The Visual History of Magic: How Grimoires Depicted Angels and Demons
How did magical manuscripts make the invisible visible? This lecture explores how ancient grimoires depicted angels, demons, and spirits through images, diagrams, seals, and schematic figures. Far from being simple illustrations, these visual forms functioned as tools for knowledge, protection, invocation, and control, shaping how practitioners imagined and interacted with supernatural beings. By examining manuscripts from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, the lecture shows how images structured magical practice and mediated between Christian theology, ritual magic, and scientific experiment.
The talk places grimoires within the broader visual culture of premodern science and religion, tracing how angelic hierarchies, demonic figures, and planetary spirits were standardised, abstracted, or deliberately obscured. It also asks why visual strategies mattered so deeply in magical texts, and how they relate to secrecy, authority, and the transmission of secret knowledge. By focusing on images rather than texts alone, the lecture offers a new perspective on how magic was learned, practised, and imagined in European history.
Speaker Bio:
Sergei Zotov is a historian of science and visual culture specialising in alchemy, magic, and iconography in medieval and early modern Europe (c. 1400–1800). He received his doctorate from the University of Warwick and is currently an Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute (University of London). His research has been supported by major international fellowships held in Baltimore, Glasgow, Berlin, Gotha, Wolfenbüttel, and Überlingen, and has involved extensive archival work across more than 100 collections worldwide. Sergei has published in leading journals, including Nuncius and the British Journal for the History of Science, and is the author of five books on early modern iconography, two of which have received prestigious prizes and others shortlisted for major awards.
Curated & Hosted by:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
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