The Grimoires, Part 1

Chris Everard's Illuminati movie series is a crash course in magical incantations, secret societies, conspiracy theories, and just about every crazy theory under the sun. It is why I love it. It gets your emotions up and your blood racing, which I imagine is exactly the point. Youtube is truly the place to go to chill out with some lunacy, but at this point in my project, I really want to get into some esoteric ideas, especially about reading. This will be part 1 of a 2 part series, as I really want to focus on the whole, and I feel like if I did everything at once the later section would suffer. But first, I will post the videos for your viewing pleasure.





It was the Paleolithic culture which put high value on evoking spirits to heal the sick and solve the community's problems. During a dance they would mimic the macrocosm to solve the microcosm, and in the scene Everard uses, we see a young man being taken spiritually in the air by an eagle and discovering rocks hidden behind a waterfall. Sean Kane would probably say these dances were the 'dance or song of the earth'. Thus, they were able to at once bring the tribe closer together and mimic the sounds of nature. These 'sounds' were also thought to have the power to summon spirits in the Cabala. In Tibet, 'ohm' was seen as the most mystical resonance. Everard mentions that NASA has picked up frequencies of the planets that sound much like the chants of the secret traditions or the wailing of the Tibetan monks. Upon further research, I found a Youtube video that gives the listener a sample of several in our solar system, and a NASA article confirming its truth. Remarkably, Saturn's is by the far creepiest to me. Musica universalis follows a somewhat similar idea. According to Wikipedia: "Musica universalis is an ancient philosophical concept that regards proportions in the movements of celestial bodies—the Sun, Moon, and planets—as a form of musica (the Medieval Latin name for music). This 'music' is not usually thought to be literally audible, but a harmonic and/or mathematical and/or religious concept."

The U.S. government famously uses music as a way to torture prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and some conspiracy theorists claim that the HAARP facility in Alaska is nefariously trying to limit humanity's collective spiritual awakening or cause natural disasters by emitting microwaves. It is said in some secret texts that the secret names of God, "Ya-ha-veh-hah" (mistranslated as Jehovah by the Christians) and "Shem Ha'mepohrash" (which is 72 letters in its original language, the same as the number of demons in the Ars Goetia), could fill a home with spirits if spoken aloud. We have learned in this class the power of music in memory. Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses, was the goddess of memory and her nine daughters were either tied to story, poetry, music, or dance. Could the act of memory, in the esoteric tradition at least, be evoking the spirits with art?





The most famous of the grimoires (books used to summon angels, demons, and spirits) was the Ars Goetia, which was the first section of the larger work, The Lesser Key of Solomon. According to Wikipedia: "Ars Goetia ... [contains] descriptions of the seventy-two demons that King Solomon is said to have evoked and confined in a bronze vessel sealed by magic symbols, and that he obliged to work for him. The Ars Goetia assigns a rank and a title of nobility to each member of the infernal hierarchy, and gives the demons 'signs they have to pay allegiance to', or seals." The writer of the grimoire is an unknown source from the 17th-century, but some of the material dates back from the 14th-century. The text claims that to summon spirits one must shout out the 72 names of the legions of hell and thus received the appellation in Medieval Europe of "The Book of Howling" because of the terrifying shrieks users would exclaim. Aleister Crowley, an occultic figure from the last 100 years, famously translated it from Latin to English; however, I also have a copy of the Ars Goetia which I downloaded off the internet but from a modern 'Luciferian' source. I must admit to be ignorant of what that exactly means.

Chris Everard, for his part, says that the chanting is used to evoke spirits' presence because certain sounds can excite their emotions. Particularly, they would swarm into a house where these noises were being made. Music, we have discovered in this class, works wonders when we are trying to remember a list of things. It arouses emotions and images from times past. Similarly, Everard would claim, there is the comparable effect on the invisible realm. I have obtained another version of the Ars Goetia, this time compiled and translated by S.L. 'MacGregor' Mathers. Looking it over myself, I can perhaps give you a more detailed description of what lays inside. What we first see is a compass which gives the reader a clearer version of the 20 main kingdoms of hell, apparently ruling over thousands of greater and lesser Dukes and 500,000,000,000 spirits (which the last time I checked, was more people than on Earth). It then lists through the 72 demons' sigils and how to conjure them.

This, of course, is very academic, but what I am interested goes deeper. I want to explore the power that books have to communicate with greater and lesser spirits. Practitioners of black magic, Everard says, often thought that the sigils themselves held the spirit inside, and that opening some books (written in human blood and made from vellum) would draw in invisible beings and make them exclaim: "What does the master desire to know?" 'Grimoire' itself is an old French word for grammar. It is almost as if these books were a link between the literate and oral cultures. The ancient Paleolithic peoples believed that everything was alive and contained a spirit--the people of burgeoning modern Europe felt this was no longer a practical idea and were forced to organize the spirits into 'litanies' and classes, but like their ancestors, knew the power of redundancy. Spirits would appear after a chant of an appropriate vocal sound which would cause the singer to lose his breath, bringing on hallucinogenic experiences. Shamanism signals a breaking with the ego and the flight to higher realms. Likewise, the oral culture focuses on redundancy because it was necessary for it to stick in the mind and for the whole audience to hear. Hypnotists also use repetition in that it is useful in the power of suggestion. I would argue that all of these reasons play a role in the realm of Occultic repetition. It is theatrical, mind-shattering, and maybe most-importantly, secret, and thus was necessary to remember the event in the future.

The great magic of the natural world was being lost, slowly falling victim to materialism. It was inside these books where the oral culture could still live, invoking in the readers a great sense of mystery and initiation into a dangerous world. They also had a certain secret history that much of Medieval and Renaissance Europe lacked, stretching far back to Palestine, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, with maybe the most important spiritual patriarch being Solomon. It is also here where the literate tradition first began in Cuneiform and some claim the shamanic birth of Judaism in "Working of the Chariot" or Merkabah mysticism. Babylon means "gateway of the gods" and was guarded by stone lions, a psychic gate. Many of these ancient artifacts have gone missing after the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the U.S. Old jars (infamous for containing genies or spirits), Annunaki statues (star gods), and many others have never been found.



What is the power of circles? When a magician summons spirits, the circle around him represents the magician's domain, one which the invisible beings can not enter. It is thus an extension of his aura. In many secret organizations a rope is wrapped around the initiates' waists, and during ancient times, this was actually the cord used during the summonings. It would prevent an evil spirit from possessing the practitioner after the séance was over, for if one syllable was said wrong, an "astral corpse" or imitating trickster spirit could be brought forward instead of the one desired. Everard claims that the spirits usually appear solely in the Magus' mind; however, if performed during an astrologically attuned time and spoken with exactly the right commands, you could be confronted by a spirit. These demons will appear in an alluring form as to seduce those around it--a beautiful man or woman, an old person, or a child. However, their true forms are often a mix between man and beast. This is a fear of the body, one which John Carpenter used to great effect in "The Thing". Often the processes of the body are a mystery. There is a great fear in this, almost a repulsion. Secret societies tied the organs and the planets together--thus, if the body became out of whack and started doing bizarre things like mixing animal and human it would be because the stars were going crazy. In "The Thing", the creature which causes the grotesque transformations is literally an alien from a crashed spacecraft frozen in Antarctica. Body organs were also used to predict opportune times for battles. In Alexander's age, bulls were killed before campaigns so soothsayer's could read their innards.

Mirrors also held a divine power, and according to Everard, Pharaohs used them to contact the astral creatures, the gods. However, after the spirit was called upon, it must be ordered to leave. Because of this fear, I still refuse to use a Ouija board. I am terrified of what sort of creature I might call in on accident. In Stephen King's "The Stand", Nadine Cross is contacted by the uber-demon Randall Flagg during a board reading in college. Remember, these are just letters of the alphabet which the spirits use to communicate with a wayward soul. Could not books hold the same sort of terrifying power over the reader? Are you not permitting your mind to communicate with dangerous entities when you open the pages of a book? According to this tradition, the answer is yes. Certain words and music can excite the spirits' emotions! What sort of creatures have been flooding into our class room during our recitations of "Kubla Khan"?