A few weeks ago I posted some images and a link to an eighteenth-century book of magic. Meanwhile, the Newberry Library in Chicago is looking for help to transcribe some magical books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so they’ve digitised the images and put them online. That means that you also get transcriptions of the otherwise difficult to read text. Here’s some instructions for talking to spirits:

The Book of Magical Charms, fol.10r, image 13 (excerpt)

To Speak with Spiritts
Call their names Orimoth, Belmoth Lymocke]
and Say thus. I coniure you by the names
of the Angels + Sator and Azamor that
yee intend to me in this Aore, and send
unto me a Spirite called Sagrigit that
doe fullfill my comanding and desire
and that can also understand my words
for one or 2 yeares [?]; or as long as I will.

Here‘s the Smithsonian Magazine article which describes the project and you can get to the scans of the books via the project’s website here. The most interesting for WFRP purposes is probably the Book of Magical Charms. Take this cure for toothache from fol. 12r (image 17), for example:

For the Toothache
Take a tooth out of a deadmans skull
and hange the same about the partie’s neck,
till the payne cease.

Or this one for a nosebleed from two pages later (fol. 14r, image 19):

Drye a little of the Pacients bloud
on a fireshovel over the fire, blow it
with a Quil into his nostrills.
This seldom or never fayleth.

These transcripts are not mine, but taken from the volunteers who’ve uploaded them onto the project website. It’s just awesome stuff and a great example of academic work in the Humanities which people often don’t know enough about.