MacGregor Mathers and the Nineteenth-Century Rediscovery of Grimoires

If the Key of Solomon or the Book of Abramelin are titles known throughout the world today, this is largely due to the work of one man, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. Between 1887 and the early twentieth century this English scholar, self-taught and passionate about occultism, turned a number of manuscripts held in the libraries of London and Paris into printed books in English. His editions have influenced more than a century of esoteric literature, for better and for worse.

A scholar in the reading room

Born in 1854, Mathers spent long hours in the reading room of the British Museum, where the manuscripts of the Sloane collection and other holdings were kept. In 1888 he was among the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, together with William Wynn Westcott and William Robert Woodman. For the order he developed rituals and teachings, drawing heavily on the very texts he was studying and transcribing.

His first important work was The Kabbalah Unveiled, published in 1887. It was not a translation from Hebrew, but from the Latin version contained in the Kabbala denudata of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, a large collection published between 1677 and 1684. Mathers added a long introduction, which helped to spread the Kabbalah in English-speaking occultist circles.

The Key of Solomon of 1889

In 1889 The Key of Solomon the King appeared, the first printed English edition of the Clavicula. Mathers built it by comparing several British Museum manuscripts in Latin, Italian and French, choosing the readings that seemed best to him and redrawing the pentacles and figures. The result was a readable and orderly text, but also, in part, a personal reconstruction that did not correspond exactly to any of the old copies.

Modern scholars have stressed these limits: Mathers omitted some parts he considered improper, standardised very different variants and sometimes corrected the text according to his own ideas. Nevertheless his edition remains an important document, because it shows how an educated Victorian reader interpreted grimoires and how he adapted them to the needs of a new public.

Abramelin and the Goetia

In 1898 The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage was published, translated from a French manuscript in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal in Paris, where Mathers had moved some years earlier. The text presents itself as the teaching handed down by a magician named Abramelin to a Jew of Worms, Abraham, in the fifteenth century. The older German versions, studied only later, show that the French copy was a late and incomplete reworking.

Finally, in 1904, The Goetia was published, the first part of the Lemegeton, based on the Sloane manuscripts. The edition, produced by Aleister Crowley, attributed the translation to Mathers, with whom Crowley had by then broken off relations. It was perhaps the book that, more than any other, brought the seals of the spirits into the imagination of the twentieth century.

Mathers died in 1918, but his editions went on being reprinted for decades, often without critical notes. Only in recent times has the direct publication of the manuscripts made it possible to distinguish what belonged to the old texts from what was the product of his work. His role nonetheless remains central: he was the bridge between the manuscript grimoire and the modern occultist book.