Now about the "terrible & forbidden books"—I am forced to say that most of them are purely imaginary. There never was any Abdul Alhazred or Necronomicon, for I invented the names myself. Robert Bloch devised the idea of Ludvig Prinn & his De Vermis Mysteriis, while the Book of Eibon is an invention of lark Ashton Smith's. The late Robert E. Howard is responsible for Friedrich von Junzt & his Unaussprechlichen Kulten. So far as Albertus Magnus goes—there was such a person, but he never wrote any such thing as "Egyptian Secrets". The latter must have been merely one of the cheap occult compilations (like the 7th Book of Moses &c.) which borrow impressive-sounding names to delude the public & attract attention. The real Albertus Magnus (Albrecht von Bollstädt or de Groot) was an ecclesiastic and philosopher of the 13th century, whose subtle speculations & knowledge of physical science caused ignorant people to regard him as a magician or devil-worshipper, & to associate his name with all sorts of things he never did & all sorts of books he never wrote. He was born in Swabia—at Laningen on the Danube—in 1193, & was educated at Padua in Italy. He joined the Dominican Friars in 1222, & was made Provincial of the order in 1254. He taught at Cologne, & had the famous ecclesiastical philosopher Thomas Aquinas as a pupil. He was made Bishop of Regensburg in 1259, but resigned three years later. Only 4 years ago—in 1932—the Catholic Church made him a saint. His works were first printed in Lyons & Leyden in 1651, by the Dominican friar Pierre Jammy. They amount to 21 large volumes, but some of these are probably spurious. The genuine ones relate wholly to philosophy & physical science, in which he was a follower of Aristotle. He founded a distinct school of Philosophy, called the "Albertists". What gave Albertus his reputation for magic & alchemy was probably—aside from his philosophical speculations—his unusual scientific experiments. The Middle Ages—as the case of Roger Bacon shows—feared & distrusted experimental science, & tended to regard experimenters as wizards or diabolists. Enemies accused him of black magic, & circulated all manner of legends concerning him. In his old age he fell into a sort of dotage, & may have made eccentric utterances & demonstrations which bore out the popular legendry. The most famous story about Albertus is that of his dinner to King William of Holland in 1240, in the garden of his monastery. It was midwinter, & the King was astonished at being asked to dine outdoors. But when the party adjourned to the garden, they found it full of flowers & greenery, & gay with singing birds. This naturally sounded like magic to the Middle Ages, but the truth is that the garden was probably a greenhouse, roofed over with some transparent substance & powerfully heated. However, the anecdote (if true) shows that Albertus liked to astonish people. The habit of calling Albertus an alchemist probably arose from a passage in his De Rebus Metallicus et Mineralibus, where he speaks of testing the gold which an alchemist claimed to have made, & of finding it very infusible. This alchemical reputation grew to such an extent that Michael Maier (alchemist & author of Musaeum Chemicum) declared that he had actually found the "Philosopher's Stone" & had given the secret to his pupil Thomas Aquinas. All of which shows that AL was quite a boy—though he never wrote some of the miscellaneous fantastic junk attributed to him—either the book you mention, or the better-known De Secretis Mulierum.

As for seriously-written books on dark, occult, & supernatural themes—in all truth, they don't amount to much. That is why it's more fun to invent mythical works like the Necronomicon & Book of Eibon. The magical lore which superstitious people really believed, & which trickled down to the Middle Ages from antiquity, was really nothing more than a lot of childish invocations & formulae for raising daemons &c., plus systems of speculation as dry as the orthodox philosophies. It was merely a lot of ill-assorted odds & ends—memories of Graeco-Roman mystery-cults, Pythagorean speculation (embodying ideas from India), Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, & Jewish magic, & the Neoplatonism & Manichaeism of the late Roman Empire. The Alexandrian Jews were probably most active in keeping it alive—hence the preponderance of Jewish Kabbalism in the puerile mixture. The Byzantines & Arabs also clung to such stuff—to which was added the scraps of popular European superstition (Latin, Teutonic, Celtic), & the dark lore of the furtive Dianic cults (responsible for witches' Sabbats &c.) which perpetuated the revolting remnants of a lost pre-Aryan nature-worship. All this lore was disconnected & fragmentary, & there was never any especial book holding a large amount of it. The so-called "Hermetic Volumes" of "Hermes Trismegistus" are simply a set of metaphysical scraps from 3d century Neoplatonism & Philonic Judaisim. It is not until modern times that we see any attempt to collect & codify these scraps. What the mediaeval & renaissance philosophers & "magicians" wrote is mostly namby-pamby stuff of their own devising—plus the popular folklore of their day (cf. Paracelsus, &c). The first serious collection of ancient magical scraps was Francis Barrett's "The Magus"—published in 1805 or so & reprinted in 1896. The first really scholarly material of this sort was the work of the eccentric Frenchman Alphonse-Louis Constant (middle of 19th century), who wrote under the pseudonym "Eliphas Levi". More compilation of the same kind has been done by Arthur Edward Waite (still living, I believe)—who has also translated "Eliphas Levi's" books into English. If you want to see what the actual "magical" rites & incantations of antiquity & the Middle Ages were like, get the works of Waite—especially his "Black Magic" & "History of Magic". Sorry I don't own these—if I did I'd be glad to lend them. Other stuff can be found in Waite's translations of "Eliphas Levi". There is a more popular history of sorcery by "Sax Rhomer" (Arthur Sarsfield Ward), whose title I forget. But you will undoubtedly find all this stuff very disappointing. It is flat, childish, pompous, & unconvincing—merely a record of human childishness & gullibility in past ages. Any good fiction-writer can think up "records of primal horror" which surpass in imaginative force any occult production which has sprung from genuine credulousness. The crap of the theosophists—which falls into the class of conscious fakery—is interesting in spots. It combines some genuine Hindoo & other Oriental myths with a subtle charlatanism obviously drawn from 19th century scientific concepts. Scott-Elliot's "Atlantis & the Lost Lemuria" & Sinnett's "Esoteric Buddhism" are rather fascinating. Clark Ashton Smith knows a lot of this stuff, & E. Hoffmann Price read up on it rather extensively some years ago.

Pseudo-scientific or semi-charlatanic stuff forms a class by itself. Among this material (all of which is good fictional source-reading) is the "Atlantis" lore promulgated by Le Plongeon, Donnelly, & Lewis SPence, the "Mu" books of the late Col. Churchward, the miscellaneous editions of Charles Fort, &c., &c. Some of these authors are plain fakers, while others are self-deluded "nuts". But even this kind of thing can't equal a really well-written story.

• H. P. Lovecraft to Willis Conover, 29 July 1936, Letters to Robert Bloch and Others 377-379

Lovecraft was always very forthright about how the Necronomicon and other strange and terrible books of the Mythos were fictional creations - and he himself did not learn much about the history of the occult until relatively late in life; his early story "The Horror at the Red Hook" famously borrowed incantations from that most mystical of tomes, the Encyclopedia Britannica - but he did "read up" on the subject a bit in the 30s, and by and large found medieval grimoires silly things, hence his drive to develop his own fictional works, which fooled many people, including a few fellow pulp writers.

There is a "long tail" to this, as eventually some "real" occultists decided to actually produce various versions of the Necronomicon and create or adapt magical systems that incorporate Lovecraftian elements - and they're still at it today.

Not to toot my own horn, but I wrote an entire series of features on magic for The Escapist using the second season of Penn & Teller's Fool Us as a launching point, most of which deal with the history of the performing art: https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/moviesandtv/columns/foolinggarwulf

It's been a long while since I even looked at this series, but the one that stands out in terms of history is about the Indian Rope Trick. This was the holy grail of magic tricks - and it was based on a hoax published in 1890 by John E. Wilkie in the Chicago Tribune.

The hoax captured the imagination of magicians, and they flocked to India in droves, driving fakirs nuts while trying to ferret the secret of the rope trick from them (which was impossible, because they weren't doing it in the first place). In the end, Western magicians invented their own methods and added them to their shows.

So, the Indian Rope Trick was so good that when it turned out not to have existed in the first place, magicians had to invent it.

My source for that article was The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History, by Peter Lamont (it's still in my library somewhere).

Here's a quick one on Harry Houdini and his rabbi(s), plus the Houdini-Spiritualism debate!

Houdini was Jewish- he was born Erik Weisz/Ehrich Weiss in Hungary to a Jewish family, emigrating along with them to the US when he was a child. The family first settled in Wisconsin, where Houdini's father, Mayer Samuel Weisz, served as a rabbi of a congregation. He was fired from his position and, impoverished, the family moved to New York City, where they settled in Yorkville, then a popular area of second settlement for German Jews. It is there that the family met Rabbi Bernard Drachman, one of the first American-born traditional (non-Reform) rabbis. Drachman, a fascinating figure in his own right who was a key figure in the development of both the Modern Orthodox and Conservative movements in the United States, at this time became the rabbi of Congregation Zichron Ephraim (now the Park East Synagogue), near the Weiszes' home in Yorkville. Houdini himself as a child attended Zichron Ephraim's Hebrew school, along with some of his siblings; Drachman remembers his name as being Jacob, and it's unclear whether this is a case of Drachman not remembering Houdini's real first name correctly or whether Jacob/Yaakov was Houdini's Hebrew name.

Drachman, who wrote a deeply interesting autobiography for those who may be interested in the development of American Jewish life at the turn of the 20th century, devotes a few pages to discussing Houdini and his parents. (While I was a bit of a magic hobbyist as a kid, I got started learning about Houdini by reading Drachman, which I acknowledge as being a bit backward...) The autobiography was written after Houdini's early death at age 52 of a ruptured appendix, and therefore serves as more of a retrospective on Drachman's relationship with such a great celebrity. He starts by mentioning that he remembered Houdini and his siblings in Hebrew school, and then describes a relationship with Houdini, who he says had "a profound reverence for the Jewish faith and and deep-seated filial affection for his parents and reverence for their memory," in which Houdini would write to Drachman from around the world and, according, to Drachman, "looked upon me as his teacher and respected me as such." He then tells a touching story about how many years earlier Drachman had bought a set of Maimonides's Mishneh Torah from Houdini's impoverished father as a way of giving him financial assistance with dignity, and that later, when Drachman asked Houdini for a contribution to help pay the synagogue's mortgage, Houdini gave $500 on the condition that Drachman return the books to Houdini, so that he could have them as a memory of his father, despite the fact that Houdini could barely read them. He also describes his time speaking at the unveiling of the massive monuments which Houdini put up at his parents' graves (which Drachman is careful to note were not a mausoleum, in accordance with Jewish tradition), and that Houdini referred himself as "your [Drachman's] old scholar" in the letter he sent requesting that he speak at the unveiling. He also mentions Houdini's wife, Bess, who was not Jewish but who he recorded saying once at a dinner at Drachman's home that she considered herself to have become Jewish when she married Houdini, which Drachman says he did not comment on at the time, but that there is Talmudic support for that idea (though normative Judaism requires conversion).

But the most interesting part to me (and Drachman, who describes the above stories as "mediocre happenings") is what happened when Drachman spoke at Houdini's funeral. This I'll transcribe from Drachman's own words:

It was my sad privilege to officiate at the funeral. His passing became the occasion for the widespread discussion of his personality and the extraordinary powers which he unquestionably possessed.... What these powers were I, of course, know as little as anyone else, but they certainly were far above the vulgar sleight-of-hand and tricks of ordinary so-called magicians. The Spiritualists claimed Houdini as one of their own and asserted that his escape from apparently unsuperable means of confinement was due to his ability to dematerialize his body and thus pass through all physical restraints. Houdini himself denied that he was a Spiritualist medium- he was, indeed, an outspoken opponent of spiritualism- and stated that his performances were strictly in accordance with natural law.

This statement, of course, left the matter as much of a mystery as before. The Spiritualists refused to accept Houdini's denial that he was a medium. They insisted that he was. They even tried to drag me into the controversy as upholding their contention. In my funeral address I had used the words, "Houdini possessed a wondrous power that he never understood and which he never revealed to anyone in life." These words are meant to be taken in their narrowest and most literal significance. All I meant was that Houdini possessed an extraordinary and mysterious power- and by that statement I am still willing to stand- the precise nature and quality of which was not clear even to him and that he had never taken anyone into his confidence nor revealed what his concept of his extraordinary gift was.

But the Spiritualists seized upon these words to draw from them the utterly unjustified inference that I considered Houdini a Spiritualist medium and that his powers were derived from a super-mundane, non-material source. Arthur Conan Doyle, the well-known author and Spiritualist leader, interprets them to this effect in his book, The Edge of the Unknown. Of course, I meant nothing of the kind. My statement was merely a recognition of his undeniably extraordinary power, concerning the nature of which I admit that I am just as ignorant as everybody else, including A. C. Doyle, neither more nor less.

Drachman really had been quoted by Conan Doyle in The Edge of the Unknown, though Conan Doyle had done him the discourtesy of misspelling his name:

At that burial some curious and suggestive words were used by the presiding rabbi, Barnard Drachman. He said: "Houdini possessed a wondrous power that he never Understood, and which he never revealed to anyone in life." Such an expression coming at so solemn a moment from one who may have been in a special position to know must show that my speculations are not extravagant or fantastic when I deal with the real source of those powers. The rabbi's speech is to be taken with Houdini's own remark, when he said to my wife: "There are some of my feats which my own wife does not know the secret of."

What kind of a relationship Drachman actually had with Houdini is debatable. While the above stories can be confirmed by other sources, when told through Houdini's eyes the story with the purchase of the Mishneh Torah reads somewhat differently- in one interview with a writer from The American Hebrew, Houdini tells the same story, but temporarily forgets Drachman's name, and doesn't mention that he gave a donation to the synagogue in order to reacquire the books, only mentioning that Drachman was the one who bought them. He describes Drachman as the rabbi who confirmed him at his bar mitzvah, and in contrast with Drachman's description of Houdini as being barely literate in Hebrew, Houdini portrays himself as having been an assistant Hebrew teacher to his father in Wisconsin. As that would have obviously occurred when Houdini was a small child, I'm inclined to believe Drachman's actual assessment of Houdini's skills. Houdini also told the story of how he visited Drachman once he was famous as Harry Houdini and revealed his true identity as a former student, and that Drachman was completely shocked, implying that any connection later in Houdini's life came after a long break in Houdini's youth. Perhaps, though, this article came before a reconnection between Houdini and Drachman, so that many of Drachman's recollections come from a time after this date when they were closer. (On a completely different note, in the same article Houdini humorously claims that his legendary lock-picking skills came from his learning how to break the locks on his mother's cabinets where she hid the pies that she'd baked.)

More significantly, while Drachman did speak at Houdini's funeral, the rabbi who Houdini actually requested to perform the service was Rabbi Benjamin A Tintner, of the Reform Mount Zion Congregation, whose father, Rabbi Moritz Tintner, had eulogized Houdini's beloved mother at her funeral (Drachman describes this as having been in his own absence) and had been a friend of Houdini's father. Rabbi Tintner, according to Houdini, had performed Houdini's wedding, a very significant difference between him and Drachman- Drachman would never have performed an intermarriage, while Tintner, in Houdini's words, had "linked me with the wife whom I have never stopped loving." (That said, there is apparently some controversy about Houdini's marriage- someone with more knowledge on Houdini could say more.)

Whatever their true relationship was, it is clear that Drachman held Houdini in high esteem, no matter how much of his motivation for stating it (or perhaps his overstatement) may be chalked up to Houdini's celebrity. At the end of his section on Houdini, Drachman says:

However, it is not because of this aspect of his personality [his magical talent] that I esteemed and respected Houdini and cherish his memory. My respect and, may I say, my love went to him, as a true friend, as a generous and unselfish character, as a loyal and truly filial son, and as a Jew with a warm Jewish heart. As such and for these reasons his name will ever be held in honor as a worthy son of Israel.