The Grimoires of Albertus Magnus" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus: Of the Virtues of Herbs, Stones, and Certain Beasts, Also a Book of the Marvels of the World"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
November 15
The Grimoires of Albertus Magnus
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In the
winter of 1249, so the story goes, a Dominican friar in Cologne invited William
of Holland, King of the Romans, to dine with him. The king and his courtiers
arrived to find the tables laid outdoors in the convent garden, deep in snow,
and grumbled at their host’s folly. Then, as they sat down, the snow melted
away, the sun blazed, the trees burst into leaf and blossom, and birds began to
sing. The moment the meal ended, winter returned. Astonished, the king granted
the friar the land he wanted.
It never
happened. But the friar was real, and he died in Cologne on November 15, 1280.
He was a bishop, a teacher of saints, one of the greatest scientists of the
Middle Ages, and eventually a saint himself, and yet for seven centuries his
name has been printed on the covers of spellbooks…
Albertus Magnus, “Albert the Great,” was
born around 1200 in Lauingen, in Swabia, and joined the young Dominican order
as a student in Italy. He became one of the first German masters of theology at
the University of Paris and then built the Dominican house of studies in
Cologne, where his most famous pupil, a heavyset, quiet young Italian named Thomas Aquinas, followed him. Albert
served as head of his order’s German province and, briefly and reluctantly, as
Bishop of Regensburg before returning to teaching. His contemporaries called
him the “Universal Doctor,” and the title was earned: he set out to explain the
whole of Aristotle’s natural philosophy to the Latin West, and wrote
encyclopedically on plants, animals, minerals, astronomy, and the human body.
What makes
Albert remarkable is how often he went and looked for himself. His books on
animals and plants are full of firsthand observations, and he was willing to
dismiss popular marvels he couldn’t confirm. In his treatise on minerals, he
discussed the alchemists’ claims with a cautious, experimental eye, reporting
that metals produced by alchemy failed the fire tests that genuine gold and
silver withstood. He’s often credited with being among the first Europeans to
isolate arsenic. And when it came to astrology and the occult virtues of stones
and herbs, he accepted what the science of his day considered natural forces
while drawing a firm line against demonic magic. A treatise called the Speculum astronomiae,
attributed to him though its authorship is still debated, even catalogued the
magical books then in circulation, sorting the permissible from the forbidden.
None of that
stopped the legends. A man who seemed to know everything about nature, it was
assumed, must also have known how to command it. Within a few generations,
Albert had become a wonder-worker in popular imagination: the magician of the
winter garden, the alchemist who found the Philosopher’s Stone and passed it to
Aquinas (a tale that conveniently ignores the fact that Aquinas died six years
before his teacher), and the maker of a talking brass head that Aquinas
supposedly smashed. Readers who enjoyed our February special on the brazen
heads of Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon will know that story well, and how
little evidence lies behind it. By 1625, the French librarian Gabriel Naudé thought it
necessary to include Albert in his Apology for All the Great Persons Falsely Suspected of
Magic.
The legend was
profitable, and the printers knew it. Two short Latin treatises circulating
under Albert’s name, a Book of Secrets on the magical virtues of herbs,
stones, and animals, and a book on the Marvels of the World, became
bestsellers of the early printing age, reissued in edition after edition across
Europe, including a London printing around 1485. Scholars today regard both as
the work of an anonymous compiler, quite possibly one of Albert’s followers,
who borrowed the master’s prestige. The same was true of a notorious treatise
on the “secrets of women,” and of the long tradition that followed. In France,
the chapbook grimoires Le Grand Albert and Le Petit Albert
were peddled from village to village for generations, the latter famous for its
recipe for the Hand of Glory, the dead man’s hand said to put a household into
enchanted sleep.
The most enduring of these imaginary Alberts crossed the Atlantic. Egyptian Secrets of Albertus Magnus, a sprawling compilation of charms, cures, and protective formulas, circulated in German-speaking lands and became a staple of Pennsylvania German folk healing, or “powwow,” alongside John George Hohman’s The Long Lost Friend. Generations of farmers and healers in Pennsylvania kept it on the shelf to stop bleeding, protect livestock, and ward off witchcraft, and it is still sold in occult shops today. Its contents have nothing to do with Egypt, and almost nothing to do with the real Albertus Magnus, but for many of its readers, his name was a guarantee that the magic inside was both learned and holy.
The real
Albert spent his life insisting on the difference between natural knowledge and
demonic magic, warned against credulity, and tested claims against experience.
Yet the more his reputation for learning grew, the more his name became a brand
for exactly the kind of wonder-mongering he was careful to avoid. The Church,
for its part, never confused the two. Albert was beatified in 1622 and
canonized in 1931, when Pope Pius XI also declared him a Doctor of the Church,
and in 1941 he was named the patron saint of the natural sciences.
So today we
remember two Alberts: one is the patient, observant friar who walked the roads
of Europe collecting plants and minerals, taught Thomas Aquinas, and tried to
understand the world as God had made it. The other is the sorcerer of the snowy
garden and the talking head, invented by admirers and publishers who couldn’t
imagine that so much knowledge came without magic. Both have shaped the history
of the occult, and only one of them ever existed.
The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus: Of the Virtues of Herbs, Stones, and Certain Beasts, Also a Book of the Marvels of the World
Edited by Michael R. Best
& Frank H. Brightman | Red Wheel/Weiser
The Book of
Secrets of Albertus Magnus, edited by Michael R. Best and Frank H.
Brightman and published by Weiser Books as part of its Weiser Classics series,
presents the sixteenth-century English translation of the medieval Liber
aggregationis and its companion De mirabilibus mundi. It’s divided
into five parts, on the virtues of herbs, of stones, and of beasts, on the
planets, and on the marvels of the world, illustrated with thirty-four
woodcuts. The editors were well suited to the task: Best is a scholar of
English literature at the University of Victoria, and Brightman was an
education officer at London’s Natural History Museum and a botanist in his own
right. Their introduction traces the text’s history, its cultural context, and
its variant manuscripts, and frankly concludes that the work was compiled by an
anonymous author, probably one of Albert’s followers, rather than by the master
himself.
What makes it
the perfect companion for today’s post is that it puts readers directly into
the hands of the legend. Here are the herbs that supposedly reveal a person’s
thoughts, the stones that grant victory or foresight, and the animal remedies
that delighted and alarmed readers of the early printing age, just as they
appeared to the sixteenth-century Englishmen who bought them under Albert’s
name. Its colloquial voice, quite unlike the real Albertus Magnus, offers a
vivid portrait of the everyday magical culture of Renaissance Europe, and a
fascinating contrast with the cautious natural philosophy of the man himself.
This is a historical edition rather than a practical manual, and its remedies belong firmly in the history books: readers should not try them at home. Those wanting the authentic Albert will need translations of his genuine scientific works, or a scholarly biography. But for readers who finished today’s post curious about what was actually inside the spellbooks that made a scientist into a sorcerer, Best and Brightman’s edition is the ideal place to open the cover.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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