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 Frater Acher

Note: Paralibrum exists to share free expert reviews of bibliophile occulture. When particularly significant books are released, such as the present volume, we are delighted to offer multiple perspectives on these. In this spirit, we have previously shared Craig ‘VI’ Slee’s review of the Excellent Booke; and we are delighted to now present a second in depth review, this time by Frater Acher. As you will see, both perspectives stand side by side in a mutually enriching way and hope to inspire more dialogue on and research into this fascinating magical source material. — Finally, we want to express our gratitude to Aenixes for the first round of copy-editing of this text.

The Excellent Booke and Certain Strange Visions are two related articles from a 16th century manuscript today kept in the British Library (BL Add. MS. 36674, fols. 47r-57v and 58r-62v). They were first brought to public attention by Frank Klaassen in his excellent essay from 2012 “Ritual Invocation and Early Modern Science: The Skrying Experiments of Humphrey Gilbert” and have now been published by Scarlet Imprint in a luxurious facsimile edition, with a modern English and an original transcription as well as rich supplementary essays by Phil Legard and Alexander Cummins. — The photos on this page are taken from the fine edition, which is limited to 72 copies, bound in crushed black goatskin, bevelled edges, all edges black dusted with gold, marbled endpapers, ribboned and presented in a lined slipcase.

This long-awaited book presents an extraordinary feast for all practitioners of ritual as well as visionary magic. It is this two-fold appeal indeed which marks the singularity of these manuscripts: side by side, emerging from the same cycle of operations, we hold in our hands a grimoire of ritual magic, as well as the artefact and actual outcome of these works: a series of detailed visions, carefully transcribed as they occurred in the shewstone (i.e. skrying stone).

In this review we aim to do three things, all intended to further the joy of reading this “excellent book” for yourself: first, we will provide a rough outline of the historic context of the manuscript, then we will reflect on the approaches taken by Legard and Cummins in their essays to unlock some of the mysteries of the texts, and finally we’ll take the liberty to chime in on this fascinating exegetical discourse by sharing our own reflections, in particular on the nature and value of the Strange Visions. 

I. Historic Context

Both of the texts are explicitly datable to the three-month period between late February and April of 1567. Klaassen, Legard and Cummins agree that the ‘H.G.’ mentioned in them is none other than Humphrey Gilbert (1539-1583), and they identify his scryer as John Davis (1550-1605). A third man possibly present during the magical operations is Adrian Gilbert, Humphrey’s younger brother and Davis’s lifelong associate who wrote the Excellent Booke according to Humphrey’s dictation and may also have annotated the script of the Visions. (Klaassen, p. 341).

The three young men have been connected to a circle of magical practitioners associated with John Dee (Klaassen, p. 359). In particular John and Adrian seem to have discussed magical matters with Dee. However, Dee’s own experiments in crystallomancy only began in 1581. So during the time of our events, in 1567, he was clearly their senior (ages at the time: John Dee 40, Humphrey Gilbert 28, John Davis 17). Dee had travelled the continent, lectured in Paris, owned a copy of the rare Steganographia by Trithemius, had already published his Monas Hieroglyphica and stood in close contact with Queen Elizabeth I. Yet, as far as our written records indicate, and despite the differences in age, all four men might have been neophytes at the time with regards to building a bridge into the visionary realm by means of a crystal stone. In fact, as Legard points out, we have reason to believe that the events of the Excellent Booke might have influenced or even inspired the Queen’s astrologer, and thus must be considered “progenitors to Dee’s own ‘actions’” (p. 8). 

A second bond between the men, unrelated to magic, we know more about: Gilbert, Davis and Dee shared a joint interest in furthering Queen Elizabeth I’s colonisation of North America, in particular by advocating for a large-scale expedition to discover the then-mythical Northwest Passage (p. 7). Phil Legard, in his introductory essay Visionary Magicke, helps the reader understand the overtly exploitative motivations underlying Humphrey Gilbert’s mundane as well as his magical actions: to men of his time and spirit, the world was an incomplete map of territories open to invasion; borders existed to be transgressed, and anything foreign or unknown met with on the other side was but another test to prove one’s virility and determination to enforce unconditional subjection. Both in the mundane and magical realm the “men of a putative British Empire” (p. 8) considered life first and foremost a matter of chauvinistic conquest. This notion is underlined by the vivid description we have of the then 28-year old Gilbert who had just returned from the battlefield in Ireland:

Contemporaries were fond of referring to “gentle Humphrey Gilbert.” It is well not to be misled. The man was anything but “gentle” in the modern sense of that word. He was a dreamer, yes, and a scholar; but he was also a man of action, who on the field of battle could be as brutal, as bloodthirsty, as any personage in history — far more so than most of them. (Donald Barr Chidsey, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 1932, p. 2)

He was no statesman and no business man. It was said of him that at Oxford he had been proficient in all his studies, but had been particularly diligent in the study of navigation and the art of warfare. Geography, a little-known branch of learning — a vague and romantic study which compared with alchemy, astrology, and magic — fascinated the young man. He was fumbling with books about sea currents and wind tendencies of the Western Hemisphere, with maps and charts and sea cards; and he was interviewing sailors, navigators, merchants, adventurers. He was beginning to dream that great dream of his which eventually was to send hundreds of men to watery graves and to start England on a career of empire-building. (Chidsey, p. 21)

Legard leaves no doubt about the hermeneutical depth of the Excellent Booke: it is a text born by an almost, to us, perversely masculine paradigm anchored into three essential pivots. First, the interest in real-life as well as spiritual Geography for means of exploitation of knowledge. Secondly, the underlying motive of Empire-building as the misunderstood epiphany of man’s noble purpose; and thirdly, an orientation of outright violent opportunism to leverage all means available in pursuit of these goals, entirely unconstrained by any sort of binding ethical code: the active utilisation of “the old, ‘dirty’ world of demonic ritual magic” (p. 2), the transfer of warfare tactics into the realm of spirit encounter, the conjuration, cursing and binding of dead souls in order to turn them into one’s personal familiars, up to the encounter of four angelic evangelists and the heavenly intervention of St. Luke. Wherever we look, transgression is the keyword shouting from the 16th century handwritten pages of the Excellent Booke and into the modern reader’s face. Within the actual short manuscript we are faced with manifold transgressions of spiritual, ethical, textual and traditional boundaries. And it is precisely in this respect that both the authentic text as well as Phil Legard’s and Alexander Cummins’s insightful essays make for a most illuminating lecture and study.

II. The Texts

The Excellent Booke and Certain Strange Visions coexist in a state of dynamic tension; they differ wildly as texts despite being born from the same series of operations. 

The Excellent Booke presents itself as a grimoire in the classical sense: a book of seemingly strict operating rules and liturgic prayers, conjurations and spirit-coercions for the aspiring ritualist. However, Phil Legard’s introductory essay also points out the early modern traits of this manuscript. For while it operates with demonic spirits familiar to older texts of the genre, consistent with the zeitgeist of the Reformation from which it was born, the Excellent Booke has stripped these “of their Catholic trappings” (p. 9). Thus its operations are liberated from the medieval armoury of heavy ritual paraphernalia generated by intricate circles of the art. The essay would have gained further in analytical depth had Legard expanded on this aspect of the Booke i.e. its importance as evidence of a general 16th century trend to reform and modernise medieval ritual magic. This trend was first instigated from within the context of the Catholic Church by writers such as Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516); after his death it quickly expanded to include Reformist circles both on the continent and beyond. Given the evident influence Trithemius’ magical writings had on John Dee, and the close proximity of our manuscripts to the famous English magician, a more careful examination of the historic current we find expressed in the Booke awaits additional research. After all, this Reformist turn of ritual magic remains a blind spot for many traditional practitioners even today: How is it that the same rituals that for centuries required meticulous observance of astrological constellations, the exact placements of triangles of coercion, the careful inscription of barbaric and divine names, as well as an entire cloakroom of magical paraphernalia, suddenly could be performed with nothing but a prayer and a shewstone? After all, the spirits both traditions attempt to invoke are the same, their most infamous proxy being the four demon kings. And we encounter again in the Excellent Booke the spirits Oriens, Amaymon, Paymon and Egyn next to younger, or more likely, derivative spirit names such as Assasel, Aosal or Bleathe. 

Despite its partial liberation from the elaborate adornments of medieval ritual, the Excellent Booke still breathes the rigid atmosphere of its predecessor. Instead of the obsession over astrological hours, we encounter the astringent compulsion to codify the handling of the shewstone and the appearance of the spirits, among many other aspects that demand strict observance. For example, the manuscript spells out for us what we must not believe, where the spirits must manifest, which sequence of conjurations we always must observe, how we must begin this art in the first place, or how we must coerce the spirits with a smoking brimstone etc..

As mentioned above, the Excellent Booke first and foremost considers the spirit realm another frontier to be transgressed, another theatre for empire-building and resource exploitation. Thus we shouldn’t be surprised that one of its main operations consists of coercing the demon Assasel to assign the familiar spirit of a famously wise dead man to the operator. Even the magical lineage is subjugated to the economies of wealth — or, in this case, wisdom — acquisition. We learn more of this tradition and its historic background in Legard’s essay. However, our main interest is how this aspect of the operation is materialised in the actual Strange Visions.

Jo. saw a great wood, having a great house in the midst of it with a little house by it most strongly built, having a front door, with nine key holes. There being written on the door these characters following […] And in this house he saw a chamber richly hanged with gold, in which chamber there was a tree of crystal which was written upon very well, having many branches, with a door in it, as it were with seven keyholes, which had the chinks written on it. Within the which there were many books, whereof one had a crystal cover, another with the hairy side of a skin outward; with diverse other goodly books. This tree spread and grew, as follows in the next leaf. (p. 119)

What is becoming unmistakably clear from the first page of the Visions is that John Davis possessed extraordinary skills as a scryer: his sight is clear and has remarkable depth. He always maintains a marked eye for detail, and his orientation is swift and precise, even when multiple actors move upon the visionary stage. Throughout the Visions, Davis’s nautical skills, transferred from the watery to the visionary realm, govern his perceptions. Often he focuses on the cardinal points from which spirits or objects appear and meticulously notes the exact time of encounters. It’s easy to follow the often somewhat turbulent events of the visions, as Davis never fails to describe who is moving into which direction, appearing or disappearing. At times the visions read like a magical choreography performed by the manifold actors involved: demon kings and headless angels, dragons, birds and dogs, crystal beings and evangelists, as well as a whole posse of famous ancestral shadows from Solomon to Agrippa. Reading and re-reading the perfectly captured timing, appearance, directions and movements of the visions, however, it becomes apparent how essentially overwhelmed our actual protagonists were by these events. For, despite the exceptional scrying skills evinced, we have little reason to believe the duo of Humphrey and Davis had recourse to any significant magical operating skills or knowledge of how to behave in the visionary realm. 

Humphrey Gilbert, for one, routinely treats spirit-encounters as warfare. Right from the get-go, we find him riding on a white horse and chasing after the spirits with drawn sword, pursuing them “very cruelly”, striking them hard, “most royal to behold” (p. 118). 

And he struck the king so cruelly that he fell down on his knees to him, holding up his hand. And yet he struck him again with great fury, as though he would have killed him. Then the boy opened his book, holding it abroad. And then they said to the boy’s hearing “What lack you that you show such cruelty unto us? Shut your book, and you shall have done what you will desire.” (p. 118)

This kind of general incapacity to make sense of the world scryer and operator have stumbled into continues throughout the visions and stands in stark contrast to the actual clarity of the visions themselves. Reading these wonderful magical accounts is to witness extraordinary visionary talent in the absence of any magical operating skills. Like Alice in Wonderland, our duo is falling deeper down the “shewstone hole” session after session, with the difference that unless spirits can fly away from them, they are met with the sword, violent curses and coercing spirit books. 

Only on the vision on the 22nd of March a spirit that presents itself as “the Evangelist Luke” has mercy with them, and:

willed the Master to leave using the names of God to hurt wicked rebellious spirits, offering himself to do all things for me, to teach me how to have all things done by the Angels, without such cursing, conjuring by the word names of God, promising me that he would come to me wherever I would have him. And I, having the spirit of King Solomon and the spirit of Job before, they both fell on their knees to Luke when they saw him. And the wicked inferior Bleath ran continually away, from one place to another round about the stone as fast as might be. (p. 126) 

After this vision we find a two-week gap in the diary. It is followed by a final Nota only on April 6th. Here it is casually mentioned that “my boy” (i.e. John Davis the scryer) had gone to the house of Solomon in the morning, and returned in the evening with a book written by “Saint Luke the Evangelist” (p. 127). It is this closing note that makes us wonder what happened in between March 22nd and April 6th — and if indeed Humphrey Gilbert and John Davis in the end benefited from the inner teachings of their spirit guides. For the last entry makes us believe that towards the end of their workings they were able to spend considerable amounts of time in vision, knew how to orientate themselves and trace back to particular locations, and most importantly, may indeed have unlocked the secret of visionary books and how to use them. 

III. The Essays

Alexander Cummins’s first essay, “Sorcerous Significances” (p. 170-199) belongs to the best of the contextual material offered in the book. It takes a measured look both at the Excellent Booke as well as the Strange Visions, introduces us to the necromancy practiced in it, and examines the correlation between Assasel, Azazel and magical operations with the dead. (Note: while a rather explicit “Experiment of Azasel” (p. 140-157) is included in the publication, Cummins does not make the connection to the Jewish tradition of the talking heads of the dead known as teraphim.) In short succession the essay continues to walk the reader through the dominant themes of the operations witnessed such as Dead Magicians, Advice & Injunctions, Ethics, Book Delivery or Voices & Visions. At the end Cummins concisely concludes: 

It appears in the Excellent Booke and the Visions – running alongside the more studied early modern practices concerning Adamic keys, planetary angels, and benevolent archangels – we have evidence of a practiced ancestral chthonic pedagogy of spirit tuition and initiation presided over by the lord of the dead and the demonic kings of the spirits. (p. 198)

Where we beg to differ from Cummins’s reading of the source material is on the several occasions in which he leaves the spirit paradigm and, without further commentary, switches into a psychologised interpretation of the actions described. Suddenly the visions are no longer authentic evidence of spirit-encounters, but likened to hallucinations and dreams (p. 199) and looking into the “dark mirror we meet our own gaze” (p. 196). As exegetes of magical texts we need to be overt with the reader through which lens we will be reading the material, and if we chose to review it through multiple paradigms this needs to explicitly stated. 

The subsequent two essays by Alexander Cummins, “By Stone and by Call” and “Tutelary Shades” span over fifty pages each, presenting a rich and extremely well-researched overview on the current field of study as it relates to the Excellent Booke. The former essay delves into the historic practice of scrying in all its textured nuances, from the legal conditions over the course of the centuries, the social position of the scryer, the particular example of John Dee’s experiments, all the way to the field of optical studies in the 16th century and well beyond. Cummins’s well trained ability to condense a large horizon of time and literature into short and concise spotlight chapters is highly impressive and useful. However, the reader should know what to expect: rather than a complete study integrated into a coherent narrative, the essay presents an open invitation to the reader to heavily annotate the book, to explore additional original sources, and to ultimately embark on one’s own expeditions — practical as well as theoretical — into the field of divining with the spirits. “By Stone and by Call” is a welcome gift to all practitioners interested in the subject.

The second study by Cummins, “Tutelary Shades”, explores the magical hagiographies the Strange Visions evoked by the tutelary spirits appearing to the operators in the crystal, from Solomon to Agrippa of Nettesheim. Following the same indexing style approach as “By Stone and by Call”, this essay is still likely to provide less original value to the experienced practitioner for multiple reasons. First of all the literature relied upon is more narrow in scope and often focussed on relatively late releases known first-hand to the proficient reader (e.g. Frank Klaassen’s work on Skyring, Pablo Torijano’s work on Solomon, or the recent editions of the Book of Oberon and the Cambridge Book of Magic). Secondly, the individual sub-chapters begin to increase in number (27 in total) while they shrink in size and scope and therefore often fail to link into each other, thus falling into the same category as the previous essay: a reading experience more similar to a reference work rather than an essay with a continuous narrative intent. In principle this could still be an advantage if it happened to align with the reader’s preference. However, it turns into a problematic approach in the section covering the mythical nature and appeal of the first human, Adam (p. 268-280). While just as diligently annotated as the rest of the book, Cummins’s essay fails to fully address the fascinating tension and polarity we find embodied in this magical persona: the chapter does a wonderful job of introducing the reader to Adam as “the First Magician” (pp. 268), the original image of the Creator in all His unspoiled and superhuman glory. At the same time it fails to mention the orthodox Christian interpretation that, since the time of the Church Fathers Origen and Athanasius, follows the completely opposite narrative with regards to our first ancestor. In their interpretation, Adam turns into the dark mirror image of Christ the Resurrected, for it was the former who allowed all of humanity to fall under the patronage of the Devil when committing original sin. Only Jesus Christ, with his death and subsequent descent into hell, liberates humanity from the fate of mortality and sinfulness. Thus, according to this opposing reading, a human held both an Adamitic as well as a Christian nature; and it was the latter that needed to be liberated from within one’s soul and flesh in order to become truly human again. This interpretation of the polarity between Adam and Christ saw a resurgence in popularity exactly at the time of Humphrey Gilbert and John Davis and would become one of the central cosmological paradigms of the early Rosicrucians and the liberal Protestants in the early 17th century.

For He [Christ] was made man, that we might be made God. (Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation of the Word, 354:3)

The last essay included in the volume is Phil Legard’s “Good Books to Call By”. At this point, the reader has absorbed almost 300 pages of fascinating and highly curious content. The essay repeats a short summary of the historic and biographic context of the Excellent Booke, strongly suggesting that Legard’s and Cummins’s essays were separately written or at least intended to be read in isolation. If so, this would have been good to call out in the introduction, for the reader should really feel free to read this essay first, last or in-between the other contextual material given, according to their interest in the various aspects of the source material.

In his article, Legard delves deep into “linguistic magicity” (p. 311) and allows the book to close with a real highlight of academic research on medieval magic. Anybody who enjoyed Christopher Lehrich’s The Language of Demons and Angels (Brill, 2003) or Bernd-Christian Otto’s extensive work on the definition of magic will thoroughly enjoy the linguistic finesse and the interdisciplinary depth Legard offers in unlocking further facets of the Excellent Booke. Particular emphasis is put on the work of Egil Asprem and his ingenious article from 2016, “Reverse-engineering ‘Esotericism’: How to Prepare a Complex Cultural Concept for the Cognitive Science of Religion” (Religion 46, Issue 2). In textual dialogue with Asprem’s approach, Legard attempts to break open the black box of ritual magical experience. Of course, such an approach follows the exact opposite path of the practitioner: rather than coming from an experience of first-hand spirit encounter, Legard’s approach leverages concepts of anthropological and cultural studies to reconstruct the underlying patterns of magical experience. Highly speculative as it must be in nature accordingly, the essay achieves something quite wonderful, especially for practicing magicians as its audience: it pushes the magician far enough out of their magical circle and the experiences made therein that they can almost see themselves in an objective scientific light, and certainly at least in a new and different one. While uncomfortable, of course — as stepping out of the intimate bounds of one’s own cultural paradigm always is — the new perspective gained is absolutely worth the effort. Asprem’s and Legard’s particular accomplishment is that their linguistic approach to magical reality does not result in vivisection and consequently complete abstraction. Rather, while translating magical experiences into an academic language and paradigm, their approach still respects and speaks to the living integrity of the tradition. 

These observations are, of course, tentative, but should also not be discounted as “mere reduction” by those invested in the practice of ritual magic: rather, they uphold to some degree the integral efficacy of ritual magic procedures, and may also help to focus practitioners on developing more effective – and affective – modes of practice. (p. 326)

IV. The Lost Horizon

Reflecting on this project, it is sobering to observe how much has changed in almost a decade since I began to pore over Add. 36674. In the summer of 2019, as I write this, there is something necromantic in the air – it seems that the shades of dead magicians still trouble us. (Phil Legard in the Preface, p. xviii)

As mentioned in the beginning, we’d like to close with our own brief reflections on the material presented in the Excellent Booke and the Strange Visions. The following is not meant as constructive criticism of the work presented by Legard and Cummins. Instead, my aim is to highlight that there are as many ways of reading and indeed of reviving the material at hand as there are practical magicians who will encounter it. As always, a diversity of perspectives concerning a tradition and the tension between them should be seen as a forte, not a shortcoming. Simplicism and one-dimensionality of orthodoxy benefits no one but the preferred narrative of the powerful. Thus, what we aim to illustrate in this appendix chapter, and what seems in dire need of emphasis in our current time especially, is that an exclusively academic perspective on a text of practical magic will close at least as many doors as it might open. The difficulty is that formally explicating personal biographies, magical histories, and esoteric literary traditions excludes by definition what is arguably the most essential key to unlocking ancient magical source-works: the subjective experience of the practitioner. This is particularly important in this case, as one of the most fascinating aspects of the current material is that it positions a classical grimoire next to intimate records of the exploration of the visionary realm.

The second text, Visions, is a partial record of visions in the crystal, detailing events which took place before, during, and after the composition of the Excellent Booke. In the course of this work, the master – Humphrey Gilbert – and scryer – John Davis – converse with a wide range of spirits as well as religious and occult personalities: Assasel, Job, Solomon, Roger Bacon, Cornelius Agrippa, four angelic evangelists, and so on. (p. 1)

Just like Humphrey Gilbert and John Davis in the 16th century, so Legard and Cummins today never seem to question the identity of the tutelary spirits who present themselves to the operators in the Strange Visions. If spirits announce themselves as a particular being, they seem to be trusted as such. Conversely, artefacts encountered in the visionary realm, such as crystal trees or books made of crystal and fur, are continuously treated as if they were physical objects, possibly possessing magical qualities, but never considered to be actual living spirits themselves.

Such a materialistic approach on the part of Gilbert and Davis clearly illustrates their lack of experience in operating within the visionary realm. The next horizon of the Strange Visions springs open like a lock waiting to be released when touched not with the hand of the academic but with the mouth of the dreamer. In the ancient tradition of dream magic we encounter a wealth of knowledge and wisdom on how to navigate the realm of dreams, which shares so much of its topography with the realm of magical vision. As early as 1986, Frater U∴D∴ published a rather holistic treatment of this subject in his book, The Healing Power of the Elements (Ralph Tegtmeier, Die heilende Kraft der Elemente, Freiburg i. Br.: Bauer Verlag, 1986). Leveraging the example of visionary journeys through the mystical gates of the tattvas, the author provides both essential training as well as theoretic underpinning on how to successfully engage with beings in the spirit realm. While the book chooses a psychological approach to the subject, it still manages to treat the actual experience in the visionary realm with deep respect for its ontological reality and authenticity.

Leveraging such ancient techniques, we would very much like to explore the landscape of the Strange Visions once again, and this time through the mouth of an attuned and respectful practitioner, such as one who might ask questions like the following:

• If the books of crystal and fur were spirits in their own rights, what do they teach us? How do we enter into dialogue with them – rather than using them as shields or weapons only?

• Similarly, the other spirit beings encountered in the Visions are never asked even the most essential questions preceding any trusted dialogue: Who are you? Why are you here? What do you want? Who rules over you? How are you present within my body today?

Davis witnesses a vision of a great wood and a house whose door has nine keyholes. Inside the house is a richly furnished chamber, with a tree of crystal. The tree has a door containing a number of books – including the aforementioned hairy book, and one with a crystal cover. (p. 21)

The tree of crystal obviously represents one of the most significant structures in the visionary realm Humphrey and Gilbert encountered. This tree turns out to be a gate, housing an archive of spirits who present themselves in the vision-shape of unusual books. Their covers of crystal and fur indicate they are not meant to be read like physical books but to be engaged with in rather magical ways. As Humphrey and Davis seem to fail to realise this, their engagement with the both the tree and the books remains ambiguous, at least judging from the extant records. The final vision recorded on 6th of April mentions that

John Davis returns to Solomon’s house as part of an operation that appears to last most of the day, after which he brings Gilbert a book written by St Luke, presumably transcribed from the crystal. This book of St Luke, however, appears to have been lost. (p. 24)

We will conclude by showing two rather different keys: that for unlocking the seeming mystery of the crystal tree as well as the purportedly lost book of St Luke. Our goal here of course, is not to provide guidance for practitioners embarking on their own journey into the crystal. Rather, we’d like to illustrate how liberating oneself from the shackles of academia and the engrained perception of magic as mainly an historical artefact begins to open vast horizons of exegetical understanding that otherwise remain blocked and veiled.

If Frater U∴D∴ provided a most pragmatic access route towards the visionary realm in 1986, it was Josephine McCarthy who from 2016 onwards has handed us the proverbial keys to the kingdom. McCarthy has made her life’s work freely available in the three large tomes and vast resources of the Quareia online self-study course. From A-Z and beginning to end, freed from overlays of orthodox magical paradigms, and most refreshing and vibrant in its accessible presentation, this most comprehensive, several decades-long magical training course empowers practitioners to pull themselves out the mire of their own unknowing. Here, not only do we find the theoretical knowledge laid bare which would have allowed Humphrey and Gilbert to immediately make sense of the dream-like visions they beheld; we are also offered a step-by-step training approach to build the required skills in ourselves. On page 288 in the first volume, Quareia – The Apprentice (2016), we are introduced to the construct of the Inner Library: a visionary place entirely unique in its nature and yet eternally mouldable in how it will present itself to the eye of the scryer. Let’s read a few paragraphs of this introduction – and compare it to the crystal tree we encountered in the Strange Visions.

The inner library is an ancient interface that has been known by various terms over the millennia, but what it is stays the same: an inner place where knowledge and the knowledgeable can be accessed. […] The main difference between inner temples and the inner library is that there are quite a few different inner temples (which are connected to outer world temples), whereas there is only one inner library and it is not connected to an outer library; rather it is the root source of knowledge for all the inner and outer temples.

All the acquired knowledge and wisdom that has passed through temples and through magical, mystical, and spiritual institutions is stored in the inner library, and it is also a major access point to virtually every inner temple that can still be reached. All the temples connect to the library in one way or another, and when a temple finally breaks up, all of the knowledge held in that temple remains in the library. As an inner temple falls into disuse from an inner point of view, it slowly breaks down and eventually sinks into the sands of the inner desert, or tips into the abyss if the structure it maintains is to be composted permanently; only its knowledge remains as ‘books’ or scrolls upon the shelf.

[…]

In the library, these inner adepts can appear in many different ways. Some appear as librarians or priests/priestesses within the inner library itself, and these are inner adepts who have stretched beyond the structure of the temple line they came from. They have become “generic” in that they no longer belong to any single stream of magic, spirituality, or structure: they are mediators of knowledge, plain and simple.

A deeper version of this “generic” knowledge contact appears in the inner library as a book or scroll. This is where the personality and the human dressing has fallen away and all that is left is the core energy and knowledge of that adept. This appears to us as a book (pure knowledge), but it is not actually a book and cannot be read as a book. This is a mistake that many magicians make: they go to the inner library, pick up a book, and expect to be able to “read” the knowledge contained within it. But it doesn’t work that way; this is not a movie with instant results. The books in the inner library are energy patterns that hold knowledge and wisdom. To access that knowledge, the magician takes the book into themselves and gives that energy and knowledge a vessel that it can unfold within and bloom through. By taking the book into yourself, you literally absorb the knowledge of an inner adept, a knowledge that will unfold within you as time goes on. And boy does it unfold! (Quareia – The Apprentice, p. 288f.)

Let’s conclude by trying another key that might help us decipher what remained a series of “strange visions” to Humphrey and Gilbert. After all it is the encounter of otherness and the slow process of becoming familiar, of becoming one with that otherness, that marks the work of the magical adept. McCarthy’s work in the Quareia curriculum is certainly one of a kind; however, the knowledge she shares has, of course, been shared by magicians from teacher to students over many centuries. Such passing on in most cases did not happen in temples or rich libraries, but rather in the simple huts of the common folk, at night-fires and hearth gatherings. It does not present itself in the shape of arcane mysteries but the exact opposite: in tales that travelled from mouth to mouth. It was only in 2010 that Erika Eichenseer handed us back a long lost compilation of such stories: old German fairy tales that luckily had escaped the sanitising touch of the Brothers’ Grimm. Here, amongst the old everyday man’s myths and teratologies we find our crystal tree again. The following translation of the fairy tale is not provided to emphasise its uniqueness, quite the opposite: herbal and mineral gateways made of crystal belong to the knowledge of the ancient inner library and how to access it. Humphrey and Gilbert must have been truly extraordinary magicians to stumble across the same patterns, while remaining entirely oblivious to their deeper meaning. Or were they? Maybe they simply stopped writing about their experiences in the inner realm. Maybe they did learn how to place the books of fur and crystal into themselves and allow their wisdom and knowledge to blossom from within. As in any good fairy tale, not all mysteries reveal themselves in ink and paper.

The Tailor in the Tree

A tailor young and nimble went into a forest. There he heard pleasant singing. He walked and walked but would not come to the place where the singing was. He arrived at a green place. There stood a tree from which came forth the singing whisper. There presumption plagued him, he took his needle, pricked and pricked on and on into the bark of the tree and wanted to see what the nature was of that tree. Yet the needle in a particular place of the bark turned into a key, the tree burst open like a gate and swallowed the tailor and retched him down its wide throat. 

The tailor lost hearing and seeing. But it did not take long until he regained consciousness, he was in a chamber which glittered like frost and crystal. Yet the walls, ceiling and floor of the chamber was covered in long needles like the back of a hedgehog. The tailor crouched and bent, cried bright tears and cursed the nest and enclosure full of spikes; finally he grasped for his scissors and dared to punch the wall. That worked. He slipped through the crack and fell into another chamber, there scissors everywhere moved and clinked, opening and closing, scissor next to scissor.

Now the tailor knew it was about his life. The needles had pierced his body like a sieve, now the scissors tore his trousers and doublet. One thing he still had: his flat iron. He gathered all his force and punched with it through thick and thin, and luckily again through the wall, and crouched through it and tumbled downwards, this time, however, softly into thickets of rose hips and hawthorn. But a thunderstorm came up and erupted and rained down close and heavy with flat irons.

The tailor, brown and beaten, pulled himself out of the prickly shrubs, crawled into a hollow tree and hoped finally for God’s mercy and some respite.

But swaths of thin red ants appeared who pinched and hurt the tailor wretchedly, so he groaned, sneezed, harrumphed and spat, and would have loved to run away, except that the iron rain outside would have beaten him to death. Thus the tailor skipped and cawed and scratched and vowed to God with severe oaths to nevermore hurt a branch, let alone a tree willingly, if only He gave him his life. 

There, the rain stopped, the tailor ran up and away and fled towards the edge of the forest. (Eichenseer, p. 56f., translation by Frater Acher)

Selected Resources

• Frater Acher, A Course in Dream Magic, 2009, https://theomagica.com/a-course-in-dream-magic-1

• Moyra Caldecott, Crystal Legends: Stories of crystals and gemstones in myth and legend, Mushroom eBooks, s.l., 2006

• Donald Barr Chidsey, Sir Humphrey Gilbert Elizabeth’s Racketeer, Harper & Brothers, New York 1932

• Erika Eichenseer, Prinz Roßzwifl, Dr. Peter Morsbach Verlag, Regensburg, 2010

• Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nightmare, Penguin Books, London, 1983

• Frank Klaassen, Ritual Invocation and Early Modern Science: The Skrying Experiments of Humphrey Gilbert, in: Claire Fanger (ed.), Invoking Angels: theurgic ideas and practices, thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, The Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, 2012 

• Phil Legard, Alexander Cummins (eds.), An Excellent Booke of the Arte of Magicke, Scarlet Imprint, London, 2020

• Josephine McCarthy, Quareia - The Apprentice, Quareia Publishing, s.l., 2016

• Alex Sumner; John Dee — A Timeline; https://solascendans.com/articles/dee/

• Ralph Tegtmeier, Die heilende Kraft der Elemente — Praxis der Tattwa Therapie, Bauer Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1986