Sooner or later every student of this subject opens a primary source: a Hermetic dialogue, a Renaissance treatise, one of the handbooks of spirits and seals that go by the name of grimoire. The first encounter is usually a disappointment. The book is repetitive, or obscure, or pious in a way one did not expect, or full of instructions that are plainly impossible. It is tempting to conclude either that the secret has been deliberately hidden or that there was never anything there.
Both conclusions are premature. Old books of magic can be read with profit, but they have to be read as what they are. What follows are the rules I have arrived at over some years of doing it badly and then less badly.
One: find out what you are holding
Before reading a line, establish four facts. When was the text written? In what language? Who wrote it, or is said to have? And what kind of book is it: a philosophical dialogue, a practical manual, a compilation, a forgery?
The answers are frequently not what the title page says. It was an accepted convention for many centuries to issue a book under the name of an ancient authority. Works attributed to Hermes, to Solomon, to Moses and to a number of medieval saints were written by other people long after. This was less a fraud than a way of saying which tradition the book belonged to. But a reader who takes a seventeenth century manual for the testament of a biblical king will misunderstand every page.
Two: read the whole before judging the part
Read the book from beginning to end once, without stopping to puzzle over details, and without copying out the diagrams. Most of these texts have an architecture that only shows at full length. The prayers that seemed like padding turn out to be the main instrument. The dramatic operation everyone quotes turns out to be an appendix. The author's own warnings, which are often emphatic, tend to be in the chapters people skip.
Three: learn the world the book assumes
No old book of magic explains its own background, because its first readers shared it. They took for granted a universe of nested spheres, four elements, seven planets and ranks of spirits, and the texts are unintelligible without that picture. They also took for granted the religion of their time and place. The magician of the grimoires fasts, confesses and prays the psalms. The Hermetic sage sings hymns at sunrise.
A modern reader need not share any of these commitments. But it is necessary to know that they are there, and to see how much of the procedure depends on them. Our pages on the Hermetic cosmos and the elements were written partly to supply this background.
Four: separate the layers
Almost every such book contains at least three kinds of material, usually interleaved. There is theory: statements about how the world is made. There is instruction: do this, at this time, with these things. And there is what might be called atmosphere: the solemn language, the threats and promises, the claims about the book's own age and power.
It helps greatly to mark these as you read. The theory is where the lasting value usually lies. The instruction shows how the theory was applied. The atmosphere tells you about the author and the market for which he wrote, and should not be mistaken for either of the others.
Five: expect errors, and do not build on them
These books were copied by hand for generations, often by scribes who did not understand them, and then printed from whatever manuscript was available. Names are garbled. Diagrams are miscopied. Whole lines drop out. Translators added their own mistakes, and some editors silently improved what they found.
The lesson is caution. If a passage makes no sense, the first hypothesis should be that it is corrupt, and not that it conceals a mystery. Be particularly wary of grand interpretations that hang on a single word or figure. I have seen an elaborate theory raised on what proved to be a printer's error. Where you can, compare two editions.
Six: do not perform what you do not understand
This rule has a practical side and a deeper one. The practical side is that many old recipes are dangerous. They call for poisonous plants, toxic metals, the smoke of substances no one should inhale, and occasionally for acts that are cruel or unlawful. None of this should be done. The books are evidence of what was once believed and not a set of instructions for the present.
The deeper side is that a ritual copied from a page, by someone who does not know why each part is there, is an empty gesture. The authors themselves insist on long preparation. A text is first to be understood, then meditated on, and only then, if ever, used as the basis of one's own considered practice. Most of the value of these books is had at the first two stages.
Seven: read slowly, with a pen
The texts of this tradition were composed in an age when a person might own five books and read each fifty times. They are dense in a way that modern prose is not, and they open only to rereading. One treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum is enough for a week. A single chapter of Agrippa will fill an evening.
Keep a notebook beside you, separate from your magical diary, and copy out by hand the passages that strike you. Add your own comments, and date them. The old name for such a notebook is a commonplace book, and nothing fixes a text in the mind so well. Return to your comments a year later. You will find that you were sometimes wrong and occasionally wiser than you knew.
Eight: ask what the book is for
The last rule is a question to carry through the whole reading. What did this book do for the person who used it? The answer is rarely a set of tricks. A Hermetic dialogue was a script for the formation of a certain kind of mind. A treatise on planetary magic trained its reader to perceive the world as a web of meaningful connections. Even the roughest grimoire imposed on its user weeks of discipline, cleanliness, prayer and concentrated purpose.
Seen in this light, the old books are neither repositories of lost technology nor monuments of superstition. They are the working papers of a long apprenticeship in attention. We can learn from them what they were best at teaching, which is how to take a symbol seriously, and we can leave the rest on the shelf with respect.
The reading list suggests where to begin.