But what then of Collin de Plancy’s infernal version? Is it a dictionary by name only, or could the affinities touch a deeper vein? In his Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, the historian Owen Davies writes of how grimoires are marked by a “desire for knowledge and the enduring impulse to restrict and control it”, a description that could certainly be applied to the projects of Johnson and Murray. “Grimoires exist”, he goes on, “because of the desire to create a physical record of magical knowledge, reflecting concerns regarding the uncontrollable and corruptible nature of . . . sacred information.” While it’s true that the grand experiment of the Enlightenment was supposedly to shine the light of rationality upon the shadows of superstition, the desire to assemble all possible information is one which the grimoire and the dictionary share. And this yearning towards completion and the all-encompassing is not just a superficial similarity, for in their obsessions with words and language, the grimoire and the dictionary share a common faith — that mere verbal pronouncements have the ability to rewrite reality itself. Both kinds of book are partisans of a Platonist philosophy that sees a type of word magic as being able to enact transformations in real life. For the rationalist lexicographer this means that mastery of rhetoric and syntax can affect our lives through the ability to explicate and convince; for the wizard this means that the magic of words can conjure alteration. In both cases, words have the power, if they’re properly organized, to change the world for better or for worse.