Esoteric Texts
The Grimoire of Armadel
Grimoire Texts
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A grimoire consisting largely of sigils and brief instructions for contacting angels and spirits in order to gain knowledge of divine mysteries, the fall of the angels, and hidden sciences. Rather than coercive demon binding, it emphasizes contemplative revelation through the powers named. Its plates pair each spirit with a specific field of wisdom.
Facts
Scholarship
Critical EditionS. Liddell MacGregor Mathers's late nineteenth century English translation of the French manuscript is the version through which most English language readers have encountered the text. 2 First PublishedMathers's translation circulated only among fellow members of his own occult order during his lifetime and was not formally published until 1980, edited posthumously with an introduction by Francis King. 3 TransmissionSurvives through a single known French manuscript held in the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal in Paris, so its entire modern circulation traces back to that one copy rather than to any wider manuscript tradition. 4 Origins
Era of Composition Attributed Author / Compiler Text
Literary FormGrimoire / manual of magical operations 1 Transmission
Manuscript TraditionSurvives as a single manuscript held in the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal in Paris. S.L. MacGregor Mathers completed an English translation from it in 1897, working, as with his Key of Solomon translation, directly from a French manuscript collection. 3 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteDistinctive among French grimoires for framing its magic as devotional rather than goetic, directing the operator toward angelic contact and knowledge of divine mysteries rather than the compulsion of demons more typical of the same manuscript milieu. 3 Learn More
Sigils for Contemplation, Published by Mathers
The Grimoire of Armadel is a comparatively obscure grimoire consisting largely of sigils and brief instructions for making contact with angels and spirits in order to gain knowledge of divine mysteries, the fall of the angels, the secrets of creation, hidden sciences. In tone it is contemplative and revelatory rather than coercive: it is concerned with learning from spirits rather than binding demons to material ends.
The text survives in a seventeenth-century Latin manuscript in the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal in Paris, and it reached modern readers through S. L. MacGregor Mathers, whose English translation was made in the late nineteenth century but published only in 1980. Its title and the name "Armadel" are of uncertain meaning. Like much of the Solomonic literature it mixes Christian devotion with operative magic, and its emphasis on receiving knowledge places it closer to the theurgic and angelic end of the tradition than to the frankly goetic grimoires.
Sigils Rather Than Conjurations
The Grimoire of Armadel is mostly pictures. Its bulk is a series of sigils, each attached to a spirit or angel and a short statement of what knowledge that figure can impart, with only brief accompanying instruction. What it offers is not command over spirits for worldly ends but access to specific pieces of understanding: the fall of the angels, the nature of the elements, the hidden sciences, matters that are theological and speculative rather than practical.
That places it at the contemplative end of the Solomonic material, closer in spirit to the Sworn Book than to the pact grimoires, and it is why the text is often described as devotional. The sigils are meant to be looked at and used as the focus of the working, which makes the book unusually dependent on the accuracy of its images: a grimoire of conjurations survives a bad copyist, a grimoire of sigils does not.
It reached English readers through a translation by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers from a French manuscript, made in the late nineteenth century and not published until long afterwards. Mathers is the translator here and not the author, a distinction that gets lost when the book is described as a Golden Dawn text.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Its working material is almost entirely angelic and spirit sigils with brief instructions for contact, rather than coercive binding.
The Grimoire of Armadel belongs to the ceremonial tradition of ritual evocation rather than to folk or natural magic.
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