Review: AN EXCELLENT BOOKE OF THE ARTE OF MAGICKE: The Magical Works of Humphrey Gilbert & John Davis From British Library Manuscript 36674, eds. Phil Legard & Alexander Cummins, [London], Scarlet Imprint 2020. ISBN: 9781912316298, 8vo (245×170 mm), 368 pp, colour facsimile of British Library Additional manuscript 36674, illustration of the Tree of Crystal by Sin Eater

by Craig ‘VI’ Slee

The Heretical Imaginal

To give it its full title is to begin to see what a wonderfully mammoth task and resource Phil Legard and Al Cummins have both undertaken, and also given us, with this book. Introduced, transcribed, and edited by Legard, with supplementary essays by Cummins, we are presented with a rare chimeric beast. This volume is an historic magical text that precedes Dee’s best known experiments by decades. This is then combined with the critically important cultural and historical context of the time – not to mention rundowns of the Elizabethan magicians and their philosophical worldview – elucidated for us by two extremely readable scholar-practitioners in the 21st century. It provides us with something which should excite anybody with an interest in magic or the occult – a readable record of occult technique and experience leading to, and dealing with, talismanic books, treasures and arcana.

And the Dead. Let’s not forget them.

Far from being solely of interest to so-called “grimoire magicians”, it provides us with a glimpse into the vibrant visionary world of Gilbert and Davis circa the spring of 1567 in Devon, England. 

Gilbert (1539-1583) – soldier, scholar, geographer, explorer (and half-brother to Walter Raleigh) – served as master in the magical operations outlined in the first section of this work. His scryer, John Davis (1550-1605) later became the British Empire’s master navigator and explorer. The first section details the conjuration of the 4 demonic kings: Oriens, Anaimon, Paimon and Aegyn. Also called are the spirits Aosal and Assasel – the latter highly significant to the thrust of this review. The second section, entitled Visions, details the visionary experiences which occurred when the spirits were called into a crystal shewstone. 

Apocalyptic in a revelatory sense, the intensity of such experiences should be familiar to any practitioner – spirits are seen both within the shewstone but also out in the world. Black dogs and headless birds seem to come and go through the lives of the magicians in a vital spiritual ecology that seems more akin to the mediaeval than the early modern proto-rationalist Protestant England, at least as far as the popular perception of the era goes.

Yet, as those who read will see, such perception is incorrect. Legard highlights, via scholar Frank Klaassen, that Gilbert & Davis’ magic is much more “dirty mediaeval” than most of the period. It involves threats, compulsion, binds, and double-binds in the methodology of testing spirits. Gilbert, a soldier, was used to commanding men by force and authority, and this is obvious in his attitude – even though he is later rebuked in this by an angel bearing the name of Luke the Evangelist. Yet for all this “dirt”, the rituals herein are Protestant in nature, which is unsurprising given that Gilbert and Davis were fervent Protestants. As Legard comments in the Preface:

[They] had reduced the complex paraphernalia and rituals of necromancy to their essentials: the crystal stone, the scryer, the conjurations and the forceful imposition of the master’s will over the demons he sought to restrain. (p. xvii)

There has recently been a surge of interest in folk-Catholicism within occulture, with particular reference to ritual, liturgy, aesthetics, and magical operations. It’s therefore interesting to this reviewer to see what an overtly “Protestant” methodology for necromancy looked like in the past – explicitly situated as such. This is rendered more so by Gilbert’s injunction “You must always in the stone never seem to believe them.” (p. 70) This comes after commenting that, not only must you punish and curse a spirit if it tells you untrue information, but also in some cases test them in the form of lying to them yourself. 

The example is given of asking Aosal to find a ring which one has placed somewhere, and even when the location is given correctly, one is to lie and put it somewhere else – like in water – and ask again:

[I]f he tells you it is in the water, say that you will not believe it except you may see it laid upon your dry hand […] [W]hen it is laid on your hand as by your compulsion it may be then say to him: Thou most vile and wicked spirit, this is not it, for this ring fell even now off my finger. (p. 66)

As Dr. Cummins notes in one of the included essays, some modern spirit-friendly models stress building relationships over antagonism, but such models may 

[j]ump the gun in presupposing an inclination on the part of a spirit to explore a pact or working relationship. Introductions are more like bird-catching than hiring a mercenary. (p. 191)

Yet it is also noted that the aforementioned angelic Luke: 

[W]illed me [i.e. Gilbert] to leave using the names of God to hurt wicked & rebellious spirits, offering himself to do all things for me, & to teach me to have all things done by Angels, without such cursing and conjuring by the words & names of God, promising that he would come to me wherever I would have him. (p. 192)

To have such a change in praxis offered in the midst of a cycle of operations perhaps should not surprise the practitioners amongst us. Indeed, that such a thing is even noted is evidence for this reviewer that Gilbert and Davis were genuine experimenters rather than hidebound liturgists. As Legard says:

[O]ne vital lesson for any practitioner who believes their methods to be congruent with the traditional ritual magic forms: there is no single “right way” to approach the conjuration of spirits, forms of magical ritual vary with their context, their period, personalities, philosophies and theologies of the practitioners and so forth. (p. 25)

Neither is the Angelic Luke the only intermediary found in An Excellent Booke – as well as the three other angelic Evangelists, Gilbert and Davis have interactions with Solomon, Job, Agrippa and Roger Bacon. That this occurs in a work on necromancy is perhaps more interesting than it might first appear. After Gilbert is told by the shade of Solomon to “rule them”, a comment given by the shade of Job is quite clearly emphasizing the necromantic: “Trust no spirit visible, or invisible, but the spirits of dead men, for they love man more than others do.” (p. 119)

For our Elizabethan necromancers then, at first glance it seems clear that their authority derives from God and the potencies of their Protestant Christian worldview – it is after all recorded in An Excellent Booke (p. 141) that one can go to the grave of someone you know and conjure them, after performing a rite and taking their grave dirt and sleeping with it under your pillow and inscribing certain signs and words on the grave and saying:

I conjure thee, I require thee, and I charge thee by the Christendom that thou hast taken, and by the sacrament thou hast received, and by the obedience that thou owest to God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, that thou they take leave of thy Lord Azazell, and master, and come to me this night in the hour of N. of the clock, meekly. And I shall do for thee to thy help, and answer me of all things that I shall ask of thee. (p. 141)

That there is potency in the implicit structures within an assemblage is something worth considering. It is by emic norms of Christendom that the dead are ritually bound to obey, not necessarily some secret or barbarous name. It is also of note that the figure of Azazell [sic, amongst many other spellings] is invoked earlier as “lord of dead men’s bodies” elsewhere in the text is something Cummins and Legard examine more deeply than can be done justice to in this review. The fact that Azazell is also regarded as the first spirit to call, even before the demonic king Oriens is worthy of consideration – for all that angels are called, the primary necromantic spirit called is very earthy on a mythic level.

In this the “dirty” of Klaassen must be recalled; for practitioners of varying traditions, the potencies of grave dirt are well known, as is the ancient practice of dream incubation – stretching back to the eras of the Greek Magical Papyri and even earlier.

That this reviewer noted a remarkable conservation of historic necromantic concepts throughout An Excellent Bookeperhaps says more about him than anything else, and yet it is precisely this continuity within an Early Modern Protestant English magical text which makes the work so fascinating. As Legard and Cummins note, the importance of optics, vision and seeing is worth examination when it comes to the historic but also epistemological  framework of An Excellent Booke.  As Cummins notes regarding Azazel as primary spirit:

Not only is Azazel appealed to in the literal conjuration of the shades of the dead, but also able to oversee and empower assemblages made on their behalf and in order to work more closely with them. (p. 173)

Within the text, Azazel is asked  to send a servant if not able to come. This is doubly intriguing when we conceive of legions and groupings in various spirit catalogues and other sources, not to mention the “trains” of spirits and shades said to attend or “follow” various powerful beings. That a magician may, in the parlance of the Greek Magical Papyri, attach themselves to a potent being and receive or gain potencies thanks to this, seems also interconnected in some fashion.

Thus we touch on the shades mentioned in An Excellent Booke – while Solomon urges the necromancers to rule them, the implication that shades have more love for Gilbert and Davis than other spirits situates them within a necromantic lineage – it is here that this reviewer finds perhaps the most food for thought in Legard and Cummins’ accompanying essays.

Obviously, the fact that there is much more to cover as regards An Excellent Booke is without doubt, and so we would like to leave that to others and other reviews. However, as this review is entitled The Heretical Imaginal, it behoves us to discuss such things given limited space.
Cummins points out that many of the spirits of the Visions section appear in animal or more monstrous forms which precede other spirit catalogues, contending that this “chimerification” has:

[S]omething to do with an epistemological shift occurring in early modern Europe in which sight and vision themselves are troubled, problematised, and increasingly questioned[…] [I]t is to draw parallels in the light reflected from a glimmering shewstone between how spirits were being perceived and how perception itself was being understood. After all, staring into the dark mirror we meet our own gaze. These [...] historical turns meet at the midnight crossroads of the heretical imaginal, where the imagination itself (most closely associated with vision) is held in suspicion as portal for bedevilled perception. (p. 196)

While Cummins – rightly in this reviewer’s view – highlights a theological turn away from the physical person of the Devil (and his minions) towards a more subtle, nebulous tempter during this period, he also notes the plastic shape-changing nature of the spirits in An Excellent Booke. Spirits are tricksy and loath to be pinned down. That Solomon, Job, and Agrippa and Roger Bacon are the shades which serve as the necromancers’ aides and servants which is to say they are magicians who have gone before. They are expert navigators of the tricksiness of spirits, lending aid to their fellow men. They are skilled in discerning the truth obscured and occulted by the flights of birdlike and theriomorphic spirits – whose dual function as concealers and revealers is inherent in their nature.

That human ingenuity and discovery of truth requires greater, clearer vision seems an implicit assumption in the original Elizabethan text. Light from darkness, whether that be in the personage of Christ as Light of the World in a Christian Worldview or an increasing systematization and structure of territories under the British Empire (in all the latter’s racist and imperialistic impulses) seems implicit within the socio-political context from which An Excellent Booke emerges.

Add to this Roger Bacon’s historic studies of optics and lens grinding, and Cummins’ comments about sight and vision become even clearer. Then we have the idea of pre-lapsarian perfect knowledge, with pre-Fall Adam as world structurer via magical naming of animals; here knowledge is rendered as linguistically magical capability.  The “garden” nature of Eden as cultivated space combines with all this, and we can clearly highlight a throughline to a mimicry of divinity; a return to a  “state of grace” which some might argue later provided justification for proselytization to newly subjugated peoples, as well as imperialism’s expansion.
While we must be careful not to project our perceptions backwards, it’s also useful to consider that the notions of structure, form, and restraint which Gilbert favours are designed to habilitate these spirits into a more “navigable” set of interactions in the same way one might “garden” a bonsai tree – something like a point that Cummins elucidates in his comments on gardening.

What if a divine pre-lapsarian orthodoxy was one of perfect knowledge and vision – that is, the impulse of Adam and Eve to cover their pre-existing nakedness was actually a deviation from divine will, with the shame clouding human “nature”? Might we thus see an altering of self-perception which was previously synchronized with the vision of the Creator? We may then argue that the visionary world revealed by the shewstone is one wherein the divine knowledge is preserved or hidden within the knowings of the aerial spirits, which are forced to reveal them by the forcible application of cosmogonic structures  which are the names and words of God and the Son, literally Word Made Flesh.

In this regard, the tricksy nature of these spirits can be theoretically overwhelmed by the angelic intercessor Luke. Yet, without calling Azazel, “lord of dead men’s bodies”, none of this could be accomplished in the first place. This tension between word and image, sight and vision is at the heart of the text – the heretic imaginal is in fact heretical, not because it goes against orthodoxy, but because instead it seeks an apocalyptic, almost millenarian vision of the world.  That this world of images is the method by which numinous, divine knowledge is grasped (i.e. perceived) can be seen again and again – similarities might be discerned in the radical visionary work of Blake and others. Emancipation from these “mind-forg’d manacles” occurs for Gilbert and Davis with the ritual processes outlined in An Excellent Booke. Such divine vision enables one to find treasure and arcana previously hidden, whether for “high” or “low” reasons.

Legard’s final essay, “Good Books to Call By” provides yet more food for thought for the academically inclined and the practitioner, particularly the section on “Linguistic Magicity” and the somewhat bare-bones approach of Gilbert and Davis, referring to the work of scholar Egil Asprem, to produce several schema that practitioners will get much use of if they are inclined to thinking about the theoretical.

In this sense, An Excellent Booke echoes the necromancers which are its subject – it provides lines of thought and structures for experimentation, it provides us with a vital, visceral experience of spirit contact, and the tools and structures to accomplish our own magical poiesis by engaging with that experience. That makes it doubly, tricksily, magical in many senses. For this we should thank our fellow humans, living and dead, for bringing this to us so we can better discover the secrets and wonders that the heretic  imaginal is the doorway to – always remembering that the dead are there. Without such aid, such katabasistic vision, we fumble blindly, only ever on the edge of what could be.