The Book That Supplied Its Own Author

The Sworn Book opens with a story about itself. The church and its rulers, moved by demons, have resolved to destroy the magical art and everyone who practises it; the masters of the art therefore assemble and choose one of their number to compile the whole of it into a single volume so that it will survive them. That compiler is Honorius, son of Euclid, master of Thebes. The oath in the title binds whoever receives the book: it may be copied only a limited number of times, given only to a person of proven character, and buried with its owner if no fit successor is found.

What the book actually contains is not quite what its frame suggests. The central operation aims at the vision of God, and it is approached through a long preparation of fasting, confession, mass and psalmody before any conjuration is attempted at all; the spirits it treats afterwards are handled inside that same devotional apparatus. It is a work of Christian ritual practice which expects the church to condemn it and says so on its first page. The manuscripts that carry it date from the fourteenth century onward. The tension between the piety of the contents and the defiance of the prologue is the most interesting thing in it, and it is the reason the book is read as evidence about medieval religion rather than only about medieval magic.