‘learned magic’ rituals, which can be incredibly complex and take even
years to accomplish). As the majority of these ‘superstitio’ accounts therefore
do not match the above criteria, they are largely irrelevant to the history of
‘Western learned magic’. (3) Finally, there is a vast range of textual descriptions

70 Take Thomas Aquinas’ curious argument that the ‘angels’ invoked during the Ars notoria
ritual are really ‘demons’ as an example: Summa Theologiae 2, 2, 96, 1 (see O’Meara/Duffy,
St. Thomas Aquinas, 71–75 and further Fanger, ‘Plundering the Egyptian Treasure’). A late
ancient example is Zacharias of Mytilene’s Vita Severi with its description of ‘magical’
books found in late 5th-century Beirut among Christian students; on the presumed dis-
tortions in Zacharias’ description see Otto, Magie, 374f.
71 See McCutcheon, The insider/outsider problem, for an introduction to the debate; in
my view, the conceptual history of ‘magic’ is a perfect example of the necessity of this
distinction.
72 Examples of such texts are abounding—I shall only mention Plato’s account of asebic
practices of pharmakeia in his Laws (933c–e) for ancient Greece, Pliny the Elder’s exten-
sive description of healing rituals for the Roman Imperial period (see Historia naturalis,
particularly books 28–32 that treat remedies made from animals), Augustine of Hippo’s
account of various types of superstitio in his De doctrina Christiana for late ancient Chris-
tianity (see particularly book 2, chapter 20–24), Thomas Aquinas’ related account of
superstitio in his Summa Theologica (2.2.96.2–4) for late medieval Europe, early modern
(theological as well as juridical) accounts of ‘witchcraft’ (on which see the splendid study
Levack, The witch-hunt in early modern Europe; see also the material gathered in Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic), post-reformation parish reports on the ‘superstitious’
practices of the rural population (see, exemplarily, Labouvie, Verbotene Künste) or even the
polls performed by 19th-century German folklorists such as Adolf Wuttke (Der deutsche
Volksaberglaube der Gegenwart) or Wilhelm Mannhardt (Die Korndämonen; Wald- und
Feldkulte).

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

178 otto

or prescriptions of rituals that resemble notions of ‘learned magic’ (e.g., which

focus on intermediary beings as ritual addressees or on short-term, inner-
worldly ritual goals), but that are neither conceptually nor historically related
to the history of ‘Western learned magic’.73 I would suggest to conceptualise
such findings under the labels ‘instrumental’ or ‘individual(ised) religion’.74
Finally, there are numerous border cases. Sometimes texts have entered the
limelight of ‘learned magicians’ even though the contents of these texts have
not been understood and, accordingly, denoted as ‘magic’ by their original
authors. Examples of such texts are again abounding, thus complicating the
matter. For example, Iamblichus’ De mysteriis is not a self-referential ‘magi-
cal’ text, even though it is often described as such in scholarly literature.75 As
Iamblichus frequently polemicises against bad, demonic ‘goētes’ that are infe-
rior to true ‘theurgists’,76 I would even assign it to the ‘discourse of exclusion’.77
The same pertains to the Corpus Hermeticum and further texts associated with
‘Hermeticism’ (such as the Latin Asclepius), which neither include the self-
referential term ‘magic’ nor appear to resemble any of the semantics of ‘magic’
established in late antiquity.78 Nonetheless, as Marsilio Ficino, the early mod-
ern inventor and apologist of a humanist version of ‘magia naturalis’, counted
both Iamblichus’ work as well as the Corpus Hermeticum as pivotal ancient tes-
timonies of the alleged tradition of ‘prisca theologia’, these texts have entered
the textual stream of ‘Western learned magic’ and were frequently invoked by
subsequent ‘learned magicians’.79

73 For example, I would count large parts of the allegedly ‘magical’ Genizah fragments (see
Schäfer/Shaked, Magische Texte aus der Kairoer Geniza), of Islamic ‘folk magic’ traditions
(see, e.g., Kriss/Kriss-Heinrich, Volksglaube im Bereich des Islam), or of rural practices
in pre-modern Christian milieus (consider the pragmatic use of the host as a ritual
device for protection and healing in medieval Christianity: see Kieckhefer, Magic in the
Middle Ages, 79 f.) mostly to the realm of ‘instrumental’ or ‘individual religion’. An ancient
case in point may be the corpus of defixiones (‘curse tablets’), where the majority has
neither been written by ritual specialists, nor followed pre-existing templates (i.e., recipe
collections).
74 See Rüpke, Aberglauben oder Individualität, and Rüpke, The Individual in the Religions of
the Ancient Mediterranean, while focussing on the Mediterranean antiquity.
75 See, e.g., Copenhaver, ‘Iamblichus, Synesius and the Chaldean Oracles’.
76 See, e.g., Jamblichus, de mysteriis, 3, 25, 160 f.; 3, 31, 176f.; see Otto, Magie, 356f. for a detailed
analysis.
77 See on the issue recently Tanaseanu-Döbler, Theurgy in late Antiquity, particularly 109ff.
78 See Otto, Magie., 365 f. for a more elaborate argument.
79 See ibid., ch. 10 for more details.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 179

The same happened to numerous larger clusters of texts, ideas and ritual
practices—such as astrology, alchemy, Neoplatonic cosmology, ‘kabbalah’ (an
originally Jewish tradition of exegesis which had no affiliation to Jewish con-
cepts of ‘magic’),80 Mesmerism, Tarot, Tantrism, or Yoga, to give only a few
examples. All these alleged ‘facets’ or ‘disciplines’ of ‘Western learned magic’
originally evolved independently from any ‘magical’ self-understanding, and,
even after their adoption by ‘learned magicians’, continued to prosper in dis-
courses and milieus detached from ‘Western learned magic’. Accordingly, I
would give these currents a proper spot within the history of ‘Western learned
magic’ only from the moment when they were actually implemented by some
of its practitioners. Beyond the quite narrow textual-ritual tradition of ‘West-
ern learned magic’, I would suggest that they are dealt with and historicised in
their own right—and without using ‘magic’ as an overall signifier (if need be,
they may, of course, be subsumed under ‘Western Esotericism’).

3.2 Further Remarks on ‘Western’, ‘Learned’, and ‘Magic’

As soon as, according to the above criteria, a (more or less) coherent corpus
of sources is identified, the notions of ‘learned’ and ‘Western’ arise inevitably.
‘Learned’ is more or less self-explanatory: we are mostly dealing with textual
sources and thus with authors, practitioners, and readers that belonged, at least
in most pre-modern contexts, to the minority of people who could read and
write (with the exception of the medieval Islamic realm, where literacy was
more wide-spread). Even today, practitioners often have a university degree81
and, at least partly, engage in publishing activities (not least on the internet),
so that the notion of ‘learnedness’ still has some validity—even though the
contexts and motivations of ‘learned magicians’ have certainly changed from
the 19th to the 21st centuries. In general, however, the sources we are dealing
with point to elitist contexts and milieus that have provided resources for
education as well as the capability of ‘learned magicians’ to preserve ritual
recipes by writing them down (partly, on costly materials such as parchment).
No surprise, thus, that the authors of the Greek Magical Papyri have been
ascribed to late ancient Egyptian temple milieus82—in fact, most of these texts
must have been written in an official temple scriptorium.83

80 See ibid., 480 f., and Dan, ‘Jewish Influences iii: “Christian Kabbalah” in the Renaissance’;
a recent and very nuanced assessment of the relationship between ‘Jewish Magic and
Kabbalah’ can be found in Bohak, ‘Jewish Magic in the Middle Ages’, 286–291.
81 See partly Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft; Mayer, Arkane Welten.
82 See Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt, ch. 5.
83 See Dieleman, ‘Scribal Practices in the Production of Magic Handbooks’.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

180 otto

The same pertains to late medieval Latin texts of ‘learned magic’ which have
mostly been copied and preserved in Christian monastery libraries.84 In fact,
until the ‘democratisation’ of ‘learned magic’ texts and techniques over the
course of the 16th century85 we can be fairly sure that we are mostly dealing
with trained religious experts that simultaneously belonged to one of the estab-
lished religious traditions (e.g., to late ancient Egyptian temple cults, Chris-
tian monasteries in Coptic Egypt, medieval Jewish communities, scholarly or
Sufi circles in the medieval Arabic realm, and Christian monasteries in late
medieval Europe). ‘Learnedness’, however, does not only refer to the social con-
text of our sources, but also to their sophisticated contents: ‘learned magicians’
surely had a passion for complex recipes, for lengthy rituals (up to forty-one
days,86 eighteen months,87 or even five years88), for the adoption and combina-
tion of a wide range of elaborate ritual techniques, for the use of sophisticated
ritual artefacts and devices that often demanded time-consuming prepara-
tions. The degree of this complexity fluctuates over time (see below, ‘complex-
ity’), but this overall characteristic of our sources again justifies the use of the
supplement ‘learned’.
The second ingredient of our composite—‘Western’—may likewise require
further explanation. ‘Western’ is surely its most fuzzy and imprecise compo-
nent, not least due to the general arbitrariness of such wide-ranging geograph-
ical border-markers. Yet, in our case ‘Western’ may still be useful: apart from
the fact that it helps to demarcate our object of research from the former,
anthropological literature on ‘magic’ (see above), it depicts specific historical
continuities on the object level, namely, the ongoing transmission and recep-
tion of ‘learned magic’ texts and techniques across a contingent and limited
set of geographical regions, cultural contexts and religious traditions. Given
these circumstances, the notion of ‘Western’ seems to imply more or less the

84 See, e.g., Page, Magic in the Cloister.

85 The notion of ‘democratisation’ refers to the increased accessibility of ‘learned magic’
texts in vernacular languages and, as a consequence, expanding reader and practitioner
milieus: see Davies, Grimoires, 61–67 and further.
86 See the ‘eighth book of Moses’ in pgm xiii, 1–343 (Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri, 172–181).
87 See the ritual described in the early modern German text Abramelin (uncritic. ed. Dehn,
Buch Abramelin; engl. trsl. Dehn/Guth, The Book of Abramelin); note that the Abramelin
ritual described in the French manuscript version that was edited by Samuel L.M. Mathers
in 1898 (Mathers, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage)—and on which sev-
eral generations of 20th-century ‘learned magicians’ relied—was incomplete (compared
to the German original), allegedly requiring only 6 months to accomplish.
88 See the medieval Coptic recipe in Meyer/Smith, Ancient Christian Magic, Nr. 135 (p. 326f.).

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 181

same advantages and problems compared to its use in the composite ‘West-
ern Esotericism’ (and there are, of course, numerous overlaps on the object
level; see below, ‘conclusions’).89 Yet, there is another twist to it: as the ritual art
described in sources of ‘Western learned magic’ adopts, combines, and merges
numerous religious motifs, theological concepts, and ritual practices derived
from all religious traditions that took part in its history (e.g., from ancient poly-
theistic traditions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, to name only the most
important strands), the notion of ‘Western’ also reflects an important theoret-
ical notion that shall be discussed below, namely, ‘hybridity’ (see section 4.3).
Finally, one more word regarding the function of ‘magic’ in our composite.
On the object level, it obviously refers to a range of things, that is, not only to
textual sources (even though the reference to these remains its main function),
but also to the (ever-changing) ‘ritual art’ described in these sources, and it
also points to various background factors, such as cultural-religious contexts or
author and practitioner milieus. From a methodological point of view, ‘magic’
therefore holds a double status as it functions both on the ‘emic’ and the ‘etic’
level. It has an ‘emic’ function as it reflects the self-referential use of the term
‘magic’ in a large amount of sources. Yet, it has also an ‘etic’ function as (1) it
also refers to sources which do not employ ‘magic’ as a self-referential term; (2)
it implies a range of further theoretical assumptions that are mostly alien to the
understanding of ‘magic’ within the sources (see below, section four); and (3) it
is, in the end, only the methodological starting point of a large-scale historical
analysis the results of which will strongly differ from any ‘insider’ account on
the history of ‘Western learned magic’.90

89 Given these overlaps, it seems reasonable to pick up some arguments of the recent ‘West-
ern’ debate in the Study of Western Esotericism: as ‘Western’ does not stand in opposition
to ‘Eastern’ in this article, but to the inspiring sources of the classical, anthropologically-
oriented debate on ‘magic’, it serves as a ‘marker of specificity rather than as a geographical
index term’ (Asprem, ‘Beyond the West’, 8). Most importantly, ‘Western learned magic’
should be understood as a ‘historical category’, and not as a ‘second-order typological
concept’ (ibid., 5). In the light of this argument the inclusion of, for example, Arabic
material—which is indeed crucial to the history theorised and outlined in this article—
does, in my view, not undermine the utility of the attribute ‘Western’. See on the issue
further Granholm, ‘Locating the West’; Pasi, ‘Oriental Kabbalah’; and, most recently, Hane-
graaff, ‘The Globalization of Esotericism’.
90 In this respect, I would like to point to an often-observable misunderstanding of the
emic-etic-distinction, particularly in the Study of Western Esotericism, namely, that the
‘emic’ perspective is the view of the informant, practitioner or ‘insider’ (see, e.g., Ham-
mer’s account on ‘emic historiography’ in Claiming Knowledge, 85f.; see also Asprem, The
Problem of Disenchantment, e.g. 105; Granholm, Dark Enlightenment, 4, 11, 12 and passim;

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

182 otto

All in all, the notion of ‘Western learned magic’ is nothing but an analyti-
cal category, that is, it is an artificial construction conceptualised by a modern
scholar. Yet, I would suggest that the historiographical value and plausibility
of this category should be measured against its final product, i.e. its narrated
history to come, and not against hasty methodological objections. For sure,
the criteria for choosing what sources to include, and what sources to omit,
are much less explicit—and hence much more vague—in a plethora of main-
stream historiography in the History of Religion, as well as in the Study of ‘West-
ern Esotericism’.91 Of course, the here-proposed criteria may also be revised
and fine-tuned in the course of historicising ‘Western learned magic’. The self-
referential or identificatory use of the concept ‘magic’ may serve as a starting
point, but it will be reasonable to add further criteria in the course of the anal-
ysis, for example regarding different terminologies in different source corpora,
or a contingent and fluid matrix (or typology: see below, section 4.6 on ‘mul-
tiplicity’) of textual or ritual contents. Yet, the amount of sources that can be
gathered on the basis of the here-proposed criterion is exhaustive and certainly
sufficient for the composition of a lengthy and abundantly data-driven histor-
ical narrative.

4 Theorising ‘Western Learned Magic’

On the basis of the above conceptualisation of ‘Western learned magic’, I will

now discuss various theoretical issues that need to be addressed in the course

the same—somewhat reductionist—interpretation of ‘emic’ has also been applied by

contemporary practitioners: see Drury, Pathways in Modern Western Magic, therein fore-
most Drury, ‘Introduction’, 1–4, and Hume, ‘Lifting the Veil: an Emic Approach to Magical
Practice’). At least when following Pike’s original distinction, and McCutcheon’s adap-
tation (see McCutcheon, The insider/outsider problem, and therein Pike, ‘Etic and Emic
Standpoints for the Description of Behaviour’), both ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ standpoints are an
exclusive preserve of scholarly analysis and should not be conflated with the practitioner’s
perspective (in other words: an ‘emic’ approach may reconstruct and re-narrate the ideas,
practices and perspectives of practitioners of ‘learned magic’, but ‘insider’ sources should
not themselves be called ‘emic’). See on this issue further Otto, ‘A discourse historical
approach towards medieval “learned magic” ’.
91 See on this general critique (i.e., the absence of transparent criteria for choosing historio-
graphical sources) Otto/Rau/Rüpke, ‘History and Religion’. On the ongoing efforts to con-
ceptualise ‘Western Esotericism’, see recently Bergunder, ‘What is Esotericism?’, Stuckrad,
Locations of Knowledge, Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy and the related review
symposium in Religion 43/2 (2013), Asprem/Granholm, ‘Constructing Esotericisms’.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 183

of its historicisation.92 Due to its overly ‘deviant’ character over large parts of
‘Western’ history (thus rendering it difficult to properly determine authors or
practitioners due to the common use of pseudepigraphy, particularly in pre-
modern times—see further below, section 4.4), its diverse and ever-changing
cultural-religious contexts and its high-grade ritual dynamics, we are facing a
range of methodological difficulties. Yet, in my view it is possible to struggle
through these difficulties by addressing some basic characteristics of ‘Western
learned magic’. As these are ultimately theoretical issues, the following sub-
sections will, it is hoped, contribute to a proper theorisation of historicising
‘Western learned magic’.93

4.1 Continuity
First of all, historiographers of ‘Western learned magic’ should focus on prop-
erly comprehending and documenting the continuity of ‘Western learned mag-
ic’ from antiquity to today—and thereby demonstrate that it is a ‘tradition’
proper that we are talking about.94 Yet, the historicisation of this ‘tradition’ is

92 The section resembles some of the dimensions of historiographic comparison suggested

by Olav Hammer (see Hammer, Claiming Knowledge, 34–35: “Firstly, there is the formal
level: doctrines or rituals may resemble (or differ from) each other at the level of overt
characteristics or form. Secondly, there is the level of social context, e.g. questions such
as the stratification of the participants and their place within society as a whole. Thirdly,
there is the level of cultural context, e.g. the place of a given ritual within the ritual cycle
or of a doctrine within a general worldview. Fourthly, and finally, there is the level of emic
interpretation, i.e. how the specifics of the ritual or doctrine are understood by members of
the community”) but extends this scheme by adding further criteria, thereby doing justice
to the specifics of ‘Western learned magic’.
93 There will be slight emphasis on pseudepigraphic texts of ‘learned magic’ throughout
the entire section for two reasons: (1) said emphasis allows for taking into account a
considerably larger pool of sources, which facilitates the illustration of basic charac-
teristics of ‘Western learned magic’—such as ‘continuity’ (section 4.1), ‘changeability’
(section 4.2), ‘hybridity’ (section 4.3), or ‘morality’ (section 4.5.1); (2) compared to the
works of ‘author-magicians’ which are well-investigated by now (consider, for example,
the early modern discourse on ‘magia naturalis’: see Otto, Magie, ch. 10), the pseudepi-
graphic corpus of ‘learned magic’ texts is still underexplored (this may be due to the rel-
atively small number of critical text editions). The emphasis also reflects my assumption
that the pseudepigraphic corpus is similarly important for historicising ‘Western learned
magic’.
94 I speak of ‘tradition’ in this article with reference to the Latin sense of the word—
‘tradere’: to ‘transmit’/‘hand on’ (see Engler, ‘Afterword: Tradition’s legacy’, 357, 366f.). In
the light of the ongoing debate on ‘invented tradition’ and the discursive instrumental-
isation of the concept of ‘tradition’ (see, e.g., Engler, Historicizing ‘Tradition’ in the Study

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

184 otto

surely more challenging than narrating the history of established religious tra-
ditions or even fully-fledged religious institutions (e.g., compared to ecclesiasti-
cal history) as ‘Western learned magic’ lacks a range of structural elements that
seem to be constitutive to religious ‘traditions’ proper.95 For example, ‘learned
magicians’ never had any fixed canon of ‘holy’ scriptures (rather, we have to
speak of multitudinous layers of texts that were often transmitted indepen-
dently from one another), they had no continuous lineages or teacher-pupil
relationships (at least on the current state of research, one can barely docu-
ment such lineages before the 19th century), no authorities that would have
determined a ‘learned magic’ orthodoxy or -praxy (such as elites to which
‘learned magicians’ would have been accountable, e.g., by establishing moral
guidelines in canonical documents), no distinctive architecture, such as tem-
ples (at least until the 18th century, when groupings inspired by high grade
freemasonry—such the Orden der Gold- und Rosenkreutzer, Pasqually’s Élus
Coëns, or Pernety’s Illuminés d’Avignon—began to equip steady ritual sites),
and no educational infrastructure that would have allowed the raising of next
generations according to a fixed set of doctrines. Thus, basic pre-conditions for
setting up a ‘tradition’ proper—that would be both easily transmittable as well
as normative to subsequent generations—are lacking in the history of ‘Western
learned magic’.
At least until the late 19th century (when group dynamics became a major
driving force in the wake of the Golden Dawn), we therefore have to restrict
ourselves to two domains while reconstructing a ‘tradition’ of ‘Western learned
magic’: the textual and the ritual (thus I often use the formulation ‘textual-
ritual tradition’ in this article). Regarding the textual domain, we have come
quite far. There are a few gaps and open queries (particularly in the Middle
Ages, where the role of the Arabic-Islamic realm is still under-investigated,
and the impact of Jewish texts and milieus, including their relationship to
Arabic, Byzantine, and Latin sources, remains mostly unclear),96 but it is now

of Religion; Lewis/Hammer, The invention of sacred tradition; with focus on Western Eso-
tericism, see Hammer, Claiming Knowledge, esp. 85–200; Kilcher, Constructing Tradition;
Asprem/Granholm, ‘Constructing Esotericisms’), my understanding is thus more essen-
tialist in this article as I focus on modes of ‘continuity with the past’ (Engler, ‘After-
word: Tradition’s legacy’, 361), even though I am also acknowledging a complex interplay
between ‘continuity’ and ‘changeability’ in the history of ‘Western learned magic’ (see
below, sections 4.1, 4.2 and 4.5).
95 On my argument for interpreting ‘Western learned magic’ as a religious ‘tradition’ (thereby
facilitating its comparison with other religious ‘traditions’) see above, footnote 24.
96 Some interesting observations on this relationship can recently be found in Bohak, ‘Jewish

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 185

indeed possible to reconstruct a continuous stream of ‘learned magic’ texts

from antiquity to today. For doing this, however, the two above domains must
be combined: where direct textual transmission cannot be substantiated,97
the second domain, that is, ritual transmission, must be taken into account.
A rough sketch of the transmission history of the late ancient Greek Magical
Papyri may serve to illustrate this point.
Most of the Greek Magical Papyri (pgm in the following) known today (par-
ticularly the so-called ‘Anastasi collection’ or ‘Theban library’ that consists of
pgm iv, v, xii, xiii, xiv, eventually pgm i–iii, vii and lxi)98 were buried in
Egyptian sand at least until the 19th century,99 thus these particular Papyri will
not have influenced ‘learned magic’ developments before the 19th century. In
other words, the material transmission of these papyri with regard to medieval
Christian (I am referring foremost to sources composed by Coptic Christians
in medieval Egypt), Jewish (Hebrew or Aramaic), or Islamic (Arabic) sources
of ‘learned magic’ cannot be substantiated. Yet, on the level of ritual contents,
there are clear continuities observable in all these three source corpora. With
regard to the corpus of surviving Coptic Papyri, there is surely a striking shift
observable from a largely polytheistic framing of ‘learned magic’ techniques
in the pgm towards a monotheistic framing, based on an elaborate angelol-

Magic in the Middle Ages’; see also below, footnote 204, for my own thoughts on this
relationship, and further Leicht, Astrologumena Judaica, even though I don’t agree with
his overvaluation of Jewish influences.
97 Such as in the late Middle Ages, where the Latinisation of numerous Arabic-Islamic as well
as Jewish texts of ‘learned magic’ can be pinpointed with regard to both date and trans-
lator due to the well-documented Toledan translation movement. Consider the trans-
lations of the ps.-Hermetic Liber prestigiorum (around 1130 by Adelard of Bath), Thabit
ibn Qurra’s De imaginibus (trsl. before 1150 by Jean of Seville), the Secretum Secretorum
/ Kitāb sirr al-ʾasrār (trsl. before 1150 by John of Sevilla), the Almandal (trsl. before 1230,
presumably in Toledo: see Pingree 1994), the Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm / Picatrix (trsl. 1256 under
the guidance of Jehuda ben Moshe in Toledo), the Sepher ha-Razim which was embed-
ded (as Liber Sameyn) in the seven-volume compendium Liber Razielis that was translated
into old Castilian in 1259 (again, under the guidance of Jehuda ben Moshe; there appar-
ently was an earlier Hebrew-Latin translation), or the compilatory works Lapidario and
Astromagia (in Toledo in the 1260s), to name only a few examples; see the overviews in
Pingree, ‘The Diffusion of Arabic Magical Texts in Western Europe’; Burnett, ‘The Trans-
lating Activity in Medieval Spain’; Lemay, ‘Books of Magic in translation’; Véronèse, ‘La
transmission groupée des textes de magie “salomonienne”’; Forshaw, ‘The Occult Middle
Ages’.
98 See Brashear, ‘The Greek Magical Papyri’, 3398 f.
99 See on their discovery history Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri, xlii–xliv.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

186 otto

ogy.100 Yet, we have a clear continuity of various specialist techniques of the

pgm, such as the predominant use of voces magicae, of charaktêres,101 palin-
dromes, or specific ritual artefacts (such as figurines or lead tablets), to name
only a few examples.102 The fact that an established palindrome from the pgm
(namely, ‘ablanathanalba’) is copied defectively in a Coptic papyrus, thus los-
ing its palindromedness,103 not only highlights what I mean by ‘continuity’, but
also points to more nuanced dynamics of transmission that shall be discussed
further below (‘changeability’).
Similar ritual continuities can be observed in medieval Jewish sources of
‘learned magic’ (the Sepher ha-Razim clearly inherits a wide range of ritual tech-
niques and recipe patterns from the pgm),104 as well as Arabic-Islamic105 and

100 See the material in Meyer/Smith, Ancient Christian Magic.

101 See on their ‘continuity’ from the pgm to the Coptic Papyri (and beyond), Gordon, ‘Charak-
têres between Antiquity and Renaissance’. Even though Gordon speaks of a ‘discontinuity’
due to recurrent changes in iconography, I would see the material gathered in his article
rather as evidence for ‘continuity’ (on the complex relationship between ‘continuity’ and
‘changeability’ see below, section 4.2).
102 In my view, these techniques are too specific to be interpreted as mere ‘similarities’ and
thus indicate modes of historical reception. In fact, over the 4th century some of the—
at that time ‘unemployed’—Egyptian temple personnel joined Christian monasteries,
which was surely accompanied by the translocation of ritual texts (see on this argument
Meyer/Smith, Ancient Christian Magic, 261; and further Frankfurter, Religion in Roman
Egypt, esp. ch. 5).
103 See Meyer/Smith Nr. 64 (Meyer/Smith, Ancient Christian Magic, 123) and compare with,
e.g., pgm iii, 80 (Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri, 20).
104 See Morgan, Sepher Ha-Razim, particularly the index with its numerous pgm-references
(p. 91/92); see also Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic, 170–175 (and passim) and Rebiger/Schäfer,
Sefer ha-Razim ii, 313–314 (index references to the pgm); see, for a wider and comparative
scope on medieval Jewish ‘learned magic’, Bohak, ‘Jewish Magic in the Middle Ages’, and,
with particular focus on charaktêres, Bohak, ‘The Charaktêres in Ancient and Medieval
Jewish Magic’.
105 For example, the oracle technique ‘Democritos’s sphere’, attested in pgm xii, 351–364 (see
Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri, 165/66) has been adopted in some manuscript versions of
the Arabic Kitāb sirr al-ʾasrār (‘Book of the Secrets of Secrets’: see, e.g., National Library
of Medicine, Bethesda [Maryland], Ms. a 57, fol. 7r), which from the late Middle Ages on
served as a template for Latin and further vernacular versions of the Secretum Secretorum
(on which see Forster, Das Geheimnis der Geheimnisse); the ‘sphere’ is also attested in
al-Būnī’s Kitāb Šams al-Maʾārif, ch. 3, and further late medieval Latin manuscripts (see
Thorndike, A History of Magic, 682f.). Apart from this specific technique, the Ġāyat al-
Ḥakīm attests the adoption of evocation techniques by means of lists of voces magicae and
the use of charaktêres (see particularly the chapters devoted to ʿazāʾim, that is, ‘conjuring’:

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 187

Byzantine (Middle Greek)106 texts, even though we surely have different reli-
gious framings and other dynamics of adaptation and transformation in each of
these corpora. Yet, by means of these transmission ‘bridges’, some of the special-
ist techniques of the Greek Magical Papyri continued to flourish in late medieval
and early modern European sources of ‘learned magic’ (consider the continu-
ous use of voces magicae and charaktêres—the latter eventually evolved into
more complex sigilla107 which then pervaded the genre of ‘Solomonic’ texts of
‘conjuring spirits’ at least up to the 18th century).
Direct textual transmission of the (extant) pgm among ‘Western learned
magicians’ gathered pace, expectably, as soon as the first editions and transla-
tions were published in the mid-19th century. In fact, a specific ritual technique
attested in pgm v—namely, the ‘identification formula’—gained particular
interest among members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,108 who
embedded some of its evocation formulae in a ritual entitled ‘bornless ritual
for the invocation of the higher genius’ (based on an English translation of
the Harris Magical Papyrus that had already been published in 1852).109 Apart

cf. the conjuration of the planets in book 3, ch. 7 & book 4, ch. 2; of the moon phases in
book 4, ch. 2; of the planetary spirits [Arab. rūḥānīyūn] in book 3, ch. 9; of one’s ‘complete
nature’ in book 3, ch. 6; see further the curious astrological interpretation of charaktêres in
book 2, ch. 5 and their ritual use in, e.g., book 2, ch. 9 and book 3, ch. 1). In a 14th-century
Arabic version of the Testamentum Salomonis (ed. Navarro/Ruiz, Medicina, farmacopea
y magia; uncritic. Engl. trsl. Shadrach, Book of Deadly Names), we still find an evocation
recipe that makes use of the ‘God names’ Adonī and Ṣabaot (see the second ‘Tayleq’ in
Shadrach, Book of Deadly Names, 10 f.), thus attesting an almost uncorrupted transmission
of these voces magicae from the pgm (where Adonai and Sabaoth appear over fifty times)
to 14th-century Al-Andalus.
106 See the voces magicae and charaktêres in various Middle Greek versions of the Hygroman-
teia Salomonis (ed. Delatte, Anecdota Athenensia; Engl. trsl. Marathakis, The Magical Trea-
tise of Solomon, Torijano, ‘The Hygromancy of Solomon’), particularly in Ms. Harleianus
5596. Its prayers to the planets and cardinal directions, its hourly lists of angels and
demons, and its ‘sympathetic chains’ (see Marathakis, The Magical Treatise of Solomon,
146–199) clearly resemble intermediate Arabic works, but see already pgm vii, 795f. (Betz,
The Greek Magical Papyri, 140) for a list of angels and charaktêres assigned to the twelve
zodiac signs.
107 See Grévin/Véronèse, ‘Les “caractères” magiques’; Gordon, ‘Charaktêres between Antiq-
uity and Renaissance’.
108 See Florence Farr’s Egyptian Magic (1896), where she claims that the “most potent magical
formula was the identification of the Ritualist with the God whose power he was invoking”
(Farr, Egyptian Magic, 12).
109 See Goodwin, Fragment of a Graeco-Egyptian work upon magic. On the ritual see Regardie,
The Golden Dawn, 442–446 and compare to pgm v, 100–175 (Betz, The Greek Magical

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

188 otto

from such minor adoptions, however, the impact of the pgm on ‘learned magi-
cians’ of the 20th and 21st centuries remains rather marginal. This is somewhat
surprising—given the often observable preference for old ritual texts—but an
affinity to medieval European sources of ‘learned magic’ was prevalent already
in the Golden Dawn and seems to have had an enduring imprint on subse-
quent developments.110 However, recently published practitioners’ analyses of
the Greek Magical Papyri suggest that a more systematic examination of the late
ancient heritage of ‘Western learned magic’ by contemporary practitioners is in
progress just now.111
This example could be elaborated upon in much greater detail. It has mainly
served to demonstrate that ‘continuity’ can take different roads in the history
of ‘Western learned magic’, but that it can nonetheless be reconstructed with
sufficient plausibility. I also hope to have shown that ‘continuity’ in no way
implies mere ‘homogeneity’. Rather, we must speak of multitudinous layers
of texts and a vast range of ritual techniques that were often transmitted
independently from one another (the transmission history of the late ancient
pgm is indeed only one of numerous streams from late antiquity onwards; on
the transmission of the Testamentum Salomonis see below). In fact, ‘learned
magicians’ were usually highly selective and/or eclectic and only seldom aware
of the actual breadth and diverse nature of circulating texts and techniques
of ‘learned magic’. It is thus crucial to develop a nuanced understanding of
‘continuity’ in the history of ‘Western learned magic’: instead of imagining a
one-way road from antiquity to today, we rather have to think of a multiplicity
of trajectories, some of which converge, some of which remain detached from
one another, and some of which come to a dead end. We may thus come closest
to the sources when thinking of a broken and repeatedly re-invented textual-
ritual ‘tradition’.

Papyri, 103). The Golden Dawnian recipe even attests the adoption of some voces magicae
from the late ancient Papyrus: compare ‘Hear me: Ar; Thiao; Rheibet; Atheleberseth; a;
Blatha; Abeu; Ebeu; Phi; Thitasoe; Ib; Thiao’ (Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 443) with ‘Hear
me, arbathiao reibet atheleberseth [am] bmtha albeu ebbnphchi chitas-
gob ibaoth iao’ (pgm v, 115 f., trsl. Betz, Greek Magical Papyri, 103). See further Butler,
Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic, 55f.
110 See recently Joseph Lisiewski and his Ceremonial Magic and the Power of Evocation (2004),
who devotes some pages to the pgm in his historical survey at the beginning of the
book, arguing that these texts would represent ‘magic in its purest and finest form’ (ibid.,
39); however, he ignores the pgm in the rest of the book and continues to denote the
Heptameron and further late medieval and early modern sources as ‘ancient’.
111 See several entries in Lycourinos, Occult Traditions, and Skinner, Techniques of Graeco-
Egyptian Magic.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 189

As a consequence, any scholarly historicisation of ‘Western learned magic’

will deviate quite substantially from accounts composed by practitioners. For
example, the well-known Parisian ‘learned magician’ Éliphas Lévi was, in the
mid-19th century, surrounded by what he called ‘catch-penny mystifications’,112
namely, by tens of thousands of ‘penny’ Grimoires, distributed within the publi-
cation genre of Bibliothèque Bleue that had flooded the French market since the
late 18th century113 (an obviously undesired consequence of the invalidation of
‘magic’ by Enlightenment authors—fooleries are easier to publish than here-
sies). While Lévi condemned most of these texts (such as the Grimoire du Pape
Honorius, Le Grand Grimoire or the Grimorium Verum) due to their egocen-
tric ritual goals and their straight-forward invocations of Satan, and explicitly
excluded them from his own account of the history of ‘magic’ (his Histoire de la
magie, publ. in 1860),114 these must certainly have a prominent place in modern
scholarly histories of ‘Western learned magic’. In other words, the tendency of
‘learned magicians’ to take on a selective stance towards, or even to regularly
‘cleanse’, ‘moralise’, and ‘purify’ their own ‘tradition’ (see below, section 4.5.1
on ‘morality’), must be taken into account and properly documented, but not
taken as an unquestioned starting point while historicising ‘Western learned
magic’.115

4.2 Changeability
I have already argued that the textual-ritual tradition of ‘Western learned mag-
ic’ may be continuous from antiquity to today, but that it is certainly not
homogenous. I would make this claim even stronger: it is ever-changing. In
fact, ‘changeability’ is the characteristic that distinguishes our research object
most strongly from most older, anthropological narratives (which have, by their
very definitions, advocated an immutable essence of ‘magic’).116 This pertains
foremost to the ritual art described in sources of ‘Western learned magic’
which is in permanent motion: it continuously adopts ritual patterns and
techniques from older sources, discards unnecessary or unwanted elements,
adapts to novel cultural and religious environments or practitioner milieus, and

112 See Lévi, Transcendental Magic, 235.

113 See, in greater detail, Davies, Grimoires, 95 f.
114 See Otto, ‘A Catholic “magician” historicises “magic” ’.
115 Put differently, the multitudinous pseudo-historical claims and further distortions in
sources of ‘Western learned magic’ should not obscure their scholarly analysis and his-
toricisation. See for a related argument on the ‘insider/outsider-problem’ and its effects in
the History of Religion Otto/Rau/Rüpke, ‘History and Religion’.
116 See on this point also Pasi, ‘Theses de magia’, 3 f.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

190 otto

continuously invents modes of ritual performance or efficacy. Transmission,

thus, is only part of the story. When we look at the actual contents of our
sources, i.e., the very ritual art of ‘Western learned magic’,117 we must take a
range of further dynamics into account, such as appropriation and adaptation,
selectivity and eclecticism, transformation and innovation, but also copying or
translation errors, writing pragmatics, or further coincidental changes. From
the perspective of contemporary ritual studies, the history of ‘Western learned
magic’ is thus a fine example of what has been discussed under the heading of
‘ritual dynamics’.118
Again, an example may serve to illustrate the ongoing ‘changeability’ of
‘Western learned magic’, namely, the transmission history of the Testamentum
Salomonis (TestSal in the following).119 If we believe current age determina-
tions, this apocryphal text emerged from late ancient Judaeo-Christian milieus
of the 3rd or 4th centuries, eventually from Egypt or surrounding regions.120
Yet, these assessments have to be read with caution, as the earliest codicolog-
ical witness (of the Greek text) stems from the mid-15th century,121 thus being
considerably younger than extant Arabic versions (on which see below). Even
though the TestSal is not a self-referential ‘magical’ text (the etymon appears,
but is only used polemically while referring to ‘others’),122 it holds a promi-

117 There are further dimensions of ‘Western learned magic’ which are subject to ongo-
ing ‘changeability’—such as cultural and religious frameworks, social and practitioner
milieus, concepts of ritual efficacy and other theorisations, transmission media and tech-
niques, as well as organisational and grouping structures (see also below, ‘Conclusions’);
however, I consider ritual dynamics to be most crucial and will therefore concentrate on
this domain in the present section.
118 See, e.g., Michaels et al., Ritual dynamics; Brosius et al., Ritual und Ritualdynamik.
119 See recently Busch, Das Testament Salomos, for a good German translation; the classic edi-
tion of the Greek text is McCown, The Testament of Solomon; engl. Trsl. Duling, ‘Testament
of Solomon’.
120 See further Johnston, ‘The Testament of Solomon’.
121 See McCown, The Testament of Solomon, 10–28.
122 See ibid., 46 (TestSal 15, 5 Rec b); see further Otto, Magie, 378f. However, the Testamen-
tum Salomonis is often transmitted in codices that include self-referential ‘magical’ texts
such as the Hygromanteía Salomonis; even though this Byzantine text may have served as
a Middle Greek prototype version of the Latin Clavicula Salomonis, it is still barely recog-
nised by Byzantine scholars (as it is neither mentioned in Magdalino/Mavroudi, The occult
sciences in Byzantium, nor in Walker, ‘Magic in Medieval Byzantium’). Nonetheless, both
texts can be found—bound together—in Ms. Harleian 5596 (see McCown, The Testament
of Solomon, 13f.), Ms. Bologna Ms. 3632 (see ibid., 21 f.), or Ms. Paris Bibliotheque Nationale,
Anc. fonds grecs, 2419 (ibid., 25 f.).

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 191

nent spot in the history of ‘Western learned magic’ due to its first account of
an elaborated Judaeo-Christian demonology: some 58 ‘demons’ are enumer-
ated in the text, alongside their proper names, their ‘visual’ appearances, their
responsibility for a range of human diseases, and ritual counter-measures. Like-
wise important is its narrative of Solomon as king not only of the Jewish people
but also of ‘demons’ (including ‘Beelzeboul, the ruler of the demons’)123 by
virtue of a ring given to him by archangel Michael (inscribed with a pentagram
in some manuscripts, or more complex inscriptions such as a thirty-one let-
ter vox magica in others)—124 a topos often evoked in texts belonging to the
‘Solomonic’ genre. Yet, the ritual prescriptions for banning demons in the Test-
Sal are extremely simple,125 and in no way foreshadow the multitudinous ritual
prescriptions for ‘conjuring spirits’ in the early modern Clavicula Salomonis and
its various offshoots.
The transmission of the TestSal illustrates ‘changeability’ in various ways.
To begin with, it attests the adoption and ‘demonisation’ of an old Egyptian
intermediary being, the ‘decan’ (or ‘decan spirit’). ‘Decans’ are astrological
entities usually attributed to ten degrees of the zodiac (360°), thus amounting
to thirty-six beings in total. Compared to the twelve astrological signs, which
are assigned to thirty degrees of the zodiac each, ‘decans’ represent a more
subtle personification and ‘deification’ of time periods that has been crucial
in the old Egyptian religion (each ‘decan’ stands for and governs ten days; thus
each zodiacal sign covers three ‘decans’). At the end of the scale, ‘day gods’, in
Greek (sometimes) addressed ‘paranatellonta’, and even ‘hour gods’ complete
the spectrum, thus being accountable—and ritually addressable—for each day
of the year and hour of the day.126 ‘Decans’ go back to the Egyptian Middle

123 Duling, ‘Testament of Solomon’, 964.

124 See ibid., 962, footnote k.
125 Consider the recipe for banning ‘Lix Tetrax’ and thereby heal the ‘day-and-a-half fever’: ‘As
a result, many men, when they see (this), pray about the day-and-a-half fever, (invoking)
these three names, “Baltala, Thallal, Melchal,” and I heal them’ (Ibid., 969). ‘Obyzouth’,
responsible for strangling newborn infants, is banned by ‘the angel Raphael; and when
women give birth, write my name on a piece of papyrus and I shall flee from them to the
other world’ (Ibid., 974).
126 The ‘decans’ and ‘day gods’ are addressed in the pgm (e.g. pgm xiii, 328f.: Betz, The
Greek Magical Papyri, 181). See for a list of all 360 ‘paranatellonta’ the late medieval old
Castilian compendium Astromagia (ed. D’Agostino, Astromagia); on ‘hour gods’ see, e.g.,
the Hygromanteía Salomonis, where they have, however, assumed the shape of ‘angels’ and
‘demons’ (see especially the lists in Ms. Harleianus 5596: Marathakis, The Magical Treatise
of Solomon, 185–196).

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

192 otto

Kingdom, where they can be found in various inscriptions and drawings on

coffins and temple walls.127 The most famous old Egyptian portrayal of the
‘decans’ is the so-called ‘Dendera zodiac’, which was originally placed on the
ceiling of the main (Hathor) temple at the Dendera temple complex; it goes
back to the late Ptolemaic period and is today located in the Louvre. On the
‘Dendera zodiac’, all thirty-six ‘decans’ are given a recognisable visual shape,
partly human, partly theriomorph.
In Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, various Greek (and later on, Latin) authors
composed ‘decan lists’, according to what they saw on Egyptian temple walls
and ceilings (see, e.g., the Holy Book from Hermes to Asclepios). However, as
these (anonymous) authors only had ‘text’ as a medium at their disposal, they
obviously had to describe literally what they saw. According to the Holy Book of
Hermes to Asclepios, the third ‘decan’ of Taurus looks like the following: “This
one is named Rhomenos. He has a human shape with a dog face. On the head
he has a curl of hair, with the right hand he holds a scepter, the left hand he
has at the back. He is clothed until the knees. He rules over the mouth and the
throat. Engrave him in Hyacinth, put the plant oxtongue [Anchusa officinalis]
under it, enclose it in gold or silver and wear it. Take care not to eat eel”.128 Note
that such descriptions vary significantly from one version to another.
Following this basic pattern, the TestSal is not only interesting due to its
adoption of visual descriptions of intermediary beings (this technique became
so popular in the Arabic Middle Ages that virtually all astrological entities—
such as the seven ‘wandering planets’, the twelve zodiacal signs, the ‘decans’, the
‘paranatellonta’, the twenty-eight ‘mansions of the moon’, etc., were described
with their ‘visual’ appearance),129 but also because its adoption of the 36 ‘de-
cans’ was accompanied by their adaption to a Judaeo-Christian background—
by addressing them as ‘demons’.130 Such transformations are continuously
observable in the transmission history of the TestSal. In the course of its Arabic
adoption, the text was again adapted to local terminology and religious lore.
Ibn an-Nadīm already attests its reception in tenth-century Baghdad (Kitāb
al-Fihrist, book 8, chapter 2) and speaks of 70 ‘jinn and devils’131 enslaved by
Solomon, but a surviving 14th-century Arabic manuscript version from Al-

127 See Gundel, Dekane und Dekansternbilder, for further details.

128 Ibid., 375 (German trsl.). Greek text and French translation can be found in Ruelle, ‘Hermès
Trismégiste: Le Livré Sacre sur les Décans’.
129 See various passages in the Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm (ed./trsl. Ritter/Plessner, “Picatrix”) and the
compilatory work Astromagia (ed. D’Agostino, Astromagia).
130 See their description in Duling, ‘Testament of Solomon’, 977–981.
131 Dodge, The fihrist of al-Nadīm (vol. ii), 727.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 193

Andalus changes the number into 72.132 While 72 could be interpreted as a

duplication of the original number of 36 ‘decans’ (thus halving them into
‘pentads’), we now have an exclusive reference to the Arabic figure of the ‘ğinni’
(Pl. ‘ğinn’; the intermediaries are dubbed ‘Ṭaīlaq’ in the text, which appears to
be a sub-type of the ‘ğinni’). In other words, if we believe the Greek TestSal to be
the original version, the Judaeo-Christian figure of the ‘demon’ has now been
transformed into the Arabic-Islamic figure of the ‘ğinni’ in the course of the
Arabicisation of the text.133
Yet, the story is not over: presumably from the early 15th century on (at
least from a codicological perspective), ‘demon’ lists appear in the European
‘learned magic’ scene,134 most famously in Johann Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia
daemonum (1577), which provides names and visual descriptions of some 70
‘demons’, and a text called Goetia, which was part of a larger early modern
compilation of ‘learned magic’ texts coming under the name Lemegeton Clav-
icula Salomonis (said compendium was probably composed between the late
16th and mid-17th centuries, even though most of its parts are considerably
older).135 The Goetia goes back to the 72-name-scheme and is quite famous
among contemporary practitioners as it was edited (and actually used in evo-
cations) by Aleister Crowley in 1904, that is, shortly after the collapse of the
Golden Dawn.136 Here is Crowley’s description of ‘Bael, the first principal spirit’:
“(1.) bael.—The first Principal Spirit is a King ruling in the East, called Bael.
He maketh thee to go Invisible. He ruleth over 66 Legions of Infernal Spirits.
He appeareth in divers shapes, sometimes like a Cat, sometimes like a Toad,

132 See Navarro/Ruiz, Medicina, farmacopea y magia (Arabic text and Spanish trsl.) and
Shadrach, Book of Deadly Names (uncritical English trsl.).
133 The Arabic version also attests a much wider scope of ritual techniques, e.g., the mixing
of substances, their sniffing or eating, the ‘drinking’ of texts (dissolved into water), colour
symbolism, or lengthy prayers accompanied by voces magicae and charaktêres.
134 The earliest codicological witness may be a text called De officiis spirituum, attested in Ms.
Coxe 25 (early 15th century), fols. 173–187, which may have influenced the list in Johann
Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia daemonum (1577). The earlier Kitāb al-Isṭamāṭīs, latinised as
Liber Antimaquis (see Burnett, ‘Antimaquis’; Burnett, ‘Remarques paléographiques’) also
attests the number of 72 spirits assigned to Saturn. Agrippa of Nettesheim, however, picks
up a Hebrew account of 72 ‘angel’ names: De occulta philosophia, book 3, ch. 25.
135 Uncritic. ed. by Peterson, The Lesser Key of Solomon, based on Ms. Harleian 6483. Note
that lists of the 36 ‘decans’ were also transmitted independently from the TestSal, for
example in the Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm (book 2, ch. 11 & 12), in old Castilian compilations such
as the Lapidario or the Astromagia, and in numerous early modern works (e.g. De occulta
philosophia, book 2, ch. 37; Oedipus aegyptiacus, book 2, ch. 2).
136 See Crowley, The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

194 otto

and sometimes like a Man, and sometimes all these forms at once. He speaketh
hoarsely. This is his character which is used to be worn as a Lamen before him
who calleth him forth, or else he will not do thee homage”.137
What do we learn from this? Even though we may again observe ‘continu-
ity’ in the transmission history of the TestSal, ‘changeability’ seems to prevail.
Over the course of its transmission, the different versions of the text display at
least three substantial transformations of its narrative core, namely, of the clas-
sification and description of intermediaries (from ‘decans’ to ‘demons’, from
‘demons’ to ‘ğinn’, and from ‘ğinn’ back to ‘demons’).138 Apart from their ‘meta-
physical’ status, also their numbers, names, and their (narrative descriptions
of) ‘visual’ appearances appear to be highly fluid and ever-changing,139 not
only between different cultural-religious realms (i.e. over the course of trans-
lation), but also between manuscript witnesses from one cultural domain.140
The transmission history of the TestSal thus highlights the delicate relation-
ship between adoption (‘continuity’) and adaption (‘changeability’) in the his-
tory of ‘Western learned magic’, that is, between the adherence to certain ele-
ments of stability on the one hand (in this case: the Solomon-narrative, the
listing of intermediaries, and the technique of describing their ‘visual’ appear-
ance) and the continuous alteration and transformation of numerous other
and obviously more volatile elements on the other (in this case: the num-
ber, names and characteristics of intermediaries as well as the ritual prescrip-
tions). Apparently, the TestSal represents one of the prototypes of a specific
text genre of ‘Western learned magic’ (namely, the ‘list of intermediaries’).
This genre propagated the seemingly counter-intuitive idea that the hierar-
chical ranks, names and visual appearances of a vast number of ‘metaphys-
ical’ beings can actually be detected by ‘learned magicians’—either to give
shape to and systematise transcendent realms, or simply to facilitate their rit-
ual handling—and may thus have been subject to a particularly high degree of
variability.

137 Ibid., 13.

138 I am emphasizing this succession because the Arabic figure of the ‘ğinni’ is much more
ambivalent and versatile than the Christianised figure of the ‘demon’.
139 With regard to names, there are only a few congruities over time, e.g., with regard to
Asmodeus/Aschmodai, who appears both in the Greek TestSal and the early modern
Goetia.
140 Note, e.g., that there is a different Arabic (Yemenite) version that speaks of twelve tribes
of ‘ğinn’ and comes under the name Kitab al-mandal al-sulaymānī (see Regourd, ‘Images
de Djinns et Exorcisme dans le Mandal Al-Sulaymānī’, and ibid., ‘Al-Mandal al-sulaymānī
appliqué’ for an edition and analysis of the ritual procedure).

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 195

Yet, even adaption is only part of the story. Even more powerful dynamics
of ‘changeability’ in the history of ‘Western learned magic’ may have been the
rejection of ritual techniques, theological motifs or narrative patterns from for-
mer texts, and also the continuous invention of novel ritual tools and practices
as well as interpretations of ritual efficacy. Again, examples are abounding so
I shall only address a selection: instances of rejection may be the discarding of
most polytheistic ‘gods’ in the course of the medieval reception of the pgm141
(yet, these regained importance later on, particularly from the Golden Dawn
onwards); the medieval Arabic sub-discipline of ‘nīranjāt’142 with its curious
instrumentalisation of human body parts143 which was mostly neglected in
the late medieval Latin realm;144 Marsilio Ficino’s well-intended ‘astrological
songs’ that were both invented by him as well as mostly neglected by sub-
sequent ‘learned magicians’;145 Éliphas Lévi’s neglect of techniques of Satan-
conjuration as well as further rituals devoted to malevolent or amoristic goals
(for him, all these had no place in the ‘holy art’);146 or Gerald Brousseau Gard-
ner’s neglect (or rather lamination) of various ‘learned magic’ texts and tech-
niques that had brought him to inventing ‘Wicca’.147
Instances of invention are likewise abounding: consider the development
of systematic hierarchies of ‘angels’ or alphabets of charaktêres in medieval
Jewish works;148 the medieval Arabic-Islamic idea of ‘astrological talismans’
based on a (more or less) mechanistic interpretation of the cosmos;149 the
evocation-technique of a ritual circle drawn on the ground which may like-

141 Apart from a few ‘survivals’ such as Hermes/Thot or the ‘Gods’ assigned to the planets,
foremost Helios.
142 The (originally Middle Persian) term ‘nīranj’ had a range of meanings in the medieval
Arabic realm (see Zadeh, ‘Magic, Marvel, and Miracle’, 241), but refers to a specific ritual
technique in the Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm and some related Arabic texts, which could be translated
as ‘mixing of substances’.
143 See, e.g., Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm, book 3, ch. 11 (Ritter/Plessner, “Picatrix”, 279f.).
144 See Burnett, ‘Nīranj: A category of magic (almost) forgotten in the Latin West’.
145 See De vita libri tres (1489), book 3, ch. 21. Apart from Francesco Cattani da Diacceto and
a few other Florentinian humanists, subsequent ‘learned magicians’ have barely adopted
the technique.
146 See Otto, ‘A Catholic “Magician” historicises “Magic” ’, 422–426.
147 See Bogdan, Western Esotericism and Rituals of Initiation, 145f., and Hutton, ‘Aleister Crow-
ley and Wicca’.
148 See foremost the Sepher ha-Razim with over 700 ‘angels’ assigned to the seven ‘firmaments’.
On the ‘alphabet(s) of Metatron’, see Bohak, ‘Jewish Magic in the Middle Ages’, 278f. and
footnote 46.
149 See, very exemplarily, the Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm, foremost books 1 and 2.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

196 otto

wise have originated in the medieval Arabic realm;150 as well as the artificial—
that is, ritual—fabrication of living animals which may perform various use-
ful deeds;151 alongside elaborate numerology / gematria (this sub-discipline of
‘siḥr’ was called ‘ḫawāṣṣ al-ḥurūf’, literary ‘qualities of letters’) and the use of
numerological ‘seals’ (‘wafq’, ‘ḫātim’),152 which even led to the idea of mathe-
matically ‘calculating’ ever new names of intermediary beings;153 the technique
of reciting ‘angel names’ while looking at peculiar images in order to ‘learn’ the
seven liberal arts in their entirety within very short time (usually a month);154
the idea to instrumentalise intermediary beings for ‘treasure hunting’;155 the

150 The ritual circle is described three times in the Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm while referring to invoca-
tions of the moon (see Ritter/Plessner, “Picatrix”, 311f.); its systematic use is also described
in the contemporaneous text aš-Šāmil fī al-baḥr al-kāmil, ascribed to Abū l-Faḍl Muḥam-
mad ibn Aḥmad aṭ-Ṭabasī (d. 482/1089) and today held, inter alia, in the Berlin National
library (Ms. Ahlwardt 5885); see on this text Zadeh, ‘Magic, Marvel, and Miracle’, 253f.,
and ibid., ‘Commanding Demons and Jinn’, 145 f. There are also various medieval Jewish
(Genizah) fragments that attest the technique (e.g., Schäfer/Shaked, Magische Texte, vol. i,
no. 6 [t.-s. k 1.1] and vol. iii, no. 62 [t.-s. k 1.3]), but I tend to follow Scholem’s assessment
that these are dependent on Arabic works: see Scholem, ‘Some sources of Jewish-Arabic
Demonology’. It therefore seems most likely that the various late medieval Latin works
that make use of the technique (e.g., the Liber Iuratus Honorii, the untitled demonologi-
cal manuscript edited in Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, or the various Claviculae Salomonis)
have adopted it from the medieval Arabic realm.
151 See, apart from some recipes in the third book of the Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm, Pseudo-Plato’s Kitāb
al-Nawāmīs (latinised as Liber vaccae); on this text see Pingree, ‘Plato’s Hermetic Book of
the Cow’, and recently Saif, ‘The Cows and the Bees’.
152 See in particular Aḥmad ibn al-Būnī’s Kitāb Šams al-Maʾārif al-Kubra (ed./trsl. Coullaut
Cordero, El Kitāb Šams al-Maʾārif ); see Canaan, ‘The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans’,
for an analysis of the ritual mechanics. For an overview of systematisations and sub-
disciplines of ‘siḥr’ in the medieval Arabic realm, see Dorpmüller, Religiöse Magie im ‘Buch
der probaten Mittel’, 23–38.
153 See Gotha research library, Ms. Orient. 1251, f. 9–11; the calculation recipe is related to a
prescription in Aḥmad ibn al-Būnī’s Manbaʿ uṣūl al-ḥikma (see al-Ḥalabī, Manbaʿ uṣūl al-
ḥikma, 61 f.). A technique for calculating angel names, derived from a Hebrew template, is
described in Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia, book 3, ch. 27.
154 See the late medieval Latin text Ars notoria (ed. Véronèse, L’Ars notoria au Moyen Age).
155 This idea, which proliferated in European ‘learned magic’ texts at least from the 15th
century on (various ritual recipes can be found in Ms. Sloane 3824, uncrit. ed. by Rankine,
The Book of Treasure Spirits), may have originated in the medieval Arabic concept of
‘ğinn’ protecting tombs; an Arabic template that may have influenced European ‘learned
magic’ texts could thus be the Book of Buried Pearls and of the Precious Mystery, giving
indications regarding the hiding places of finds and treasures (Kitāb al-Durr al-maknūz wal-

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 197

idea of a ‘kabbalistic’ version of ‘learned magic’;156 of the ‘learned magician’s’

ascension towards divine union and apotheosis;157 of imaginary mnemotech-
niques used for contacting intermediary beings;158 the Rosicrucian motif of
psycho-alchemical transformation or rebirth;159 the invention (or alleged reve-
lation) of ‘Enochian’;160 the construal and use of four ‘elementary weapons’;161
the use of meditation and imagination techniques,162 or of sexuality as a ritual

sirr al-maʿzūz fi ʾl-dalāʾil wal-khabāyā wal-dafāʾin wal-kunūz), ed. Kamāl, Kitāb al-Durr al-
maknūz (Arabic text with French trsl.); apparently, various Judaeo-Arabic versions of this
ritual genre have survived from medieval (Egyptian) Jewish communities (see Golb, ‘The
Esoteric Practices of the Jews of Fatimid Egypt’), too, presumably dependent on Arabic
templates.
156 First systematically proposed by Pico della Mirandola in his Conclusiones Nongentae
(particularly theses 9 > 7, 9 > 9, 9 > 15, 9-19-26; see further Otto, Magie, 480f.), but see
already the adoption of the ha-Shem ha-mefôrash (the topos of a ‘complete’ and/or ‘hidden’
name of God) in the mid 13th-century compilation Liber Razielis (see Ms. Halle 14 b 36, 5r–
130v) and the Liber Iuratus Honorii (see Hedegård, Liber Iuratus Honorii).
157 Famously proposed by Agrippa of Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia, particularly book 3
(‘magia caeremonialis’), thereby going beyond earlier accounts of ‘theurgy’ (by striving
towards actual apotheosis, in contrast to mere communio mystica which was central to
Jamblichus’ understanding of ‘theurgy’ where humans and Gods remained ontologically
distinct: see Tanaseanu-Döbler, Theurgy in late Antiquity, 95ff.).
158 See Giordano Bruno’s ars imaginativa, described in his De imaginum, signorum et idearum
compositione (first ed. 1591; ed./trsl. Higgins/Doria, On the Composition of Images).
159 See the original manifestos in Dülmen, Fama Fraternatis. On their conceptual relationship
to the humanist notion of ‘magia naturalis’ see Otto, Magie, 509f.
160 See Pasi/Rabaté, ‘Langue angélique, langue magique, l’énochien’, for an analysis of its
conceptualisation and pre-history, Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations, on Dee’s ‘angel
conversations’, and Asprem, Arguing with Angels, on ‘Enochian’s’ later reception.
161 First proposed by Eliphas Lévi (see Otto, Magie, 536 f.) and systematised further by the
Golden Dawn; a less elaborated ritual instrumentalisation of the four ‘elementals’ can
already be found in ch. 38 of the Petit Albert (Secrets Merveilleux de la Magie Naturelle
et Cabalistique du Petit Albert, published 1782 in Lyon, uncritic. ed. Peterson, ‘Les secrets
merveilleux du Petit Albert’). The conceptualisation of ‘elementals’ is, of course, even
older, going back at least to Paracelsus, Liber de nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salamandris
et de caeteris spiritibus.
162 Consider the conceptualisation and use of ‘Tattva visions’ in the Golden Dawn (see Otto,
Magie, 581f.). I agree with Christopher A. Plaisance (‘Magic made modern?’) that the two
Golden Dawnian ‘novelties’ discussed by Alison Butler (‘active imagination’ and ‘unmedi-
ated invocation’) were not really innovations, but Plaisance has, in my view, overlooked
numerous other—more obvious—innovations of the Golden Dawn to strengthen his
argument.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

198 otto

device.163 In this respect, Crowley’s edition of the Goetia is itself a fine instance
of the interplay between adoption and innovation. Some of the drawings which
he added to the visual descriptions of the Goetian ‘demons’ included an erect
penis,164 thus highlighting Crowley’s early interests in the relationship between
‘learned magic’ and sexuality (which he explored more systematically in the
years after this publication). Finally, to name only three of many innovations
of the 20th century: Jack Parson’s and L. Ron Hubbard’s curious ‘moonchild’
experiments (‘Babalon working’) illustrate how an originally fictional idea165
has inspired modern ‘learned magic’ practice.166 Peter J. Caroll’s technique of
writing down wishes and turning these into ‘medieval’ sigilla by re-arranging
the letters one above the other167 (which he had adopted from Austin Osman
Spare) not only provided the modern ‘Chaos magician’ with a highly creative
and ever-adaptive ritual tool (compared to the slavish reception of pre-defined
sigils beforehand), but also highlights the ‘psychologisation’ of ‘learned magic’
that has been crucial throughout all the 20th century.168 Last but not least,
Kenneth Grant’s amalgamation of Crowleyian ‘Thelema’, Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu’
myth, Hindu Advaita and Tantra, as well as contacts with ‘extraterrestials’ in the
‘Mauve zone’ (to name only some facets of the allegedly age-old ‘Typhonian

163 The idea was probably devised by Paschal Beverly Randolph (see his pivotal texts The
Mysteries of Eulis, ed Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph, Appendix b; and Magia Sexualis,
ed. North, Sexual Magic: Paschal Beverly Randolph; note that the latter is a somewhat
dubious English translation of a French translation—which was published and re-edited
in 1931 by Maria de Naglowska—of the now lost original), and developed further by
Brotherhood of Luxor, the oto (Ordo Templi Orientis), Aleister Crowley, and further groups
and practitioners of the 20th century; see further Urban, Magia sexualis.
164 See his drawing of the fourth spirit titled ‘Samigina’: Crowley, The Book of the Goetia of
Solomon the King, 13.
165 See Crowley’s novel Moonchild (first publ. 1929) with its idea of impregnating a woman
with an ethereal being by means of ‘learned magic’ (especially sexual) rituals; the related
idea of marrying ‘elementals’ may go back to the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor (see
Godwin et al., The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, 107–120) and from there all the way back
to de Villar’s Comte de Gabalis.
166 See Urban, ‘The Occult Roots of Scientology’, and recently Bogdan, ‘The Babalon Work-
ing’.
167 See Carroll, Liber Null & Psychonaut, 20–22.
168 See on ‘psychologisation’, Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft; Hanegraaff, ‘How
magic survived the disenchantment of the world’; Pasi, ‘Varieties of Magical Experience’;
Asprem, ‘Magic Naturalized?’; Mayer, Arkane Welten; Plaisance, ‘Israel Regardie and the
Psychologization of Esoteric Discourse’.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 199

tradition’),169 attests the recurring desire for inventing ‘traditions’ within the
history of ‘Western learned magic’.170 What is more, Grant demonstrates that
innovativity may also manifest in novel combinations of existing (yet hitherto
unrelated) ideas and techniques, and thus reveals another important facet
of ‘Western learned magic’ that shall be discussed in the following section:
‘hybritiy’.

4.3 Hybridity
If ‘changeability’ is one consequence of the millennia-long transmission of
‘learned magic’ texts and techniques, ‘hybridity’ is another.171 It has often been
noted that ‘learned magic’ texts are usually highly ‘hybrid’ (sometimes by the
use of alternating vocabulary), but the issue has rarely been thought through
in a more systematic manner. Yet, ‘hybridity’ is such an essential characteristic
of ‘Western learned magic’ that it must be properly addressed and theorised in
the course of its historicisation.
We may need to distinguish (at least) two different types of ‘hybridity’ in
sources of ‘Western learned magic’, namely, ‘ritual hybridity’ and ‘religious
hybridity’. ‘Ritual hybridity’ refers to the observation that we often find the
combination of a vast array of different ritual (micro-) techniques in prescrip-
tions of ‘learned magic’ (either based on astrology, angelology, demonology,
numerology, evocations, fumigations, the use of material artefacts and devices,
the use of special cloth, fasting and further preparations, speech acts of numer-
ous kinds, further performative actions, or the use of a special ‘language’ of
signs and symbols, to name only a few examples).172 Quite often, these tech-
niques are assembled in the manner of ‘building-blocks’, which, precisely by
combining them, may have ensured or heightened the perceived efficacy of a
given ritual. However, there is also a second type of hybridity, which I would call
‘religious hybridity’: unsurprisingly—given their long and diverse history—
sources of ‘Western learned magic’ attest and combine influences from a vast
range of different religious traditions. As ‘religious hybridity’ seems to indicate
historical dynamics (in contrast to ‘ritual hybridity’ which rather reflects psy-
chological dispositions towards ritual efficacy), distinguishing these two types
of ‘hybridity’ may be helpful.

169 See on Grant’s ‘Typhonian trilogies’, Bogdan, ‘Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian Tradition’.
170 See on the notion of ‘invented tradition’ above, footnotes 28 and 94.
171 In my understanding of ‘hybridity’ I follow Burke, Cultural Hybridity, particularly chapter
one (‘varieties of object’).
172 These are, in fact, only some of the techniques combined in the Clavicula Salomonis.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

200 otto

Note that ‘hybridity’ does not begin with the amalgamations of the Golden
Dawn (e.g., with its numerous correlative tables).173 Already the first surviv-
ing corpus of ‘Western learned magic’, the Greek Magical Papyri, combines
multitudinous ritual micro-techniques (take the 41-day ritual of the ‘eighth
book of Moses’ in pgm xiii as an example), and attests influences from old
Egyptian, Babylonian, Mithraic and Persian, Greek, Roman, Christian, and Jew-
ish religions as well as ‘Gnostic’ symbolism.174 And it extends further: con-
sider the medieval Arabic work Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm (which not only assembles
at least three sub-genres of ‘siḥr’,175 but also mentions 226 reference works
that even attest the adoption of ritual techniques from medieval India),176
the amalgamation of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic influences in Berengar-
ius Ganellus’ late medieval compilation Summa Sacre Magice,177 the enor-
mous amount of topics and disciplines dealt with in Agrippa of Nettesheim’s
De occulta philosophia (first ed. 1531/33),178 the multitudinous correlations in
Johann Baptist Großschedel’s Calendarium Naturale Magicum Perpetuum (first
ed. 1619/1620),179 the mass of influences underlying the ‘study curriculum’ of
the Golden Dawn,180 or the exuberant and yet barely examined ritual portfo-
lio of Aleister Crowley,181 to name only a few examples. Obviously, and quite

173 See Regardie, The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic, book 1, pp. 46–51, book 3, pp. 24–
26, 63–86, etc.
174 See the overview in Brashear, ‘The Greek Magical Papyri’, 3390f. and in particular 3422–
3429.
175 Namely, ‘ilm aṭ-ṭilasmāt’ (‘art of the Talismans’—see most parts of book 1 & 2 and further
chapters), ‘ʿazāʾim’ (‘conjurations’—see the conjuration of the planets in book 3, ch. 7 &
book 4, ch. 2; of the moon phases in book 4, ch. 2; of the planetary spirits [Arab. rūḥānīyūn]
in book 3, ch. 9; of one’s ‘complete nature’ in book 3, ch. 6) and ‘nīranjāt’ (‘mixing of
substances’—see book 3, ch. 10 & 11).
176 See, exemplarily, book 2, ch. 12 on the awful and allegedly Indian ritual of producing
a ‘talking head’; see Pingree, ‘Some of the Sources of the Ghāyat al-hakīm’, for further
details.
177 See the forthcoming edition of the work by Damaris Gehr. In the meantime, it can be
studied in Ms. Kassel 4° astron. 3.
178 Given its heterogeneity, I would, in contrast to Müller-Jahnke, ‘Agrippa von Nettesheim’,
not claim that any kind of coherent ‘magical system’ underlies Agrippa’s work.
179 Uncritic. ed. MacLean, The Magical Calendar.
180 See the overviews in Otto, Magie, 565f., and Butler, Victorian Occultism and the Making
ofModern Magic, ch. 1–3.
181 Apart from the useful volume Bogdan/Starr, Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism, and
various partial analyses (e.g., Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 186f.; Pasi, ‘Varieties of
Magical Experience’), there is yet no systematic scholarly introduction to Crowley’s system

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 201

from the start, ‘Western learned magicians’ were fully-fledged ‘syncretists’ who
believed in inclusivism rather than exclusivism (why doubt the existence of
other gods or different types of ritual efficacy when they may all help your rit-
ual task?). Given this overall tendency, the textual-ritual tradition of ‘Western
learned magic’ could even be interpreted as the first truly ‘ecumenical’ move-
ment in the Western history of religions!
What consequences should historiographers of ‘Western learned magic’
draw from the fact that their source material is usually highly ‘hybrid’? First
of all, they should consider implementing the historiographical perspective
most suited to analysing and depicting cultural hybridity, namely, ‘entangled
history’.182 In fact, the discourse historical approach proposed in this article nat-
urally implies entangled history as one of its methodological facets because the
history of ‘Western learned magic’ is in itself fundamentally entangled. As has
already been demonstrated, this history implied textual transmission across
millennia and a vast range of cultural-religious boundaries, and, as a conse-
quence, multi-lingual manuscript versions with reciprocal re-translations,183
composite texts (or textual corpora or entire study curricula) derived from
a vast range of religiously diverse sources, and further dynamics of cultural
and/or religious entanglement (such as adoption and transformation, as dis-
cussed above). Taken together, these dynamics may explain why sources of
‘Western learned magic’ often appear as inter-cultural/religious patchwork
rugs, thus differing largely from most other religious text genres composed in
Western history.
There is another twist to adopting the perspective of entangled history while
historicising ‘Western learned magic’: as the ‘ritual art’ described in the sources
reflects these circumstances, we are often dealing with what could be dubbed
‘entangled rituals’.184 While this is more or less self-evident with regard to
‘ritual hybridity’—as mentioned above, ‘learned magic’ prescriptions usually
combine a vast range of different ritual (micro-) techniques—it also pertains

of Magick, but numerous practitioner accounts, of which Regardie’s Eye in the Triangle and
DuQuette’s The Magick of Thelema, seem to be the most acclaimed.
182 On entangled history, see still the pivotal volume Conrad et al., Jenseits des Eurozentris-
mus; and, more recently, Haupt/Kocka, Comparative and Transnational History, esp. part
one; Olstein, Thinking History Globally.
183 A telling example is the extremely complex transmission (and translation) history of the
‘astromagical’ block of the 1701 Amsterdam edition of the Sefer Raziʾel, as described in
Leicht, Astrologumena Judaica, 187–306.
184 See the related argument in Burke, Cultural Hybridity, 13f. (‘hybrid practices’).

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

202 otto

to what I have called ‘religious hybridity’ above. In fact, ‘learned magicians’

were often quite aware of the ‘religious hybridity’ of their art. A telling case in
point is the use of efficacious words that has been crucial throughout the his-
tory of ‘Western learned magic’. Already the author(s) of the late ancient pgm
provided translations of some voces magicae (here: ‘God’ names) into different
‘languages’ (among them ‘birdglyphic’, ‘falconic’ and ‘baboonic’);185 this trans-
lation pattern was also adopted in the medieval Arabic work Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm.186
In a similar vein, early versions of the late medieval Latin text Ars notoria men-
tion four inspiring languages of efficacious words (here: ‘angel’ names) to be
used during the ritual,187 and the tabula semamphoras described in Berengar-
ius Ganellus’ Summa Sacre Magice (book two, chapter five) even combines the
four ‘sacred’ alphabets—Greek (east), Arabic (north), Hebrew (west), and Latin
(south)—in an allegedly powerful sigillum quadratum.188 The ongoing quest of
‘learned magicians’ for powerful, ‘secret’ and/or ‘holy’ languages eventually led
to John Dee’s ‘discovery’ of ‘Enochian’189 which was then, again, combined with
other languages (English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian) in the initiatory rit-
uals of the Golden Dawn.190 Of course, these (exemplary) combinations and
translations of efficacious words do not only attest the ‘religious hybridity’ of
‘learned magic’ rituals, but can also be seen as creative attempts to heighten
their perceived efficacy.
Why is it helpful to interpret the history of ‘Western learned magic’ as an
entangled history and thus to acknowledge the ‘hybridity’ of its texts and rit-
uals? In my view, there are three major advantages. Firstly, such an approach
will do justice to the actual complexity of the matter: obviously, the histori-
cisation of ‘Western learned magic’ will not result in a straight-forward, uni-
dimensional narrative from antiquity to today; rather, a multiplicity of simul-

185 See pgm xiii, 80 f. (Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri, 174): ‘I call on you, lord, in birdglyphic:
arai; in hieroglyphic: lailam; in Hebraic: anoch biathiarbath berbir echila-
tour bouphroumtrom; in Egyptian: aldabaeim; in baboonic: abrasm; in falconic:
hi chi chi chi chi chi chi tiph tiph tiph; in hieratic: menephoiphoth cha
cha cha cha cha cha cha’.
186 See Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm, book 3, ch. 7: Persian, Iranian, and Indian translations of voces
magicae (here: ‘planet’ names) are given in an evocation of Jupiter (see Ritter/Plessner,
“Picatrix”, 217).
187 Namely, ‘caldei, hebrei, greci et arabici […] sermonis’: See Véronèse, L’Ars notoria au
Moyen Age, 35/36 (version a).
188 See Ms. Kassel 4° astron. 3, fol. 37v; drawing on 38r.
189 See Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels.
190 See Otto, Magie, 585 f.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 203

taneous developments have to be acknowledged and described, be it on the

level of textual transmission, ritual or societal dynamics, or further dynamics
of entanglement (e.g., ‘pendulum dynamics’, see below, section 4.5). Instead of
a ‘going through the centuries’ approach, historiographers of ‘Western learned
magic’ might choose parallel and/or more nuanced modes of narrating, maybe
based on specific clusters of texts, ideas or ritual techniques, instead of main-
stream denotations of ‘regions’, ‘eras’ or ‘cultural realms’.191 Secondly, the notion
of ‘hybridity’ may help to pinpoint specific influences that underlie a given
‘learned magic’ source (instead of merely acknowledging its ‘heterogeneous’ or
‘chaotic’ contents). In some cases, this might allow for determining the tempo-
ral and geographical origins and/or transmission of a ‘learned magic’ text.192
Thirdly, both ‘hybridity’ as well as ‘changeability’ contradict the widespread
master narrative that there is an alleged ‘core’ or ‘essence’ of all ‘learned magic’
practice and theorising. Tempting as this narrative still appears to contempo-
rary practitioners as well as some scholars of ‘magic’, it is foremost the acknowl-
edgement of ‘hybridity’ that calls for more nuanced and sophisticated analy-
ses.

4.4 Deviance
I have already mentioned the overly ‘deviant’193 character of ‘Western learned
magic’ above and thereby referred to the great quantity of polemical attacks
and legal statutes brought forth against ‘magic’ over large parts of Western
history (apparently, the ‘discourse of exclusion’ was the dominant discourse
at least until the 20th century).194 It is, in fact, quite tempting to argue that
‘Western learned magic’ was and is both a contested as well as marginal textual-
ritual tradition: on the one hand, it was (and still is) frequently marginalised
and ‘othered’ by powerful cultural and religious elites.195 On the other hand,
its authors and practitioners have always tended to ‘adopt systems of knowl-
edge that are marginalised or rejected in contemporary mainstream or elitist

191 On the latter approach see still Collins, The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in
the West.
192 See, exemplarily, Leicht, Astrologumena Judaica, for an impressive intertextual analysis of
potential templates and versions of the Sefer Raziʾel.
193 In my understanding of ‘deviance’ I roughly follow Stark/Bainbridge, Religion, Deviance,
and Social Control, foremost part 2 (‘religion as deviance’).
194 See Otto, Magie, 650 f.
195 See in general Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe, Otto, Magie, esp. ch. 6–8, and
Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, for analyses of some of these ‘othering’ dynam-
ics and strategies.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

204 otto

discourses’.196 One might even argue that this ongoing ‘othering’ dialectic (that
includes polemical stigmatisation as well as positive identification) was so fun-
damental to the conceptual history of ‘magic’ that it has furthered or even
produced the very ‘tradition’ of ‘Western learned magic’.197
Due to this basic characteristic of ‘Western learned magic’, historiographers
have to work through a range of difficulties in the course of its historicisa-
tion. Apart from the fact that a large amount of sources may be ultimately lost,
thus rendering it difficult to generalise findings from single texts within larger
cultural contexts (is the Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm really representative of the medieval
Arabic realm?), we also encounter numerous difficulties within the surviving
sources. For example, in pre-modernity there is an omnipresent use of pseude-
pigraphy, alongside reference to mythological lineages,198 fictitious events,199
or deliberately erroneous publication dates and provenances.200 Related to
the frequent absence of authentic author names are the fluctuating titles of
‘learned magic’ texts—sometimes different texts would come under the same
title, sometimes similar texts were transmitted under a wide range of titles.201
At least partially, we have to deal with cryptic or encrypted literature,202 which
also attests the need or at least desire for ‘secrecy’. There are further strategies

196 Otto, ‘A Catholic “Magician” historicises “Magic” ’, 422.

197 See on this point also Pasi, ‘Magic’, 1139; Pasi, ‘Theses de Magia’, 3–5; Otto, ‘Towards histori-
cizing “Magic” in Antiquity’, 338/39; Bogdan, ‘Introduction: Modern Western Magic’. For
a similar argument with regard to ‘Western Esotericism’, see Hanegraaff, Esotericism and
the Academy, 254 f. The classical sociological argument would be that social stigmatisa-
tion eventually leads to appropriation and identification: see Goffman, Stigma, and Lipp,
Stigma und Charisma (who applied Goffman’s notion of ‘stigma’ to the field of religious
deviance).
198 Consider the narrative pattern of ‘angelic transmission’ frequently evoked in pre-modern
pseudepigraphic texts, such as the Sepher ha-Razim, the Ars notoria, or the Clavicula
Salomonis.
199 Consider the gathering of 89 (in Ms. Sloane 3854) ‘learned magicians’ that have allegedly
resolved upon the composition of the Liber Iuratus Honorii, as described in its foreword
(see Hedegård, Liber Iuratus Honorii, 60).
200 Consider the fictional publishing company ‘Beringos Fratres of Lyon’, allegedly responsible
for numerous French Bibliothèque Bleue Grimoires of the 18th century, often with supposed
publication dates around 1500 (see Davies, Grimoires, 98f.).
201 See on the latter issue Mathiesen, ‘The Key of Solomon’, with regard to the Clavicula
Salomonis.
202 See, e.g., pgm xii with its list of secret names for ritual ingredients, Trithemius’ Stegano-
graphia, or the Golden Dawnian ‘cypher manuscripts’ (on the latter see Küntz, The Com-
plete Golden Dawn Cipher Manuscript).

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 205

of concealment (apart from neglecting the term ‘magic’ as a self-signifier, see

above), such as the deliberate corruption of previous ‘learned magic’ texts in
the course of their translation or re-edition,203 or the general masking of influ-
ences which, from the viewpoint of a given ‘learned magic’ author or compiler,
would have reduced the credibility of his text or rituals.204 Finally, we often
encounter moral justifications (justified or not), up to the degree of what will
below be called ‘moral pendulum’. All these dynamics seem to be obvious con-
comitants of the overly deviant nature of ‘Western learned magic’.
Yet, taking a closer look at some pre-modern sources, the deviant nature of
‘Western learned magic’ becomes blurry, if not—at least partly—questionable.
I am not even referring to those pre-modern milieus where ‘learned magic’
texts and techniques were, at the time, held in high esteem and (more or
less successfully) defended against surrounding polemics—such as the early
modern European humanist discourse on ‘magia naturalis’,205 or, to go back
even further, the medieval Arabic milieu of the Iḫwān as-Ṣafāʾ (‘Brethren of
Purity’) that attests an enthusiastic account of ‘learned magic’ in 9th- and 10th-
century Basra and Baghdad.206 Another striking case in point are medieval
Jewish communities where, according to Gideon Bohak, ‘Jewish magic […] was

203 Consider Mathers’ excision of four sub-chapters of his manuscript template of the Clav-
icula Salomonis in the course of composing his 1888 edition of the text (unsurprisingly,
three deal with amoristic, one with malevolent ritual intentions: see Peterson, ‘The Key of
Solomon’).
204 In my view, the frequent reference to Jewish or Hebrew templates in medieval Latin texts
of ‘conjuring spirits’ largely distorts the fact that the medieval Arabic realm must have
been more important in transmitting this art into the European realm. Yet, Arabic influ-
ences are increasingly erased from the Latin sources. Two texts that attest this dynamic are
Almandal (while early manuscript versions attest an Arabic-Latin translation, most later
versions—often dubbed Almandel or Almadel—display ‘Hebraicized’ or ‘Christianized’
contents: see the Arabic-Latin translations in Véronèse, L’Almandal et l’Almadel latins au
Moyen Âge, 75–118 and compare to the later versions in ibid., 119f.–170; on these later ver-
sions see also Veenstra, ‘The Holy Almandal’) and Ars notoria (early versions of the text
still include “arabici […] sermonis” as an inspirational source of efficacious words, whereas
the reference to the Arabic language is omitted in most later versions: see Véronèse, L’Ars
notoria au Moyen Age, 35/36 = version a, and compare to the “caldei, hebrei, greci” that
remain in ibid., version b, or the version appended to Agrippa of Nettesheim’s printed
Opera Omnia from the early 17th century on: see Klaassen, The Transformations of Magic,
231, note 13).
205 See Otto, Magie, ch. 10.
206 See, exemplarily, epistle 52 of the Rasāʾil Iḫwān as-Ṣafāʾ (ed./trsl. Callatay et al., Epistles of
the Brethren of Purity).

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

206 otto

never considered heretical or diabolical. […] no one ever tried to persecute its
practitioners, burn its handbooks, or punish its users, and only a handful of
rabbis saw it as inherently “un-Jewish”’.207 While these milieus are certainly
interesting in their own right, the notion of deviance could be questioned even
more fundamentally.
In fact, one could reverse the perspective by asking why so many texts of
‘Western learned magic’ have actually survived (see below, ‘multiplicity’), even
though these have been allegedly forbidden, suppressed or ridiculed for large
parts of Western history. The exuberant mass of ‘learned magic’ sources, of
which only the tip of the iceberg may be known and accessible to date, calls into
question the intuitive assumption that polemics and legal acts against ‘magic’
are evidence of its marginal acceptance or successful suppression. It may be
the other way round: such manoeuvres might attest the wide distribution
and large appeal of ‘learned magic’ texts and techniques in a given historical
context.208 Given the multitudinous reprints of early modern works on ‘magia
naturalis’209 and adjacent topics (such as ‘Hermetism’,210 ‘Kabbalah’,211 ‘occult
philosophy’,212 ‘alchemy’,213 etc.), or the enormous literary echo of the Fama
or the Confessio fraternatis214 (which clearly resemble the conceptual agenda
of the humanist notion of ‘magia naturalis’),215 one might even be tempted to
interpret these as ‘mainstream’ writings of early modernity.

207 Bohak, ‘Jewish Magic in the Middle Ages’, 268.

208 Consider the 35+ late medieval manuscript witnesses of the text Ars notoria before 1500
(see Véronèse, L’ Ars notoria au Moyen Age, 297/98) which by far outclass the surviving
manuscript copies of many contemporaneous theological classics.
209 Marsilio Ficino’s foundational work De vita libri tres (first ed. 1489) witnessed over thirty
re-editions until the mid-17th century: see Copenhaver, ‘Hermes Trismegistus’, 80.
210 Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum (Pimander), first published in 1471, wit-
nessed seventeen re-editions until 1591 (see Campanelli, Mercurii Trismegisti Pimander).
211 Reuchlin’s De arte cabalistica (first publ. 1517) witnessed six re-editions until 1587: see
Worstbrock, Deutscher Humanismus (ii), 630.
212 Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia (first ed. 1531 [first book] and 1533 [books 1–3]) witnessed
fourteen re-editions until 1564: see Worstbrock, Deutscher Humanismus (i), 31.
213 Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (first publ. 1595) may have wit-
nessed only two editions (1595, 1609) and one reprint (1653), but various manuscript trans-
lations (e.g., into German) and was, despite all polemics, widely received, for example
among German pietist circles; see Glarean/Krüger, Frühe Neuzeit in Deutschland 1520–1620,
535/36, and further Forshaw, ‘Alchemy in the Amphitheatre’.
214 See, e.g., McIntosh, The Rosicrucians, ch. 4 and further.
215 See Otto, Magie, 509 f.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 207

Given these observations—and presumed future findings—historians of

‘Western learned magic’ might arrive at the conclusion that ‘occulture’ is not
a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st centuries only.216 Accordingly, the notion
of ‘deviance’ must be handled with caution. Instead of accepting it as a sta-
tus quo, historians should rather focus on determining the acceptance and/or
neglect of ‘learned magic’ texts and techniques (i.e. the ‘degree’ of ‘deviance’) in
different periods and contexts and to further elucidate their author, reader, and
user milieus, wherever this is possible.217 Thereby, the overly simplistic narra-
tive of Western history as a ‘persecution history’ in the framework of ‘magic’
will most certainly be discarded, thus opening the door for a more nuanced
understanding of the social embeddedness of ‘Western learned magic’ in dif-
ferent historical contexts and milieus and over longer periods of time. Again,
‘changeability’ must be taken into account as we will, most likely, encounter
different degrees of acceptance and/or neglect in different historical contexts
and milieus, instead of one overall dynamic. Adopting a systematic focus on
‘deviance’ may thus contribute to a nuanced and probably multi-factorial
explanation of both the millennia-long ‘continuity’ of ‘Western learned magic’
as well as the impressive quantity of its surviving sources.

4.5 Further Dynamics (‘Morality’, ‘Complexity’, ‘Efficacy’)

When working their way through the history of ‘Western learned magic’, histo-
riographers will encounter a range of further historical dynamics that are quite
specific as they mostly reflect ritual dynamics (in contrast to, say, the inter-
play between adaption and adoption, which is rather universal to any longue
durée tradition). I shall address three such dynamics in this section (without
suggesting that there may not be numerous further important dynamics in the
history of ‘Western learned magic’), all of which reflect, so to speak, a back-and-
forth movement and thus tempt me to adopt the analytical term ‘pendulum’.
As with ‘continuity’, ‘changeability’, and ‘hybridity’, all three pendulum dynam-
ics demonstrate that a diachronic and cross-cultural perspective on ‘Western
learned magic’ reveals more fruitful and interesting insights than the (so far,
prevailing) analysis and contextualisation of ‘learned magic’ sources within
single historical contexts and disciplines. In what follows, I will address the
‘morality pendulum’, the ‘complexity pendulum’, and the ‘efficacy pendulum’.

216 See on this notion Partridge, The Re-enchantment of the West, who mostly focusses on
developments from the 19th century onwards.
217 Davies, Grimoires, has put considerable effort into such questions and may be used as a
starting point from early modernity on.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

208 otto

4.5.1 The ‘Morality Pendulum’

The ‘morality pendulum’ pertains to the observation that sources of ‘Western
learned magic’ appear to have fluctuating standpoints towards the moral eval-
uation of the ritual techniques described in these sources. Of course, ‘learned
magicians’ were usually quite aware that their standards of morality were
‘lower’ than, or at least very different to, those of mainstream religious dis-
courses and doctrines. At least from the moment on when ‘learned magic’ was
adopted by monotheistic practitioners (that is, by late ancient or medieval
Jews, Christians, or Muslims), there apparently was a strong tension between
the highly instrumental approach of ‘learned magic’ (which relied on the as-
sumption that destiny could be ritually controlled or manipulated) and an
omnipotent divine power and/or providence that seemed to preclude or for-
bid human interventions (consider the notion of ‘blasphemy’—in the sense
of ‘undermining God’s omnipotence’ or the dictum ‘Thy will be done’—often
evoked in ‘magic’ polemics from antiquity onwards).218 No surprise, then, that
‘learned magicians’ regularly engaged in justifications or self-legitimisations.219
But this is not what I mean by ‘morality-pendulum’. The ‘pendulum’ comes
into play when looking at the ritual prescriptions in ‘learned magic’ texts over
longer periods of time and across diverse corpora of sources. Broadly speaking,
it seems that there have been phases where moral issues were of greater or of
lesser importance, or where ‘learned magicians’ even seem to have shuffled
off all moral restrictions. For example, the medieval Arabic art of ‘nīranjāt’
suddenly makes extensive use of (solid) human body parts,220 a practice that
is in no way foreshadowed in the pgm nor adopted in genuine Latin works
(i.e., works which are not translations) of the late Middle Ages.221 Actually, its
blatant instrumentalisation of the human body (which obviously necessitated
the acquisition of corpses or even the murdering of ‘innocents’) does not bear
resemblance to any ‘learned magic’ texts at least until the Petit Albert, an

218 Beginning with Plato, Laws, part. Books x and xi (the conceptual equivalent here is
asebeía); see Otto, Magie, 172 f. and Otto/Stausberg, Defining Magic, 19f.
219 See justifications in the pgm (Otto, Magie, 395 f.), the Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm (ibid., 450), the Liber
Iuratus Honorii (ibid., 498 f.), Ficino’s Apologia (ibid., 433f.), Giambattista della Porta’s
Magiae naturalis, book 1, ch. 1 (ibid., 504), or Francis Barrett’s The Magus (ibid., 514f.), to
name only a few examples.
220 See Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm, e.g. book 3, ch. 11.
221 Note that from the viewpoint of ritual mechanics I would distinguish the use of volatile
body parts (such as hair or nails)—which is indeed a continuous feature in ‘learned magic’
sources from antiquity onwards—from the instrumentalisation of solid human body parts
(such as head, brain, organs, or extremities) as ritual devices.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 209

early 18th-century French Grimoire that describes, among other things, the
production of the ‘Hand of Glory’222 (human sacrifice, a common topos in
‘magic’ polemics from antiquity on, seems to be first critically addressed by
‘learned magicians’ in the 20th century only, e.g., in Crowley’s Magick in Theory
and Practice or LaVey’s Satanic Bible).223
But there are also less drastic textual and ritual patterns that attest the
‘moral pendulum’. For example, the harming (or killing) of another human
being by ‘learned magic’ techniques has, more often than one might expect,
been a border case for ‘learned magicians’. While malevolent ritual goals are
widespread across the late ancient and medieval (i.e. Jewish, Coptic, Arabic)
sources, there seems to have been a strong moral filter in some late medieval
Latin composites, which mostly refrained from malevolent ritual intentions.224
The same filter is observable in the works of many early modern authors
on ‘magia naturalis’: Marsilio Ficino, for example, must have read through
multitudinous malevolent recipes in one of his main sources—the Picatrix
(the Latin translation of the above-mentioned Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm)—but these
appear to have absolutely no place in his own, idealised version of ‘magia
naturalis’, as sketched out in the third book of his De vita libri tres (where he
rather becomes lost in discussing whether one is allowed to use talismans for
healing purposes).225 Many (Ps.-) Rosicrucian individuals and groupings of the
17th and 18th centuries may have adopted similar moral filters226 (even though
contemporaneous ‘learned magic’ texts continued to propagate malevolent
rituals),227 and in the 19th century we again encounter various authors of

222 See Davies, Grimoires, 98–100. On the Petit Albert see Peterson, ‘Les secrets merveillieux
du Petit Albert’.
223 See Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, chapter xii; LaVey, The Satanic Bible, 45 f.
224 A telling example is the ritual text Ars notoria which instrumentalises a range of ‘learned
magic’ techniques for digesting the seven liberal arts in very short time; see also John
of Morigny’s exuberant moral considerations and justifications in the related text Liber
florum celestis doctrine, critic. ed. Fanger/Watson, Liber Florum Celestis Doctrine / The
Flowers of Heavenly Teaching.
225 See Ficino, De vita libri tres, book 3, esp. chapters 12–18.
226 See, exemplarily, the ‘pious’ contents of the three journals Geheime Figuren der Rosen-
kreuzer aus dem 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (1785–1788: online available at http://digicoll.library
.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/HistSciTech/HistSciTech-idx?id=HistSciTech.GeheimeFiguren [last ac-
cess June 17 2015]), used in study groups of the German Orden der Gold- und Rosenkreuzer
that existed somewhen between 1710 und 1787.
227 Staying in Germany, the university library of Leipzig today hosts a corpus of some 142—
mostly German—texts of ‘learned magic’ (Leipzig Univ. libr. Cod. Mag. 1–142), all copied

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

210 otto

‘learned magic’ who explicitly exclude malevolent (and also amoristic) rituals
from their vision of the ‘holy art’.228 Yet, the pendulum swung again when
Aleister Crowley entered the stage and, thereby, loosened (or re-interpreted)
‘morality’ quite substantially.229
Beyond the moral evaluation of ritual goals, the ‘morality pendulum’ might
also be tangible in the complex relationship between angelology and demonol-
ogy in ‘learned magic’ sources, at least from the late Middle Ages on (when the
poles came to be marked more clearly, in contrast to earlier Coptic or Jewish
texts).230 Of course, as mentioned already (as in the case of the TestSal), the
very ‘nature’ of intermediary beings is overly fluid in the history of ‘Western
learned magic’: even with regard to angelology and demonology, outright trans-
formation was possible (see different versions of the Almandal/Almadel, which
demonstrate that ‘demons’ could eventually turn into ‘angels’ over the course
of transmission).231 Said relationship was blurred even more from the moment
when (Neo-) Platonic interpretations of the daímōn were re-discovered and
advocated in Europe, that is, from the mid-15th century on.232 Now, again,233 at
least in theory, both ‘demons’ as well as ‘angels’ could be addressed by ‘learned
magicians’ as positive—or at least neutral—mediators between earthly and
heavenly realms, or simply as agents of ritual efficacy.

between the 17th and early 18th centuries. The corpus includes various malevolent ‘Höl-
lenzwänge’ attributed to ‘Dr. Faust’ (e.g., Cod. Mag. 45–52).
228 Apart from Eliphas Lévi, who has already been mentioned, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s
notion of ‘white magic’ is another case in point here (see Otto, Magie, 557f.). On related
polemics against the egocentric instrumentalisation of ‘learned magic’ techniques in the
Golden Dawn, see ibid., 592 f.
229 See Stuckrad, ‘Aleister Crowley, Thelema und die Religionsgeschichte des zwanzigsten
Jahrhunderts’.
230 Apparently, in both Coptic and (most) medieval Jewish sources of ‘learned magic’, ‘angels’
operate the entire spectrum of ritual goals, from healing to harming one’s enemies (see
for harming rituals, exemplarily, Meyer/Smith, Ancient Christian Magic, e.g., nos. 88–111
[pp. 187–224] and Rebiger/Schäfer, Sefer ha-Razim (vol. ii), e.g., first firmament, second
encampment [p. 132 f.] or second firmament, fourth encampment [p. 150f.]).
231 Whereas an early Arabic-Latin translation (which survives in Ms. Firenze ii.iii.214, 74v–
77r and Ms. Firenze Bibliotheca Medicea Laurenziana Plut. 89 sup. 38, 383r–393v; see
Véronèse, L’Almandal et l’ Almadel latins au Moyen Âge, 75–118) mentions “algin et assa-
iatin, id est demones corporei et incorporei” (see ibid., 88; note that the Arabic figure of the
ǧinni is here translated as ‘corporeal demon’), versions of the 15th and 16th centuries (often
dubbed Almandel or Almadel) usually refer to ‘angels’ (see Veenstra, ‘The Holy Almandal’).
232 See, e.g., Marsilio Ficino’s De amore (Otto, Magie, 426f.).
233 As in the late ancient pgm, for example.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 211

Despite (or due to) this basic uncertainty, we have a continuous stream
of both angelological as well as demonological texts of ‘learned magic’ from
antiquity to today.234 While this does not necessarily point to a ‘pendulum
dynamic’ per se (as angelological and demonological texts could stand side
by side,235 or angels and demons could be addressed in one and the same
ritual),236 future research may reveal such dynamics. In this respect, it is inter-
esting to note that angelological texts are sometimes imbued with polemics
against the demonological pole.237 These polemics suggest that the decision

234 While late ancient examples may be the Testament Salomonis for the demonological pole
and the Sepher ha-Razim for the angelological pole, contemporary examples would be,
respectively Nacht, Book of Satanic Magic and Shadrach/Harrison, Magic that works.
235 In the 15th and 16th century, for example, Ms. Munich Clm 849 (ed. Kieckhefer, Forbidden
Rites) and Ps.-Bacon’s De nigromancia (uncritic. ed. Macdonald, De nigromancia attributed
to Roger Bacon, based on Ms. Harleian 3885) seem to mark the demonological, whereas
the texts Heptameron (uncritic. ed. Peterson, ‘Peter de Abano: Heptameron, or magical
elements’) and Arbatel (uncritic. ed. Peterson, Arbatel: Concerning the Magic of Ancients,
based on the 1575 Latin edition) mark the angelological pole. Larger corpora, such as
the abovementioned Leipzig archive (Leipzig Univ. libr. Cod. Mag. 1–142), often include
angelological as well as demonological texts.
236 E.g., in the late ancient pgm (see various recipes in pgm iv) or the early modern Claviculae
Salomonis.
237 To stay with an already-mentioned example, the Arbatel begins by polemicising against
the ‘cacomagi and the despisers of the gifts of God’ (Peterson, Arbatel: Concerning the
Magic of Ancients, 4/5) and then claims to be devoted to ‘the benefit and pleasure of
all those who truly and piously find pleasure in the creations of God’ (ibid.); accord-
ingly, it continues to focus on ‘angels’ exclusively. Similar polemics against ‘demonolog-
ical’ approaches can be found in the late medieval Latin text Liber Iuratus Honorii (see
Peterson, ‘Liber Juratus Honorii’: ‘But these negromancers or magians, denying the sac-
rifice due to God, and in tempting him have done sacrifice to devils, and abused His
Name in calling of them, contrary to the profession made at their baptism, for there it is
said, “Forsake the devil and all his pomps”.’ For the Latin text, see Hedegård, Liber Iura-
tus Honorii, 60), in the preface to a 16th-century manuscript version of the Lemegeton
Clavicula Salomonis (Ms. Harleian 6483: see Peterson, The Lesser Key of Solomon, 4: ‘This
noble science often degenerates, and from Natural becomes Diabolical, from true philos-
ophy turns to Necromancy which is wholly to be charged upon its followers who abusing
or not being capable of that high and mystical knowledge do immediately hearken to
the temptations of Sathan, and are misled by him into the study of the black art’), in a
17th-century text called Janua Magica Reserata (Ms. Sloane 3825: uncritic. ed./trsl. Skin-
ner/Rankine, The Keys to the Gateway of Magic, see esp. 71–72, where ‘angels’ are argued
to be superior and much more healthy for the practitioner than ‘demons’) or, in the 19th
century, in Éliphas Lévi’s Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (see on his polemics against

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

212 otto

of ‘learned magicians’ to ritually address ‘angels’ instead of ‘demons’ (or other

intermediaries) may not (only) have been driven by the assumption of a greater
efficacy or ‘superiority’ of these beings, but (also) by the adoption of different
moral standpoints.
Be this as it may, historians of ‘Western learned magic’ should certainly
refrain from drawing artificial boundaries between alleged subtypes or genres
of ‘angelic’ and ‘demonic magic’.238 As the ritual techniques adopted in angelo-
logical and demonological texts of ‘learned magic’ are often more or less similar,
the decision to address ‘angels’ instead of ‘demons’ (or the other way round)
may rather have marked a ‘learned magician’s’ pole on the ‘morality pendu-
lum’, which may simply (in either way) have been a strategy of self-justification
and/or identity formation. As the issue of ‘morality’ has thus influenced the
development and transmission of numerous texts and techniques of ‘learned
magic’ as well as the self-understanding of many of its practitioners, it has to
be acknowledged as an important factor in the history of ‘Western learned
magic’.

4.5.2 The ‘Complexity Pendulum’

I shall only briefly address two further pendulum dynamics that historians of
‘Western learned magic’ might encounter on the way, namely, the ‘complexity
pendulum’ and the ‘efficacy pendulum’. The former refers to the observation
that the degree of ritual complexity varies greatly in the history of ‘Western
learned magic’, both over time as well as across contemporaneous texts or cor-
pora of texts. While the ‘morality pendulum’ rather reflects matters of justifi-
cation and identity formation (also in the light of the notion of ‘deviance’), the
‘complexity pendulum’ is located on the level of ritual performances and prag-
matics.
Broadly speaking, we seem to encounter two basic tendencies in ‘learned
magic’ texts, namely, the tendency towards longer and ever more complex rit-
uals on the one hand, and the tendency towards shorter and simplified ritual
prescriptions on the other hand. The desire towards simplicity is certainly eas-
ier to explain: why perform day-long rituals when you have prescriptions that
promise the same outcome in a five-minute procedure? Simplicity allows for

demon-conjurors, Otto, ‘A Catholic “Magician” historicises “Magic”’, 423f.), to name only

a few examples.
238 See, e.g., Fanger, Conjuring Spirits, vii–ix; Fanger, Invoking Angels (therein foremost Mesler,
‘The Liber iuratus Honorii and the Christian Reception of Angel Magic’); see also various
entries in Collins, The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 213

the performance of more rituals in a shorter amount of time, which may have
implied economic benefits (in case a given ‘learned magician’ was dependent
on that, and the short rituals were perceived similarly ‘successful’, in what-
ever way); what is more, short rituals demand fewer ritual ingredients (and
resources) and are easier to memorise and replicate.
The tendency towards complexity seems to reflect a greater range of histor-
ical dynamics. Certainly, the long and entangled history of ‘Western learned
magic’ may have played a role as it led to the accumulation of an ever greater
number of ritual texts, techniques, recipes, and modes of efficacy. No surprise,
then, that a complex composite such as the early modern Clavicula Salomonis
made use of so many ritual techniques and recipe segments that one wonders
how anyone could ever have replicated the ritual without permanently mak-
ing errors.239 Yet, from the viewpoint of the early modern ‘learned magician’,
the combination of multitudinous ritual segments and techniques may have
heightened the perceived efficacy of the ritual, thus reflecting a rather ‘additive’
interpretation of ritual efficacy (as opposed to an ‘all or nothing’ approach).
Such overly lengthy rituals also indicate that some ‘learned magicians’ may
have believed that the amount of time invested into a ritual is repaid in the
quality of its outcome. This may also pertain to those (usually very complex) rit-
uals that aim at acquiring a transcendent helper who then simplifies a ‘learned
magician’s’ life by means of its miraculous powers,240 or to the genre of ‘Lego’
rituals that demand a lengthy performance at the outset but then end up with
a large number of ritual ‘shortcuts’ that are often accomplishable in a few min-
utes.241

239 In Alison Butler’s words, the complexity of the ritual did “almost ensure the failure of the
would-be magician” (Butler, Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic, 48).
240 See, e.g., the complex ritual prescriptions in pgm i (acquisition of a ‘páredros’), in chap-
ter 5 of al-Būnī’s Šams al-Maʿārif (acquisition of seven ‘ğinn’), in the Liber Theysolius super
perfectionem operum Razielis (acquisition of one’s ‘familiar spirit’: see Page, ‘Magic and
the Pursuit of Wisdom’), the Abramelin (acquisition of a ‘guardian angel’), or in Crowley’s
adaptation of the Abramelin ritual in his Liber Samekh (acquisition of the ‘Holy guardian
angel’, now equated with one’s ‘higher’ or ‘inner self’).
241 Examples are here pgm xiii, 1–343 (see the various short recipes that make use of the
obtained ‘god name’ at the end of the 41-day ritual: Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri, 179–
182), the Coptic Papyrus Michigan 593 (see Meyer/Smith, Ancient Christian Magic, Nr.
133; after sanctifying water and oil for five years with multitudinous prayers to archangel
Michael, 21 short recipes are provided at the end of the text that make use of both liquids),
the medieval Jewish work Harba de-Moshe (whose approximately 1800 voces magicae in
the middle part are assigned to 137 short recipes at the end of the text: see Harari, ‘The

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

214 otto

As we often encounter both simplicity as well as complexity within single

texts or corpora of ‘learned magic’,242 the ‘complexity pendulum’ rather refers to
changes in complexity over time and across different groups of sources. These
changes do not seem to represent a general tendency or overall rule in the his-
tory of ‘Western learned magic’: in fact, they could be rather coincidental and
contingent, maybe highlighting the reception of ‘learned magic’ texts and tech-
niques in novel societal milieus. A good example of complexity reduction may
thus be the early modern German genre of ‘Brauchbücher’, which were trans-
mitted in manuscript form roughly between the 15th and the 18th centuries,243
were brought to letterpress printing from the late 18th century onwards (see,
e.g., the Romanusbüchlein, the Sechstes und Siebtes Buch Mose, etc.),244 and
even made independent careers in different colonial contexts (e.g. in Northern
America or Brazil).245 Interestingly, this text group adopts some sophisticated
ritual techniques of the Solomonic cycle (e.g., it makes use of sigilla or voces
magicae) but, at the same time, boils down ritual complexity substantially: its
ritual performances are simple, aim at every-day needs and are usually accom-
plishable in a few minutes only.
Here, complexity reduction seems to reflect changes in reader and prac-
titioner milieus: the addressees are now literate peasants, soldiers, or mer-
chants, who are neither interested in, nor apprenticed for, lengthy ritual perfor-
mances.246 One might generalise that, as soon as ‘learned magic’ texts address
non-professionals, that is, inexpert users of ritual prescriptions, there is a good
chance that ritual complexity drops. On the other hand, non-professionality
(that is, the absence of a provider-client relationship) may also lead to com-
plexity enhancement. Many protagonists of the Golden Dawn had plenty of
time and monetary resources, and they were not dependent on selling rituals

Sword of Moses’), or the fourth book of the (German version of the) early modern ritual
text Abramelin (uncritic. ed. Dehn, Buch Abramelin), with its 251 easy-to-use word squares
for specific ritual goals after the ‘guardian angel’ has been acquired (ibid., 143f.).
242 See already the late ancient pgm: whereas pgm iv and pgm vii provide mostly short
recipes, pgm i and pgm xiii provide lengthy and overly complex rituals.
243 See Labouvie, Verbotene Künste.
244 See on some versions of these two texts Anonymous, Romanus-Büchlein; Bauer, 6. und 7.
Buch Mose.
245 See Davies, Grimoires, 189 f. (for Northern America) and the forthcoming work of Natacha
Klein-Käfer (for Brazil).
246 Tellingly, most recipes in the Romanusbüchlein are devoted to either rural (e.g., healing,
protection of the farmyard, curing cattle, theft, fire) or military purposes (preventing
injuries from weapons, defeating enemies).

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 215

to clients. Yet, they strove for lengthy and sophisticated rituals. This seems
to illustrate further (post-Enlightenment) driving forces towards complexity:
group formation, theatricality, escapism, or, at least in the case of some Golden
Dawn members, the tediousness of the upper classes.

4.5.3 The ‘Efficacy Pendulum’

The third ‘pendulum’ alluded to above is the ‘efficacy pendulum’. It refers to
the observation that the explanation of ritual efficacy encountered in sources
of ‘Western learned magic’ changes over time. Broadly speaking, there seems
to be a pendulum dynamic between the desire to explain the effects of ‘learned
magic’ techniques by reference to ‘intermediate’ or ‘higher beings’ (which then
represent or conduct the ‘agency’ of the ritual) and the reference to inner-
worldly, that is, ‘naturalistic’ or even ‘mechanistic’ interpretations. In fact, the
conjuration-based approach of ‘learned magic’ that has been predominant ever
since late antiquity was frequently punctuated with alternative, inner-worldly
interpretations of ritual efficacy or physical causation. To name only a few
examples for the latter type of interpretation: consider the disciplines ‘ilm aṭ-
ṭilasmāt’ (inspired by a largely ‘mechanistic’ interpretation of the cosmos) or
‘nīranjāt’ (inspired by medieval alchemy based on a restricted set of elements
and states of matter) in the Arabic Middle Ages,247 the adoption of the idea
of ‘qualitates occultae’ by ‘learned magicians’ from the late Middle Ages on
(referring to the inner-worldly yet ‘occult’ properties of material objects, such as
stones or herbs),248 the early modern humanist discourse on ‘magia naturalis’
with its numerous offshoots at least until the late 16th century (from Marsilio
Ficino’s De vita to Giambattista della Porta’s Magiae naturalis),249 the influence
of Mesmerism on ‘learned magicians’ from the late 18th century onwards,250 or

247 Both disciplines can be grasped in the Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm, even though the recipes are often
intermingled with conjurations; a contemporaneous and purely ‘mechanistic’ interpreta-
tion of invocations may be grasped in al-Kindī’s De radiis stellarum (ed. D’Alverny/Hudry,
‘Al-Kindi. De radiis’).
248 See Fanger/Klaassen, ‘Magic iii: Middle Ages’, and Klaassen, The Transformations of Magic,
esp. part i (pp. 13–80) on late medieval conceptions of ‘magia naturalis’. A corresponding
‘learned magic’ text of that epoch would be the Lapidario (ed. Montalvo, “Lapidario”).
249 See Otto, Magie, ch. 10.
250 E.g., on Éliphas Lévi (see on his Mesmeric background the forthcoming PhD thesis by
Julian Strube), Paschal Beverly Randolph (see Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph), or,
via Joseph Ennemoser’s Mesmerism-oriented History of Magic (Geschichte des thierischen
Magnetismus. Bd. 1: Geschichte der Magie, 1844; engl. trsl. 1854), Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
(see on this influence Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 273, footnote 62).

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

216 otto

the ‘psychological’ interpretation of the effects and efficacy of ‘learned magic’

techniques throughout all the 20th century.251 Each of these cases represent,
so to speak, an interpretative shift towards locating the efficacy and agency of
‘learned magic’ rituals within the world, instead of attributing it to ‘transcen-
dent’ realms or beings. The fact that almost every shift towards the ‘naturalistic’
pole was quickly followed by a backswing towards the ‘sacrality’ pole252—
thereby attesting the indelible desire for ‘re-sacralisation’ in the history of
‘Western learned magic’—indeed points to a pendulum dynamic.
I doubt that there is an easily identifiable reason or overall driving force for
this dynamic. Partly, at least, the shift towards ‘naturalisation’ had a legitimising
function, as in late medieval or early modern discourses on ‘magia naturalis’,
and thus illustrates the desire of some ‘learned magicians’ to work one’s way
out of the deviant niche (see above, ‘deviance’). ‘Re-sacralisation’, on the other
hand, illustrates the predominantly religious background and impetus of ‘West-
ern learned magic’. We should not forget that for most parts of its history—at
least until late Enlightenment—it was more plausible (for ‘learned magicians’
as well as for most other people) to believe in ‘transcendent’ beings and realms
or, more generally, an ‘enchanted’ universe. Seen from this perspective, ten-
dencies of ‘re-sacralisation’ in the 20th and 21st centuries (visible, for exam-
ple, in contemporary non-psychological interpretations of evoked beings)253
might attest further—again genuinely ‘modern’—driving forces of the ‘efficacy

251 A telling example is Aleister Crowley who, in the foreword to his Goetia-edition, inter-
prets the 72 spirits described in the text in a ‘neuro-psychological’ way: “The spirits of the
Goetia are portions of the human brain. Their seals therefore represent […] methods of
stimulating or regulating those particular spots. […] There is no effect which is truly and
necessarily miraculous” (Crowley, The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King, 3/4). See
further, Asprem, ‘Magic Naturalized?’, Pasi, ‘Varieties of Magical Experience’; on ‘psychol-
ogisation’ see also above, footnote 168.
252 Consider Agrippa’s partial ‘re-sacralisation’ of ‘learned magic’ in the third book of his De
occulta philophia (‘magia caeremonialis’), the proliferation of the Solomonic art of ‘con-
juring spirits’ from the 15th to the 18th centuries (which could be interpreted as some sort
of counter-narrative to the humanist notion of ‘magia naturalis’), the Mesmerism-driven,
but significantly ‘re-sacralised’ version of ‘learned magic’ brought forward by Eliphas Lévi
in the mid-19th century (see Otto, ‘A Catholic “Magician” historicises “Magic”’), or, mod-
ern psychologisations notwithstanding, the countless 20th-century accounts of ‘learned
magic’ that are based on a strong belief in ‘transcendent’ beings, agency, or realms (see
partly Mayer, Arkane Welten; Asprem, Arguing with Angels; Id., ‘Contemporary Ritual
Magic’).
253 Two out of multitudinous contemporary examples would be Lisiewski, Ceremonial Magic
& The Power of Evocation, and Shadrach/Harrison, Magic that works.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 217

pendulum’: the desire for intense(r) religious experiences (rituals of ‘learned

magic’ often imply ‘direct encounter’ with metaphysical beings), frustration
with a ‘secularised’ world-view,254 or the striving for ‘authentic’ religious truth
(this has, in a way, always been one of the major promises of ‘Western learned
magic’).

4.6 Multiplicity
There is one final issue that needs to be discussed in this programmatic article:
the enormous amount of sources that needs to be taken into account while
historicising ‘Western learned magic’. Even at the current state of research,
we are speaking of thousands of textual (not to mention further, e.g., mate-
rial)255 sources, and the currently edited or accessible source corpus may only
be the tip of the iceberg (compared to what was really circulating at a given
time, or what survives but remains unexplored or unrecognised by scholars).
Apart from the fact that we are often dealing with ritual texts—ritual prescrip-
tions, particularly those of ‘learned magic’, are difficult and time-consuming
to re-narrate and generalise (partly due to their great level of detail and the
numerous variations across the texts)—the sheer mass of sources obviously
challenges any historian of ‘Western learned magic’ to come up with plausible
strategies of reduction, simplification, or facilitation. A several-thousand page
history of ‘Western learned magic’ is surely within the realm of possibility, but
not what any historian should be aiming at. This final section thus suggests
strategies to ease one’s way through the material.
A first strategy should certainly be the addition of further criteria for neglect-
ing sources in the course of composing a broad overview of the material. In this
respect, it seems reasonable to argue that the historical relevance and impor-
tance of ‘learned magic’ sources (as well as distinct groupings from the 19th to
the 21st centuries) differ widely from each other. Out of the exuberant pool of
‘learned magic’ sources, I would thus suggest taking into account only those
that have been well-known among ‘learned magicians’ (in a given period and
historical context), indicated, perhaps, by the fact that they have circulated in
numerous variations and copies (thus pointing to an effective reception) and
which were therefore also likely to influence subsequent developments. The
main issue here is dissemination and impact (and thus representativity) as well
as later reception.256 This criterion—which may be developed and fine-tuned

254 See on this issue partly Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft; Mayer, Arkane Welten.
255 See the recent volume Boschung/Bremmer, The Materiality of Magic.
256 In Otto, Magie, I have used the Foucauldian concept of the discursive ‘founding father’ (see

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

218 otto

in the course of working one’s way through the material—does not automati-
cally lead to the preclusion of sources only because they were not widespread
or received later on. Marginal yet fascinating findings may still be mentioned
in an overall narrative. Nonetheless, a general ‘history of impact’ approach will
certainly be helpful for identifying possible red threads through the material
and thereby also reflect ‘insider’ modes of reception and selection. This crite-
rion also pertains to ‘learned magic’ orders and groupings from the 19th to the
21st centuries. As it is impossible to take into account all of these,257 here, too,
impact and representativity (indicated by prominence, membership figures,
literary output, or organisational complexity) may serve as a rough guideline
for providing a plausible overview.
A second criterion may be the focus on main templates or, so to speak,
‘ideal’ prototypes of a text. The identification of dozens of different versions
and text groups of the Clavicula Salomonis (ClavSal in the following), based on
122 surviving manuscripts,258 is certainly fascinating and useful for specialised
research, but not serving the here-described goal of composing a wide-ranging
overview of the history of ‘Western learned magic’ (where the ClavSal is only a
tiny piece in the puzzle). For this purpose, it would be wise to work with only
one—preferably the most representative—textual version, instead of getting
lost in its numerous variations. Again, a ‘history of impact’ approach may serve
as a rough guideline: for example, the ClavSal versions received and synthesised
by Samuel L. MacGregor Mathers in the late 19th century (who consulted
several French manuscripts of the so-called Colorno-group)259 appear to be
more important than others, at least from a bird’s eye perspective. Particularly
when dealing with pre-modern manuscript sources, historians will often have
to decide which version or variation they want to consider within their overall
narrative, as it is impossible (and, actually, quite senseless) to take into account
all of them.
From the late 18th century onwards, however, when the letterpress print
enhanced the dissemination of ‘learned magic’ texts, things seem to become

ibid., 18f.; see Foucault, ‘Was ist ein Autor?’) which, however, is not thoroughly applicable
to the history of ‘Western learned magic’ (due to the mass of pseudepigraphic sources).
Yet, its general focus on impact and prominence is comparable to the approach proposed
here.
257 Consider the 100+ groupings linked on the website http://www.hermetics.org/links/orders
_links.html (last access July 16, 2015), which are surely only the tip of the iceberg.
258 See Mathiesen, ‘The Key of Solomon’.
259 See Peterson, ‘The Key of Solomon’.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 219

easier with regard to textual variations (as the printed versions often synthe-
sised and somewhat ‘canonised’ the previously more heterogeneous manu-
script base). However, as the overall quantity of ‘learned magic’ texts continued
to increase, the problem of ‘multiplicity’ now becomes ever more challenging.
Already the large German print-compilations of the early 19th century (Georg
Konrad Horst’s six-volume Zauber-Bibliothek [1821–1826] and Johann Scheible’s
twelve-volume Das Kloster [1848–1849])260 demonstrate that the problem of
‘multiplicity’ becomes ever more drastic at that time,261 let alone the impos-
sibility of arriving at even a broad overview of the textual output of the 20th
and 21st centuries’ ‘learned magic’ scene.262 Today, as with other contemporary
research topics in the Study of Religion, the idea of ‘completeness’ becomes
absurd in the light of the internet. Yet, the focus on prominence, impact and
representativity may nonetheless allow for casting light on at least the most
important contemporary developments.263
Apart from dissemination (impact), representativity (prominence), later
reception, and the adoption of ‘ideal’ templates, I would also suggest laying
more weight on lengthy and complex ritual prescriptions—in contrast to short
and simplified recipes—and on sophisticated approaches and theorisations,
as these point to the professional and specialist milieus which should be of
greater interest to any historian of ‘Western learned magic’. The adoption of
a limited range of ‘learned magic’ techniques by untrained ‘lay’ practitioners
points to interesting modes of reception, dissemination and ritual dynamics
(see above, ‘complexity’), but should not lie at the epicentre of historicising
‘Western learned magic’—precisely because the ‘learned’ aspect somewhat
fades into the background here. I would thus consider the 18th- and 19th- cen-
tury French Grimoires (and their impact on French ‘author-magicians’ such as
Éliphas Lévi, Stanislas de Guaita, or Gérard Encausse) to be more important
than the contemporaneous German genre of Brauchbücher, to give an exam-
ple.

260 See Horst, Zauber-Bibliothek, and Scheible, Das Kloster.

261 See Bachter, Anleitung zum Aberglauben, for numerous further ‘learned magic’ texts cir-
culating in the German-speaking world of the 18th and 19th centuries.
262 Even if one starts with recollecting the literary output of the dozens of ‘practitioner’
publishing houses devoted to topics of ‘learned magic’ (see a partial overview in Asprem,
‘Contemporary Ritual Magic’), one will grasp only the tip of the iceberg.
263 This calls for taking into consideration practitioners’ accounts of prominence and repre-
sentativity (even though these may also be selective)—see, exemplarily, Drury, Pathways
in Modern Western Magic.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

220 otto

The regard for complexity also calls for focusing on larger and more elabo-
rate compilations, as opposed to, say, the exuberant mass of surviving papyrus
snippets (e.g., from Oxyrhynchus in late ancient Egypt) or the thousands of
Genizah fragments (e.g., with regard to medieval Judaism).264 Concentrating
on greater complexity calls for neglecting these snippets while taking into
account only the larger, systematic handbooks that have survived from these
historical contexts (i.e., the Greek Magical Papyri for late ancient Egypt, or
the Sepher ha-Razim and Harba de-Moshe for medieval Judaism). This focus
on larger and more systematic texts also reflects the abovementioned issue of
‘continuity’ and, thereby, the criterion of impact. Apparently, larger handbooks
were transmitted and recognised more easily over the course of the centuries,
compared to short recipes or snippets. The multi-lingual, cross-cultural and
partly millennia-long transmission histories of large composites such as the
TestSal (see above), the Sepher ha-Razim,265 the Ġāyat al-ḥakīm / Picatrix,266
or the ClavSal267 are telling examples of this important factor in the history of
‘Western learned magic’.
With regard to analysing and re-narrating ritual prescriptions, I would sug-
gest not getting lost in the myriads of individual recipes and ritual details that
form the bulk of ‘Western learned magic’ from late antiquity onwards. Instead,
I would opt for the development of an abstract, second-order analytical lan-
guage that depicts and ‘clusters’ basic ritual techniques, genres, purposes and
approaches, as well as narrative patterns across the texts. The goal would be
to arrive at an open and flexible typology that should be both consecutively
derived from the sources as well as applied to these for comparative purposes
and the analysis of ritual dynamics (such as ‘changeability’ or ‘hybridity’, see
above). The items of such typologies could be conceptualised in the man-
ner of the recently proposed ‘patterns of magicity’.268 This implies that (1) the
items are gathered from the sources consecutively by means of a ‘bottom-up’
approach; (2) they can, but need not be interrelated (depending on the source);
(3) none of the items will be pivotal to ‘Western learned magic’ as such, as
the latter entails no conceptual ‘essence’ or ritual ‘core’ whatsoever. Based on
these reflections, it may be sensible to develop distinct typologies for ritual

264 See on the latter corpus Schäfer/Shaked, Magische Texte aus der Kairoer Geniza.
265 See on its complex transmission history Rebiger/Schäfer, Sefer ha-Razim (vol. ii), 86–
125.
266 See Boudet et al., Picatrix, Images et magie.
267 See Mathiesen, ‘The Key of Solomon’.
268 See Otto/Stausberg, Defining Magic, 10 f.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 221

goals,269 ritual (micro-) techniques,270 and concepts of ritual efficacy,271 as well

as further dimensions (such as sociality or identity). The development of such
typologies would serve two main purposes: on the one hand, they facilitate the
analysis, comparison and synoptic re-narration of a large quantity of ritual pre-
scriptions; on the other hand, they offer a nuanced and fine-grained analytical
terminology that does justice to the complexity, heterogeneity and hybridity of
the subject matter. What is more, as these typologies will be quite extensive,
versatile, and heterogeneous themselves, they will once more cut the ground
from the master narrative of an unalterable essence of ‘magic’.
Even if one adopts all these additional criteria and research foci, there will
still be myriads of specific details and developments, which may (or may not)
find their place in an overall narrative, thus calling for pragmatic decisions.
Pragmatism, however, should neither relapse into arbitrary selectivity nor into
the adoption of pre-established stereotypes or master narratives derived from
older literature. One such master narrative, which is also relevant to the issue
of ‘multiplicity’, is the idea that there has been a ‘revival’ of ‘learned magic’
(or, more generally, ‘the occult’) in the 19th century.272 Taking into account

269 Any list of items will only be preliminary for the time being, but I shall nonetheless pro-
vide a few suggestions for ritual goals (without any systematic order): helping and healing,
harming and destruction, divination, influencing or controlling one’s or other’s desires
and/or destiny, influencing or changing natural events or phenomena, gaining knowl-
edge, acquiring transcendent helpers, acquiring miraculous powers, equilibrating bodily
or mental energies, liberating the will/mind, self-therapy, self-deification or apotheosis,
divine visions, divine union, contacting or instrumentalising the dead, divination, clair-
voyance, telepathy, etc.
270 Suggestions: fumigation, offering, sacrifice, preparation, purification, eating/drinking/
anointing, special cloth, praying and praising, evocation and invocation, cursing, threaten-
ing, unusual or secret names/languages/alphabets/signs/seals/images, repetition, ritual
device, ritual artefact, recourse to mythology, ritual circles and further spatial prepa-
rations, direct encounter (with ‘metaphysical’ beings), astrology, alchemy, numerology,
(astrological) talismans, amulets, (initiatory) group rituals, music and sound, colour and
light, ritualised sexuality, breathing and imaginative techniques, Yoga, drugs, (controlling)
dreams, etc.
271 Suggestions: instrumentalisation of ‘metaphysical’ beings, divine hierarchies (e.g., angelol-
ogy, demonology), ‘occult’ properties, correspondences, sympathy and ‘sympathetic
chains’, further extra-ordinary realities (e.g., astral planes, subtle bodies), Neoplatonic
and/or Ptolemaic cosmology, power of words, knowledge of ‘secret’ names, similia sim-
ilibus, historiolae, etc.
272 See, e.g., McIntosh, Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival, who speaks of a ‘rebirth of
magic’ in the 19th century (part one, chapter two); see further Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

222 otto

the hundreds of distinct ‘learned magic’ texts that had already been circu-
lating in the previous centuries (some of which have been discussed in this
article), or the thousands of printed ‘penny’ Grimoires that had been flooding
the (French) market ever since the late 18th century,273 there was obviously
nothing to ‘revive’ in the mid-19th century. In fact, Éliphas Lévi, who is often
mentioned as a towering figure in this development, rather engaged in strate-
gies of what I would call ritual ‘moralisation’, ‘purification’, and ‘innovation’.274
In stark contrast to the ‘revival’ narrative, Lévi’s version of ‘learned magic’ sig-
nificantly boiled down textual quantity as well as ritual complexity, at least
compared to the bulk of ‘learned magic’ texts that were circulating in France
at his time—namely, the extremely heterogeneous, chaotic and (with regard
to the issue of ‘morality’) much more wicked French Grimoire scene of the 18th
and 19th centuries. At most, one might speak of a moral ‘realignment’ and a
range of conceptual innovations in Lévi’s work, which led to some sort of novel
‘canonisation’ of ‘learned magic’ in those milieus that received his works (e.g. in
the writings of Helena P. Blavatsky or the Golden Dawn). Yet, in the light of the
striking ‘multiplicity’ of ‘learned magic’ sources that were circulating in Lévi’s
days, the term ‘revival’ appears to be counterfactual.275

Roots of Nazism, e.g., chapter two; Lehrich, The Occult Mind, chapter one; even Christopher
Partridge still perpetuates this master narrative in his introduction to The Occult World
(see p. 1f.); the only critical discussion of ‘revival’ is currently to be found in Granholm,
Dark Enlightenment, 43 f.
273 See Davies, Grimoires, 95 f.
274 See Otto, ‘A Catholic “Magician” historicises “Magic”’, 425/26.
275 The same argument may be applied to earlier as well as later ‘revival’ narratives. For exam-
ple, modern ‘insider’ narratives such as the one outlined in Grant, The Magical Revival,
clearly put an arbitrary or even teleological emphasis on allegedly outstanding practition-
ers (in this case Crowley; similarly distortive ‘insider’ narratives are King, The Rebirth of
Magic; Drury, ‘Modern Western Magic and Altered States of Consciousness’). Even the
ongoing invocation of a ‘revival of magic’ during the Renaissance (this master narrative
has been popularized by Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, e.g. 61, 167,
452) may be revised in the light of the apparent ‘multiplicity’ of ‘learned magic’ texts that
were already circulating in Ficino’s and Pico’s days as well as in previous centuries (see for
a partial overview of these texts Johannes Trithemius, Antipalus Maleficiorum, ed. Zam-
belli, White Magic, black Magic, 101–112, and, one and a half centuries earlier, Berengarius
Ganellus’ enormous Summa Sacre Magice—on which see above, footnote 177). Acknowl-
edging ‘multiplicity’ thus calls for fine-tuning the historical argument: instead of speaking
of actual ‘revivals’, one might—for example regarding the Renaissance narrative—rather
emphasise the reception and re-valorisation of texts and techniques of ‘learned magic’
in novel societal milieus, the sudden, or at least more frequent, occurrence of ‘author-

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 223

Taking into account the issue of ‘multiplicity’ is thus not only crucial for the
development of selection strategies. Keeping an eye on ‘multiplicity’ allows for
an open and unbiased approach to the history of ‘Western learned magic’, it
reduces the risk of arbitrary selectivity and blind spots, and may thus result in
the development of a more accurate historical narrative.

5 Conclusions

The Study of Western Esotericism has flourished over the past two decades,
even though the precise contents and implications of its main object of re-
search continue to be the subject of controversial debate.276 Nonetheless, the
histories of ‘Western Esotericism’ that have been published in recent years tend
to take a rather uncritical attitude towards the nature and shape of their histo-
riographical object.277 In fact, the amount of contemporary research and publi-
cations on ‘Western Esotericism’ is an indication of the apparently self-evident
status and popularity of this topic. ‘Western learned magic’, however, has barely
achieved this status to date, if it is acknowledged as a distinct (or plausible)
topic of historiography at all. One of the leading figures of the Study of West-
ern Esotericism, Wouter Hanegraaff, has even uttered fundamental doubts as
to the possibility of writing a methodologically sound ‘history of magic’ (see
above) and suggested eliminating the ‘tainted terminology’ of ‘magic’ from the
Study of Western Esotericism.278
One of the aims of the present article was to demonstrate that such a strat-
egy runs the risk of throwing the baby out with the bath water. In the light of

magicians’ (in contrast to the previously dominant pseudepigraphy), the exploitation

of new media (such as letterpress), or enhanced group dynamics (such as, in this case,
the ‘Florentine Academy’ and related humanist networks). These dynamics may have
prompted further innovations (e.g., in the realm of ritual dynamics) and textual ‘multi-
plications’, but do not attest a historical ‘revival’ of ‘learned magic’ per se. See on the issue
further, albeit with different emphasis, Kieckhefer, ‘Did magic have a Renaissance?’.
276 See foremost the review symposium in Religion 43/2 (2013) and Asprem/Granholm, ‘Con-
structing Esotericisms’.
277 See Stuckrad, Western Esotericism; Katz, The Occult Tradition; Versluis, Magic and Mys-
ticism; Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions; Godwin, The Golden Thread;
Faivre, Western Esotericism: A Concise History (see Hanegraaff, ‘Textbooks and Introduc-
tions to Western Esotericism’, on some of these works). Exceptions to these observa-
tions are certainly Stuckrad, Locations of Knowledge, and Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the
Academy (on both see Otto, ‘Discourse theory trumps discourse theory’).
278 See Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 164–177.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

224 otto

the material presented here and further recent findings, the time seems ripe
for scholars of ‘Western Esotericism’ to acknowledge ‘Western learned magic’
as an important strand of ‘Western Esotericism’, if not as one of its main or
even ‘mother’ discourses, given that an identificatory use of the concept of
‘magic’ is continuously attested since late antiquity, in contrast to ‘Esotericism’
or ‘Occultism’, which have been used from the 19th century onwards only.279 I
also hope to have demonstrated that ‘Western learned magic’ can be concep-
tualised as a coherent (even though not homogeneous) and continuous (even
though repeatedly broken) textual-ritual tradition. The theoretical and histo-
riographical issues that have been discussed in this article as being pivotal
for historicising this tradition—namely, continuity, changeability, hybridity,
deviance, morality, complexity, efficacy, and multiplicity—may serve as a first
guideline for composing a broad overview of the material.
It goes without saying that these theoretical underpinnings for historicising
‘Western learned magic’ differ strongly from the bulk of existing theories or
definitions of ‘magic’. As ‘Western learned magic’ is ultimately a historical object
and thus determined by its historicity—that is, by its tendency to change over
time—the proposed approach cuts the ground from under all those narratives
and theories that have advocated an immutable essence of ‘magic’ in the
Study and History of Religion. In stark contrast to such narratives, ‘Western
learned magic’ was (and is) ever-changing in a vast range of domains, be it
ritual dynamics, cultural and religious frameworks, social and practitioner
milieus, concepts of ritual efficacy or physical causation, transmission media
and techniques, or organisational and grouping structures.
This has important consequences for the very concept of ‘historicisation’
employed in this article. As argued in section three, it is inspired by recent
attempts to approach the concept of ‘magic’ from a discourse historical per-
spective280 and thus ‘anti-essentialist’ in the sense that it (1) denies the exis-
tence of a conceptual or ritual core or ‘essence’ that wanders through time
and space, (2) stresses the complexity of its object by sheding particular light
on its heterogeneity, hybridity, and changeability, (3) stipulates the contin-
gency and arbitrariness of historical dynamics, and (4) thereby rejects teleo-
logical arguments—to name only a few facets of ‘anti-essentialism’.281 How-
ever, acknowledging ‘changeability’ and ‘hybridity’ as core features of ‘Western

279 See on this issue Bergunder, ‘What is Esotericism?’.

280 See above, footnote 54.
281 On ‘anti-essentialism’ see, exemplarily, Moberg, ‘First-, Second-, and Third-level Dis-
course-analytic Approaches’, 8 f., and further Otto, ‘A discourse historical approach to-
wards medieval “learned magic” ’.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 225

learned magic’ does not result in a meaningless deconstruction or—to invoke

Olav Hammer’s understanding of ‘radical historicism’—in an ‘atomization’ of
its historiographic object.282 The approach outlined here employs transpar-
ent criteria for setting up a coherent corpus of sources (see above, section 3.1)
and, on these grounds, advocates the possibility to reconstruct a continuous
textual-ritual tradition of ‘Western learned magic’ (see above, section 4.1). This
‘tradition’ is neither purely ‘invented’ by historiography—I am alluding to the
ongoing debate on ‘invented traditions’—283 nor is it—to quote again Olav
Hammer—devoid of ‘broader theorizing’.284 To the contrary, it is characterised
by a range of specific structural elements (namely, those outlined in section
four) which may give orientation, shape and theoretical depth to any future
historicisation of ‘Western learned magic’.
Narrating a history along the lines proposed in this article is not an easy
task. We are dealing with an overwhelming amount of sources from a vast
range of different cultural and religious realms; their contents are fuzzy, hybrid,
sometimes overly complex, bewildering, or incomprehensible. The amount of
reading and language skills necessary for a broad overview of the history of
‘Western learned magic’ will thus, at one point or another, overchallenge single
historiographers. Like other contemporary approaches in historiography (con-
sider ‘transcultural’ or ‘global/world history’),285 the historicisation of ‘West-
ern learned magic’ challenges the idea of a historiographical ‘lone-fighter’.286
Instead, it calls for the establishment of interdisciplinary study groups or at
least the systematic collaboration of a range of scholars coming from all disci-
plines relevant to its history, such as Classical Studies, Medieval Studies, Arabic,
Jewish and Byzantine Studies, Early Modern History or the Study of Western
and Contemporary Esotericism. Yet, if the goal is to arrive at a diachronic and
cross-cultural overview of the history of ‘Western learned magic’ and to recon-
struct possible red threads through the manifold material, the composition of
yet another multi-authored volume is surely not the way to go. Coherent his-
torical narratives stem from one hand or at least from hands that are strongly
synchronised. Historicising ‘Western learned magic’ is, thus, not only an inno-
vative and largely overdue task for future research, but calls for equally inno-

282 See Hammer, ‘Deconstructing Western esotericism’, 242f.

283 See above, footnote 94.
284 Hammer, ‘Deconstructing Western esotericism’, 246 f.
285 See, exemplarily, Herren-Oesch et al., Transcultural History; Northrop, A Companion to
World History.
286 See for a related approach towards ‘global intellectual history’, Mulsow, ‘Vor Adam. Ideen-
geschichte jenseits der Eurozentrik’, and his suggestion to strongly enhance scholarly
collaborations in the history of ideas.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

226 otto

vative modes of scholarly cooperation in the Study of Western Esotericism and

the broader field of historical sciences.

Bibliography

Primary Sources and Text Editions

Al-Ḥalabī, Muṣṭafā al-Bābī (ed.), Aḥmad Ibn al-Būnī, Manbaʿ uṣūl al-ḥikma, Cairo: aṭ-
Ṭabʿa al-aḫīra 1951.
Anonymous, Romanus-Büchlein oder Gott der Herr bewahre meine Seele, meinen Aus-
und Eingang, von nun an bis in alle Ewigkeit, Amen. Halleluja, Leipzig: Hülsemann
ca. 1880 (a digitalised manuscript version from the university library of Göttingen is
accessible online: http://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/dms/load/img/?PPN=PPN64581
3052&DMDID=&LOGID=LOG_0001&PHYSID=PHYS_0002; last access July 31, 2015)
Bauer, Wolfgang (ed.), 6. und 7. Buch Mose. Einleitung und Bildkommentare von Wolf-
gang Bauer, Berlin: Kramer 1979 (reprint Dresden: Gutenberg 1931).
Betz, Hans D. (ed.), The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation. Including the Demotic
Spells. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 21996.
Bruno, Giordano, On the Composition of Images, Signs & Ideas. Transl. by Charles Doria.
Ed. and annot. by Dick Higgins, New York: Willis, Locker & Owens 1991.
Burnett, Charles, ‘Antimaquis’, in: Bos, Gerit et al. (ed.), Hermes Trismegisti. Astrologica
et Divinatoria, Turnhout: Brepols 2001, 177–221.
Busch, Peter (ed.), Das Testament Salomos. Die älteste christliche Dämonologie, kommen-
tiert und in deutscher Erstübersetzung, Berlin: de Gruyter 2006.
Callatay, Godefroid de et al. (ed.), Epistles of the Brethren of Purity. On magic i: an Arabic
critical edition and English translation of Epistle 52a, Oxford: Oxford University Press
2011.
Campanelli, Maurizio (ed.), Mercurii Trismegisti Pimander, sive, De potestate et sapien-
tia Dei, Turin: Aragno 2011.
Carroll, Peter J., Liber Null & Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic, York Beach:
Weiser 1987.
Compagni, Vittoria Perrone (ed.), De occulta philosophia: libri tres, Leiden: Brill 1992.
Coullaut Cordero, Jaime (ed.), El Kitāb Šams al-Maʾārif al-Kubra (al-ŷuzʾ al-awwal) de
Aḥmad b. ʾAlī al-Būnī: Sufismo y ciencias ocultas, Salamanca: dle. Tesis del Departa-
mento de Lengua Española 2009.
Crowley, Aleister, Magick in Theory and Practice, Paris: Lecram Press 1929.
Crowley, Aleister (ed.), The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King, Leeds: Celephaïs
Press 2004 (reprint Foyers: Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth 1904).
D’Agostino, Alfonso (ed.), Astromagia: (Ms.Reg.lat. 1283a) / Alfonso x el Sabio, Naples:
Liguori 1992.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 227

D’Alverny, Marie-Thérèse, and Hudry, Francoise, ‘Al-Kindi. De radiis’, Archives d’histoire

doctrinale et litteraire du moyen age 49 (1974), 139–260.
Daniel, Robert W. and Maltomini, Franco (eds.), Supplementum Magicum, 2 vols., Opla-
den: Westdt. Verlag 1990–1992.
Dehn, Georg (ed.), Buch Abramelin, das ist die egyptischen grossen Offenbarungen oder
des Abraham von Worms Buch der wahren Praktik in der uralten göttlichen Magie,
Saarbrücken: Verl. Neue Erde 1995.
Dehn, Georg, and Guth, Stephen (ed./trsl.), The Book of Abramelin: A New Translation,
Newburyport: Ibis Press 2006.
Delatte, Armand (ed.), Anecdota Athenensia 1: Textes grecs inédits relatifs à l’ histoire des
religions, Liège: Vaillant-Carmanne 1927.
Dodge, Bayard (ed./trsl.), The fihrist of al-Nadīm: a tenth-century survey of Muslim cul-
ture, 2 vols., New York: Columbia University Press 1970.
Drury, Nevill, Magic and Witchcraft: From Shamanism to the Technopagans, London:
Thames & Hudson 2003.
Drury, Nevill, ‘Modern Western Magic and Altered States of Consciousness’, in: Lewis,
James R. and Hammer, Olav (eds.), Handbook of Religion and the Authority of Science,
Brill: Leiden 2010, 707–740.
Drury, Nevill, (ed.), Pathways in Modern Western Magic, Richmond: Concrescent
2012.
Duling, Dennis C., ‘Testament of Solomon’, in: Charlesworth, Hames H. (ed.), The
Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Volume 1: Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments,
Doubleday: The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library 1983, 935–987.
Dülmen, Richard van (ed.), Fama Fraternatis (1614). Confessio Fraternatis (1615). Chymis-
che Hochzeit: Christiani Rosencreutz. Anno 1459 (1616). Johann Valentin Andreae. Ein-
geleitet und hrg. Von Richard van Dülmen, Stuttgart: Calwer 41994.
Duquette, Lon Milo, The Magick of Thelema: A Handbook of the Rituals of Aleister
Crowley, York Beach: Weiser 1993.
Fanger, Claire, and Watson, Nicholas (eds.), Liber Florum Celestis Doctrine / The Flowers
of Heavenly Teaching, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies 2015.
Farr, Florence, Egyptian Magic, London: Theosoph. Publ. Soc. 1896.
Gardner, Gerald B., Witchcraft Today, London: Rider 1954.
Goodwin, Charles W., Fragment of a Graeco-Egyptian Work upon Magic: From a Papyrus
in the British Museum, Cambridge: Deighton, Macmillan & Co. 1852.
Grant, Kenneth, The Magical Revival, London: Muller 1972.
Harari, Yuval, ‘The Sword of Moses (Harba de-Moshe): A new translation and introduc-
tion’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft 7/1 (2012), 58–98.
Hedegård, Gösta (ed.), Liber Iuratus Honorii: A Critical Edition of the Latin Version of the
Sworn Book of Honorius, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell 2002.
Horst, Georg Conrad, Zauber-Bibliothek oder von Zauberei, Theurgie und Mantik, Zau-

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

228 otto

berern, Hexen und Hexenprocessen, Dämonen, Gespenstern und Geistererscheinun-

gen, 7 vols., Freiburg/Br.: Aurum Verlag 1979 (reprint Mainz: Kupferberg 1821–
1826).
Hume, Lynne, ‘Lifting the Veil: An Emic Approach to Magical Practice’, in: Drury, Nevill
(ed.), Pathways in Modern Western Magic, Richmond: Concrescent 2012, 19–35.
Kamāl, Aḥmad (ed.), Kitāb al-Durr al-maknūz wal-sirr al-maʿzūz fi ʾl-dalāʾil wal-khabāyā
wal-dafāʾin wal-kunūz. Livre des perles enfouies et du mystère précieux au sujet des
indications des cachettes, des trouvailles et des trésors, 2 vols., Cairo: Maṭbaʿat maǧlis
al-maʿārif al-faransāwī al-ḫāṣṣ bi-l-ʿādāt aš-šarqīya 1907.
Kaske, Carol V. and Clark, John R. (eds.), Three Books on Life: Marsilio Ficino. A critical
ed. and transl. with introd. and notes by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark, Binghamton,
ny: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 1989.
Kieckhefer, Richard, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century,
University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press 1998.
King, Francis, The Rebirth of Magic, London: Corgi Books 1982.
Küntz, Darcy, The Complete Golden Dawn Cipher Manuscript. Deciphered, translated,
and edited by Darcy Kuntz. Introd. by R.A. Gilbert, Edmonds: Holmes 1996.
LaVey, Anton Szandor, The Satanic Bible, New York: Avon Books 1969.
Lévi, Éliphas, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, 2 vols., Paris: Germet Baillière 1854–
1856.
Lévi, Éliphas, Histoire de la Magie: Exposition claire et précise de ses procédés, de ses rites
et de ses mystères. Paris: Germet Baillière 1860.
Lévi, Éliphas, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual by Eliphas Lévi, London:
George Redway 1896.
Lisiewski, Joseph C., Ceremonial Magic & The Power of Evocation, Tempe: New Falcon
2004.
Lycourinos, Damon Zacharias (ed.), Occult Traditions, Colac: Numen Books 2012.
Macdonald, Michael-Albion (ed./trsl.), De nigromancia attributed to Roger Bacon, New
Jersey: Heptangle Books 1988.
MacLean, Adam (ed./transl.), The magical calendar: a synthesis of magical symbolism
from the seventeenth century Renaissance of medieval occultism. Transl. and comm.
by Adam McLean, Grand Rapids: Phanes Press 1994.
Marathakis, Ioannis (ed./transl.), The Magical Treatise of Solomon or Hygromanteia, also
called To Apotelesmatikē Pragmateia, Epistle to Rehoboam, Solomōnikē, Singapore:
Golden Hoard Press 2011.
Mathers, Samuel Liddell MacGregor (ed.), The Key of Solomon the King, London: Red-
way 1889.
Mathers, Samuel Liddell MacGregor (ed.), The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin
the Mage, London: Watkins 1898.
McCown, Chester Charlton, The Testament of Solomon, Leipzig: Hinrichs 1922.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 229

Meyer, Marvin W. and Smith, Richard (ed.), Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of
Ritual Power, San Francisco: HarperCollins 1994.
Montalvo, Sagrario Rodríguez M. (ed.), “Lapidario” segun el manuscrito escurialense
h.i.15 Madrid: Gredos 1981.
Morgan, Michael A. (ed./trsl.), Sepher Ha-Razim: The Book of the Mysteries, Chicago:
Scholars Press 1983.
Nacht, Aleister, Book of Satanic Magic, Amazon Digital Services, Inc.: Loki / Speckbohne
Publishing 2011.
North, Robert (ed.), Sexual Magic: Paschal Beverly Randolph, New York: Magickal Childe
Publishing 1988.
Navarro, Joaquina Albarracín, and Ruiz, Juan Martínez (ed.), Medicina, farmacopea
y magia en el “Misceláneo de Salomón” (Texto árabe, traducción, glosas aljamiadas,
estudio y glosario), Granada: Universidad 1987.
O’Meara, Thomas F. and Duffy, Michael J. (eds.), St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theolo-
giae. Latin text and English translation, Introductions, Notes, Appendices and Glos-
saries. Volume 40 (2a2ae. 92–100): Superstition and Irreverence, New York: Cambridge
University Press 2006 (reprint Cambridge: Blackfriars 1968).
Peterson, Joseph H. (ed.), The Lesser Key of Solomon. Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis.
Detailing the Ceremonial Art of Commanding Spirits Both Good and Evil, York Beach:
Weiser 2001.
Peterson, Joseph H. (ed.), ‘The Key of Solomon (Clavicula Salomonis)’, online edi-
tion 2005: http://www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/ksol.htm (last access May 23,
2015).
Peterson, Joseph H. (ed.), ‘Les secrets merveilleux du Petit Albert’, online edition 2006:
http://www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/petitalb.htm (last access February 11,
2016).
Peterson, Joseph H. (ed.), ‘Peter de Abano: Heptameron, or magical elements’, online edi-
tion 2008: http://www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/heptamer.htm (last access
March 13, 2015).
Peterson, Joseph H. (ed.), ‘Liber Juratus Honorii or The Sworne Booke of Honorius’,
online edition 2009 (a): http://www.esotericarchives.com/juratus/juratus.htm (last
access July 22, 2015).
Peterson, Joseph H. (ed.), Arbatel: Concerning the Magic of Ancients: Original Source-
book of Angel Magic, Lake Worth: Ibis Press 2009 (b).
Pingree, David (ed.), Picatrix. the Latin version of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm; text, introduction,
appendices, indices, London: Warburg Institute 1986.
Preisendanz, Karl and Henrichs, Albert (eds.), Papyri Graecae Magicae. Die Griechis-
chen Zauberpapyri, 2 vols., Stuttgart: Teubner 1973/74.
Rankine, David, The Book of Treasure Spirits, London: Avalonia 2009.
Rankine, David, ‘From Roots to Fruits: A History of the Grimoire Tradition’, in: Ly-

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

230 otto

courinos, Damon Zacharias (ed.), Occult Traditions, Colac: Numen Books 2012, 93–
109.
Rebiger, Bill, and Schäfer, Peter (eds.), Sefer ha-Razim: Das Buch der Geheimnisse, 2 vols.,
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2009.
Regardie, Israel, The Eye in the Triangle: An Interpretation of Aleister Crowley, St. Paul:
Llewellyn Publ. 1970.
Regardie, Israel, The Golden Dawn. The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites & Cere-
monies of the Hermetic Order, St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn Publ. 61990.
Regardie, Israel, The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic, Tempe: Arizona 51994.
Ritter, Hellmut (ed.), Ġāyat al-ḥakīm wa aḥaqq al-natīǧatain bi-ʾl-taqdīm, Leipzig: Teub-
ner 1933.
Ritter, Hellmut, and Plessner, Martin (eds.), “Picatrix”. Das Ziel des Weisen von Pseudo-
Mağrīṭī. Translated into German from the Arabic by Hellmut Ritter and Martin Pless-
ner, London: Warburg Inst. 1962.
Rosenthal, Franz (Ed./Transl.), Ibn Khaldûn. The Muqaddimah. An Introduction to His-
tory. Translated from the Arabic by Franz Rosenthal in three Volumes: Vol. 3, Princeton:
Princeton University Press 1967.
Ruelle, Charles-Émile, ‘Hermès Trismégiste: Le Livré Sacre sur les Décans: Texte, vari-
antes et traduction française’, Revue de Philologie 32/4 (1908), 247–277.
Schäfer, Peter, and Shaked, Shaul (eds.), Magische Texte aus der Kairoer Geniza, 3 vols.,
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1994–1999
Scheible, Johann, Das Kloster, 13 vols., Stuttgart: Scheible 1848–1849.
Scot, Reginald, The discoverie of witchcraft. With an introd. by Montague Summers, New
York: Dover Publications 1972.
Shadrach, Nineveh, Book of Deadly Names as revealed to King Solomon by Jinn King
Fiqitush, Burnaby: Ishtar Publishing 2007.
Shadrach, Nineveh, and Harrison, Frances, Magic that Works: Practical Training for the
Children of Light, Burnaby: Ishtar Publishing 2014.
Skinner, Stephen, Techniques of Graeco-Egyptian Magic, Singapore: Llewellyn Publica-
tions 2014.
Skinner, Stephen, and Rankine, David (eds.), The Keys to the Gateway of Magic: Sum-
moning the Solomonic Archangels and Demon Princes, Singapore: Golden Hoard
Press 2005.
Torijano, Pablo A., ‘The Hygromancy of Solomon’, in: Bauckham, Richard et al. (eds.),
Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More noncanonical scripture. Vol. 1, Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans 2013, 276–295.
Véronèse, Julien (ed.), L’ Ars notoria au Moyen Age. Introduction et édition critique,
Florence: sismel 2007.
Véronèse, Julien (ed.), L’ Almandal et l’ Almadel latins au Moyen Âge: Introduction et
éditions critiques Florence: sismel 2012.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 231

Secondary Sources
Ankarloo, Bengt et al. (eds.), The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, 6
vols., London: Athlone Press 1999–2002.
Asprem, Egil, ‘Magic Naturalized? Negotiating Science and Occult Experience in Aleis-
ter Crowley’s “Scientific Illuminism” ’, Aries 8/2 (2008), 139–165.
Asprem, Egil, Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture, Albany: State
University of New York Press 2012.
Asprem, Egil, ‘Patterns of Magicity: A review of Defining Magic: A Reader (eds. Otto
& Stausberg: Equinox, 2013)’, in: Heterodoxology (2014), online available at http://
heterodoxology.com/2014/02/01/patterns-of-magicity-a-review-of-defining-magic-
a-reader-eds-otto-stausberg-acumen-2013-part-1/ (last access August 7, 2015).
Asprem, Egil, ‘Contemporary Ritual Magic’, in: Partridge, Christopher (ed.), The Occult
World, London: Routledge 2014, 382–395.
Asprem, Egil, ‘Intermediary Beings’, in: Partridge, Christopher (ed.), The Occult World,
London: Routledge 2014, 646–658.
Asprem, Egil, ‘Beyond the West: Towards a Comparativism in the Study of Esotericism’,
Correspondences 2/1 (2014), 3–33.
Asprem, Egil, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Dis-
course, 1900–1939, Leiden: Brill 2014.
Asprem, Egil and Granholm, Kennet, ‘Constructing Esotericisms: Sociological, Histori-
cal and Critical Approaches to the Invention of Tradition’, in: Idd. (eds.), Contempo-
rary Esotericism, London: Routledge 2014, 25–48.
Bachter, Stephan, Anleitung zum Aberglauben. Zauberbücher und die Verbreitung ma-
gischen “Wissens” seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, Hamburg: Univ. Diss. 2005.
Bailey, Michael D., Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity
to the Present. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 2007.
Bergunder, Michael, ‘What is Esotericism? Cultural Studies Approaches and the Prob-
lems of Definition in Religious Studies’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion
22 (2010), 9–36.
Bogdan, Henrik, Western Esotericism and Rituals of Initiation, Albany: State University
of New York Press 2007.
Bogdan, Henrik, ‘Introduction: Modern Western Magic’, Aries 12 (2012), 1–16.
Bogdan, Henrik, ‘Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian Tradition’, in: Partridge, Christo-
pher (ed.), The Occult World, London: Routledge 2015, 323–330.
Bogdan, Henrik, ‘The Babalon Working 1946: L. Ron Hubbard, John Whiteside Parsons,
and the Practice of Enochian Magic’, Numen 63/1 (2016), 12–32.
Bogdan, Henrik and Starr, Martin P. (eds.), Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism,
Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012.
Bohak, Gideon, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press 2008.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

232 otto

Bohak, Gideon, ‘The Charaktêres in Ancient and Medieval Jewish Magic’, Acta Classica
Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis 47 (2011), 25–44.
Bohak, Gideon, ‘Jewish Magic in the Middle Ages’, in: Collins, David J. (ed.), The Cam-
bridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present,
Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 2015, 268–300.
Bohak, Gideon et al. (eds.), Continuity and Innovation in the Magical Tradition, Leiden:
Brill 2011.
Boschung, Dietrich, and Bremmer, Jan (eds.), The Materiality of Magic, Paderborn: Fink
2015.
Boudet, Jean-Patrice et al. (ed.), Picatrix, Images et magie, Paris: Champion 2011.
Brashear, William M., ‘The Greek Magical Papyri: an Introduction and Survey; Anno-
tated Bibliography (1928–1994) [Indices in vol. ii.18.6]’, in: Haase, Wolfgang et al.
(eds.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt. Geschichte und Kultur Roms im
Spiegel der Neueren Forschung. Teil ii: Principat. Band 18: Religion. Teilband 5: Hei-
dentum (Die religiösen Verhältnisse in den Provinzen, Fortsetzung), Berlin: de Gruyter
1995, 3380–3684.
Bremmer, Jan (ed.), The Metamorphosis of Magic: From Late Antiquity to the Early
Modern Period, Leiden: Brill 2003.
Brosius, Christiane and Michaels, Axel and Schrode, Paula (eds.), Ritual und Ritual-
dynamik: Schlüsselbegriffe, Theorien, Diskussionen, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rup-
recht 2013.
Burke, Peter, Cultural Hybridity, London: Polity Press 2009.
Burnett, Charles, ‘Talismans: Magic as Science? Necromancy among the Seven Liberal
Arts’, in: Id. (ed.), Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages, Aldershot: Variorum 1996,
1–15.
Burnett, Charles, ‘The Translating Activity in Medieval Spain’, in: Id. (ed.), Magic and
Divination in the Middle Ages, Aldershot: Variorum 1996, 1036–1058.
Burnett, Charles, ‘Remarques paléographiques et philologiques sur les noms d’ anges et
d’ esprits dans les traités de magie traduits de l’ arabe en Latin’, Mélanges de l’ École
Française de Rome 114/2 (2002), 657–668.
Burnett, Charles, ‘Nīranj: A category of magic (almost) forgotten in the Latin West’, in:
Leonardi, Claudio and Santi, Francesco (eds.), Natura, scienze e società medievali:
Studi in onore di Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Florence: sismel 2008, 37–66.
Butler, Alison, Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic: Invoking Tradition,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Canaan, Tewfik, ‘The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans’, in: Savage-Smith, Emilie (ed.),
Magic and Divination in Early Islam, Aldershot: Ashgate 2004, 125–177.
Collins, David J. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From
Antiquity to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 2015.
Conrad, Sebastian et al. (eds.), Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: postkoloniale Perspektiven
in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, Frankfurt/Main: Campus 22013.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 233

Copenhaver, Brian, ‘Iamblichus, Synesius and the Chaldean Oracles in Marsilio Ficino’s
De Vita Libri Tres: Hermetic Magic or Neoplatonic Magic?’, in: Hankins, James
et al. (eds.), Supplementum Festivum. Studies in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller,
Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies 1987, 441–455.
Copenhaver, Brian, ‘Hermes Trismegistus, Proclus, and the Question of a Philosophy of
Magic in the Renaissance’, in: Merkel, Ingrid and Debus, Allen G. (eds.), Hermeticism
and the Renaissance. Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe,
Washington d.c.: Folger Books 1988, 79–110.
Copenhaver, Brian, Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015.
Dan, Joseph, ‘Jewish Influences iii: “Christian Kabbalah” in the Renaissance’, in: Hane-
graaff, Wouter J. et al. (eds.), Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism. ii: i–z,
Leiden: Brill 2005, 638–642.
Davies, Owen, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press
2009.
Deveney, John Patrick, Paschal Beverly Randolph: a nineteenth century black American
Spiritualist, Rosicrucian and Sex Magician, Albany: State University of New York
Press 1997.
Dieleman, Jacco, ‘Scribal Practices in the Production of Magic Handbooks’, in: Bohak,
Gideon et al. (eds.), Continuity and Innovation in the Magical Tradition, Leiden: Brill
2011, 85–118.
Dorpmüller, Sabine, Religiöse Magie im ‘Buch der probaten Mittel’: Analyse, kritische
Edition und Übersetzung des Kitāb al-Muğarrabāt von Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf as-
Sanūsī (gest. um 895/1490), Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2005.
Engler, Steven (ed.), Historicizing ‘Tradition’ in the Study of Religion, Berlin: de Gruyter
2005.
Engler, Steven ‘Afterword: Tradition’s legacy’, in: Id. (ed.), Historicizing ‘Tradition’ in the
Study of Religion, Berlin: de Gruyter 2005, 357–378.
Faivre, Antoine, Western Esotericism: A Concise History, Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2010.
Fanger, Claire (ed.), Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic,
Stroud: Sutton 1998.
Fanger, Claire, ‘Plundering the Egyptian Treasure: John the Monk’s Book of Visions and
its Relation to the Ars Notoria of Solomon’, in: Id. (ed.), Conjuring Spirits: Texts and
Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic, Stroud: Sutton 1998, 216–249.
Fanger, Claire (ed.), Invoking Angels: Theurgic Ideas and Practices, Thirteenth to Six-
teenth Centuries, University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press 2012.
Fanger, Claire and Klaassen, Frank, ‘Magic iii: Middle Ages’, in Hanegraaff, Wouter et al.
(eds.), Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism. ii: i–z, Leiden: Brill 2005, 724–731.
Forshaw, Peter, ‘Alchemy in the Amphitheatre: some considerations of the alchemical

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

234 otto

content of the engravings in Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom

(1609)’, in: Wamberg, Jacob (ed.), Art and Alchemy, Copenhagen: Museum Tuscu-
lanum Press 2006, 195–220.
Forshaw, Peter, ‘The Occult Middle Ages’, in: Partridge, Christopher (ed.), The Occult
World, London: Routledge 2015, 34–48.
Forster, Regula, Das Geheimnis der Geheimnisse: Die arabischen und deutschen Fas-
sungen des pseudo-aristotelischen Sirr al-asrar / Secretum Secretorum, Wiesbaden:
Reichert 2006.
Foucault, Michel, ‘Was ist ein Autor?’, in: Id., Schriften zur Literatur. Aus d. Französ. von
Karin von Hofer, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer1988, 7–31.
Frankfurter, David, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance, Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press 1998.
Ginzburg, Carlo, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries, London: Routledge 1983.
Ginzburg, Carlo, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, New York: Pantheon
Books 1991.
Glarean, Heinrich and Krüger, Bartholomäus (eds.), Frühe Neuzeit in Deutschland 1520–
1620: literaturwissenschaftliches Verfasserlexikon, Berlin: de Gruyter 2014.
Glucklich, Ariel, The End of Magic, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997.
Godwin, Joscelyn, The Golden Thread: The Ageless Wisdom of the Western Mystery
Traditions, Wheaton: Quest Books 2007.
Godwin, Joscelyn and Chanel, Christian and Deveney, John P. (eds.), The Hermetic
Brotherhood of Luxor: Initiatic and Historical Documents of an Order of Practical
Occultism, New York: Samuel Weiser 1995.
Goffmann, Erving, Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Englewood
Cliffs: Prentice-Hall 1963.
Golb, Norman, ‘The Esoteric Practices of the Jews of Fatimid Egypt’, American Philo-
sophical Society Year Book 1965(publ. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical
Society Independence Square 1966), 533–535.
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and their
Influence on Nazi Ideology, London: Tauris 2004 (rev. ed. Wellingborough: Aquarian
1985).
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction,
Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008.
Gordon, Richard, ‘Charaktêres between Antiquity and Renaissance’, in: Dasen, Véroni-
que and Spieser, Jean-Michel (eds.), Les savoirs magiques et leur transmission de
l’ Antiquité à la Renaissance, Florence: Sismel 2014, 253–300.
Granholm, Kennet, ‘Locating the West: Problematizing the Western in Western Esoteri-
cism and Occultism’, in: Bogdan, Henrik and Djurdjevic, Gordan (eds.), Occultism in
a Global Perspective, Durham: Acumen Publishing 2013, 17–36.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 235

Granholm, Kennet, Dark Enlightenment: The Historical, Sociological, and Discursive

Contexts of Contemporary Esoteric Magic, Leiden: Brill 2014.
Grévin, Benoît and Véronèse, Julien, ‘Les “caractères” magiques au Moyen Âge (xiie–
xive siècle)’, Bibliothèque de l’ École des chartes 162 (2004), 305–379.
Gundel, Wilhelm, Dekane und Dekansternbilder: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Stern-
bilder der Kulturvölker, Hamburg: Augustin 1936.
Hammer, Olav, Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the
New Age, Leiden: Brill 2004.
Hammer, Olav, ‘Deconstructing Western esotericism: on Wouter Hanegraaff’s Esoteri-
cism and the Academy’, Religion 43/2 (2013), 241–251.
Hanegraaff, Wouter, ‘How magic survived the disenchantment of the world’, Religion
33/4 (2003), 357–380.
Hanegraaff, Wouter, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Cul-
ture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012.
Hanegraaff, Wouter, ‘Textbooks and introductions to Western Esotericism’, Religion
43/2 (2013), 178–200.
Hanegraaff, Wouter, ‘The Globalization of Esotericism’, Correspondences 3 (2015), 55–91.
Hanegraaff, Wouter, ‘Magic’, in: Magee, Glenn Alexander (ed.), The Cambridge Hand-
book of Western Mysticism and Esotericism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
forthcoming.
Harari, Yuval, ‘What is a Magical text? Methodological Reflections aimed at redefining
Early Jewish Magic’, in: Shaked, Shaul (ed.), Officina Magica: Essays on the Practice of
Magic in Antiquity, Leiden: Brill 2005, 91–124.
Harkness, Deborah E., John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the
End of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999.
Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard and Kocka, Jürgen (eds.), Comparative and transnational His-
tory: Central European approaches and new perspectives, New York: Berghahn Books
2009.
Herren-Oesch, Madeleine et al. (eds.), Transcultural History: Theories, Methods, Sources,
Berlin: Springer 2012.
Hutton, Ronald, ‘Aleister Crowley and Wicca’, in: Bogdan, Henrik and Starr, Martin P.
(eds.), Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism, Oxford: Oxford University Press
2012, 285–306.
Johnston, Sarah Iles, ‘The Testament of Solomon from Late Antiquity to the Renais-
sance’, in: Bremmer, Jan (ed.), The Metamorphosis of Magic: From Late Antiquity to
the Early Modern Period, Leiden: Brill 2003, 35–49.
Kapferer, Bruce, The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press 1997.
Katz, David S., The Occult Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Present Day, London:
Cape 2005.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

236 otto

Kieckhefer, Richard, Magic in the Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
1989.
Kieckhefer, Richard, ‘Did magic have a Renaissance? An historiographic question revis-
ited’, in Burnett, Charles and Ryan, W.F. (eds.), Magic and the Classical Tradition,
London: Warburg 2006, 199–212.
Kilcher, Andreas (ed.), Constructing Tradition: Means and Myths of Transmission in
Western Esotericism, Leiden: Brill 2010.
Klaassen, Frank, The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle
Ages and Renaissance, University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press 2013.
Kriss, Rudolf, and Kriss-Heinrich, Hubert, Volksglaube im Bereich des Islam. Bd. 2: Amu-
lette, Zauberformeln und Beschwörungen, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 1962.
Labouvie, Eva, Verbotene Künste: Volksmagie und ländlicher Aberglaube in den Dorfge-
meinden des Saarraums (16.–19. Jahrhundert), St. Ingberg: Röhrig 1992.
Lehrich, Christopher, The Occult Mind: Magic in Theory and Practice, Ithaca: Cornell
Univ. Press 2012.
Leicht, Reimund, Astrologumena Judaica: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der astrolo-
gischen Literatur der Juden, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2006.
Lemay, Richard, ‘Books of Magic in translation from the Arabic and the birth of a
theology of the Sacraments of the Church in the twelfth century’, in Gyselen, Rika et
al. (eds.), Charmes et sortilèges: magie et magiciens, Bures-sur-Yvette: Groupe pour
l’ Étude de la Civilisation du Moyen-Orient 2002, 165–192.
Levack, Brian P. (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook, New York: Routledge 2004.
Levack, Brian P., The witch-hunt in early modern Europe, Harlow: Pearson Longman
32006.
Lewis, James R. and Hammer, Olav (eds.), The Invention of Sacred Tradition, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 2007.
Lipp, Wolfgang, Stigma und Charisma. Über soziales Grenzverhalten, Berlin: Reimer
1985.
Luhrmann, Tanya, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary Eng-
land, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1989.
Magdalino, Paul and Mavroudi, Maria (eds.), The Occult Sciences in Byzantium, Geneva:
La Pomme d’ Or 2006.
Mannhardt, Wilhelm, Die Korndämonen. Beitrag zur Germanischen Sittenkunde, Berlin:
Dümmler 1868.
Mannhardt, Wilhelm, Wald- und Feldkulte, 2 vols., Berlin: Bornträger 1875/76.
Mathiesen, Robert, ‘The Key of Solomon: Toward a Typology of the Manuscripts’,
Societas Magica Newsletter 17 (2007), 1–9.
Mayer, Gerhard, Arkane Welten: Biografien, Erfahrungen und Praktiken zeitgenössischer
Magier, Würzburg: Ergon 2008.
McCutcheon, Russel T. (ed.), The insider/outsider problem in the Study of Religion: A
Reader, London: Cassel 1999.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 237

McIntosh, Christopher, Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival, London: Rider 1972.
McIntosh, Christopher, The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology, and Rites of an Esoteric
Order, York Beach: Weiser 1998.
Mesler, Katelyn, ‘The Liber Iuratus Honorii and the Christian Reception of Angel Magic’,
in: Fanger, Claire (ed.), Invoking Angels: Theurgic Ideas and Practices, Thirteenth to
Sixteenth Centuries, University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press 2012, 113–150.
Meyer, Birgit and Pels, Peter (eds), Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and
Concealment, Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press 2003.
Michaels, Axel et al. (eds.), Ritual dynamics and the science of ritual, 5 vols., Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz 2010–2011.
Moberg, Marcus, ‘First-, Second-, and Third-level Discourse-Analytic Approaches in the
Study of Religion: Moving from Meta-theoretical Reflection to Implementation in
Practice’, Religion 43/1 (2013).
Müller-Jahnke, Wolf-Dieter, ‘Agrippa von Nettesheim: “De Occulta Philosophia”: Ein
“Magisches System”’, in: Heinekamp, Albert and Mettler, Dieter (eds.), Magia nat-
uralis und die Entstehung der modernen Naturwissenschaften. Symposion d. Leibniz-
Ges. Hannover, 14. u. 15. Nov. 1975, Wiesbaden: Steiner 1978, 19–26.
Mulsow, Martin, ‘Vor Adam. Ideengeschichte jenseits der Eurozentrik’, Zeitschrift für
Ideengeschichte ix/1 (2015), 47–66.
Northrop, Douglas (ed.), A Companion to World History, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2012.
Olstein, Diego, Thinking History Globally, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan 2015.
Otto, Bernd-Christian, Magie. Rezeptions- und diskursgeschichtliche Analysen von der
Antike bis zur Neuzeit, Berlin: de Gruyter 2011.
Otto, Bernd-Christian, ‘ “Magie” beweisen? Überlegungen zur Prozesslogik des früh-
neuzeitlichen crimen magiae’, @KIH-eSkript. Interdisziplinäre Hexenforschung on-
line 4 (2012), 79–100.
Otto, Bernd-Christian, ‘Zauberhaftes Ägypten—Ägyptischer Zauber? Überlegungen
zur Verwendung des Magiebegriffs in der Ägyptologie’, in: Jeserich, Florian (ed.),
Ägypten, Kindheit, Tod. Gedenkschrift für Edmund Hermsen, Wien: Böhlau 2012, 39–
70.
Otto, Bernd-Christian, ‘Towards historicizing “Magic” in Antiquity’, numen 60, 2/3
(2013), 308–347.
Otto, Bernd-Christian, ‘Review: Gideon Bohak, Yuval Harari, Shaul Shaked (eds.), Con-
tinuity and Innovation in the Magical Tradition, Leiden: Brill 2011’, aries: Journal for
the Study of Western Esotericism 13/2 (2013), 308–313.
Otto, Bernd-Christian, ‘Discourse theory trumps discourse theory: Wouter Hanegraaff’s
Esotericism and the Academy’, religion 43/2 (2013), 231–240.
Otto, Bernd-Christian, ‘A Catholic “magician” historicises “magic”: Eliphas Lévi’s His-
toire de la magie’, in: Otto, Bernd-Christian and Rau, Susanne and Rüpke, Jörg (eds.),
History and Religion: Narrating a religious past, Berlin: de Gruyter 2015, 419–443.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

238 otto

Otto, Bernd-Christian, ‘A discourse historical approach towards medieval “learned

magic” ’, in: Page, Sophie and Rider, Catheline (eds.), Ashgate Research Companion
to medieval magic: ca. 1000–1500, Farnham: Ashgate forthcoming.
Otto, Bernd-Christian and Stausberg, Michael (eds.), Defining Magic: A Reader, Shef-
field: Equinox (now Routledge) 2013.
Otto, Bernd-Christian and Rau, Susanne and Rüpke, Jörg, ‘History and Religion’, in: Idd.
(eds.), History and Religion: Narrating a religious past, Berlin: de Gruyter 2015, 1–18.
Owen, Alex, The Place of Enchantment: British occultism and the culture of the modern,
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press 2004.
Page, Sophie, ‘Magic and the Pursuit of Wisdom: the “familiar” spirit in the Liber
Theysolius’, La Corónica 36/1 (2007), 41–70.
Page, Sophie, Magic in the Cloister: Pious Motives, Illicit Interests, and Occult Approaches
to the medieval universe, University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press 2013.
Partridge, Christopher, The Re-enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sa-
cralisation, Popular Culture, and Occulture, 2 vols., London: t & t Clark International
2004.
Partridge, Christopher, (ed.), The Occult World, London: Routledge 2015.
Pasi, Marco, ‘Magic’, in: Stuckrad, Kocku von (ed.), The Brill Dictionary of Religion.
Volume iii: m–r, Leiden: Brill 2006, 1134–1140.
Pasi, Marco, ‘Theses de magia’, Societas Magica Newsletter 20 (2008), 1–8.
Pasi, Marco, ‘Oriental Kabbalah and the Parting of East and West in the early Theosoph-
ical Society’, in Huss, Boaz and Pasi, Marco, and Stuckrad, Kocku von (eds.), Kab-
balah and Modernity: Interpretations, Transformations, Adaptations, Leiden: Brill
2010, 151–166.
Pasi, Marco, ‘Varieties of Magical Experience: Aleister Crowley’s Views on Occult Prac-
tice’, Magic, Ritual & Witchcraft 6/2 (2011), 123–162.
Pasi, Marco and Rabaté, Philippe, ‘Langue angélique, langue magique, l’ énochien’,
Politica Hermetica 13 (1999), 94–123.
Pike, Kenneth L., ‘Etic and Emic Standpoints for the Description of Behaviour’, in:
McCutcheon, Russel T. (ed.), The insider/outsider problem in the Study of Religion:
A Reader, London: Cassel 1999, 28–36.
Pingree, David, ‘Some of the Sources of the Ghāyat al-hakīm’, Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes 43 (1980), 1–15.
Pingree, David, ‘The Diffusion of Arabic Magical Texts in Western Europe’, in: Amoretti,
Scarcia (ed.), La diffusione delle scienze islamiche nel medio evo europeo, Rome:
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei 1987, 58–102.
Pingree, David, ‘Plato’s Hermetic Book of the Cow’, in: Prini, Pietro (ed.), Il Neoplaton-
ismo nel Rinascimento, Rome: Instituto Italiana della Enciclopedia 1993, 133–145.
Pingree, David, ‘Learned magic in the time of Frederick ii’, Micrologus: natura, scienze
e società medievali 2 (1994), 39–56.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

historicising ‘western learned magic’ 239

Plaisance, Christopher A., ‘Magic Made Modern? Re-evaluation the Novelty of the
Golden Dawn’s Magic’, Correspondences 2/2 (2014), 159–187.
Plaisance, Christopher A., ‘Israel Regardie and the Psychologization of Esoteric Dis-
course’, Correspondances 3 (2015), 1–50.
Regourd, Anne, ‘Images de Djinns et Exorcisme dans le Mandal Al-Sulaymānī’, in:
Boudet, Jean-Patrice et al. (ed.), Picatrix, Images et magie, Paris: Champion 2011, 253–
294.
Regourd, Anne, ‘Al-Mandal al-sulaymānī appliqué: une section interpolée dans le ms.
Sanaa 2774?’, The Arabist forthcoming.
Rüpke, Jörg, Aberglauben oder Individualität? Religiöse Abweichung im römischen Reich,
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2011.
Rüpke, Jörg, The Individual in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean, Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press 2013.
Saif, Liana, The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy, London: Palgrave
Macmillan 2015.
Saif, Liana, ‘The Cows and the Bees: The Arabic Tradition of Magical Artificial Gen-
eration from Pseudo-Plato’s Liber vaccae (Kitāb al-Nawāmīs) to al-ʿIrāqi’s ʿUyūn
al-Haqāʾiq’, forthcoming.
Stark, Rodney and Bainbridge, William S., Religion, Deviance, and Social Control, New
York: Routledge 1996.
Stratton, Kimberly B., Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology, & Stereotype in the Ancient
World, New York: Columbia Univ. Press 2007.
Stuckrad, Kocku von, ‘Aleister Crowley, Thelema und die Religionsgeschichte des zwan-
zigsten Jahrhunderts’, in: Stuckrad, Kocku von and Luchesi, Brigitte (eds.), Religion
im kulturellen Diskurs. Festschrift für Hans G. Kippenberg zu seinem 65. Geburtstag.
Herausgegeben von Brigitte Luchesi und Kocku von Stuckrad, Berlin: de Gruyter 2004,
307–324.
Stuckrad, Kocku von, Western Esotericism: A brief history of secret knowledge, London:
Equinox 2005.
Stuckrad, Kocku von, Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
Esoteric Discourse and Western Identities, Brill: Leiden 2010.
Styers, Randall B., Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World,
Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004.
Tanaseanu-Döbler, Theurgy in late Antiquity: the Invention of a Ritual Tradition, Göttin-
gen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013.
Taussig, Michael, The Magic of the State. London: Routledge 1997.
Thorndike, Lynn, A History of Magic and Experimental Science. Vol. 2: During the First 13
Centuries of our Era, New York: Columbia Univ. Press 1923.
Urban, Hugh B., Magia sexualis: sex, magic and liberation in modern Western esoteri-
cism, Berkeley: University of California Press 2006.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

240 otto

Urban, Hugh B., ‘The Occult Roots of Scientology: L. Ron Hubbart, Aleister Crowley, and
the Origins of a Controversial New Religion’, in: Bogdan, Henrik and Starr, Martin P.
(eds.), Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism, Oxford: Oxford University Press
2012, 335–368.
Veenstra, Jan R., ‘The Holy Almandal. Angels and the Intellectual Aims of Magic’, in:
Bremmer, Jan N. and Veenstra, Jan R. (eds.), The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late
Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, Leiden: Brill 2002, 189–229.
Véronèse, Julien, ‘La transmission groupée des textes de magie “salomonienne” de
l’ Antiquité au Moyen Âge: bilan historiographique, inconnues et pistes de re-
cherche’, in: Gioanni, Stéphane and Grévin, Benoît (eds.), L’ Antiquité tardive dans
les collections médiévales: Textes et representations, vie–xive siècle, Rome: École Fran-
çaise de Rome 2008, 193–223.
Versluis, Arthur, Magic and Mysticism: an Introduction to Western Esotericism, Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007.
Walker, Alicia, ‘Magic in Medieval Byzantium’, in: Collins, David J. (ed.), The Cambridge
History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present, Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press 2015, 209–234.
Worstbrock, Franz J., Deutscher Humanismus: 1480–1520. Verfasserlexikon, 2 vols., Berlin:
de Gruyter 2008–2013.
Wuttke, Adolf, Der deutsche Volksaberglaube der Gegenwart, Hamburg: Agentur des
Rauhen Hauses 1860.
Yates, Frances A., Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London: Routledge 1999
(reprint Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press 1964).
Zadeh, Travis, ‘Magic, Marvel, and Miracle in Early Islamic Thought’, in: Collins, David J.
(ed.), The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to
the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 2015, 235–267.
Zadeh, Travis, ‘Commanding Demons and Jinn: The Sorcerer in Early Islamic Thought’,
in: Korangy, Alireza and Sheffield, Dan (eds.), No Tapping around Philology: A Fest-
schrift in Honor of Wheeler McIntosh Thackston Jr.’s 70th Birthday, Wiesbaden: Har-
rassowitz Verlag 2014, 131–160.
Zambelli, Paola, The Speculum Astronomiae and its Enigma: Astrology, Theology and
Science in Albertus Magnus and his Contemporaries, Dordrecht: Kluwer 1992.
Zambelli, Paola, White Magic, Black Magic and the European Renaissance, Leiden: Brill
2007.

Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 161–240

Copyright of Aries is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be
copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
individual use.