Sorcery for Beginners

Harry Potter is for amateurs. This week, the Guardian features Grimoires author Owen Davies's favorite magic tomes—and these books are the real deal. One of the best, Davies says, is The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, the so-called “secret book of Moses,” which is full of pseudo-Hebraic mystical symbols. Then there’s the Clavicule of Solomon, the “granddaddy of grimoires,” which was supposedly written by King Solomon himself. Davies calls The Book of Honorious—a manual on how to “receive visions of God, Hell and purgatory"—“very handy.”