Hidden, Lost and Forbidden Knowledge

A list of ten grimoires is not a reading plan. It is a pile, and a pile has no order, so people start with whatever has the most dramatic cover, spend three evenings on it, and never reach the one book that would have told them what they were doing. The difference between a pile and a plan is that a plan answers three questions in advance: which book, in which month, and what you are reading it for. This is a plan for ten texts, arranged so that each one gives you something the previous one could not, and so that the first year produces a working practice rather than a collection of impressions. It begins with a pamphlet rather than a grimoire, on purpose, and it deliberately postpones the two books that most lists put first. It also includes one item that is frequently included in lists of grimoires and is not a grimoire, because knowing that is worth more than the item. If you only take one thing from this, take the ordering. Any ten books read in this order will be better than any ten books read in the order they look most interesting.

Ten books, and the order that works

The order below is not a ranking. It is a dependency structure, where each entry supplies something the following entries need. Month one is a pamphlet, because it is short, contemporary, and gives you a procedure you can run that same evening, which matters more than anything else at the start. Months two and three are documents of different kinds, one ancient and one modern, read to give you two different relationships to the same material. Months four and five are the working texts. Months six and seven are the ones most lists put in the first month and should not. Months eight through ten are reference material, and reading them last is the difference between a practice and a collection.

There is a practical reason for putting a pamphlet first that nobody emphasises. A person who begins with a long text arrives at their first working having read a great deal and having no experience, and the two facts compete for attention in a way that makes both worse. A person who begins with a short text that contains an instruction has had one working by the end of the week, and one working changes what the subsequent reading is for. The reading stops being research and starts being preparation, and the two are much easier to sustain. The pamphlet is not the most interesting item on the list. It is the most useful one to begin with, which is a different property.

The one to read in your first month

Read the short pamphlet published in the late nineteen-seventies, in its entirety, in one sitting. It runs to a little over a hundred pages. It contains, more or less, a set of instructions, a few pages of commentary on why you should follow them, and a chapter on results that is short enough to be the most important part. The reason it goes first is not that it is the best text, and it would be a mistake to describe it as that. The reason is that it is the only item on the list that will give you something to do before it gives you anything to think about, and at the start those need to come in that order.

There is a second, less obvious reason. This pamphlet is also the one that has to be read carefully rather than quickly, because it contains the only place in the whole list where a claim is made plainly enough to be tested. Later in the year you will be tempted to read it again and find that you have stopped noticing that claim, which is the normal process and not a failure of attention. So the first reading carries the weight, and it is worth writing three lines afterwards: what it told you to do, what you did, and what happened. Those three lines are the first entry in the record that will eventually be the most valuable thing you own.

The one most people should skip

The text published anonymously in the early twentieth century, the one that appears on every list and is described as foundational, is the item to postpone, and quite possibly to skip. It is pleasant to read. It is short. It is full of confident claims about the principles underlying everything, and it has no named author, and its claims about where it comes from are not supported by anything anybody can check. None of that makes it worthless, and one of its claims is genuinely useful as a piece of vocabulary. But it is not a grimoire, it is not a source of practice, and reading it early gives you a set of confident generalities that will feel like knowledge and will not function as any.

The reason to postpone rather than to dismiss is that it will be recommended to you repeatedly, and having read it you will be able to place it, which is a different relationship than never having looked. Read it in month six or seven, after you have a working practice going, and ask of it one question: does anything in here describe an operation I could perform. For most people the answer is no, and having asked the question is what settles it. A text that cannot pass the operational test is not useless, it is simply not doing what the list claims for it, and knowing which items on a list are doing what is a large part of the value of making the list yourself.

What a grimoire is, structurally

A grimoire has a recognisable structure and it is worth being able to identify one, because most items sold under the name are not. A grimoire is a procedure book for a working practice. It contains instructions in an order, and the order is load-bearing, because these are systems of transformation and the stages cannot be swapped. It has a stated or plainly implied point of termination. It has a defined relationship to a named intelligence or process, whether that is a spirit, a planet, a material or a stage of a larger sequence. And it is written for practitioners, which means it assumes context it rarely supplies.

Most of what circulates under this name is none of those things. Compilations of spooky-looking invocations with no sequence and no termination are not grimoires, they are mood pieces. Modern books about the topic are not grimoires, they are about grimoires. Translations of historical material are valuable and are not themselves grimoires, since a translation is an edition rather than an instruction set. Being able to sort a list into these categories takes about twenty minutes once you know how, and it prevents the most common error in self-study, which is treating a pile of related objects as if it were a course.

The excluded text, and why it is worth reading

One item on the list is an ancient Jewish apocalyptic text that survives in fragments found in the caves near the Dead Sea, and that was known to some early Christian writers before it was dropped from most modern Bibles. Read it in month three, and read it because of that history rather than in spite of it. The exclusion is documented, the reasons for it are documented, and the story of how a text that was quoted by some of the earliest writers became absent from the canon is one of the clearest cases available of a body of material being narrowed by institutional decision rather than by fading.

The content is worth reading on its own terms, and it is not the interesting part. What is useful is the procedure the exclusion teaches: when a body of material has been reduced, the question worth asking is which parts were removed and by whom, and whether the removal was a judgement about error or a judgement about control. That question transfers directly to modern material in this field, where entire bodies of practice have been lost and where the loss is rarely documented. The ancient text is a case where the paperwork survived. Most cases do not have that advantage, which is precisely why the ones that do are worth the attention.

The pamphlet that is still the entry point

Two items on the list serve the beginner, and they serve different needs. The pamphlet gives you a procedure you can run, and it does so in language you can understand, which is a rarer combination than it sounds. The ancient text gives you a relationship to the material, which is slower and less immediately useful and arguably more important over a lifetime. If you have to pick one for your first year, pick the pamphlet, because a procedure is a thing you can build on and a relationship is a thing that will be there whenever you are ready.

The reason to read the pamphlet in full rather than skimming the instruction pages is that the commentary is where the method actually lives. The instructions could be written by anyone. The reasoning about why you should record results, why you should be prepared to be wrong, why the practice is small, is the part that determines whether a person persists. Skimming it produces a person who has learned an operation and has not learned the disposition that makes the operation worth doing, and such a person usually stops within a year, without being able to say why.

The text with no author behind it

The anonymously published text occupies an odd position in the field. It is often described as the most influential modern book in the tradition, which may well be true and is not the same as being a practical document. It has been continuously in print since early last century, which means its mystery is not hidden manuscript status but a bibliographic oddity, and a bibliographic oddity is a much smaller thing than it is made to sound. A work that has been commercially available for a hundred years was not suppressed.

What this establishes is worth stating plainly, because the argument runs in the other direction more often. The absence of an author is a reason to be cautious about claims of attribution, not evidence that the content is withheld. The two claims get run together constantly and they are opposites. If you want the field to be more rigorous, then anonymous texts should be evaluated on their content and their stated provenance, neither assumed secret nor assumed authoritative. That standard would also apply to some of the older material, and applying it consistently would improve the whole self-study landscape more than any amount of argument about individual books.

The one on the list that is not a grimoire

A fictional book invented by a writer in the nineteen-twenties appears on almost every list of forbidden grimoires, and it is not a grimoire. It is a fictional object inside a cycle of stories, and it never existed, and the fictional authors it is attributed to were also invented. It appears on the lists because its reputation inside the fiction was that of a dangerous book, and the reputation transferred to the outside world along with the name. This is a category error that has been repeated for a century, and correcting it costs nothing.

It is worth correcting it explicitly because the error does damage. A reader who has been told that a fictional book is a real and suppressed manual is being introduced to the field on a false premise, and the false premise tends to produce a particular kind of attachment, which is the conviction that the important things are hidden. That conviction is unfalsifiable, it is incompatible with the practice's own stated commitment to testing, and it is the single most common route by which people end up in the version of this field that has abandoned method in favour of mystique. One item on the list, corrected, removes an entire category of confusion. It is the highest-value twenty minutes of reading in the whole year.

What each one is actually for

The pamphlet teaches a method and gives you your first working. The ancient text teaches you how a canon narrows and gives you vocabulary. The modern grimoire texts give you two very different models of what a procedure book looks like, one structured and one not, and reading them against each other is more instructive than reading either alone. The anonymous text gives you a lesson in provenance. The two working manuals give you, between them, enough structure to build your own sequences. The book about the history of the tradition gives you the map that stops you reinventing what has already been tried, and it is the item people most consistently skip because it does not contain instructions.

What none of them gives you is the thing you actually want, which is a complete system you can follow without having to make decisions. No such system exists in this field, and the closest thing to one is a practice tradition you are inside, which is a different kind of acquisition and takes years. A year of reading produces competence at reading. A year of practice produces a practice. The list is worth doing because the second is what you are after, and the reading is the cheap part, but the reading is the part that has to happen first and the part that most people abandon.

The first year, month by month

Month one: the pamphlet, complete, with three lines written afterwards. Month two: a working manual with a defined sequence, read for structure rather than content. Month three: the ancient text, read for the exclusion story. Month four: a second working manual of a different type, and a comparison of the two sequences. Month five: the text about the tradition's history, which will now mean something to you. Month six: the anonymous text, with the operational question. Month seven: whatever the first half-year made you want, chosen by you rather than by a list. Months eight to ten: reference material, consulted rather than read, alongside a working practice that has been running since month one.

The structure to notice is that months one and two are instructions, three to six are context, and seven to ten are whatever the earlier months actually left you wanting. Most reading lists do not have this property, because most reading lists are ordered by fame. A list ordered by what you need in order to keep going is different in a way that only shows up at month eight, when you are still doing it. The final quarter is the part that converts a year of reading into a practice, and it happens through a working that has been running the whole time and that you have finally started to understand. This is the mechanism and it is not a metaphor.

When to stop reading and start working

You will have worked throughout, so the question is really about when to stop reading entirely, and the answer is sharper than the usual advice. The test is whether you can state your aim in one sentence, in the imperative, without consulting anything. If you cannot, keep reading, and read specifically for what is stopping you, which is usually the vocabulary of the aim rather than the procedure. If you can state it and have not yet run it, stop reading today and run it. Everything else in this field can wait, and the people who last are not the best-read, they are the ones who read for a while and then stopped and started.

There is a second test, which is about the ratio. If you have spent more than six consecutive weeks reading and not working, the reading has become a substitute, and this happens more often than people admit. The mechanism is straightforward: reading about practice produces the feeling of doing something about practice, and the feeling is a partial reward that removes the pressure to do the real thing. If you recognise this, the fix is a scheduled working, not a resolution. Put a date in. A person who has read for a year and then run three workings in a fortnight has learned more about the practice than a person who has read for another year, and this is not a claim about knowledge. It is a claim about what compounds.

The shelf you would build

The shelf, after a year, is about a third of the size of the list you started with, and the items you would remove are the ones that produced a feeling rather than an operation. You would keep the pamphlet, worn, because it is the text you will return to. You would keep the two working manuals, because you will be consulting their structures for years. You would keep the ancient text, because of the exclusion. You would keep one book about the history, because it is the map. Everything else goes into a box, and the box is not a failure, it is simply a different relationship to the material that you can return to in a year when you have a specific question.

The test of a shelf at this stage is whether you can hand it to somebody and say, read these in this order, and they will be doing what you are doing. If you can, it is a shelf. If you cannot, it is a collection, and the difference is the ordering rather than the contents. The plan above is really a suggestion that the ordering is the artefact and the books are interchangeable. That is true, and it is a slightly deflating conclusion, and it is also the reason that a beginner who reads ten books in a good order will end up in a completely different position from one who reads the same ten in the order they look most interesting.

Frequently Asked Questions

What order should I read these books in?

Begin with a short contemporary pamphlet that contains instructions, because it will give you something to do in your first week and that changes what the rest of the reading is for. Then a working manual with a defined sequence, then the ancient excluded text for the canon-narrowing lesson, then a second manual of a different type, then the history, then the anonymous text with an operational question, and only then whatever the first half-year made you want. The order is a dependency structure rather than a ranking.

Is the fictional book on these lists a real grimoire?

No, and this is the single highest-value correction in the whole list. It is an invented object inside a cycle of stories, it never existed, and the fictional scholars it is attributed to were also invented. Its reputation inside the fiction was that of a dangerous book and the reputation transferred outward along with the name. Believing it was suppressed is a false premise that pushes readers toward the conviction that the important things are hidden.

Why postpone the anonymously published book?

Because it is pleasant, confident and general, which at the start of self-study is a bad combination, since it feels like knowledge and will not function as any. Its absence of an author is a reason for caution about attribution, not evidence that the content is withheld, and the two claims are constantly run together when they are opposites. Read it later and ask one question of it, which is whether anything in it describes an operation you could perform.

How much should I write down while reading?

Three lines after each item: what it told you to do, what you did, and what happened. That is the whole requirement and it is enough to make the year count, because the third line is the beginning of the record that is the only thing you will still want in five years. The second line is the one people skip and it is the one that turns reading into practice, since it is the moment where you find out whether you did anything.

When should I stop reading and just work?

When you can state your aim in one sentence, in the imperative, without consulting anything. If you cannot, keep reading and read specifically for what is stopping you, which is usually the vocabulary of the aim rather than the procedure. If you can state it and have not run it, stop today. And if you have read for six consecutive weeks without working, that is a signal rather than a failure, and the fix is a date in the diary rather than another resolution.