Hans Sloane, the Sloane Grimoires and the Birth of the British Museum

When he died in 1753, the physician Hans Sloane left a collection of more than seventy thousand items, including books, manuscripts, dried plants, coins, minerals and specimens of every kind. In his will he offered it to the nation in exchange for twenty thousand pounds for his heirs, a sum far below its value. The British Museum was born from his bequest, and part of his manuscripts is now among the collections most consulted by historians of magic.

From Ireland to Jamaica

Sloane was born in 1660 at Killyleagh, in what is now Northern Ireland, and studied medicine in London and France. In 1687 he left for Jamaica as physician to the governor and stayed about fifteen months, gathering plants, animals and observations that he later published in two large illustrated volumes. Back in London he became one of the capital's most sought-after physicians, treating members of the royal family as well.

His career culminated in the presidency of England's two most prestigious scientific institutions: the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society, at whose head he succeeded Isaac Newton in 1727. Part of the wealth that allowed him to collect came from his wife's Jamaican plantations, worked by enslaved people, an aspect of his biography now studied with care.

A Collector of Collections

Sloane did not merely buy individual pieces: he bought entire collections formed by others. In this way manuscripts of physicians, alchemists and astrologers of earlier centuries flowed into his library, often bought en bloc on the death of their owners. The result was a vast and heterogeneous collection, in which medical treatises sit alongside alchemical texts, astrological works and books of ceremonial magic.

Among the latter are several copies of the Clavicula Salomonis, the Key of Solomon, and of other grimoires in Latin, French and English. At the end of the nineteenth century Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers used British Museum manuscripts, including some from the Sloane collection, for his English translation of the Clavicula, published in 1888. Some originals of John Dee's angelic diaries are also among the Sloane manuscripts.

From the British Museum to the British Library

In 1753 Parliament passed the act establishing the British Museum, joining Sloane's collection to the Cotton library and the Harley library. The museum opened to the public in 1759 at Montagu House, in the Bloomsbury district. It was a novelty: a national, free institution, open, at least in principle, to all studious and curious visitors.

In 1973 the book collections were separated from the museum and entrusted to the new British Library, which since 1997 has been housed at St Pancras. Sloane's manuscripts, identified by the shelfmark Sloane MS, are kept there today, while the natural specimens are divided between the British Museum and the Natural History Museum, itself born largely from his bequest.

The figure of Sloane is a reminder that many grimoires have reached us not thanks to magicians or initiates, but to methodical collectors who regarded them as documents among others. In his library ceremonial magic was a chapter in the history of medicine and of human curiosity, and this very encyclopaedic outlook has ensured its preservation to the present day.