Grimorium Verum: the «true grimoire» of Alibeck the Egyptian

The title itself is a polemical statement: Grimorium Verum, the «true grimoire», as if all the others were false or incomplete. The title page of the French editions attributes it to Alibeck the Egyptian and gives Memphis, 1517, as its place and date of printing. None of this is reliable: the book is in all likelihood an eighteenth-century product, born in the milieu that reworked the material of the Key of Solomon in French and Italian.

An Italian and French origin

The text exists both in print, in French, and in numerous manuscripts, including Italian versions. Scholars have noted close links with the Italian tradition of the Clavicula, from which it takes its terminology and many parts of the ritual preparation. The Grimorium Verum probably arose as a reworking of that material, enriched by a striking demonic hierarchy and an exotic attribution.

The attribution to an Egyptian answers to an ancient topos. Since classical times Egypt had been regarded as the homeland of magic, and the Hermetic tradition had made Hermes Trismegistus an Egyptian sage. Placing a book in Memphis, the ancient pharaonic capital, meant claiming a remote and venerable origin for it, perfectly in tune with the publishing strategies of popular grimoires.

The infernal hierarchy

The heart of the book is a hierarchy of spirits headed by three supreme figures, Lucifer, Beelzebub and Astaroth, each with subordinates and a geographical sphere of influence: Lucifer is assigned Europe and Asia, Beelzebub Africa, Astaroth America. Lesser spirits follow, each associated with a function. The same triad appears in the Grand Grimoire, and the relationship between the two texts suggests a common area of production.

The structure recalls the administration of a modern state, with ministers, generals and officials. This bureaucratic image of hell, already present in the demonological catalogues of the sixteenth century, here reaches a particularly clear form that would enjoy a long fortune in literature and popular imagination. The inclusion of America also shows that the text had in mind a world already enlarged by the voyages of discovery.

Circulation and scholarship

Like other French grimoires, the Grimorium Verum circulated through cheap editions and manuscript copies, often bound with other texts. Some versions include sections taken from collections of «secrets» of natural magic, mixing Solomonic ritualism with recipes of a domestic kind, confirming the composite nature of this literature and of its varied readership.

Arthur Edward Waite gave an extensive description of it in 1898, helping to make it known to English-speaking readers. More recently scholars have compared the French and Italian versions, showing how unstable the work was and how its different redactions depended on the tastes and knowledge of individual copyists and printers.

The Grimorium Verum remains an eloquent example of eighteenth-century literary magic: a book that presents itself as extremely ancient, claims authenticity against its rivals and builds its appeal on an exotic origin. Precisely these claims, read with the tools of philology, reveal its real history, much closer in time and space than the title page would have us believe.