Hi there, for an assignment, I am comparing Prospero's magic book to other historical examples of spellbooks or something similar, I feel like I have some things on the tip of my tongue but just cannot quite place exactly what I am going for here. The only one that springs to mind is the Necronomicon, but if there are others, fictional or otherwise, would love a handful of ideas. Thanks!
The entire prompt is very open ended and the topic is my choice so hoping it is fine to ask here rather than in the HW specific subreddit.
The 'Order of the Golden Dawn,' an influential English occult organization, used a text called the "cypher manuscript." This document, with some context, is available through Yale at the following link: https://ia802907.us.archive.org/30/items/EllicHowe-TheGoldenDawnCypherManuscrit/EllicHowe-TheGoldenDawnCypherManuscrit.pdf
The famed occultist Aleister Crowley used a text called "the book of the law," which has some overlap with religious use. (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aleister-Crowley)
While these two texts were associated with people who identified with the term "magic," most older texts do not use this term. Instead, the books that have been called magic over the centuries were often books with mundane, religious, or sometimes unknown purposes. These include documents like the 2nd-century Iranian alchemy treatise called the "Book of the Seven Climbs" (https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/medieval-alchemical-book-reveals-new-secrets#:~:text=The%20Book%20of%20the%20Seven%20Climes%20is%20the%20earliest%20known,in%20the%202nd%20century%20AD) or the writings of Ptolemy.
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