Sunday Word: Grimoire
grimoire [greem-wahr]
noun:
a manual of magic or witchcraft used by witches and sorcerers; a magician's manual for invoking demons and the spirits of the dead
Examples:
Necronomicon, or the 'book of dead names' that Montrose refers to isn't actually a real book - unless you count the 2008 collection of Lovecraft's short stories published under that title. It's a 'grimoire' invented by by Lovecraft in his 1924 story The Hound. (Ellen E Jones, Lovecraft Country recap: season one, episode two - have you guys not seen Get Out?, The Guardian, August 2020)
E'ilor dwells in a large cavern deep beneath a small farming village in the Severn Valley, and possesses vine-like tentacles which can be used for capturing prey or offering communal sacrifices. Both of these deities receive brief mention in the multi-volume grimoire Revelations of Glaaki. (Ramsey Campbell deities, The Annex)
The book was his Grimoire, a collection of magical writings. The pages were all different sizes and thicknesses, which made them difficult to turn. Some were of parchment, others were of vellum, and some were thin sheets of leather. It was the strangest book in the world. (Richard Carpenter, Catweazle: Novelisation of the 1969 TV Series)
And vain the charm recovered
From out the daemon-hovered,
Worm-travelled page of pentacled grimoire.
(Clark Ashton Smith, 'O Golden-Tongued Romance')
The first object that caught his attention, was a large grimoire, or book of spells, which lay open on the philosopher's desk. (Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions)
(The frontispiece and title page of a French translation of a grimoire allegedly, but unlikely
to have been, written by Pope Honorius III, click to enlarge)
Origin:
1849, from French grimoire, altered from grammaire 'incantation; grammar' (Online Etymology Dictionary)
A grimoire is a book of magic that may contain spells, conjurations, instructions for divination and the construction of amulets, and other secret knowledge of a supernatural kind. The examples include such famous works as the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, The Book of St Cyprian, The Key of Solomon and The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.
The word is French, in the same sense. It began to appear in French-English dictionaries early in the nineteenth century but became more widely known in the 1850s. In French, it was a medieval modification of grammaire, a book of grammar, by which was meant Latin grammar, since at the time there was no other kind. It derives from the Latin grammatica, the study of literature in general, which by the Middle Ages had come to mean knowledge of Latin.
The shift from book of grammar to book of magic isn’t as weird as it might seem. Few among the ordinary people in those times could read or write. For superstitious minds books were troubling objects. Who knew what awful information was locked up in them? For many people grammar meant the same thing as learning, and everybody knew that learning included astrology and other occult arts.
In medieval English, grammarye was likewise the study of Latin grammar and this, too, took on undertones of occult learning, magic and necromancy. It fell out of use but was revived by Sir Walter Scott in his Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805. (World Wide Words)