How to Conjure Demons Using the Holdings at the Folger Shakespeare Library: A Primer

It is a rare thing to discover you have become a living literary trope.

Huddled within the Folger’s ornate library of wooden carvings and stained glass, I found myself sifting through rare, hand-drawn tomes of occult knowledge. Carefully examining the detailed diagrams for invoking and controlling the Great Prince of Hell, Orobas, I realized I was a character out of an H.P. Lovecraft story.

A key figure in the Weird Fiction literary movement of the early 20th century, Lovecraft was known for his obsessive characters who sought out forbidden knowledge within ancient occult manuscripts buried in the bowels of libraries. Characters often paid the price for that knowledge with their sanity.

Demonology had not initially led me to the Folger. Instead, as a film director and scholar of drama, my plan was to examine the director’s markings in the prompt books of Shakespearean plays that featured characters transforming into other beings.  Used to collect the directions needed to conduct a play, prompt books include blocking, lighting, speech, and sound cues that collectively form a director’s interpretation of a work.  Examining these handmade markings across several stagings of a single Shakespearean play, I was curious about the insights that could be gleaned by tracing directors’ interpretations of the same plays over time.

However, everything changed when I discovered the two volumes of a 16th century grimoire, one with a modern binding misleadingly titled Key of Solomon. Though the Folger’s grimoire is not the actual Key of Solomon, the manuscript draws on Solomonic and other traditions. The binding with the title was added by a later owner in reference to The Key of Solomon and The Lesser Key of Solomon.

A foundational text in Western occultism, The Lesser Key of Solomon is an anonymously authored compilation of materials dating back several centuries. Cobbled together from a variety of sources in the 17^th century, The Lesser Key of Solomon continues the tradition of The Key of Solomon written during the 14^th or 15^th century. Although the Key and Lesser Key contain a variety of information, including the use of plants for medicinal purposes, it is the details on summoning and controlling 72 spirits found in The Lesser Key of Solomon that led to the book’s infamy — elements also included in the Folger’s grimoire.

Written in Latin and illustrated by hand, The Lesser Key of Solomon would go on to influence nearly all esoteric works in the subsequent centuries, including those created by the influential Victorian secret society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and its most famous member, Aleister Crowley.  So interested was Crowley in The Lesser Key of Solomon that he published a 1904 version that added additional writings, including essays recontextualizing the rituals as psychological exploration rather than demonic summoning. This approach would go on to influence 20th-century Western esotericism, stretching from Chaos Magick to the works of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky.

However, as is often the case, Hollywood had other ideas. Spirits outlined in The Lesser Key of Solomon have been loosely interpreted across a variety of recent cinema works, ranging from Hereditary (2018) to The Conjuring series (2013–), A Dark Song (2016), and Night of the Demons (1998). These CGI-generated spirits are as far removed from their initial texts as the technology used to create them is from the illustrated manuscript.

Turning from the grandiose adaptation of tinsel town to the films of Jodorowsky and Kenneth Anger, we find two influential film directors who approached filmmaking not as a traditionally dramatic pursuit, but as something descended from the lineage of Crowley’s interpretation of The Lesser Key of Solomon. That filmmaking is a magical rite in itself.

With The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky created an iconic midnight movie that rejects traditional dramatic structure. Instead, he approaches the act of watching films, or theater, as an alchemical process, an audio-visual experience that transforms the viewer from one state of being to another. In this view, the philosopher’s stone isn’t a substance that turns lead into gold, but an experience that transmutes a person into a more enlightened being.

Jodorowsky’s occult approach to cinema has influenced my own, although in a differing form. My interest lies in the processes used to create drama. How do the rituals we employ in filming and viewing cinema leave lasting effects on their participants? What might happen if we alter the ways the blocking, camera, or performances are employed? What new knowledge can be discovered if we infuse these filmic traditions with ideas and approaches culled from vastly different backgrounds?

With this in mind, the markings in prompt books do not seem so different from those found in The Lesser Key of Solomon. Like notes on a musical composition, both drama and the occult seek to use actions to manipulate the intangible to affect us tangible creatures.

Unlike H.P. Lovecraft’s protagonists who found doom through the acquisition of hidden knowledge, the lessons learned from The Lesser Key of Solomon and prompt books unlock another kind of education. These hand-inscribed symbols provide reveal how past practitioners sought to release the entrapped emotions that churn deep within us. They make visible how with cinema and drama, we are also striving to exorcise demons – just those of a more personal nature.