Touch Me Not. A Most Rare Compendium of the Whole Magical Art.
London: Fulgur Ltd., 2017. First Edition. Hardcover. Folio. 158pp. Special Silk Cloth with red gilt titling to upper board, and spine. Printed custom endpapers. Printed on thick art paper in colour and b&w. A beautifully produced facsimile of a heavily illustrated eighteenth century Austrian magical manuscript, with English translation. The book apparently sold out very quickly, and was reissued by the publisher in a different binding in 2019. From the publisher: "Dr Hereward Tilton has taught on Rosicrucianism, magic and alchemy in Renaissance and early modern Europe at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, the department for the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam, and the Exeter Centre for the Study of Esotericism at the University of Exeter. Here he provides us with a brief introduction to his discoveries while translating the text of Touch Me Not. Like a Bosch painting, the pages of Touch Me Not – an Austrian manuscript compendium of the black magical arts – teem with a bizarre host of threatening, misshapen demons. Clad with feathers, scales and butterfly wings, they beat drums, spew fire and assault our sensibilities with their pendulous breasts and engorged genitalia, urinating, defecating and spawning yet more demons to devour any wretched soul unable to resist the temptation of the forbidden arts. Thirty-five watercolour and ink images of demons, their sigils and the magicians who summon them illustrate the German and Latin text of the Wellcome Library’s Touch Me Not. A Most Rare Compendium of the Whole Magical Art. The manuscript was created circa 1795, and appears at first sight to be a ‘grimoire’ or magician’s manual intended for noviciates of black magic. Psychedelic drug use, animal sacrifice, sigillary body art, masturbation fantasy and the necromantic manipulation of gallows-corpses count among the transgressive procedures it depicts. With their aid hidden treasures are wrested from guardian spirits, and the black magician’s highest ambition – an infernal transfiguration and union with the Devil – can be fulfilled. But for those dilettantes who fail to follow the procedures to the letter, or succumb to their fears at lonely, Godforsaken sites in the dead of night, the consequences are dire. Hidden for decades within the Wellcome Library collection, Touch Me Not is published here as a full colour facsimile for the first time. We have commissioned a translation of the German and Latin texts from Hereward Tilton and Merlin Cox, scholars who have explored the sources for the various elements and provided copious references. There is also an introduction from Hereward that lays out the context for this extraordinary survival. Contents include:– On coagulation. Narcosis.– Compendium of the operation.– Names of the evil spirits to be conjured.– On the pact in nigromancy between the Devil and man. – On black magic in general.– On the cacomagical mirror.– He who has ears [to hear], let him hear." As new. Fine with the fine original publisher's paper "belly band / book-band" (a printed thick paper advertising strip that is sometimes - as in this instance - issued instead of a dust jacket). Item #70596
ISBN: 9781527211629
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