Blessing of a Book or Spiritual Formulary

This is the fourth of my corrected English translations from Robert Ambelain’s Sacramentaire du Rose + Croix ([1964]). With the salt, the taper, and the Water of Exorcism made, we can turn to the blessings of other things. The first is a book.

Books have always had a special place in powwow. Hohman’s Long Lost Friend promises in its own pages that whoever carries the book with them is safe from their enemies, and many a powwow doctor’s charms were kept in a handwritten book that was guarded as carefully as anything in the house. A prayer book, a book of charms, or your own notebook of prayers and workings is worth setting apart and asking God to protect.

Personally, I don’t bless a Bible with this formula, but don’t let that stop you. I just don’t personally feel that it needs it. I wouldn’t use it on, for example, The Poetic Edda, or a Jewish prayer book, since its nature is explicitly Christian. It can be adapted in form to other purposes experimentally at the discretion of the reader. Each of these formulas contains specific words, but also a specific architecture.

Ambelain’s prayer asks two things for a book. It asks that the book be kept from every harm, the way the Book of the Law was preserved through the Babylonian Captivity and came into the hands of Esdras, the scribe we know as Ezra. And it asks that the book be sought out and studied by all “people of desire” (in the original, Hommes de Désir, “men of desire”): those who long for God and for spiritual knowledge.

Now on to the sacralisation of a book.

Blessing of a Book or Spiritual Formulary

Robert Ambelain, Sacramentaire du Rose + Croix (Paris: La Diffusion Scientifique, [1964]), 39.

Set the book on a table before you, with your Water of Exorcism at hand. Say the prayer over the book. When you see ✠, make the sign of the cross over it.

Almighty and Eternal God, You who saved from destruction and oblivion the Holy Book of Your Law during the Babylonian Captivity, so that it came providentially into the hands of Your servant, the scribe Esdras: we beseech You that this book be protected by Your Holy Angels and by Your Saints against every attack and every harm, as well as against all destruction by the Powers of Evil; and that, through the merits of Your Prophets, Your Doctors, and Your Saints, it may be much sought after and studied by all people of desire. Through Jesus ✠ Christ our Master and Lord, and by Saint John His servant. Amen.

Close with the aspersion of the Water of Exorcism: four casts in the form of a cross into the space before you, top to bottom, then right to left.

Ambelain gives that aspersion as the general rule at the end of every one of his orisons. The book is blessed by the prayer and the sign of the cross, and there’s no need to wet its pages. I will get a bit of the water on the cover of the book and quickly wipe it off.

May God bless you, through Jesus Christ our Master and Lord, and by Saint John His servant.

✠ ✠ ✠
Arthur