The Grand Grimoire (The Red Dragon)

The Grand Grimoire, later reissued as Le Dragon Rouge (The Red Dragon), is notorious among the French grimoires for abandoning the pious tone of the Solomonic books in favour of frank spirit coercion and a diabolical pact. Its centrepiece is a rite to summon Lucifuge Rofocale, the "prime minister" of the infernal empire, and to negotiate with him for wealth, together with the making of the Blasting Rod (baguette foudroyante), with which the magician compels the spirit to terms. It claims great antiquity, sometimes a date of 1522, but it is an eighteenth- to nineteenth-century compilation belonging to the French "Bibliotheque bleue," the cheap popular chapbook trade, and its false antiquity is part of its sales pitch. Owen Davies treats it as a characteristic product of the point where the learned grimoire tradition met mass-market print and folk sorcery; it circulated widely in the nineteenth century, was carried to the French Caribbean, and left a mark on the folk-magical traditions there. It is best read as popular occult literature of the early-modern print trade rather than as a medieval magical text.

The Grand Grimoire is the most notorious of the French grimoires because of what it openly proposes. Where the Solomonic tradition frames the operator's authority as delegated from God and the spirit as compelled, this text sets out a negotiation. The operator raises Lucifuge Rofocale, who refuses, is compelled by the Blasting Rod, and then bargains; the pact that follows has terms on both sides.

Its other distinctive content is the instructions for making that rod, which involve a specific wood cut at a specific moment, and a set of practical directions written in the plain voice of a manual rather than the liturgical register of the Key of Solomon.

What matters as much as the contents is the form of publication. The Grand Grimoire circulated as a cheap chapbook, printed badly and sold widely under the title Le Dragon Rouge, and it travelled with the French language. It is a living presence in Haiti and the francophone Caribbean, where it has been absorbed into practice in ways its European compilers never intended, and it remains in print in that lineage. That afterlife, rather than any manuscript pedigree, is what makes it important.

The Blasting Rod itself has a wider life than the book. The instrument, and the phrase, recur across the French grimoire tradition and in works that borrow the name without the contents, which is one of the ways the Grand Grimoire's material spread beyond its own covers.