Grimoire - q.v. PDF Print E-mail

cuplogo50x50.jpgBlack book of spells

 

... reading backwards dis-spells trouble

 

Grimoire: French word ... (GRIM - wah) -- book of spells, black-book; secret language; uneasy scrawl (v. Cassell's French Dictionary, c. 1962).

Thanks go to the writer Mikita Brottman (v. The Solitary Vice: against reading) for giving a provocative vision of grimoire, and blogs as well:

Books, it was once believed, had hidden powers; they could cast a spell on you. One of the earliest forms of book was the grimoire -- a magical spell-book felt to be so powerful that if you read it aloud (and reading aloud was the only kind of reading there was), you'd get tangled up in the words, like a fly in a spider's web. To reverse the spell, you'd have to read the words, backwards, to the place you started from. Books, it was felt, were repositories of magic symbols that, when recited in certain ways, could release hidden forces or summon the dead.
  		 

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