The main sources for the following list of grimoires are A.E.
w/Freda Dowie and Kim Wall - When a young couple visit an old house with a view to buying it, they are unaware of the memories of 80 years contained within it.
Feng, Youlan (1953). “Chu Hsi,” trans. D. Bodde in A History of Chinese Philosophy, 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP, vol. 2, 533-71.
Austin, Jon. ed. (2005) Culture and identity, 2nd ed. Pearson Education Australia, Sydney, Australia. ISBN 0-7339-7329-9
The main sources for the following list of grimoires are A.E. Waite, The Book of Ceremonial Magic: A Complete Grimoire (New York: Citadel Press, 1970; first published in 1898); Richard Cavendish, A History of Magic (New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1977); Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Joseph H. Peterson’s excellent website www.esotericarchives.com ; as well as the site www.sacred-texts.com and the antiquarian books site www.wierus.com. The order of presentation below is approximately chronological, from oldest to most recent. The grimoires are listed here for more than mere historical curiosity; they are a record of a different worldview, cultural artifacts predating (or in some cases coinciding with the beginning of) the scientific worldview. In some respects they are simply primitive attempts at science, and often were reflective of depressed economic eras in which men and women were driven to all sorts of ideas and efforts to achieve some means of control over Nature and their lives (the Spanish anthropologist Julio Caro Baroja referred to the grimoires as ‘the last products of the Medieval mind’).
