The Book of Oberon ─ A Sourcebook of Elizabethan Magic

Sitting a block away from the U.S. Capitol, the Folger Shakespeare Library holds one of the most unusual manuscripts of magic ever discovered. The book was written around the year 1580, a decade before Shakespeare began writing in earnest. This is a manual of magicians in search of results, who scribbled down whatever secrets they could find.

One of the most unusual collections of magical lore ever assembled, The Book of Oberonincludes:

• Rituals for summoning several different spirits, including Oberon (one of the main characters of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream), Satan, Mosacus, Birto, and others
• A ceremony to call Baron, a spirit associated with the notorious Gilles de Rais
• Several intriguing drawings of spirits and other curious beings
• A list of spirits similar to, but predating, that found in the magical manual the Goetia
• Lore and rituals for the summoning of fairies
• Pages of talismans for various purposes
• One of the oldest known copies of the magical manual The Enchiridion, said to have been given to Charlemagne by Pope Leo III
• Charms for toothache, bleeding, and the capture of thieves
• Headings and words written in cipher, most of which we have managed to decipher
• An account of a mystical brotherhood of magicians that seems to have ties to the conspiracy against the author and playwright Christopher Marlowe

Daniel Harms (Upstate New York) holds two masters’ degrees, one in anthropology and one in library and information science. His major area of research is magic from antiquity to the present, and he has been published in the Journal for the Academic Study of Magic and the Journal of Scholarly Publishing. Harms is also the author of two books on horror fiction and folklore. Visit him online at DanHarms.wordpress.com.

James R. Clark is a self-taught artist.

Joseph H. Peterson has been studying esoteric texts for decades, intrigued by the Renaissance intellectual and experimental approach to spirituality. After years of collecting and digitizing rare texts for his own research, in 1995 he created the avesta.org and esotericarchives.com websites to share them with a wider audience. He lives near Rochester Minnesota.