The Grand Grimoire and the Dragon Rouge: a chapbook best seller

Among French books of magic, none has had a more sinister reputation than the Grand Grimoire, known in many editions as the Dragon Rouge, the «Red Dragon». Its title page presented it as an ancient work, edited by one Antonio Venitiana del Rabina and drawn from the writings of Solomon. In reality it is a much more recent booklet, born in the world of popular publishing and spread by pedlars through the countryside.

False dates and phantom publishers

Editions of the Grand Grimoire and the Dragon Rouge often bear dates from the early sixteenth century, such as 1521 or 1522, which are wholly implausible. Scholars believe the text was probably composed in the eighteenth century and printed mainly in the nineteenth, at a time when ancient dates and exotic places served to lend prestige and mystery to cheap books. The editor's name, with its Italian flavour, also appears to be an invention.

These booklets belonged to the vast world of the Bibliothèque bleue, the small volumes printed on poor paper, often with bluish covers, that colporteurs carried from village to village along with almanacs, saints' lives and chivalric romances. Troyes was for a long time one of the main centres producing this popular literature, later imitated by printers in many other provincial towns.

The pact and Lucifuge Rofocale

The content revolves around an infernal hierarchy headed by Lucifer, Beelzebub and Astaroth, beneath whom operates a «prime minister» called Lucifuge Rofocale, a figure tied precisely to these texts. The book tells of a pact with this spirit to obtain riches and hidden treasure, a theme reflecting the fantasies of sudden wealth common in the rural societies of the time, where the hunt for buried treasure was a recurring obsession.

Alongside this main section, the editions gather heterogeneous material: secrets attributed to the Solomonic tradition, formulas for winning at games, folk remedies, prayers. The book is in short a commercial anthology, built to satisfy a curious public rather than to transmit a coherent doctrine. Its success can be measured by the reprints and versions, including Italian ones, that multiplied during the nineteenth century.

Reputation and reception

The fame of the Grand Grimoire grew precisely because of its bad reputation. The clergy pointed to it as the devil's book par excellence, and under the Second Empire the commission overseeing pedlar literature, established in 1852, sought to limit the circulation of pamphlets of this kind. In the folklore of some French regions there were tales of books of magic that could be neither destroyed nor given away, often identified with these volumes.

The learned occultists of the nineteenth century regarded it with contempt. Arthur Edward Waite, in his Book of Black Magic and of Pacts of 1898, described it as one of the crudest texts of the tradition, while still devoting ample space to it. This attitude reflected the wish of esotericists to distinguish their «high magic» from the popular magic of fairground booklets.

For the historian of the book, the Grand Grimoire is an exceptional document of mass culture before industrial modernity. It shows how the themes of learned magic, Solomon, spirits, pacts, were simplified, dramatised and sold to a new public. It is the grimoire as merchandise, no longer kept in private libraries but bought from a travelling pedlar.