The Black Grimoire – Angel Zialor

The Black Grimoire – Angel Zialor
Starlight Books – 2008

I told myself I’d stop doing it, but I realised a few days ago that the multibook post I had planned for today wasn’t going to be finished on time. I have hence reviewed yet another independently published grimoire that I found on the internet. These things are often short, and they’re usually handicapped enough to poke some serious fun at. The only downside is having to come to terms with the fact that I am wasting my time reading such shit.

This little pamphlet is awful muck. It’s clearly just a bunch of spells, rituals and prayers that the author, Angel Zialor, stole from other sources. Although the author describes the contents of this book as diabolic, much of it is made up of Christian prayers. Angel Zialor is a clueless moron.

I have two examples from this text that further demonstrate that last point. The first is a ritual of Sumerian Money magic that instructs the magician to urinate into a jar and say to it, “Salty liquid from within me, I demand that you bring me wealth.” I’m not making this up. Angel Zialor is literally instructing her readers to speak to a jar of their own piss. This sounds like the kind of thing a severely deranged mental patient might do, not a powerful magician. I wonder if there’s an equivalent ritual in which the practitioner must demand a plate of their shit to deliver them a lover. “Smelly brown paste from within me, I demand that you bring me my one true love.” That would be no more ridiculous.

As mentioned already, the spells or rituals in The Black Grimoire seem like they have been taken from other books. With the exception of one, I wasn’t bothered tracking down the original sources. This piece of shit book doesn’t warrant that level of research. The one ritual that I did look up was “The Spell of Hatred”, a spell to cause harm to your enemies. This spell is a paraphrased version of the Barabbas Spell featured in Paul Huson’s 1970 book, Mastering Witchcraft. There’s a few minor differences between the Spell of Hatred and the Barabbas prayer, but the content is almost identical. The most noticeable change is that instead of using sard stone as an ingredient, Zialor opts for a small piece of sardine. This makes things sound pretty funny later on when instead of evoking the “Queen of Sard” as in the original Barabbas spell, Zialor’s version calls for the “sardine Queen”.

The publisher of this nonsense, Starlight Publishing, has an amazing website. It’s worth a look for the utterly awful cover art they use on their books. I was not surprised to see that they have also published stuff by my old friend, Marcus T. Bottomley.

Ugh, enough of this shit. I apologise for presenting my readers with a work of such low caliber.