You really can’t take it with you, and those who fail to realize as much before the final accounting comes have often proved to be no end of trouble for those who live on in the vicinity of their estates. Still bound by the material things to which they fettered themselves in life, lacking the power to clearly express what torments them, the inarticulate grasping of the dead for what should have been left behind can manifest in all manner of phenomena customarily characterized as “haunting.”

Dispelling such posthumous obsessions has been the object of exorcisms, propitiations, and affiliated priestly rituals since antiquity. Among the most ancient of magical rites and incantations are those designed to contact, conjure, and compel the spirits of the deceased, often in order to glean some vital knowledge which they took with them to the grave. And among the most ubiquitous of cunning crafts are those concerned with the discovery of concealed treasure, or the locating of those who have absconded with it. It is perhaps not surprising then that these two concerns should find their synthesis in the working-books of charms and prayers employed by freelance sorcerers down through the ages, and nowhere moreso than in the silver-rich and fractiously sectarian lands of early-modern Germany.

Divulged here is one such magical modus operandi, translated from the Latin text – as preserved by the Stuttgart antiquarian publisher Johann Scheible in the 1846 edition of his folkloric and grimoiric miscellany Das Kloster – and presented in the form of a chapbook not unlike those of the Volksbücher corpus which circulated sensational tales of ghostly apparitions and ill-won riches, if not the methods of summoning them forth…

About the Author

Brian Johnson is a freelance writer, translator, humanities scholar, and editor. His personal research is largely concerned with reconstructing the esoteric worldviews and practices of historical individuals, based upon the study of primary source documents.