At The Paris Review, Dan Piepenbring looks at the Ouija board-style “Charlie Charlie” teen fad-cum-hoax and finds it lacking in artistic verve. In comparison, he points to the awesome Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros, a book of “Satanic” illustrations from the 18th century (slyly-presented, at that time, as something much older), devised with similar adolescent titillations in mind: “DO NOT TOUCH!”
The Wellcome Library, in whose custody the book resides, describes it so:
In German and Latin. On white, brown and grey-green paper. The title within an ornamental border in wash, with skulls, skeletons and cross-bones. Illustrated with 31 extraordinary water-colour drawings of demons, and three pages of magical and cabbalistic signs and sigils, etc. At the end the figures are in red, and part of the text is written in white on the grey-green paper.
