From Hermetic Dialogues to Modern Grimoires

Begin in Greco-Roman Egypt, where spells, hymns and ritual instructions were written on papyrus between roughly the 2nd century BCE and the 5th century CE. Its practitioners treated Greek, Egyptian and Jewish divine names as interchangeable sources of power, and Karl Preisendanz edited the corpus into its modern form between 1928 and 1931.

Next come the philosophical treatises, dated roughly 100 to 300 CE, framed as dialogues between Hermes Trismegistus and his pupils. The opening Poimandres describes a vision of creation and the fall of primal Man into matter, and Renaissance readers took the whole collection as the teaching of an Egyptian sage older than Moses.

This Hermetic dialogue survives chiefly in a Latin translation, though its lost Greek original was likely composed in Alexandria between 100 and 300 CE. Its God Making passage describes how the ancient Egyptians ensouled temple statues with spirits, a passage that later fed Renaissance image magic.

A handful of enigmatic lines, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, gave alchemy its maxim of as above, so below. The sources record that the text is first attested in Arabic, within the Kitab Sirr al-Khaliqa, and has no Greek or Egyptian original, so the Hermetic line passes through the Islamic world here.

Written in Arabic in the first half of the eleventh century, this large manual teaches how to draw the virtues of the planets and fixed stars into images and rituals timed to the heavens. It joins Neoplatonic cosmology, Hermetic philosophy and practical recipes, and is attributed in the atlas to Maslama al-Majriti.

The archetypal Renaissance grimoire teaches the building of magic circles, the consecration of tools and the use of planetary pentacles, all under a pious framework of prayer and purification. Its Solomonic authorship is a convention of the grimoire tradition; the surviving text is late medieval or early modern.

A seventeenth century composite in five parts. Its first book, the Ars Goetia, catalogues seventy two demons with their seals and offices, while the other books treat aerial spirits, planetary angels and prayers for wisdom, making it the best known manual of spirit evocation in the West.

Published in 1908 under the name of Three Initiates, this New Thought treatise sets out seven Hermetic principles and claims an ancient oral source. Scholars treat it as a product of early twentieth century American occultism, and the atlas records its attribution to William Walker Atkinson.

Published in 1909, this book is almost entirely tables aligning the Kabbalistic Tree of Life with gods, colors, plants, perfumes and tarot cards. Attributed to Aleister Crowley, it condenses the correspondence tradition of Agrippa and the Golden Dawn into a working reference, which closes the path where the Papyri began, with a magician looking for equivalences between names of power.