Blood, Brains, and Botany: Decoding the Grossest Grimoire Recipes
To step into the world of traditional magic is to enter a stranger, older imagination. In the pages of grimoires like the Picatrix or the Greek Magical Papyri, you may come across ingredients that feel shocking to the modern eye: odd, unsettling, and steeped in a logic that no longer sits easily in the daylight.
From medieval “love cakes,” for which the dough was said to be rubbed over the practitioner’s sweating body before baking, (1) to darker spells requiring powdered human bones (2) or cobra blood (thought in parts of Indonesia and Southeast Asia to rouse sexual desire) (1) the history of magic can read less like legend and more like a haunted, fever-dream cinema. The infamous Picatrix casually drops recipes requesting lion brains, leopard fat, and wolf blood, or a concoction of black cat brains mixed with human faeces to make someone hate you. (3) A 16th-century love potion recipe created and shared by the Italian monk Girolamo Folengo even listed tomb dust, bits of corpses, toad venom, and infant’s blood. (4) A lot of these ingredients make magic sound like the evil cult that a lot of media paints it as. Like… what kind of occult shopping list is this supposed to be?
However, before you freak out and close the books, or worry that traditional magic is a disgusting unethical hellhole, I’d like to share the big secret with you: you aren’t actually supposed to be using blood and brains. I’ve written this post in order to look into the grossest grimoire recipes and help you decode them for your practice.
Unmasking Decknamen
Back in ancient times, magical and alchemical knowledge was highly guarded and very secret. To prevent untrained laymen from getting their hands on and performing rituals that were secret and that could entail "destruction for the world", ancient sages in Egypt and Mesopotamia used a system called Decknamen, which translated to “code names”. These codes used animal or human terminology in order to refer to common substances.(3)(5)
Some examples mentioned in the Greek Magical Papyri and ancient Mesopotamian texts (3)(6)(7):
Blood of Hestia = Chamomile
Semen of Hermes = Dill
Human Bone = Shepherd's Staff plant
Snake's Blood = Hematite stone (or Snake-Plant resin)
Blood of a Baboon = Cynocephalion herb (or lizard blood)
Blood of Typhon (or Donkey) = Red Anemone flower (or red lead oxide)
Blood of Titan = Wild Lettuce
Kronos' Blood = A specific high-energy terrestrial mineral or resin
Wolf’s Fat = A specific currently unidentified medicinal plant
Mummy Powder = Myrrh or Benzoin
So if the spell you found in that old grimoire is telling you to use the Semen of Hermes don’t freak out, you just need some dill, my friend.
Sources:
Casting Love Spells by Gregory Lee White
Ex Umbra. Necromancy Grimoire by Asamod ka
The Complete Picatrix (Christopher Warnock translation)
Bring Me Love by Icy Sedgwick
Written in Blood? Decoding Some Red Inks of the Greek Magical Papyri by Miriam Blanco Cesteros
"Dreck- Deck- or What the Heck?" by Maddalena Rumor
Greek Magical Papyri
