The Grimoire Encyclopaedia

Grimoires are the practical texts of magic, written in most cases by practitioners. They are therefore central to understanding how magic really works. Before the twenty-first century, the number of grimoires in print was limited, but in the last quarter of a century, many more have been discovered in manuscript and appeared in print. Keeping track of all of them has become a difficult task. David Rankine has solved this difficulty with his most recent book, the massive two-volume Grimoire Encyclopaedia: a convocation of spirits, texts, materials, and practices. This is a work of incredible scholarship by someone who truly understands his subject. David documents and explains more than one hundred individual grimoires, their history, and their makeup, setting them in the continuum of experimental magic. Volume 1 provides the most extensive collection of resources ever gathered on the grimoire tradition along with a spirit list of all the catalogued grimoires. The fourteen huge appendixes in Volume 2 include a survey of magical tools, magic circles, and much more. Spanning hundreds of years and including both familiar grimoires and others virtually unknown until recently, these books are certainly destined to become a key classic in the field. They deserve to be on the bookshelves of all magicians and scholars of grimoire studies. When David and I came up with the idea of creating a series of publications called Sourceworks of Ceremonial Magic in 1999, we thought that maybe we could publish most of the key grimoires in the first ten to fifteen or so volumes of the series. Little did we realise how many grimoires were resting in private collections or libraries around the world, often hidden under other names or even deliberately miscatalogued. It is only with the advent of The Grimoire Encyclopaedia that the huge scope of these grimoires becomes visible. --Stephen Skinner, Golden Hoard Press