This is it, which the Angels wish you'd stop pestering them about.

So I just uploaded the first update of my Enochian bibliography in 3 years yesterday, and have already found something calling for further remark.  Actually got round to skimming through Skinner & Rankine's typeset (Practical Angel Magic of John Dee's Enochian Tables) of "The Practice of the Tables"[1] from Sloane MS. 307 (regrettably it's some way down the BL's priority list for digitising and placing online, although they teased us with a photograph of one page five years ago).  The third set of conjurations in this are headed Janua Orientalis (or Occidentalis, &c.) Reserata and have strong parallels, beyond the title, to another English work of angel-magic of the period, the Janua Magica Reserata.[2]

The Janua scheme is based on the nine orders of Angels from the Celestial Hierarchies of pseudo-Dionysius, referred to the Kabbalistic Sephiroth excluding Malkuth (based on the scale of the number 10 in De Occulta Philosophia lib. II cap 13); however phrases from the English of Dee's Claves Angelicæ appear in the conjurations ("the servants of the same your god," "make us partakers of undefiled knowledge," "in power and presence, whose works shall be a Song of honour and the praise of your God in your Creation.") and Dee's interrogation of Ave (TFR p. 169), slightly paraphrased, is used as an example of how to ascertain the genuineness of supposed angelic manifestations (Treatise on Angel Magic, p. 185 ed, 2006, section "To know who it is").

At the moment I'm not sure who borrowed from whom; both definitely borrowed from TFR independently of each other, "The Practice of the Tables" much more extensively.[3]

EDIT: Well . . . on checking again, "To know who it is" in the Harley MS. 6482 Janua is not in the Sloane MS. 3825 version, the entire "Second Introduction" preceding the preliminary prayer and the Nine Celestial Keys is an interpolation by Smart or "Rudd."  There is a near-parallel section in the first "Introduction" (McLean p. 176-177, cf. Sloane MS. 3825 42vo-43ro), which does not follow the TFR passage so closely; there is still some similar or identical phrasing, but Ave's responses are not quoted.

EDITED AGAIN: blech, still didn't check carefully enough.  The "Second Introduction" wasn't interpolated by Smart / "Rudd," just moved from its original position after the "First Key," and added  / changed section headings.

[1] I use this name as a convenience.  Sloane MS. 307 has no overall title; it is described in the BL catalogue as "Magic. On the invocation of angels"; the defective and mucked-about version of Dee's "Tables of Enoch" which begins that copy is headed Clavicula Tabularum Enochi which name is sometimes applied to the whole work and was also used as the title of an edited extract from this work (omitting the verbose and repetitive conjurations that occupy about 80% of the page count in the typeset) circulated in the Ordo R.R. & A.C. as manuscript "H."  "The Practice of the Tables," denoting a copy of this work, appears in as the first item of a contents list written at the start of Sloane MS. 3821, in a different hand to the main text; this most likely derived from internal section titles in the work where the first of the three sets of conjurations were headed "The Practice of the East Table," "The Practice of the West Table," &c.  Skinner & Rankine called it Tabula Bonorum Angelorum Invocationes, a name previously used by Ashmole for the final untitled "book" of Dee's magic digests (Sloane MS. 3191 fol. 52vo-80vo). 

[2] Versions of this text survive in Sloane MS. 3825 and the early 18th-century magical miscellany Harley MS. 6482 (the latter completely omitting the preliminary theoretical part, which in any case was mostly plagiarised from Cornelius Agrippa), in both cases followed by a version of the Lemegeton: typesets in Skinner & Rankine, Keys to the Gateway of Magic (mainly based on Sloane 3825 but incorporating interpolations from Harley 6482 and with a section on the demon kings of the quarters from a Liber Officiorum Spirituum fragment in Sloane MS. 3824 bolted on to the end) and McLean, A Treatise on Angel Magic (Harley 6482).  Additionally, the conjurations or "Celestial Keys" were copied into the records of a group trying to contact various angels mentioned in Dee's spirit diaries, which survive in Sloane MS. 3628.  For a discussion of Harley 6482, see E. Asprem, "False, Lying Spirits and Angels of Light" in Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft 3:1 (2008).

[3] Well, the more I've looked at this, the more I'm inclined to believe they are of common authorship.

Just in case -- though it's pretty unlikely -- the intersection of people who care about this subject and people who haven't worked it out yet is not an empty set, the title of this post and others on similar subjects is a parody of a line in Michael's description of the wonder-working "Ring of Solomon" in Mysteriorum Liber Primus (Action of 1582.03.14, Sloane MS. 3188 fol. 12ro).  The header image is taken from the same MS. (images at www.bl.uk/manuscripts/).

EDITED (rather than making a new post and having to come up with another variant on the title)

Moving forward 200 years or a bit more, one of the things that the version of "Enochian Magic" taught and practiced in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (well, strictly, the "Second Order" to the H.O.G.D., the R.R. et A.C.) has been criticised and mocked is that the version of the Tables of Enoch published by F.I. Regardie and writers who cribbed from him, and apparently those used in the original organisation, feature up to four letters on a number of squares.  Practically, the reason for this is quite simple: the source documents used by Mathers and Westcott (Sloane MS. 3191, Casaubon's True and Faithful Relation and Sloane MS. 307 apparently being the main ones) disagreed on a number of squares, and even the "fair copies" in 3191 have a number of corrections and crossings out, or instances of one letter being written in small below another.  This study gives a rather dry run-through these variations and suggests possible ways of dealing with the issue in practice. 

Meddling with the Goëtia again (3)

To be clear, it's not (well, not just) a Heavy Metal Umlaut in my preferred orthography of the name (one of very few things in which I follow A.E. Waite -- see the title page to Book of Ceremonial Magic), rather my remorselessly pedantic streak making it clear that the 'o' and 'e' are pronounced distinctly, representing Greek οη, rather than Latin œ.

The writer of an ongoing blog covering MS. and printed works of magic, observes in a discussion of the Abramelin texts that the French MS. of Abramelin (Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, MS. 2351) used by Mathers left many of the magic squares incomplete, with more than a few only having the top and left edge squares lettered; the "KODSELIM" square which Crowley prefixed to the Goëtia being one of these, suggesting that thus incomplete, "the intended effect of its associated spell (“To undo any magic soever”) would fail"; however, Crowley's rationale for prefixing it to the Goëtia was essentially to make the whole thing useless (compare the MACANEH square, "to hinder Sorcerers from operating" prefixed to "Handbook of Geomancy").  While we're on the subject, it appears that the description of the CASED AZOTE square as "should never be made use of" was down to the translator / scribe of the Arsenal MS. of Abramelin and not a piece of censorship by Mathers (in the German version, its purpose is apparently to cause liver damage).

The meddling with my edition of the Mathers-Crowley Goëtia continues.  Given how long it takes to rebuild the bookmarks every time I re-generate the PDF, not going to upload the updates until I've got it to a reasonably satisfactory state.  For example, my attention was recently drawn to the fact that the entry for Belial in the Pseudomonarchia Dæmonum refers to Solomon sealing up the 72 demon kings and their legions in vase vitreo, "in a glass vessel," mis-translated "in a brasen vesell" in the Scot version of the Offices of the Spirits.  This reading was not only perpetuated into the Goëtia but influenced an elaboration of its praxis.

Grant us eyes . . .

So I've been going through the Heptameron and 4th Book again lately, and finally accepted that my schoolboy Latin (well, formally, equivalent to undergraduate 1st-year I think, but it was a long time ago and I've forgotten a lot of it) really isn't enough to provide an improvement on Robert Turner's translation of the latter, but I have nearly completed a re-set of the texts with some annotations that may or may not be helpful, as well as a more thorough bibliography than the excuse for plugging his own books that Stephen Skinner appended to his 2005 re-set of Robert Turner's translation.

The 1559 printing of the Heptameron includes in its conjurations appeals to "Bathat vel Vachat," "Ima vel Ina" and the planetary Angel, "Caphriel vel Cassiel."  As another example of this phenomena, I cited "Kos, or, some say, Kosm" -- which is not, in fact, from a Grimoire at all but is part of a prayer recited by a character in a 2015 video game called Bloodborne.

So the simplest explanation for this kind of thing that I could come up with, is that scribal glosses, notes on variant readings, or queries of doubtful or unclearly written words get incorporated into the main text of repeatedly hand-copied documents.  The name Buné, one of the spirits of the Goëtia, for instance, appears as Bimé in Sloane MS. 3648 and Harley MS. 6483, probably due to the name being written cursively in their source text and a piece of dirt or squashed fly on the MS. being taken as a dot on an 'i.'  Bathat sometimes appears as Bathal owing to the final 't' being indistinctly crossed (compare comments in previous post about "Seal of Adonay").  Caphriel is written Cafriel in at least one of the proto-Heptameron MSS., and a cursive fr might have been taken for ß, the German double-s ligature (which in the earliest print editions is used to write the name Cassiel).  [The forms "Cafziel" and "Casziel" apparently occur in some copies of the Liber Iuratus Honorii, an earlier magical text which includes many of the same names of Angels &c. as the Heptameron.]

If the name is genuinely ambiguous, the scribe might put the most likely reading in the main text and asterisk it with a note on the other possibility in the margin; alternatively, the scribe might have access to more than one copy, with different readings; for example, the version of the Goëtia in Sloane MS. 2731 has marginal notes by the names of seven of the spirits such as "in another copy Sabnock," "other copy Gromory," &c.  When, in order to save time or ink, the variant reading is accompanied by simply "or," "vel," "some say," and the like, there arises a risk that this gets incorporated into the text by a subsequent copyist.

So, here is the not-entirely-serious in-universe origin of that line in Micolash's prayer.  One scribal abbreviation used to save time / space / ink in mediæval-renaissance Latin manuscripts (also appearing in printed works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) was a tilde ~ placed above a letter, usually but not always a vowel, to indicate an 'n' or 'm' to follow (this sort of thĩg, for exãple).  So someone wrote out that prayer, with only the name 'Kos.'  Then a squashed bug on the MS. above the 's' caused a later copyist to read it "Kos̃," pronounced "Kosm."  Other copies made prior to this persisted; a second copyist, aware of both readings, kept the first in the main text but put a marginal note "or, some say, Kosm" ("say" since it was a liturgical formula used by members of the sect).  Then copyist #3, possibly tired or light-headed from excessive consumption of the blood of eldritch abominations, takes the marginal note as an insertion and incorporates it into the main text, producing the version Micolash recites.

Do Origins Matter Anyway?

(At least) three manuscripts of the "D.O.M.A." text (Physica α & ω Metaphyisca et Hyperphysica D.O.M.A.), the source of many of the emblems in Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, are viewable online.

A late 18th-century copy (including many figures not in other versions, but probably cribbed from the Altona printing), formerly from the collection of Michael Innes, is now in the Warburg Institute at the University of London and a PDF of images can be downloaded.

A copy (ca. 1780?) formerly in the possession of Manly Palmer Hall (printed with an English translation in his Codex Rosæ Crucis: D.O.M.A.), now in the possession of the Getty Institute, can be viewed here.

Another copy, dated only "18th century," in the collection of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, can be viewed here.

What "D.O.M.A." stands for is unclear, although in the Warburg and Hall MSS. the title is followed by a brief Latin doxology beginning Deo Omnipotenti laus &c.  Hall suggested Deo Optimo Maximi Altissimo, and observed that the initials appear at the head of the title page of many works by alchemist Andreas Libavius (ca. 1550-1616), who was somewhat at odds with the Rosicrucians (he was an admirer of Aristotle and Galen who were implicitly attacked in the Fama, critical of the theories of Paracelsus though accepting some of his methods, and his last writings included responses, varying from flat-out hostile to apparently friendly criticism or "well-meaing observations," to the Rosicrucian manifestos).  The initials also appear at the top of the engraved frontispiece (not the main title page) of the Thesaurus et armanentarium medico-chymicum of Adrian von Mynsicht, generally believed to be "Henricus Madathanus" whose Aureum Seculum Redivivum was incorporated into the Geheime Figuren.

(And all this turned up at the end of a series of tangents that started with me trying to identify the printer of one of the editions of Cornelius Agrippa's Opera in duos tomos bearing the -- generally regarded as fake -- imprint, "Lugduni: per Beringos fratres."  The edition in question (somewhat ropy Google Books copy of vol. I here) has on its title page a printer's device showing three pillars and a crown with the motto "Firmant Consilium Pietas Politia Coronam."  This turned out to have been used by a German printer, Cornelius Sutor (Sutorius) of Oberursel near Frankfort (examples here, here and here) on works dated 1599-1602 (one of which, a commentary on Machiavelli's The Prince, was later placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum at the order of Pope Clement VIII).  Sutor also printed the the 1602 edition (comprising only the first three volumes) of the massive alchemical compendium Theatrum Chemicum.)

Minor fixes, continued

Finally managed to fix an extensive compositor's error, if such it may be called, dating back to 1887, in The Rosicrucians: their Rites and Mysteries.  The final chapter of that work (in the 4th edition, which is the basis for the CP re-set) consisted mostly of a series of excerpts in Latin from tom. I of Kabbala Denudata.  One such excerpt was interrupted in mid-sentence and concluded with the last sentence and a bit of a previous excerpt, followed by the repetition of another whole excerpt.  Since Jennings was rather sparing about giving page references and even the first volume of Kabbala Denudata runs to nearly 1400 pages and the OCR software available to me wasn't really up to dealing with the typography of the work, I was unable at the time to locate and restore the truncated paragraph.

So, I just discovered that Google Books has page images of both volumes of the rare 1887 third edition of The Rosicrucians (vol. 1 / vol. 2), the first in which that passage appear (though, owing to how appallingly badly indexed Google Books is when it comes to older printed books, it took me a while to find vol. 2).  The same editorial error occurred in the 3rd edition; however Google has better OCR software and by picking out a phrase without any long 's's complicating matters I was able to find the passage in Kabbala Denudata and restore it.  Since the omitted text (assuming the quote was meant to continue to the end of the paragraph in the original work) was significantly longer than the spuriously duplicated text, this meant that pagination and layout on the last six pages is no longer conformed exactly to the print edition.

The 2003 Celephaïs Press edition of the second edition of The Rosicrucians is seriously flawed and should not be re-posted / mirrored.  It appears that the omission of the circled cross emblem from the title page which appears, rubricated, on the original printing of the second edition, was because someone had for some unknown reason blanked it out on the crappy page images (a copy here) I was working from.

Meddling with the Goëtia again (2)

OK, this gets murkier.  For years I had glibly asserted that the conjurations in the Goëtia derived from Robert Turner's translation of the Heptameron that was bound up with the Fourth Book of pseudo-Agrippa.

On examining a facsimile of the 1655 edition posted at the Internet archive, it turns out that Turner didn't translate the conjurations at all, but (with the exception of the "Prayer to God, to be said in the four parts of the World, in the Circle") left them in the original Latin.  The translated conjurations do appear in a reprint of the Turner translation, "with great Improvements" issued without publisher, place, or editor's name, dated 1783 on the title page.  This of course significantly post-dates the Lemegeton MSS.; it now seems more likely that the compiler of the Goëtia did their own translations from pseudo-Abano (the additional sections from the Heptameron interpolated into the variant Goëtia in Harley MS. 6483, the "Dr. Rudd" Lemegeton, are verbatim with Turner, barring some minor variations in spelling).

EDIT: dammit my head hurts now.  Skinner apparently used an earlier and less complete printing of Turner's translation as the basis for the facsimile (Askin, 1978).  The translated conjurations do appear in another edition, dated 1665 (neither this nor the 1783 edition are mentioned in the chapter on Robert Turner in Elizabethan Magic by Robert Turner et al., which incorrectly describes the Askin facsimile as the "second edition").

The 1783 edition was the source for Barrett's The Magus: in the conjuration of Wednesday, Animalium in the Latin was misprinted as Ammalium, leading to et per nomen sedis Animalium, habentium senas alas being translated by the nonsensical "and by the name and place of Ammalium," which reading was then further corrupted by Barrett to "and by the name and place of Ammaluim" (I erroneously stated in an edition of the Heptameron I issued many years ago and which still lingers on in the dark corners of the Internet that the garbling was due to Turner or Barrett; in fact Turner (1665) translated it correctly).  Steven Skinner's 2005 re-set of Turner reverted "Ammalium" to "Animalium" but kept the rest of the citation.  "Animals having six wings" is probably a reference to the Apocalypse.

However, my characterisation of passages as being "identically or near-identically worded" to the Turner translation was based on the Mathers-Crowley edit, and not on any BL MSS., and Mathers took liberties with his texts that went beyond modernising English spelling and attempting to revert corruptions in Divine Names of Hebrew origin.

For example: in the Second Conjuration, after the reference to Moses calling on the name ADONAI to summon a plague of locusts, in the Mathers edition there follows: "and by the name SCHEMA AMATHIA which Ioshua called upon, and the sun stayed his course."

In the Exorcism of the Aërial Spirits in the Heptameron of pseudo-Abano, some texts (not the "Marburg, 1559" printing or the edition of Agrippa's Opera used as the basis for the 1970 Georg Olms facsimile, but it is in at least three of the other "per Beringos fratres" editions of Agrippa including that used by Turner), the reference to the plague of locusts is followed by et per nomen Schemes amathia, quod Iosua vocavit, et remoratus est Sol cursum.  Turner translated this: "and by the name Schemes amathia, which Joshua called upon, and the Sun stayed his course."

In the four BL Lemegeton MSS. (Sloane MSS. 2731, 3648, 3825, Harley MS. 6483) the citation appears slightly earlier, after the reference to Aaron becoming wise after hearing and speaking the name Anepheneton (or Anaphexaton, Anephexeton, &c.), and is worded (with minor variations in spelling): "and by the name Schemes-Amathia which Joshua called upon and the Sun stood still."

Conclusion: Mathers used the Turner Heptameron in the process of editing the Goëtia.  How heavily the original redactor did is less clear.

There is one noticeable variation in wording between Turner and Mathers & Crowley: in the three references in the second conjuration to Moses calling plagues on Egypt, Mathers or Crowley deleted specific references to, well, Egypt:

Compare:

Sloane MS. 3825: "And by the name Zebaoth, which Moses named, & all the Rivers and waters in the land of Ægypt were turned into blood; and by the name Escerchie Oriston, which Moses named, and the rivers brought forth froggs, they went into the houses of the Egyptians, Distroying all things [...] and by the name Adonay, which Moses named, & there came up locusts throughout all the land of Egypt and devoured all that the Haill at [sic] left"

Turner: "And by the name Zebaoth, which Moses named, and all the Rivers and waters in the land of Egypt were turned into blood; and by the name Ecerchie Oriston, which Moses named, and all the Rivers brought forth frogs, and they ascended into the houses of the Egyptians, destroying all things [...] and by the name Adonay, which Moses named, and there came up Locusts, which appeared upon the whole land of Egypt, and devoured all which the Hail had left"

Mathers & Crowley: "And by the name ZABAOTH, which Moses named and all the rivers were turned into blood; and by the name ASHER EHYEH ORISTON, which Moses named, and all the rivers brought forth frogs, and they ascended into the houses, destroying all things [...] and by the name ADONAI, which Moses named, and there came up locusts, which appeared upon the whole land, and devoured all which the hail had left."

And let's not get started on how entire heresies and schisms can arise from scribes neglecting to dot 'i' s or cross 't's.  It's quite clearly "seal [or 'seale'] of Adonay" in three of the four BL Lemegeton MSS., Sloane 2731 (at least in the badly digitised microfilm I'm using) is ambiguous, it could be a 't' or 'l' but it's not clearly crossed and differs from the scribe's other terminal 't's; but the corresponding citation in the Heptameron is sedem Adonay.  Turner's translation, as printed, has "seal" although the Latin is given correctly.  Suggestion: either Turner (assuming he was responsible for the additional translations in the 1665 printing, which is possible but by no means certain; Robin E. Cousins in the account of his works in Robert Turner's Elizabethan Magic suggests he died during the plague that year) neglected to cross the 't' in 'seat' or the typesetter misread his handwriting, and the error was perpetuated into the Lemegeton.

And so I come back to the stance I was on the point of recanting at the start of this post: the Goëtia (as distinguished from Book of the Offices of the Spirits) depends on and thus post-dates, not merely the Heptameron (a prototype of which under a different name but with the same pseudoepigraphal author credit apparently existed half a century or more prior to the Fourth Book), but a specific printing of a specific English translation of the Heptameron.

EDITED AGAIN: Blech, I can't read.  The second printing of Turner's translation was dated 1665, not 1655.  The above has been corrected accordingly.

Meddling with the Goëtia (again)

Following the recent work on the Greek text of the Stele of Jeu for Liber Samekh, the corrected transcription has now been incorporated into the Celephaïs Press edition of the Mathers-Crowley Goëtia, and a bunch of other upgrades to the editorial endnotes and general formatting made.  

For various reasons I had to change the blackletter face used for the Preliminary Invocation and Enochian conjurations, as all accented letters in the font I previously used (Jeff Lee's JSL Blackletter) failed to render in the PDFs generated by the Word plugin I'm using, rendering large parts of those texts actually unreadable.  The replacement is not quite as good a match for the face used in the print edition.

On re-checking, it turns out that (a) the Pseudomonarchia Dæmonum was printed in 1577, first appearing in the fifth edition of Wier's De Præstigiis Dæmonum, and (b) the MS. of the catalogue of spirits printed by Scot in the Discoverie of Witchcraft, by "T.R." (who cannot have been Captain Thomas Rudd, he was born the year the first edition of the Discoverie was published) is said to have been dated 1570; therefore, either (a) the translation was made from an earlier MS. copy of the Liber Officiorum Spirituum and not Wier's publication, or (b) the MS. was back-dated (the reference to the Pseudomonarchia in the margin of lib. xv. cap. 1 of the Discoverie could simply have been Scot noting the similarity; Scot reportedly drew on De Præstigiis Dæmonum et Incantionibus ac Veneficiis for the Discoverie).  It is unclear just how far back this MS. tradition goes (a 1508 work of Trithemius includes  a list of works on magic that were circulating in MS. at the time, citing De Officiis Spirituum attributed to Solomon ("excerable and entirely diabolic") and also a Liber Officiorum which divides up demons into four Imperatores and multiple Kings, Dukes, Marquises and Counts under them); however, the Ars Goëtia in its familiar form remains clearly (a) composite, (b) of English origin and (c) no older than the latter half of the seventeenth century.

EDIT: It's not clear how and when Scot acquired the "T.R." MS., but given Wier openly admitted to omitting portions of the text of Liber Officiorum in the Pseudomonarchia in order to render the whole thing unusable, and was probably responsible for interjections about various spirits being deceived in their hopes to return to their pre-Fall place and rank, and given that the only major variation between the Wier and Scot versions of the text (barring garblings due to mis-translation) is the omission in the latter of one spirit,[1] the "back-dated MS." explanation looks more likely (either that, or the Pseudomonarchia was printed independently of De præstigiis prior to the fifth edition of the latter work).

Have some links to copies of De præstigiis dæmonum et incantionibus ac veneficiis:

• 1563 first edition at archive.org
• 1564 second edition at Google Books.
• 1566 third edition at archive.org
• 1568 fourth edition at Google Books (not indicated as "fourth" on title page but adds a sixth "book" to the 1566 edition).
• 1577 fifth edition at Google Books.
• 1583 sixth edition at Google Books.

It will be observed that the Pseudomonarchia only appeared in the 1577 and later editions.

Another possibility is that the "T.R." manuscript of the Liber Officiorum is a phantom, that the translation in the Discoverie was commissioned by Scot from Wier's printing (Joseph Peterson suggests the translator was Abraham Fleming, who translated other texts from the Latin for Scot) and that the marginal note at the end of Book XV ch. 2 (p. 393, ed. 1584) describing the "T.R." MS. was placed there in error (or as a misdirection) and belonged with one or more of the other magical texts printed by Scot in Book XV.

[1] A significantly divergent version of the Offices of the Spirits, roughly contemporary with the Wier and Scot publications, including information on the four Kings of the quarters (there called Oriens, Paimon, Amaimon & Egyn) appears in an English magical miscellany (ca. 1580) in MS. (Folger Shakespeare Library, Folger MS. V.b. 26, prosaically catalogued as "Book of Magic, with Instructions for Invoking Spirits, &c." -- the overall title, if it ever had one, is lost along with the first 14 pages -- and published as a typeset with translations of Latin passages as The Book of Oberon, ed. Daniel Harms, James Clark, Joseph Peterson; Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2015).  High-quality images of the MS. can be found online at the Folger's website; Peterson's transcription of the text (PDF link) is on his Esoteric Archives site.