Historical Library of Witchcraft and Magic

As this app is so far only available for the iPad, and I do not own one, I am unable to tell you how this app really works. But according to this favourable review, it works very well as a 'virtual book shelf'.

The Historical Library of Witchcraft and Magic app is made by Bibliolife, and includes a number of out of print and obscure books on the subject of witchcraft. According to Bibliolife's own promotional material, the texts include The Magic Staff: An Autobiography of Andrew Jackson Davis, The Witch, The Magic of Jewels and Charms, Modern Magic, A Short History of the Salem Village Witchcraft Trials, Mysticism and Magic in Turkey, and many more, probably including a number of those available from Bibliolife subsidiary Bibliobazaar.

It looks like an interesting app, and possibly a brilliant ressource of a mix of fictional and non fictional books on the subject that may be worth reading or at least having at hand if you are particularly interested in older books on the subject. In that respect, I suppose it could be very interesting if a similar app was made that included various books and texts relating to the subject of vampires, e.g. the rarely seen first English translation of Calmet's Dissertation which is available as a print on demand book from Bibliobazaar.

However, if the library app does not include any current information on the books and the subject, I am somewhat worried that the casual reader will be more misinformed than informed on the subject. This is apparently still a relevant issue in certain circles that have a particular interest in the subject, as a so-called 'Neopagan' writes in an interesting essay on Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt:

‘We Neopagans now face a crisis. As new data appeared, historians altered their theories to account for it. We have not. Therefore an enormous gap has opened between the academic and the “average” Pagan view of witchcraft. We continue to use of out-dated and poor writers, like Margaret Murray, Montague Summers, Gerald Gardner, and Jules Michelet.

We avoid the somewhat dull academic texts that present solid research, preferring sensational writers who play to our emotions. For example, I have never seen a copy of Brian Levack’s The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe in a Pagan bookstore. Yet half the stores I visit carry Anne Llewellyn Barstow’s Witchcraze, a deeply flawed book which has been ignored or reviled by most scholarly historians.

We owe it to ourselves to study the Great Hunt more honestly, in more detail, and using the best data available. Dualistic fairy tales of noble witches and evil witch hunters have great emotional appeal, but they blind us to what happened.’

I heartily welcome any new technological advance in making books and information easily available, but at the same time I find it paramount to stress how important it is that outdated information and views are not presented as if they are still valid. The easier it gets to find all sorts of old books and material, the more important it is to be able to view this material in a contemporary and informed perspective.

Why librarians should be interested in vampyrology

As should be apparent from this blog, I and others interested in this subject of magia posthuma or vampires spend a lot of time perusing books and other texts. We hope to find more information through books or archival material instead of going on a field expedition to regions of the world where, perhaps, we can find people who believe in vampires or other revenants. In that sense, vampyrology – as some call it – is rarely thought of as an empirical endeavour. For that reason, people who are or have been part of or in contact with a society whose ‘belief system’ includes something akin to a ‘vampire’, can be bewildered and perplexed by our interest.

Of course, a lot of research (if I dare use that term in this connection) is done in an office, but in many cases it does in fact relate to empirical data, like in the case of so-called desktop experiments. In the case of vampires, we somehow expect the subject to be part of something remote, something in the past or at least something that is hard, most likely even impossible to observe, so the endeavour to gain some understanding of the subject usually involves, as Eric W. Steinhauer says in his Vampyrologie für Bibliothekare, ‘Ein Haufen Papier’: a pile of paper. And, as he points out, this was certainly the case in the 17th and 18th century, when people debated vampires. For a great number of the learned people of that day, the library was their equivalent to a laboratory. The texts of e.g. the Serbian vampire cases themselves, in particular Flückinger’s 1732 Visum & Repertum, became the source of knowledge:

‘Was bedeutet das methodisch? Nun, der gelehrte Forscher nimmt die Vampirschilderungen so hin, wie sie berichtet werden – war doch das plötzliche Dahinsiechen offenbar vorbei, wenn der vampirische Leichnam vernichtet wurde – und sucht dann nach einer plausiblen Erklärung in den Texten und Theorien der in den Bibliotheken präsenten philosophischen und theologischen Autoritäten. Hier wurde er leicht fündig. Und so konnte der Vampir aus der spezifischen Medialität der Bibliothek heraus erwachsen und so konnte seine Existenz intellektuell plausibel werden.’ (p. 47)

The way that the vampire research of the 18th century was related to archives and libraries is the first point in Steinhauer’s vampyrology for librarians. The second point relates to the importance of texts and libraries in certain pieces of vampire fiction: Polidori’s The Vampyre, Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Stoker’s Dracula, and Kostova’s The Historian: Books and libraries connect the fantastic world of the undead with the reality of our present day, making libraries, in Steinhauer’s terminology, into a mechanism that materializes the uncanny.
The third and final point, however, relates to the nature of books themselves. They somehow stand there on the shelves waiting for a reader to pick them up, only to suck him into the world and thought of the author, who may have been dead for centuries. Here Steinhauer quotes Jorge Luis Borges who says that a library is full of dead people who can be reborn:

‘… eine Bibliothek sei …voll von Toten. Und diese Toten können neu geboren, wieder zum Leben gebracht werden, wenn man ihre Seiten ôffnen.’

But too much study of books can make you weak and pale, as I recall my grandparents telling me when I was a child who, apparently, at times spent a little too much time reading books and comics. Other descriptions of the effects that books can have on the health and imagination of researchers and other people who spend a lot of time over books are dealt with in Steinhauer’s Vampyrology, which is a delightful little book on vampires with some tongue-in-cheek observations meant for fellow librarians.

Vampyrologie für Bibliothekare is brief, just 101 pages, but the notes and bibliography show that Steinhauer himself has spent many hours studying vampire books! In fact, I found a few interesting references that I will now check up on. There are also a number of very nice illustrations, which - although it is slightly flawed by some unfortunate typos - altogether makes the book a pleasure to read.

And it is, of course, worth reading not only for librarians. In fact, it would make for a nice gift for anyone interested in books in general.

Eric W. Steinhauer: Vampyrologie für Bibliothekare: Eine kulturwissenschaftliche Lektüre des Vampirs (Eisenhut Verlag, 101 pages, €12.90)

Bloody crimes in a magnificent library

As mentioned in my previous post, Gerard van Swieten was head of the court library (Hofbibliohek). The library was built in the 1720s, under Charles VI, and today is known as the Prunksaal, a magnificent baroque library that should make anyone say: Now, this is a library! Van Swieten started systematically obtaining books for the library, and he is commemorated in the huge hall by a bust shown in the photo below.

Until November 2nd this year the Prunksaal houses an exhibition on bloody crimes from Cain's murder of Abel over cannibals to modern mass murderers and the Holocaust: Blutige Geschichte. A gallery of some of the exhibited books and objects is found here.

The photos can't do the baroque hall with its frescos, books etc. justice, so it's obviously a place to visit if you go to Vienna, although you have to hurry if you want to see books on cannibals exhibited next to Van Swieten :-)

More on eBooks on demand

I mentioned the concept of eBooks on demand in a previous post, and I would like to point the web site of that excellent and promising initiative. The list of libraries that are part of the initiative includes major libraries in Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic and other countries on the European continent. In short, we can hopefully look forward to being able to borrow more books related to the subject of vampires and magia posthuma of a better quality than some of those available on Google books.

Old and new

Spending a few hours at the reading rooms of the Royal Library in Copenhagen perusing a huge stack of books from the eighteenth century, I took a few photos of the 'old' and 'new' library, a synthesis of old and new, the new part being the so-called Black Diamond lopcated by the Copenhagen harbour.

As you can see, a road kind of intersects the library, and you can pass from one part of the 'diamond' to another above the road. Actually, you collect books on the part connecting the two buildings just above the road.

Inside, in the reading room, you forget about being in a modern building, as you are transported into the world of the books you are reading or browsing :-)

Exhibiting Valvasor

Years ago a friend and I wrote to the Royal Library in Copenhagen suggesting that they arranged an exhibition of books relating to vampires. Well, we got a polite no, but I still think it is a promising idea. One of the books in the collections of the library that should be included in an exhibition like this one is the magnificent book Die Ehre des Hertzogthums Crain by Johann Weichard Valvasor published in 1689.

In an earlier post I have reprinted a small portion from this book while discussing the shepherd of Blov, but a digitalized edition of the whole book is available here. The link goes directly to the page where you will find the excerpt that I reprinted from my old photocopy in my post.

Reading a digital book on the internet certainly isn't like holding the book in your hands, but the digital edition of Valvasor does allow you to study all the nice engravings that are included in this large format book, and you can do so 24/7 all around the globe, so I'm not complaining. But the book would be ideal in an exhibition of vampire books!

The Royal Library in co-operation with libraries in a number of EU countries is offering eBooks on demand (EOD), which means that the first one to order a book pays a fee to have the digital book made, whereas future users can use the eBook for free! As the fee is pretty low, it is hopefully a very handy way of getting books digitized for the benefit of everyone interested in old books!

Internet resources

Like I stated in my welcome post to this blog, there are thousands of internet sites about vampires but I know of very few that are really useful for my purposes. There is, however, a great deal of material that can be useful, one example being the databases of libraries, another digitalized books.

Google's book search is often pretty confusing. A lot of the books are not fully available, and some of them have even been scanned so hurriedly that pages are missing. However, the general idea of establishing an online library of practically any book is ingenious and most welcome, and I have of course also been able to find interesting material using it.

A lot of libraries these days have their own online section of high quality digitalized books. The national library in my own country, the Royal Danish Library, has a number of digital facsimiles on their web site. One example is a Danish translation of a book on the dance of the dead, but you can also find the latin lext of the Gesta Danorum, and there is even a section on fabulous creatures. Unfortunately, a number of these resources are only available in Danish, so beware!

For the study of Magia Posthuma, other resources may prove more helpful. Here I will only mention one, the Gallica of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, but I will return to the subject in future posts.

Gallica is a very large collection of French books and texts. So you can e.g. find a digital facsimile of the Encyclopédie ou Dictionaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers with a definition of a vampire, and the text of the Lettres Juives ou Correspondance philosophique, historique et critique entre un juif voyageur et ses correspondans en divers endroits with its 137th letter on vampires by the Marquis d'Argent.

Of particular interest is the digital facsimile of Augustin Calmet's 1751 "nouvelle édition revûe, corrigée & augmentée" of Traité sur les apparitions des esprits, et sur les vampires, ou les revenans de Hongrie, de Moravie, &c. So with Gallica you can have the 1751 original text at your hand for reading or reference, which can come in very handy when you are studying the Magia Posthuma and e.g. wish to read Calmet's reference to de Schertz's book:

"Ces apparitions ont donné occasion à un petit ouvrage intitulé: Magia posthuma, composé par Charles Ferdinand de Schertz, imprimé à Olmuz en 1706. dédié au Prince Charles de Lorraine Evêque d'Olmutz & d'Osnabruch." (Tome II, p. 32f)

Carl Ferdinand von Schertz: Magia Posthuma

Magia Posthuma is not only the name of this blog, but also the title of a book written by Carl Ferdinand von Schertz (d. 1724) and published in Olmütz (present day Olomouc in the Czech Republic) in 1706. At least that is what we are told by Augustin Calmet in his famous Dissertation sur les apparitions des esprits etc. and by Montague Summers in The Vampire in Europe. However, although I have been able to find a few other books by von Schertz in the catalogues of a few libraries, I have as yet not been able to locate one single copy of the Magia Posthuma!

It is quite obvious from other books that refer to von Schertz’s Magia Posthuma, that the authors are simply quoting or paraphrasing either Calmet or Summers. A few authors even comment on the unavailability of the book. Stephan Hock in his Die Vampyrsagen und ihre Verwertung in der deutschen Literatur (1900) mentions that it is “mir leider nicht zugänglich”, i.e. it was not available, and Aribert Schroeder in Vampirismus: Seine Entwicklung vom Thema zum Motiv (1973) indicates that the book belongs to the category that “konnte nicht eingesehen werden”, i.e. it was unavailable.



I have tried to ask the Danish Royal Library to locate the book for me. However, they could not locate a copy. Consequently I have myself looked at a number of web sites of Continental European libraries, but still without result.

So it seems that this book, which some have labelled as the earliest book on vampires, remains a bit of a mystery. Frankly, I have at times doubted that this book might even exist, so if anyone can shed any light on the whereabouts or even existence of a copy of this book, I would be very grateful!