Everything here has
its provenance attached.

The great compendium of astral magic: talismanic images, planetary hours, suffumigations and the theory of drawing celestial virtue down into matter. Nearly everything later European magic does with planetary timing has a root somewhere in this book.

We read it in the study circle a few paragraphs at a time, because it rewards slowness and punishes skimming.

Recommended edition: The Complete Picatrix, Greer & Warnock, in my Bookshop

Handle withThe Latin is a translation of a translation, and it diverges from the Arabic in places that matter. Where a modern edition notes a variant, the variant is usually the interesting part.

Circles, pentacles, planetary hours, elaborate purifications and a working method that assumes you have time, privacy and nerve. It is the template most later ceremonial magic argues with.

There is no single Key of Solomon. There is a family of manuscripts that disagree with one another, which is itself worth knowing before you treat any one instruction as authoritative.

Read it free: the Mathers edition at Sacred Texts · In print: Bookshop.org

NoteMathers assembled his edition from several British Library manuscripts and made choices while doing it. A useful book, but an edited one.

The spine of Renaissance magic, arranged as natural, celestial and ceremonial. Correspondences, sympathies, the dignities of number, the orders of spirits. If you have ever seen a table matching planets to metals, herbs and hours, you have seen Agrippa's descendants.

Read the Tyson annotated edition if you want the sources traced for you, and read Agrippa's own closing remarks on the vanity of the arts if you want to understand the man's ambivalence.

Read it free: the 1651 English at Esoteric Archives · Recommended edition: the modern translation, in my Bookshop

CautionThe so called Fourth Book is not his. It circulated under his name after his death and has a rather different temperament.

A working parish minister's account of the good people and of the second sight, written by a man who also produced a Gaelic psalter. He treats the subject as a natural historian would: taxonomies, habits, dwellings, and the mechanics of how a seer comes by the sight.

The most important text in the Scottish material, and the one most often quoted by people who have not read past the first few pages.

Read it free: Sacred Texts · In print: the NYRB edition, in my Bookshop

In practiceRead it beside Martin Martin. The two together give you a picture no summary reproduces.

A Skye man writing for a London readership, gathering accounts of the second sight across the isles and recording, with unusual care, who told him what and whether he believed them.

The section on the sight is the closest thing we have to a field survey before the Victorians tried it again with committees.

Read it free: the 1703 edition at the Internet Archive, the very copy Boswell and Johnson carried to the Hebrides · In print: Bookshop.org

NotePublic domain and freely available. Read it before you read anyone summarising it, including me.

Not theory. Working papers: bindings, dream oracles, lamp divinations, protective phylacteries and invocations that switch between Greek, Egyptian and Hebrew names without apology.

Reading the PGM cures a great deal of romanticism about ancient purity. These practitioners were syncretic, pragmatic and entirely willing to use whatever worked.

Recommended edition: the Betz translation, in my Bookshop

CautionMany recipes call for materials that are now illegal, genuinely dangerous, or simply cruel. Read them for structure and intent, not as a shopping list.

The philosophical Hermetica: mind, cosmos, ascent, and the relation of the human to the divine. Ficino's translation lit the fuse of the Renaissance revival, and the whole Western esoteric edifice leans on it somewhere.

This is the source of the phrase everyone half quotes about above and below, though the tidy version we use comes from the Emerald Tablet rather than from here.

Read it free: the Mead translation at Sacred Texts · Recommended edition: the edition on my shelves, in my Bookshop

NoteIsaac Casaubon dated these texts to the Christian era in 1614 and demolished the claim of Egyptian antiquity. It did nothing whatever to the quality of the philosophy.

The great Victorian synthesis: Qabalah, Egyptian imagery, Enochian, alchemy and tarot welded into a graded initiatory system. Almost every modern ceremonial practice in English descends from it, including the ones that would rather not admit the debt.

Superb ritual craftsmanship. Genuinely inventive. Also assembled in the 1880s by a small number of people with a fondness for inventing pedigrees.

Recommended edition: the Regardie compilation, in my Bookshop

ProvenanceFiled under revival, not attestation. That is not a demotion. It is simply the difference between a practice we can trace to 1888 and one we can trace to 1488.

The book that restarted ceremonial magic. Lévi, born Alphonse Louis Constant, a seminarian who left the church and became the century's most influential magician, wove Kabbalah, tarot, the astral light and his famous Baphomet into a single doctrine, each volume structured in twenty two chapters to mirror the trumps.

The Golden Dawn built on him. Crowley, born the year Lévi died, claimed to be his reincarnation. If you want to know where the modern tradition's furniture came from, most of it came from this desk.

Read it free: Waite's 1896 translation at the Internet Archive · In print: the new Greer and Mikituk translation, Bookshop.org

ProvenanceLévi presented as ancient a good deal that he was composing at his own desk, including the marriage of tarot and Kabbalah. Filed under revival with gratitude and open eyes.

Abraham of Worms leaves his son Lamech the system he learned from the magician Abramelin in Egypt: a long retreat of prayer and purification whose aim is the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, followed by the governance of spirits through word square talismans.

Mathers translated a flawed French copy: six months instead of eighteen, a missing book, half empty squares. Dehn's edition of the German manuscripts restores what the French dropped. The operation's demands, seclusion, property, months of devotion, are not an obstacle to the point. They are the point.

Read it free: the Mathers translation at Sacred Texts · In print: the Dehn and Guth edition, Bookshop.org

CautionThe retreat is designed to reorganize an entire life. Read both editions in full before deciding the book is asking you, personally, to do it this year.

Barrett stitched Agrippa, the Fourth Book and the Heptameron into a two volume handbook with hand coloured portraits of spirits, then advertised in the back for pupils. Written in the middle of the Age of Reason, it may be the last moment such a book could be made in earnest.

Very little in it is original, and that is precisely its value: it carried the Renaissance material alive across the rationalist century to the Victorian revival. Lévi and the Golden Dawn both drank from it.

Read it free: the 1801 text at Sacred Texts · In print: Bookshop.org

ProvenanceOpenly a compilation, much of it word for word. Filed under compiled without embarrassment; a library can love an honest thief.

Still the clearest on ramp to the Tree of Life ever written. Fortune, born Violet Mary Firth and trained in the Golden Dawn's successor orders, lays out the ten spheres and twenty two paths as a working map of forces: something you climb, not something you memorise.

What makes her trustworthy is that she says plainly what she is doing. This is the Hermetic Qabalah of the Western lodges, a modern adaptation, and not medieval Jewish Kabbalah; she names the difference herself, which is exactly why she can be believed about the rest.

In print: Bookshop.org

In practiceRead a chapter, then sit with the sphere it describes before reading the next. It is a book that only opens when worked.

Seven principles, mentalism, correspondence, vibration, polarity, rhythm, cause and effect, gender, that have become the pocket grammar of modern Hermeticism. Short, quotable, and quietly everywhere.

The three initiates were almost certainly one man: William Walker Atkinson, a prolific Chicago New Thought publisher. The book is 1908 America wearing the robe of ancient Egypt, and it still manages to say true and useful things.

Read it free: Sacred Texts · Recommended edition: the Centenary edition, in my Bookshop

ProvenanceNot ancient Hermetica, whatever the cover implies. Read it beside the Corpus Hermeticum, shelved at LL·MS·007, and let each correct the other.

The reference book: tables running the Tree of Life across gods, colours, stones, perfumes, plants, beasts and the tarot, so that a working can be tuned like an instrument. Nearly every ceremonial magician keeps it within arm's reach.

The tables descend from Golden Dawn material, some of it Allan Bennett's and Mathers' work, which Crowley expanded and published without excessive concern for permission.

In print: the Weiser edition, in my Bookshop

In practiceCorrespondences are agreements, not laws of nature. 777 records one lineage's agreements with superb thoroughness; treat it as a tuning fork, not a cage.

Hymns, charms, blessings, invocations and working prayers gathered in Gaelic from people who still used them. Kindling prayers, milking prayers, journey blessings, charms against the eye. An irreplaceable record of a living devotional practice.

It is also the single most quoted and least examined source in modern Celtic spirituality.

Read it free: volume one at Sacred Texts · In print: the Floris one-volume edition, in my Bookshop

Handle withLater scholarship shows Carmichael smoothed, combined and occasionally improved what he was given. Use the collection with its scholarly apparatus rather than instead of it, and be careful about presenting a nineteenth century editor's cadence as ancient.

Spoken charms for particular complaints: the evil eye, sprains, burns, bleeding, the rose. Usually short, usually rhythmic, usually addressed to a saint or to the Trinity, and often transmitted under conditions, from a man to a woman or a woman to a man, or only at certain times.

The transmission rules are as much a part of the practice as the words are, which is a point most modern reproductions miss entirely.

Source: recorded throughout the Carmina Gadelica, free at Sacred Texts

In practiceA charm lifted out of its transmission conditions is a poem. That may still be worth having. It is simply not the same object.

A divinatory practice performed at dawn, fasting and often barefoot, in which the frithir steps to the threshold with eyes closed, opens them, and reads the first thing seen through a frame made of the hands. Traditionally used to locate the lost, whether cattle or people.

It is one of the cleanest surviving examples of an omen practice with a formal procedure attached: a time, a state, a threshold and a frame.

Source: recorded in the Carmina Gadelica, free at Sacred Texts

ProvenanceFiled as compiled rather than attested because our detailed picture of it comes through Carmichael. The practice is old. The description in our hands is Victorian.

Counter-magic, not magic. A stoneware or glass vessel filled with the afflicted person's urine, along with bent pins, nails, hair and sometimes a cloth heart, then sealed and buried beneath the threshold or hearth.

The logic is sympathetic and defensive: whatever is reaching the victim is caught in the bottle instead and turned back on itself.

Further reading: Brian Hoggard, Magical House Protection, in my Bookshop

NoteWe know these almost entirely from excavation rather than from books. A great deal of real practice left no text at all, which is worth remembering whenever someone claims a tradition is invented because it is not written down.

Single worn shoes, dried cats, written charms and bottles, found built into chimneys, roof voids and thresholds during renovation. Thousands are recorded, across centuries, from every social class.

Nobody wrote down why. No period source explains the custom. The practice is unmistakable and the reasoning is lost.

Handle withA useful corrective to tidy explanations. Sometimes a practice survives for four hundred years and its meaning does not survive at all.

Traveller's herb, dreamer's herb, smoke for the threshold. Historically used for the digestion and as an emmenagogue, carried against weariness on the road, and burned or placed at the bed for vivid and memorable dreaming.

In practice it is the plant I most often give a beginner, because its effects on dream recall are noticeable enough to reward a dream journal within a fortnight, which teaches the record keeping habit better than any lecture of mine.

CautionA uterine stimulant. Not to be used in pregnancy. In the daisy family, so a common allergen. Nothing here is medical advice, and a herbalist is not a doctor.

The Romans recorded it as a herb of altars and treaties, gathered with ceremony and used for purification. Pliny associates its ritual gathering with the Gauls, which is the thin thread from which a great deal of modern druidic lore has been spun.

Cool, bitter and quietly steadying. In my own practice it belongs to consecration and to the settling of a space before work.

CautionEmmenagogue. Avoid in pregnancy. May interact with blood pressure medication and with iron absorption.

Rowan and red thread, in the Scottish rhyme, puts the witches to their speed. Planted at the door, worked into crosses bound with red wool, hung in the byre against the eye. The single most reliably attested protective plant in the Scottish material.

The pentagram at the base of each berry gets a great deal of modern attention. The tradition itself was more interested in where the tree stood.

CautionRaw berries contain parasorbic acid and will make you ill. Cooking or freezing converts it. Cook them or leave them to the birds.

Wound herb, fever herb, and one of the very few plants with a documented divinatory role on two continents: the dried stalks are the traditional instrument for consulting the I Ching, and in Britain and Ireland it appears in love divination charms performed at particular hours.

A good teaching plant, because its practical and its oracular lives sit side by side without either one embarrassing the other.

CautionDaisy family, so allergenic for some. Can increase photosensitivity. Avoid in pregnancy.

The standard of the older European tradition: unillustrated pip cards, a fixed trump sequence, and a visual vocabulary built from woodblock printing rather than from symbolist painting.

Reading Marseille teaches structure, because the pips give you nothing to free associate from. You are obliged to work with number, suit and position, which is exactly the discipline most modern readers never acquire.

In practiceIf your readings have gone vague, spend a season in Marseille. It is the fastest cure I know for a woolly hand.

The deck that made modern tarot legible, chiefly because Smith illustrated the pip cards as scenes. That single decision is why a beginner can pick up a deck today and read something from a five of cups without a course of study.

Waite provided a Golden Dawn derived scheme. Smith provided the images that everyone actually reads. Her name belongs on the deck, and for most of a century it was left off.

Read the companion free: Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot at Sacred Texts

ProvenanceFiled as revival: the symbolism is a Victorian and Edwardian synthesis, not a survival from antiquity. That does not make it weak. It makes it 1909.

Engraved, strange, and populated with classical and biblical figures rather than the familiar trump cast. Its pip cards are illustrated with scenes, four centuries before anyone thought that was an innovation.

Photographs of the deck were held by the British Museum, and Pamela Colman Smith saw them. Several of her pip designs answer Sola Busca images directly.

NoteA useful antidote to the belief that tarot symbolism has ever been fixed.

The secret document under the modern tarot: esoteric titles for every card, the decan assignments of the small cards, the court card system, the machinery that Waite hinted at in public and Crowley built upon in the open.

If you have ever wondered why the Five of Swords feels exactly the way it does, the answer was written here first.

In print: inside the Golden Dawn volume, in my Bookshop

NoteShelved beside the decks it quietly governs: LL·ATU·002 and LL·ATU·005.

Crowley's last major work and the Thoth deck's companion: tarot fused with Qabalah, astrology and his own Thelema. Dense, allusive, occasionally maddening, and endlessly rewarding when read with the cards laid out beside it.

Give Frieda Harris her full due: five years of painting, projective geometry learned for the purpose, and the deck's entire visual genius. He wrote a book. She built the cathedral.

In print: the Weiser edition, in my Bookshop

NoteHis Egypt is the ceremonial revival's Egypt, not the archaeologists'. Read it for the system, not the history.

Twenty two letters, one for each major arcanum, written as spiritual exercises in Christian Hermeticism. Not a book about reading cards at all: a book about being read by them.

The author asked to remain unnamed so the letters would speak without a biography attached; scholarship identifies him as the Russian émigré Valentin Tomberg. Both facts deserve keeping.

In print: Bookshop.org

In practiceOne letter a week is fast. This is slow food.

The modern key to the esoteric tarot: Book T's correspondences, the decans, the Qabalistic structure, laid out with sources shown and every claim traceable, by the makers of the Fortune's Wheelhouse podcast.

Exactly the kind of scholarship this library exists to point at: rigorous about where things come from, generous about what to do with them.

In print: Bookshop.org

NoteFiled under modern, proudly. The tradition is alive, and this is what it looks like when it is honest about itself.

The Marseille name means the house of God, and the card was very likely a house struck by heaven long before it became a symbol of catastrophe. Lightning, a crown or cap dislodged, two figures falling, and in the older cards a scatter of coloured discs that look considerably more like grace than like debris.

The dread attached to this card is largely a twentieth century inheritance. In practice it turns up most often for people who have already been living inside something untenable, and it lands as relief rather than threat.

In practiceWhen it appears, the useful question is not what will collapse. It is what has already collapsed that you are still paying to hold upright.

Not heightened perception but a second perception running alongside the ordinary one. The old accounts describe it as involuntary, frequently unwelcome, largely concerned with death, and distributed without regard to virtue.

The English phrase second sight loses the doubleness that the Gaelic keeps.

Further readingKirk and Martin Martin, and the essay in the journal on what the sight actually meant to the people who had it.

A spoken or made protection placed around a person, an animal, a house or a journey. The word covers both the words said and the state produced by saying them, which tells you something about how the tradition understood the work.

Numerous examples survive in the Carmina Gadelica, most of them invoking saints, the Trinity or Bride.

ProvenanceCompiled rather than attested, for the same reason as the frìth: the practice is old and our detailed record of it is Victorian.

Clearing a space and a mind before ritual work. The gesture is ancient and near universal; the specific rite most practitioners mean by the word, with its pentagrams and its four archangels, is a Victorian construction built from Qabalistic and Christian materials.

It works. It is also a hundred and something years old rather than a thousand, and knowing that changes how rigidly you need to hold its details.

In practiceIf you find you cannot begin anything without banishing first, that is worth examining. There is a real difference between a working habit and a nervous one.

A collective thought form: the notion that a group, sustained over time by shared attention and ritual, generates something with its own momentum, which then acts back upon its members.

Whether you hold that literally or as a precise description of group psychology, it is a genuinely useful concept for anyone running a coven, a cohort or an order, and I use it constantly.

ProvenanceFiled as modern. The word is older than the idea in its present form, and the present form owes more to the twentieth century than to Levi.