forbidden rites a necromancer's manual of the fifteenth century

Once the plant has sprouted, the practitioner takes each sprouted bean, putting them in his mouth one by one while gazing into a mirror until he turns invisible. He cuts out the cat’s eyes and places heliotrope seeds in its eyes and mouth then he buries the cat while reciting conjurations. The Clm 849 operation for invisibility instructs the operator kill a black cat that was born in March. ( If you wish to be invisible: take a dead dog and bury it and plant a bean plant over it and place one in your mouth and without a doubt you will be invisible.)īean plant (Phaseolus species): flowering and fruiting stem with three beans. Si vis esse inuisibile: accipe vnum canem mortuum et sepilles eum et plantes super eum fabus et vnam in ore tuo et sine dubio eris inuisibile This is the third one in the manuscript and it is the most complex, bearing a strong resemblance to a necromantic operation for invisibility in Clm 849 and a spell from the Greek Magical Papyri. Of the four recipes for invisibility in Ashmole 1435 one in particular caught my eye.

1 And of course this desire has extended to the modern day with Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility! Experiments promising this outcome survive in similar recipe collections in London, Wellcome Historical Medical Library MS 517 (a fifteenth-century Dutch collection) Kassel, Murhardsche und Landesbibliothek Codex Medicus 4˚10 the Greek Magical Papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt Munich, Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, Clm 849, the German necromantic handbook edited by Richard Kieckhefer in Forbidden Rites and it is frequently seen in later medieval ritual magic. The desire to become invisible seems to be a common theme for the pre-modern magician.

Understandably, in a collection that large the kinds of recipes vary considerably: there are recipes for cooking, metallurgy, divinatory experiments, texts of the virtues… and four experiments for invisibility (pages 7, 12, and 25). This is an anonymous manuscript from the fifteenth century that contains mostly academic medical texts and is a large collection of over 180 magical and non-magical recipes in English and Latin in no discernible order. One of the manuscripts I focused on for my dissertation research is Oxford, Bodleian Library Ashmole MS 1435.

As I promised in my last post, today I want to touch on a magical recipe with ties to some interesting sources.

Forbidden rites a necromancer's manual of the fifteenth century