[For one reason or another I have gotten back into studies that I largely abandoned the best part of a decade ago in favour of video game addiction, and so I am toying with ideas on how to actually continue this series.]
"Help me in my search for knowledge
I must learn the secret art
Who dares to help me raise the one
whose very name near stills my heart . . ."
[Ref Couliano & Walker on late mediaeval / early modern treatises on witchcraft as borderline pornographic works; wherever the hell I read it (prob. Kieckhefer), on books of magic treated as if intrinsically alive / demonic, compared with the way the book in BB is implied not simply to be demonic in so far as its procedures operate through the involvement of demons, but actually has a demon bound to it which obsesses / possesses those who acquire the book & drives them to work the rites.
Observations on Grimoire of Honorius & its reputation & its thus being used as the main model for the book in BB. Lévi's fantasies & misrepresentation of the work.
(the spell pour faire danser une Fille nue which is used by the protagonist in the game, and by characters in the prequel to the anime, Bible Black Gaiden, in both cases as their first experiment with the book's magic, and with the result of publicly humiliating one of their classmates, appears in two "1670" editions of Honorius as well as the "1517" edition of the Grimorium Verum, but the collections of "plus rares secrets de l'Art magique" in the two volumes have significant overlap; either one was plagiarised from the other, or the same publisher was responsible for both. The de Blocquel press of Lille, a prolific reprinter of pulp Grimoires in the 19th century, redacted it out of the "1760" edition of Honorius and modified (read: censored) it in Les Véritables Clavicules de Salomon, a re-issue of the GV; Blocquel seems to have had no problem with violence / cruelty against all manner of farm animals, invocation of various major demons, magical abuse of the Mass and curses intended to magically induce a potentially fatal grand mal epileptic seizure (which is pretty much what Pour faire danser une fille nue is represented as doing), but references to nudity were apparently too much for him.)
"Hekas Hekas" & "Zazas" formulas.
General nature of MS. works of magic tending to be fluid things rather than fixed received texts or even stable textual traditions.
How the hell do I tie this back to BW? Sacrifice shows little actual acquaintance with the literature of Ceremonial Magic (save possibly the reference to Astaroth turning up "in human form," but that was made nonsense of with the rewrites to "Seduction") & the ritualistic portions of their show have more in common with Alexandrian Wicca (story was Sanders actually wrote those bits or at least advised them) than the Clavicle. The references to magical traditions in the lyrics are pretty vague and scattergun; use of "blood and hair and sweat and ends of fingernails" as magical materia; spells "cast with mirrors, dolls and wax"; bragging about magic books, that "the Clavicles of Solomon are nothing by their side"; controlling the Horsemen of the Apocalypse with "the talisman of Set"; the past lives / reincarnation theme which drives the protagonist's motives is hardly a thing in medieval through to early modern European occulture.]
