The Necromancer’s Handbook: Conjurations, Circles and Spells

About this book

Around the middle of the fifteenth century, somewhere in the German lands, an anonymous cleric wrote down his experiments: circles drawn with a sword, mirrors and crystals in which spirits appear, the names of demons and the prayers of the Mass side by side. He promised to master any science in thirty days, to win love and honour at court, to become invisible, to find hidden treasure and stolen goods. He even tells how he showed an illusory castle to an emperor at a hunt.

Books like this were burned, and their owners could lose their office or their freedom. This one survived in a single manuscript, now in the Bavarian State Library in Munich, and it is one of the most complete witnesses to how demon magic was actually practised in the Middle Ages.

Rendered into modern English by BlusaBooks with the help of AI tools, working from images of the pages of the manuscript. Sentence by sentence, not a summary or a retelling. The names of demons and spirits and the long strings of "barbarous words" in the conjurations are kept exactly as written in the manuscript.

What is inside

• Part I: the necromancer's experiments (knowledge, love and hatred, the feast, the castle, the ship, the horse, invisibility, mirrors, the fingernail, the shoulder blade)
• Part II: the Book of Consecrations; Part III: spirits, conjurations of the days and the seven seals; Part IV: planetary angels, hours and images; Part V: the truest and proven experiments, the spirit Mirage and the "Flower of Flowers"
• Appendices: German blessings and remedies, short experiments, the later copy, the Book of the Seven Planets and the medieval Dutch "Book of the Moon"
• a contents page with every experiment
• 25 drawings from the manuscript: magic circles, the mirrors of Floron and Bylet, planetary seals and characters
• colour illustrations: the necromancer in his circle, the castle of illusion, the black horse, the boy's fingernail (created with AI tools)
• 265 short footnotes on the same page: people, Bible passages and terms in plain language
• a foreword on the manuscript, necromancy and the Church's prohibitions; commentary at the end: in plain words, the necromancer's world, what we know today

Who it is for

Readers of grimoires and medieval magic; anyone curious about demonology, magic circles, scrying and the history of the occult; collectors of strange old books. A thoughtful gift for a lover of mysteries.

A historical source, not a manual for practice: the necromancer's experiments, his piety and his cruelty are kept as in the original. The notes and commentary explain what we know today.