…ou l’Art de commander les esprits célestes, aériens, terrestres, infernaux, avec le vrai secret de faire parler les morts, de gagner toutes les fois qu’on met aux lotteries, de découvrir les trésors cachés, ..
by Antonio Venitiana del Rabina, 1512 (ca. 1800)
The Red Dragon (Le Dragon Rouge) is a rebranded version of the earlier French grimoire The Grand Grimoire, first published around 1750. The Red Dragon was published approximately fifty years later at the turn of the eighteenth century. Around the same time, or closely thereafter (ca. 1800), another variation of the same text with slightly different content was published under the name, The True Red Dragon (Le Veritable Dragon Rouge). Like Le Grand Grimoire, the introductory chapter was authored by someone named Antonio Venitiana del Rabina who supposedly gathered this information from the original writings of King Solomon. It contains instructions purported to summon the demon in charge of Hell’s government by order of Lucifer named, Lucifuge Rofocale, for the purpose of forming a diabolic pact with Lucifer. Like many Solomonic tracts, it also contains a section on rare secrets with spells for various purposes such as winning the lottery, speaking to the dead, to be loved by a girl, to make oneself invisible, etc.
Some of material in this grimoire derives from the Clavicules du Roi Salomon, Par Armadel. Livre Troisieme which is an abbreviated French verion of the much earlier Latin text, Clavicula Salomonis de Secretis which I have translated into English here.
Below, I present the earliest known version of Le Dragon Rouge (ca. 1800), along with two of its earliest German translations, both dating to the mid-nineteenth century. The demon illustrations closely match those found in a more obscure, mid-nineteenth-century French edition of Le Grand Grimoire, suggesting that this edition, rather than the earliest imprint, may have served as the source for the German translation. One German edition bears the notorious and mysterious Peter Hammer imprint, with an almost certainly fictitious publication date of 1725, while the other is marked C. F. Trommsdorff, 1850. It is difficult to determine which appeared first.
As I have discussed elsewhere, Peter Hammer may have been a pseudonym used by J. Scheible, who published numerous Zauberbücher during the nineteenth century. Alternatively, the imprint may have belonged to another publisher whose editions Scheible subsequently reproduced. We know that some books bearing the Peter Hammer imprint contain Scheible’s publisher catalogs at the back, strongly suggesting that he also printed under this name. But whether an earlier, independent Peter Hammer publisher existed remains an open question.
The Peter Hammer imprint was, of course, fictitious, serving as a convenient means for publishers to conceal their identities and avoid potential legal repercussions. Thus, the true identity of Peter Hammer remains a mystery.
