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Oh man, this is so good! This is Touch Me Not (what a name!), a facsimile of a one-of-a-kind 1795 grimoire recently discovered in a London medical library. No one knows much about its history before it got to the library. Spooky! It's full of some of the most effed art I've ever seen in a grimoire. Most folks, I think, expect wild and lurid illustrations in books of magic but that is really rarely the case, but this one delivers in spades. Gore, nudity, sexual perversion, all in gorgeous, often modern-seeming watercolors. The best part? It's all a bunch of baloney. It purports to be a treasure-finding manual, but lots of the stuff seems to just be made up from whole cloth. If anything, it's a book about getting high - it's possibly the first mention of DMT extraction in a European publication and has lots of notes on other mind-altering substances.
I suppose I should be disappointed that most evil looking grimoire ever is a bunch of hooey, but I really, really love knowing that the heavy metal impulse to artistically transgress, right down to the details of the how of it, has been with humanity for centuries. |
