Chasing the Black Pullet: On Dodgy Grimoires, Mythic Framing, and Magic Rings with Dr Alexander Cummins

In the furthest murky corner of the grimoiric corpus – that sum total of all the arcane tomes, spellbooks, and manuals of spirit conjuration which we call grimoires –  we might imagine a shelf of especially denigrated works housing those texts considered, well, dodgy even by the darkest of black magicians…

It is on this imaginary shelf we can envisage we would find The Black Pullet, an especially folkloric text bearing very little  resemblance on first inspection to more formal systems of grimoiric  sorcery. Cataloguing and disclosing the uses of a variety of talismanic signs and magic rings, the Black Pullet frames itself as a first-person account from a French soldier fleeing a Napoleonic conflict in Egypt who is taken in by an old Turkish man living in grand secret chambers beneath the pyramids to be taught the ancient secrets of “Ptolemy’s library”.

Yet despite the fanciful nature of this framing,…