Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Three Chief Spirits, and a Book That Assumes You Are Poor

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Three Chief Spirits, and a Book That Assumes You Are Poor

Grimorium Verum is short, practical and notably unceremonious. Its hierarchy has three chief spirits, Lucifer, Beelzebuth and Astaroth, each with subordinates assigned to particular tasks, and the operations are direct: find treasure, become invisible, cause a woman to appear, make a pact.

What distinguishes it from the Solomonic tradition it borrows from is the economy of the thing. The Key of Solomon demands consecrated instruments, virgin parchment, precise metals and weeks of preparation. This book repeatedly offers substitutions and shortcuts, and its operations can be attempted with what a household would have. That is a clue to its readership, and it fits the false imprint and the cheap circulation the other article on this page describes.

Its characteristic instrument is a knife of a specified kind, and its characteristic instruction is that the operator must have the courage to hold to what he has begun, a warning that recurs.

Like the Grand Grimoire, its later life has been in French language practice well beyond Europe, and it has been absorbed into working traditions the atlas describes rather than reconstructs. It remains in print.

The book also gives a hierarchy of spirits with sigils, and those sigils, rather than the operations, are what most modern readers reproduce, generally without the accompanying warnings the text attaches to each.

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