Memphis, 1517, a False Imprint

The Grimorium Verum ("True Grimoire") is a goetic grimoire in the Solomonic line, drawing directly on the Key of Solomon but frankly concerned with commanding infernal spirits rather than angels, and organised around three chief spirits (Lucifer, Beelzebuth and Astaroth) and their subordinates. Its title-page claims that it was printed at Memphis by "Alibeck the Egyptian" in 1517, and this is demonstrably false on its face: Memphis was a ruin, not a press, in 1517.

As A. E. Waite already observed and later historians such as Owen Davies confirm, the work actually belongs to the mid-eighteenth century, first appearing in French (with an Italian manuscript background) around 1750, the antique imprint being a deliberate fiction to lend it authority, "Memphis is Rome," in Waite's phrase, and the true date is two centuries later than claimed. Internal anachronisms, including references to the New World, confirm the later date. It is a representative case of the false-antiquity convention that runs through the grimoire trade, and it later influenced folk-magical traditions in the French-speaking Caribbean.