Grimoires Online: Digitising Magical and Alchemical Manuscripts

Until a few decades ago, to see a manuscript of the Key of Solomon or the Splendor Solis one had to travel to London, Paris or Berlin, obtain permission to consult it and work for hours in a reading room. Today many of these codices can be browsed from home, page by page, in high-resolution images. Digitisation has profoundly changed the way books of magic are studied, and has opened this heritage to a much wider public.

The great digital libraries

The main European and American institutions launched reproduction programmes long ago. Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, created at the end of the 1990s, offers thousands of manuscripts and early books, including many French grimoires. The British Library has put online an important part of its manuscripts, among them the famous copy of the Splendor Solis dated 1582. The Vatican Apostolic Library is progressively digitising its immense holdings.

Specialised collections have also played their part. The Wellcome Collection in London has published under open licences thousands of images of medical, alchemical and magical manuscripts. Yale's Beinecke Library has made the entire Voynich manuscript available, and in Switzerland the e-codices project gathers manuscripts from many of the country's libraries in a single portal.

A common standard for images

A decisive step was the adoption of shared standards. The most widespread is IIIF, the International Image Interoperability Framework, developed from 2011 by a consortium of libraries and universities. Thanks to this system, images from different libraries can be opened in the same viewer, enlarged, annotated and compared. For those who study grimoires it means being able to place side by side on the screen two copies of the same text kept thousands of kilometres apart.

This direct comparison is fundamental for a literature such as that of magic, made up of copies, variants and reworkings. A distorted pentacle, a badly transcribed secret alphabet or a simplified diagram can reveal which manuscript was copied from which. What once required years of travel can now be done in a few hours of work.

Transcriptions, editions and new technologies

Alongside the images, projects of transcription and digital editing have arisen. At Indiana University, for example, the project The Chymistry of Isaac Newton has published online transcriptions of the English scientist's alchemical manuscripts, with images and research tools. Multispectral photography techniques, moreover, make it possible to read erased or faded texts, as in palimpsests, without damaging the support.

Digitisation also has its limits. The image on the screen does not convey the weight of the volume, the grain of the parchment, the real colours or the binding, and it can make one forget the context from which the book comes. This is why libraries continue to regard the original as irreplaceable: the digital copy is a tool of access and protection, because it reduces the handling of the most fragile codices, not a substitute for them.

The overall result is nonetheless extraordinary. Books once reserved for a few specialists are now accessible to students, artists and curious readers all over the world. The history of grimoires, for centuries a story of secrecy and hidden circulation, is thus living a new season of openness, in which every page can be observed closely and discussed publicly.