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Grimorium Verum

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A goetic grimoire in the Solomonic line, drawing directly on the Key of Solomon but frankly concerned with commanding infernal spirits rather than angels. Its title page claims Memphis and 1517; the text is an eighteenth-century French and Italian compilation. It sets out a hierarchy under Lucifer, Beelzebuth and Astaroth, the seals of their subordinates, and the making of the tools and the knife of the art. It is one of the small number of manuals the tradition itself regarded as black.

Facts
Origins
Era of Composition
1750 1
Language
French 1
Origin of the Name
Both are fictions of the eighteenth-century French trade in cheap grimoires 1
Origin of the Name
The imprint is false by more than two centuries 1
Origin of the Name
The title page gives "Memphis, 1517" and an author, Alibeck the Egyptian 1
Attributed Author / Compiler
Attributed to Alibeck the Egyptian (pseudonymous) 1
Text
Literary Form
Grimoire / manual of magical operations 1
Attributions
Tradition
Solomonic and Goetic 1
Scholarship
First Published
Falsely claims a 1517 imprint at Memphis on its own title page, a printing history no surviving copy supports, its real, traceable circulation beginning only in eighteenth century French manuscript and chapbook copies. 1
Transmission
Circulated across France and Italy in variant manuscript and printed versions that borrow material from earlier grimoires including the Key of Solomon, so no two surviving copies agree exactly on its contents. 2
Transmission
Manuscript Tradition
Circulated across France and Italy in variant manuscript and printed versions borrowing from earlier grimoires including the Key of Solomon, so no two surviving copies agree exactly on its contents, despite a title page claiming a false 1517 Memphis origin for what is an eighteenth century compilation. 2
Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly Note
Despite its title's claim of Egyptian origin and a false imprint date, bibliographic analysis places its actual composition in eighteenth century France, part of a wider grimoire tradition that manufactured ancient pedigrees to lend its conjurations authority. 1
Learn More
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.

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.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Ceremonial Magick, Disciplines

A grimoire in the Solomonic line, drawing directly on the Key of Solomon.

Demonology, Disciplines

A goetic grimoire frankly concerned with commanding infernal spirits, setting out a hierarchy under Lucifer, Beelzebuth and Astaroth.

Originates in Language

Modern French, Languages
Source Grimoires: A History of Magic BooksOwen Davies

Related To

Beelzebub, Figures

The Grimorium Verum's own description sets out a hierarchy under Lucifer, Beelzebuth and Astaroth.

Source Grimoires: A History of Magic BooksOwen Davies
Lucifer, Figures

The Grimorium Verum's own description sets out a hierarchy under Lucifer, Beelzebuth and Astaroth.

Source Grimoires: A History of Magic BooksOwen Davies
Sources
1. Grimoires: A History of Magic Books
Owen Davies, Oxford University Press, 2009On the goetic grimoires and the black-book traditionView the Source
2. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005on goetic grimoires and false antiquityView the Source
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