The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts

About this book

Pentacles, demonic names, protective circles and solemn promises appear across the old grimoires. Arthur Edward Waite opens these books to examine what their ritual writers believed an operator could summon or command.

He collects and compares magical procedures from historical sources, often questioning their claims while preserving remarkable material about ceremonies and pacts. Engraved symbols and diagrams make the material particularly compelling as a record of occult literature. Waite's mixture of scepticism and painstaking quotation preserves the strange apparatus of signs, oaths and diagrams through which ceremonial magic was transmitted.