Addenda et Scholia (1)

I'm now finally in a position to cross-reference Mead's arrangement of the Stobæus excerpts in his Thrice-Greatest Hermes with the numbering in modern academic literature (following the edition of Nock & Festugiére).

• Mead's I: sections 1-6 = SH 2B, the rest = SH 11.
• Mead's II = SH 1.
• Mead's III = SH 2B.
• Mead's IV = SH 21.
• Mead's V = SH 9 (Matter)
• Mead's VI = SH 10 (Time)
• Mead's VII = SH 5.
• Mead's VIII = SH 4.
• Mead's IX = SH 6 (Decans and Stars).
• Mead's X = SH 8 (Providence, Necessity & Fate).
• Mead's XI = SH 7 (Justice).
• Mead's XII = SH 12 (Providence and Fate).
• Mead's XIII = SH 14.
• Mead's XIV = SH 16.
• Mead's XV = SH 15 (Motion and Nature).
• Mead's XVI = SH 20.
• Mead's XVII = SH 17.
• Mead's XVIII = SH 3.
• Mead's XIX = SH 19.
• Mead's XX = SH 18 (Power of Choice).
• Mead's XXI = SH 27 (sentence on philosophical refutation).
• Mead's XXII = SH 28 (sentence on "what is God?").
• Mead's XXIII = SH 22 (from "Aphroditē").
• Mead's XXIV = SH 29 (poem on planetary gods).
• Mead's XXV = SH 23 (Korē Kosmou).
• Mead's XXVI = SH 24 (continuation of Korē Kosmou).
• Mead's XXVII: sections 1-7 = SH 25, sections 8-20 = SH 26.

SH 13, a single sentence extracted from an account of the opinions of various philosophers on the subject of Necessity, is not in Mead.

De secretis

Clavicula Salomonis de Secretis.

Been on something of a binge of downloading Solomonic grimoires lately, mostly from the Wellcome Institute collection.  Since the bulk are directly downloadable as PDFs from the Wellcome website anyway, no point in my sticking them on Scribd.  Wellcome 4670, apparently only obtainable as images of individual page spreads, I might make an exception for, but it'll take a while.

Anyway, in the process of looking for more information about a work called Traite Universel, des clavicules de Salomon, which appears appended to two copies of the more familiar 2-book version of the KoS (Wellcome MS. 4659, p. 101; Wellcome MS. 4669 p. 77; see also the third "Book" of the Lansdowne MS. 1202 Clavicules, transcript by Joseph Peterson here), turned up a 17th-century ancestor of the Traité Universel, in Latin (& my Latin is a *lot* better than my French).  Joseph Peterson posted a transcription & information on MS. sources in 2013 or so & more recently published an English translation (The Secrets of Solomon: a Witch's Handbook from the Trial Records of the Venetian Inquisition, the somewhat sensational title referring to the fact that a copy of this work featured in a sorcery case in the 1630s).

The copy linked is assembled from page images posted on the site of the Polish collection that holds the MS. (site won't let you bulk download without a login, hence why I did this).

Another "De Secretis" copy is Mscr. Dresd. N91, which can be viewed or downloaded here.  I personally found this slightly harder to read (that's entirely relative though, the handwriting is still pretty good), although it does contain 24 pentacles which were omitted (only appear as blank borders) in the other copy.

[Also the Dresden copy has about 50 pages of additional material filling out the notebook, including a Liber Officiorum variant, various characters and sigils, and a couple of passages in Italian which was presumably the scribe's first language (as remarked above, yet another copy of De Secretis was involved in a sorcery trial in Venice in the 1630s).]

Besides the Traité Universel, De Secretis has a better-known descendent in the Grimorium Verum: they have an analogous hierarchy of three chief infernal spirits, each with two immediate subordinates (Elestor has become Astaroth in the GV, and the subordinates have been garbled[1]), and a further list of 18 spirits with stated characters and offices, all under Syrach, who in turn is one of the chief underlings of Lucifer.  The order differs, some of the names are barely recognisable, some of the characters completely unrecognisable (the French editions of the GV also appear to lack the characters for the six "Dukes").

De Secretis, in turn, contains noticeable borrowings from the Heptameron (or possibly the Lucidarium, but -- given it *also* contains a substantial excerpt, slightly paraphrased, from the Liber quartus de occulta philosophia -- probably the printed Heptameron), although the characters for Anael and Sachiel are completely different and that for Cassiel bears only a vague resemblance to the central part of the angel's seal in pseudo-Abano; the compiler also appears to have devised characters for several of the angels of the quarters for each day.

The character on the first leaf of De Secretis, by the way, is almost certainly the character of Scirlin or Scyrlin, a supposedly vital part of the GV ritual which is missing in the original printed editions (along with the characters of the six Dukes, as noted, and various symbols called for in the miscellaneous and minor procedures).

(For "A" and "B," substitute your initials.) 

* * *

[1] De Secretis has:

• Satanachi and Syrach under Lucifer
• Agateraptar Kymath and Ftheruthi under Belzebuth
• Serphagathan and Resbiroth under Elestor.

The Grimorium Verum has:

• Put Satanachia and Agalierap under Lucifer
• Tarchimache and Fleruty under Beelzebuth
• Sagatana and Nesbiros under Astaroth

"Put" is possibly from reading a carelessly-written sunt or et as part of a proper name. It appears that Agateraptar Kymath (Agaleraptar Kymath in Dresden N91) got garbled into Agalerap Tarchimath and then turned into two different demons.  The 18 lesser spirits for whom characters and offices are given are still said to be under Syrach in the GV.

The Grand Grimoire / Dragon Rouge has the same three chiefs as the GV; the six immediate subordinates are mostly the same although Tarchimache has disappeared and Lucifuge joined them at the top of the list as "Prime Minister" (the others have been given military ranks and are not assigned to individual chiefs).  A different list of 18 lesser spirits follows, three under each of the second-tier chiefs; no characters or offices for them are given, and in any case they are simply the first 18 of the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (on balance, it seems *much* more likely that the writer of the GG used Wier, or a source deriving from Wier, and bolted on a modified version of the chiefs from the GV rather than deriving from a De Officiis Spirituum MS. tradition which did not suffer decapitation; as such, the GG chiefs are unlikely to be the same as those in Wier's source).

1. Bael.
2. Agares.
3. Marbas.  (Marbas alias Barbas in Wier)
4. Pruslas.  (Pruflas, alibi invenitur Bufas in Wier)
5. Aamon.  (Amon vel Aamon in Wier)
6. Barbatos.
7. Buer.
8. Gusoyn.
9. Botis.
10. Bathin.  (Bathym, albibi Marthim in Wier)
11. Hursan.  (Pursan, alias Curson in Wier)
12. Eligor.  (Eligor, alias Abigor in Wier)
13. Loray.  (Loray, alias Oray in Wier)
14. Valefar.  (Valefar, alias Malaphar in Wier)
15. Faraï.  (Morax, alias Foraii in Wier)
16. Ayperos.  (Ipes, alias Ayperos in Wier)
17. Naberus.  (Naberus, alias Cerberus in Wier)
18. Glosialabolas.  (Glasya labolas, alias Caacrinolaas vel Caassimolar in Wier)

Errata et corrigenda

Just uploaded an update to the 4th Book & Heptameron.  This fixes multiple errors in editorial material, trims some superfluous text in the bibliography, expands some notes and expands the "Testimonia" with Wier's denunciation of the Liber Quartus from the second and subsequent editions (not the first, as I incorrectly stated in the previous release) of De præstigiis dæmonum et incantionibus ac veneficiis and a brief excerpt from Thomas Willard's 2017 essay "How magical was Renaissance Magic?" touching on the Fourth Book.  There are still some minor tweaks that need to be made and a needlessly hostile passage that could use toning down / recasting.

I'm not planning on incorporating the material in the previous post into the Mathers-Crowley Goëtia, save for a general note referencing the Folger Offices of the Spirits.

In addition to the four BL Lemegeton MSS., a codex of similar content to Sloane MS. 2731 was in the possession of E.M. Butler, who reproduced one page from it as Plate II of her Ritual Magic (1949).  It is unclear if this was the same "private codex" mentioned by Mathers and cited as the source for his figure of the Circle.  Probably it is still in a private collection somewhere.

* * *

The edition of Agrippa's Opera in Duos Tomos (which I suspect, though this is on the basis of a single typo, was the one used by Robert Turner), with the pillars & crown device and motto Firmant consilium pietas politia coronam (also read Consilium, pietas et politia coronam firmant which means the same thing but flows a little better), which device (as I remarked in a previous post) was used ca. 1600 by Cornelius Sutor of Oberursel, is attributed by some bibliographers to Eberhard Zetzner of Strasburg, "ca. 1630."  Eberhard, it would seem, inherited his father's printing business in 1616; a German catalogue of printer's devices shows this among those used by E. Zetzner (Table LI & facing text).  I haven't so far managed to find anything on the Zetzner imprint with this device so far, but that doesn't mean much as I've not really looked very thoroughly (as in, ran a search -- inpublisher:"Zetzner" -- on Google Books).

What I *did* find was this -- a per Beringos fratres edition of an "Appendix Apologeticus" to a "Lyon" edition of Agrippa's Opera in duos tomos, with the date 1605 and the distinctive device of Lazarus Zetzner (head & shoulders of Minerva on plinth with motto SCIENTIA IMMUTABILIS).  This suggests Zetzner was responsible for the "1600" edition.  Since Zetzner senior worked with Sutor prior to relocating to Strasburg (e.g. on the original three-volume edition of Theatrum Chemicum), it is within the bounds of possibility that his heirs wound up with Sutor's device.

* * *

Pseudo-Agrippa's ritual for invocation of spirits of the middle / terrestrial order (p. 38 of CP edition, p. 61 ed. 1559, p. 68 in Turner, 1655) looks to be an ancestor of the procedure, mocked by A. E. Waite in Book of Ceremonial Magic (p. 302) in the Grimorium Verum (also the "1670" editions of the Grimoire of Honorius), "Pour faire venir trois demoiselles ou trois messieurs dans sa chamber après souper."

EDIT: actually, probably not.  While looking up some stuff in connection with some groups of 7 fairies cited in the Folger "Book of Magic" (where they appear with their queen, tacked on to the end of a Liber Officiorum version), Sloane 3851 (which incidentally contains English translations of the Heptameron and Liber Quartus independent from, and quite plausibly pre-dating, Turner's) and Folger X.d 234, turned up references to similar things in French folk tradition going back long prior to Agrippa's time (see for example K. M. Briggs, "Some Seventeenth-Century Books of Magic," published in Folklore in 1953; also the writings of Dan Harms concerning the "Table Ritual").  BTW, before attempting the procedure from Folger X.d 234, bear in mind that the 7 sisters were probably originally disease demons, as a very similar set of names is cited in 11th-century charms against fever.

Also, the same section of the Liber Quartus depends more heavily on OP III.32 than III.16, from which much of it is slightly paraphrased.

Contrary to my statement in a previous post, Joseph Peterson did remark on the citation in the printed Ars Notoria of Lemegeton as the name of a Solomonic text, in a set of corrections posted online after the print edition of the Lemegeton went to press.

Meddling with the Goëtia again (6)

As I remarked in my endnotes, the compiler of the Goëtia evidently left it up to the Magician to work out which of the four Kings of the Quarters was set over each of the 72 spirits, as an explicit rulership or assignment to a quarter was only given for a few (#1: Bael & #2 Agares — East; #32: Asmoday & #33, Gaäp — Amaymon; Amaymon also mentioned in passing in the entry for #13, Bileth).

The Folger "Offices of the Spirits,"[1] deriving from a somewhat divergent line of the MS. tradition to the version that was published in an incomplete form by Wier, is some help on this count.  It follows on the initial list of 82 spirits (the three chiefs and the four Kings of the quarters are counted in that number), the Queen of the Fairies and seven sisters subject to her (p. 81) with lists of names under the four Kings (some apparently repeated from the first section).  Obviously, there is a less than 100% overlap between this list of names and that in the Goëtia, but a fair few of them match or are similar enough in orthography, description and office that the identification is reasonable.

[1] Folger Shakespeare Library, MS. V.b. 26, "Book of Magic with instructions for invoking spirits," a.k.a. "Theurgia M.S."; images of MS. viewable online here, transcription by Joseph Peterson here, print edition (edited & Latin passages translated by Daniel Harms & Jospeh Peterson, illus. by James R. Clarke) as The Book of Oberon, Llewellyn, 2015.  The "Offices of the Spirits" appears on pp. 73-84 of the MS.

Also someone (17th century or later) wrote numbers next to the names of several of the spirits in the margin of the Folger MS. which appear to be cross-references to their numbers in Scot (which are one less than those in Wier after #3); a note in the same hand and colour next to the entry for Baall reads "According to Scot p: 277 4to 1651."

Under Oriens,[2] King of the East: 

[2] Since Oriens is simply the Latin for "east," this is possibly a euphemism or honorific title rather than the actual name of the ruler. Some versions of the scheme, e.g. in the Key of Solomon versions in Wellcome MS. 4666 (18th c.), Wellcome MS 4659 ("mid-18th century") and La Véritable Magie Noir ("179?," a textually corrupt and woefully incomplete printed edition), have Asmodée or Asmodiel as one of the kings of the quarters instead of Oriens; however in the Trinity, Folger and Wier-Scot-Goëtia Liber Officiorum versions (which disagree on many things), Asmoday consistently appears as one of the subordinate spirits distinct from the four kings, usually subject to Amaymon.  Oriens sometimes appears as Uriens (e.g. in the 16th-century Clavicula Salomonis version in Vadian Slg MS 334, p. 69, which notes the more common reading in the margin).

• Baall = Bael, #1
• Agaros = Agares, #2
• Barbas = Marbas, #5 (Marbas alias Barbas in Wier)
• Star — not in Goëtia (name possibly a copyist error for Scor alias Skor; can render men blind, deaf, and insane; brings money; appears in likeness of a swan; speaks hoarsely)
• Semper — probably Vepar, #42 (Vepar alias Separ in Wier; same powers; the Goëtia spirit appears as a "mermaid" (similis syreni per Wier), as opposed to Semper's "likenes of a mayden").
• Algor — probably Eligos, #15 (Eligor alias Abigor in Wier)
• Seson — possibly Purson (Pursan alias Corsan in Wier), #20 (similar appearance and offices)
• Maxayn — not in Goëtia (teaches virtues of herbs and stones, fast travel, appears as bear with serpent's tail)
• Neophon — not in Goëtia (can tell all things past and future, and all secrets; gives favour of the powerful, appeases enemies, gives dignity & riches, appears as a dog)
• Barbais — probably Barbatos, #8 (similar appearance -- "a wild archer," compare Wier's in signo sagittarii sylvestris, similar offices)
• Amon = Amon, #7
• Suffales — not in Goëtia (starts fights, gives false answers unless strongly constrained, appears as a spark of fire).

Under Amaymon, King of the South:

• Asmoday = Asmoday, #32
• Bileth — Beleth (alias Bileth) is #13 in Goëtia but stated offices are completely different; the Folger Bileth teaches the Liberal Arts & invisbility, and makes consecrations evil & good.
• Astaroth = Astaroth, #29
• Abech — apparently not in Goëtia (teaches "7 sciences" (i.e. the "liberal arts") & all languages, gets friendship, gives true answers, appears like an old king but only head visible)
• Berith = Berith, #28
• Mallapas = Malphas, #39 (same appearance and offices)
• Partas — possibly Foras, #31 (Forras alias Forcas in Wier; similar offices.  The Goëtia spirit appears as "a strong man" (forma viri fortissimi), the Folger spirit as "a wood bear")
• Busin — apparently not in Goëtia (answers all questions, can move dead bodies around and cause spirits to animate them, appears as a fair woman, speaks hoarsely)
• Oze = Osé, #57 (Oze in Wier)
• Pathin — name suggests Bathin, #18, but description & offices completely different (the Folger spirit can make a man wise and tell secrets, appears with 3 heads, a serpent in his hand & a pin of burning iron in his mouth with which he sets fire to things; there are some similarities with #23, Aim (Aym vel Haborym in Wier), who appears with 3 heads, rides a viper, carries a firebrand, can make one witty (ingeniosum), gives true answers of private matters (de abstrusis rebus)  and also sets fire to things)
• Cambra — not in Goëtia (teaches virtues of herbs and stones, tames birds, appears as a swan)
• Gamor — possibly Amy, #58 (name poor match but description and offices very similar).

Under Paimon, King of the West (who himself is #9):

• Belial = Belial, #68
• Bason — possibly Balam, #51 (offices and description similar)
• Gordonsor — apparently not in Goëtia (can tell the truth of all things, mighty in doing errands, appears as angel with a dark face)
• Balath — apparently not in Goëtia (can make men sick & deprive them of senses and wits; teaches liberal arts, gives love and dignity, can carry one from place to place; appears as a "mishappen image")
• Mistalas — possibly Stolas, #36 (same appearance, similar offices).
• Lecher — apparently not in Goëtia (knows secrets of "7 sciences," gets friendship; appears as knight with red lion's face, speaks sadly)
• Sagayne = Zagan, #61
• Caleos — Sallos, #19 (Zaleos in Wier), has a similar description but different offices (Wier omitted this spirit's offices so the compiler of the Goëtia either guessed, made something up, or called up the spirit—said in the Folger list to be very false in all his answers unless well constrained and mastered—and asked).
• Cagyne (or Cogin) — possibly Samigina, or Gamigin, #4 (similar appearance and offices)
• Suchay — not in Goëtia (teaches languages, provides fast travel, gives love of women (widows in particular); appears with a fair face like a woman)
• Reyall — probably Vual, #47 (same form, very similar offices; marginal note in MS. has "65" which correspond's to this spirit's number in Scot's list)
• Zayme — Räum (Raum vel Raym in Wier), #40, has some points of similarity in form and office.

Under Egin, King of the North (with one doubtful exception, these do not appear to be identifiable with spirits in the Goëtia):

• Ozia
• Uriell
• Vsagoo — possibly Vassago, #3, but offices are completely different
• Synoryell
• Fessan
• Goyle
• Auras
• Othey
• Saranyt
• Muryell
• Hinbra (also appears as Umbra due to errors by 17th / 19th / 21st century copyists)
• Anaboth

OK, that's still only about a third of the 72, even counting the more stretched identifications, but it's a start.  No idea why Egin doesn't get any of those in Wier's list.  Anaboth, Mureril, Caleos (also appears as Calchos), and Sonenel, possibly a variant of Synoryell, along with Vassago, Agares and Barbaros (possibly a variant of Barbatos or Barbais), are among a group of twelve spirits cited in treasure-hunting processes in Sloane MS. 3824, (fol. 5v-13r & 89-102).  Also, several of the above (again, with minor variance in the spelling of the names) appear as "Presidentiall Councellors" and "Messengers" of the Kings in Sloane MS. 3824 fol.117v (in fact, that whole section of 3824 has significant derivations from the De Officiis tradition represented by V.b. 26, although the conjurations have been re-written to be Protestant and the description of Egyn has been unaccountably heavily truncated, ending at the description of his nostrils).

OFC, as previously remarked, Wier (and hence Scot and the Goëtia) gives a different set of names of the kings of the quarters; only one name is in common with the traditional set (as per Agrippa, the Folger "Book of Magic," & most of the other Liber Officiorum versions not deriving from Wier that mention them at all), and that name assigned to a different direction, but since Wier (like Waite three centuries later) admitted to deliberately tampering with the text in the hopes of making it unusable, this can probably be safely disregarded.

BL Additional MS. 36674 fol. 65r (transcription by Joseph Peterson here) contains a Liber Officiorum fragment listing 13 spirits (rather, by the looks of it, two fragments nailed together; the first six entries are in Latin and also appear in the Pseudomonarchia; the remaining 7, (3 under Oriens, 2 under Amaymon, 2 under Egin) are in English and appear in the Folger list with variations in names that can be chalked up to copyist errors: Scor (Star), Algor, Sefon (Seson), Partas, Gamal, Umbra (Hinbra), Anaboth.  This fragment, incidentally, was the source of the list of the "Globes of Yog-Sothoth" in the Hay-Turner Necronomicon (an infamous literary-occult hoax of the late 1970s).

A French Liber Officiorum version with 47 spirits (again, counting the three chiefs and kings of the quarters in that number) survives in a manuscript in the collection of Trinity College, Cambridge (o.8.29).  Noticed briefly in E.M. Butler's Ritual Magic (p. 36), a detailed study and typeset by J-P Boudet was published in the Spring 2003 issue of Médiévales ("Les who's who démonologiques de la Renaissance et leurs ancêtres médiévaux").  An English translation of the text was included in Pandemonium by Jake Stratton-Kent (Hadean Press, 2016), a study of "spirit catalogues" which cross-references it with the Wier-Scot-Ars Goëtia line, the Folger "Offices of the Spirits" and the Grimoirum Verum (the list of spirits in the GV itself derives at least partially from a Solomonic text in Latin, the De Secretis, which survives in multiple 17th-century MS. versions, but that's a subject for another post).

[The link to view the MS. online at Trinity's own website was throwing errors last I checked.  A PDF of the relevant pages of the MS. can be downloaded from  the "Books of Magic" blog which has a summary of the text.]

A 15th-century manuscript in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Firenze (Plut 89 sup 38) contains a version of the Liber Officiorum in Latin at fol. 303r sqq. (going on the numbers written lightly at the bottom right corners of the pages, which appear to be those used by the website's interafce).  Boudet (op. cit., §25) gives a list which collates spirit names between this version, the Trinity version and Wier, as well as the selection in the "Munich manual of Demonic Magic" (Clm 849).

An earlier part of Plut 89 sup 38 (fol. 47v-51r) gives 100 characters for spirits, but this appears to be independent from the Liber Officiorum version and only a few names are common to both.  They are generally simpler than the elaborate sigils of the Goëtia, and for the few names that appear in both there is little resemblance: compare

with

(Belial, Bilet, Berit, Amon and Paimon are other names shared between the two lists.  There are also characters for the other Kings of the quarters, at the top of fol. 47v.)

[EDIT: that set of characters belongs with a De Officiis variant in Italian which is missing several pages including about 80% of the catalogue of spirits.  What remains of it, begins at fol. 35r.]

While Wellcome MS. 110 (late 16th cent.), which contains some extracts from an "Officium Sprituum" text (Flores extracti de libello qui nuncupatur 'Offitium spirituum') at fol. 32r and 101r on, is available online, it appears to have been very hastily written and I have insufficient experience reading Elizabethan secretary hand to pick out more than a handful of words from the relevant sections.  Joseph Peterson has transcribed the two entries in English from fol. 32r here.

The De Officiis Spirituum version in MS. Coxe 25 (formerly part of the Ritman Library as BPH 114) has not, as far as I am aware, been published or digitised; while it is frequently cited, I am not aware of any studies on it specifically.

One of the studies in the Routledge History of Medieval Magic (2019) mentions that Boudet was, at the time of writing, preparing "an edition of the catalogues of demons, often attributed to Solomon or which make mention at least of the wise king's ability to bind spirits."  (J. Véronèse: "Solomonic Magic").  It has not so far been published to my knowledge.

[EDIT: according to a comment on Dan Harms' blog in 2017, Boudet has been working on this (under the title Les catalogues de démons attribués à Salomon et à saint Cyprien) for over a decade.]

A Hebrew De Officiis Spirituum version is extant in a MS. (dated mid-19th century) in the collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, under the title Sepher Hokhmat Shelomoh (Book of the Wisdom of Solomon).  Description and link to images of manuscript here.  What the linked article doesn't mention, is that the 100 spirits described (including the familiar four Kings of the Quarters, but only one chief infernal spirit, Beelzebuth set over them, although Lucifer appears, twice, further down the list) are the same ones mentioned above which appear in BML Plut 89 sup 38, fol. 47v sqq.  Skimming through the first 20 or so, the names appear to be similar, and were probably transliterated from a Latin list (even in the case of names that were originally of Hebrew etymology, like Beelzebuth, Astarot, &c.) and the seals are mostly recongisable, though not identical.

Meddling with the Goëtia again (5)

[This is an updated / corrected version of a post under the same title of a couple of days ago, as the original somehow got flagged and deleted by Blogger while I was trying to edit it.]

After all these years, I only just noticed I forgot to transcribe how many legions #70, Seere, rules (26, for what it's worth).  And while turning the sigils into a TrueType font seemed like a good idea at the time (I lost count of how many times the drawing program I was using crashed while I was editing the vector art), it had the unfortunate effect that those mapped to lower-case letters accidentally got changed in a few instances by MS Word's auto-correct capitalising them.  I think they're all fixed in the most recent upload.

So, as is well known, there are four spirits in the Goëtia that do not appear in Wier or Scot: #3 (Vassago), and #70-72 (Seere, Dantalion, Andromalius).  Vassago, as I had previously remarked (citing A.E. Waite's Book of Ceremonial Magic (p. 197 n.), which cited no source), was reportedly also called on in ceremonial crystallomancy in a ritual tradition distinct from Solomonic / Goëtic conjurations (simply calling it "White Magic" in scare-quotes would have been insufficient for Waite: his actual phrasing was "[...] White Magic--as the most dubious of all arts is called in the scorn of its professors").

Anyway, in the course of looking for other instances of a group of planetary angels mentioned in the conjurations in the Heptameron (Salamia, Orphaniel, &c.) but not elsewhere in the same text, I turned up a reference by Joseph Peterson to an earlier work by Waite, The Occult Sciences (Kegan Paul et al., 1891) where Waite treats of more detail on the subject (p. 107), alluding to MSS. copied by Frederick Hockley.  One of these -- published as facsimile and typeset as The Clavis or Key to the Magic of Solomon (Lake Worth, FL: Ibis Press, 2009), edited and introduced by Peterson -- includes an "Experiment of Vassago," with the variant sigil (similar to, but significantly less elaborate than, that in the Goëtia) printed by Waite, in which the spirit is called to appear in a "Crystal Stone or Glass."

[Copies can also be found in Wellcome MSS. 2842 and 3203.]

This "experiment" was not, though, written by Hockley, nor by his source, Ebenezer Sibley; a version appears in BL Sloane MS. 3824 at fol. 110r-112v (the notebook containing this is mid-seventeenth century, has identifiable cribs from printed works such as J. French's translation of De Occulta Philosophia (pub. 1651) and Casaubon's True and Faithful Relation (pub. 1659), but also features material from multiple earlier sources such as the 16th-century English MS. traditions compiled in Folger MS. V.b. 26 or put into print by Scot in Book XV of the Discoverie of Witchcraft).  This MS.'s close proximity to those numbered 3821 and 3825 (the latter containing the earliest known complete Lemegeton) in the collection predates their cataloguing by Hans Sloane's librarian; all three were previously in the possession of John Somers (d. 1716) and after him, Sir Joseph Jekyll (d. 1738), and according to an account by David Rankine who edited a partial typeset of 3824 (The Book of Treasure Spirits, London: Avalonia, 2009) and had previously co-edited works drawing on the other two, portions of all three are in the same hand [1].  The "experiment of Vassago" is immediately followed by a similar one for Agares (#2 in the Goëtia as well as the Wier / Scot Liber Officiorum).  

[1] 17th-century handwriting is scarcely my specialism, but based on the copies I have seen (after first writing the above), the first half or so of 3824 (fol. 3-79), along with many notes, corrections, &c. to the originally independent texts in the latter part; the prayers on fol. 188-193 of 3821 along with some corrections and an inserted leaf of notes to the text on fol. 1-157, and some corrections to the texts in 3825, are in the hand of Elias Ashmole, who probably owned all three prior to their acquisition by Somers.

Later in 3824 (fol. 114r-120v) is found what looks to be part of a different Liber Officiorum version.  This has a lengthy account of a spirit called Bleth, "who is mostly called upon and appeareth of a glass of water" and shorter accounts of subordinate spirts: Sonoryan (said to have been the familiar of Cardinal Richlieu), Mamon, Seere, Asmodiah, Dantalion, Andromalius and Sondenna alias Sendenna.  Seere, Dantalion[2] and Andromalius[3] are, of course, the three other spirits not in the Wier / Scot list that were added to the Goëtia to make the number up to 72.  Their offices are more or less as in the Ars Goëtia, descriptions of their appearances and numeration how many legions they rule are omitted, and the characters recognisably similar to, but far less elaborate than, the Lemegeton forms.  Of Sondenna alias Sendenna, it is said "This Spirit was the Servant and familiar to Mr. E.K." (i.e., Edward Kelley) and whose description is copied from A True & Faithful Relation, p. 185 (Cotton Appendix xlvi part i fol. 201v, where the first 'n' in both forms of the name looks more like a 'u';[4] not (?) to be confused with SONDN, one of the ruling names of the upper right lesser angle of MOR).

[2] A probable variant of "Dantalion" appears as Dentalion, cited alongside Lucifer and Sathan in a process in Sloane MS. 3851 (date uncertain, likely mid 17th century) fol. 59v-60r; the procedure (which the scribe claimed to be "proved") is a coercive agoge "love spell," consistent with the offices of Dantalion in the Ars Goëtia.

[3] A probable variant / antecedent of "Andromalius" appears as Andrew Malchus, mentioned as a spirit called up by treasure hunters in Norfolk during the reign of Henry VIII.  Also Andromalcus or Andromalchus is cited in minor procedures in 16th & 17th-century magical MSS. such as Sloane MS. 3846 (fol. 83v), BL Additional MS 36,674 (fol. 89v) and Bodleian Rawlinson D. 252 (don't have exact reference), typically involving recovering stolen goods or identifying or punishing a thief.  The orthography Andromalius perhaps originates from an ink blot, piece of dirt or squashed fly above an ill-formed 'c' being taken as the dot on an 'i'.

[4] While Dee's scrawl in Cotton Appendix xlvi is frequently extremely hard to read, this name was lettered out fairly carefully, and Soudenna as a mis-hearing of Seudenna (Dee initially wrote the name as he heard it spoken during the Spirit Action, then added the marginal note with the second spelling following a later discussion with Kelley) is more believable than Sondenna as a mis-hearing of Sendenna.

Following this truncated catalogue of spirits is a page and a half with "The names of Severall spirits, both with and without their Characters" (omitted by Rankine and barely readable in the crappy images of the MS. that I'm currently working from) followed by (117r-120v) an account of the demon kings of the four quarters, and the three chief infernal spirits, Lucifer, Beelzebub and Satan (the first of whom, we are informed, cannot be called up directly although it is implied he should be cited in summoning and binding lesser demons), which appears to have been part of the Liber Officiorum tradition that was redacted out by Wier and remained largely AWOL in the Goëtia.[5]  This has parallels to the start of the "Offices of the Spirits" section of Folger MS Vb 26 (p. 73 sqq.) and the French Le Livre des esperitz (Cambridge Trinity MS. O.8.29 fol. 179ro-182vo).

[5] This section was also included by Skinner and Rankine in their earlier Keys to the Gateway of Magic (Golden Hoard, 2005), the bulk of which is a typeset of the Janua Magica Reserata.

In fact, the discrepancy in Wier between the number of spirits actually listed (69) and the number said to have been sealed up by Solomon in the br^H^Hglass vessel (72) could be accounted for by the missing three being the remaining Kings of the quarters, Oriens (E), Amaymon (N), and Egyn (S), since Paimon (W) does get an entry as #22 in the Pseudomonarchia.  Of course Wier also gives an almost completely different set of names for the Kings (Amaymon appears among them, but assigned to a different quarter), which was perpetuated into the Goëtia, but he also openly admitted to tampering with the text to make it unusable.

No, the *other* Book 4 about Magick

De Occulta Philosophia, seu de Cæremoniis Magicis, Liber Quartus; cui accesserit Heptameron, seu Elementa Magica.

After much prevaricating, getting distracted, and fine-tuning of the balance of pedantry and sarcasm in the footnotes, the previously-threatened Latin text of the Fourth Book of pseudo-Agrippa and Heptameron seu Elementa Magica of pseudo-Abano, an important Renaissance work on ceremonial magic and possibly the first Grimoire to actually be printed (1559, if the date on the title page is to be believed), can now be read on Scribd.  While I did some cross-checking with the 1565 and 1567 printings (links are to copies on Google Books with everything that implies) and the texts included in various of the "per Beringos Fratres" printings of tom. i of Agrippa's Opera, this makes no pretence at being a critical text.  

I have inserted things like paragraph breaks and section headings into pseudo-Agrippa's walls of text,  rearranged some of the lists of names in the Heptameron into tables for ease of reference, identified (most of) the chapters of De Occulta Philosophia libri tres cited, added a bibliography as well as an overview of the "supplements to Agrippa," the collection of texts on magic, divination & the like that were bound up with various posthumous printings of De Occulta Philosophia.

What I have not (yet) done, is indicated quite how extensive the borrowings in the Heptameron from the Liber Iuratus Honorii (Sworn Book of Honorius) are, largely due to my lack of familiarity with the latter work.  While BL Royal MS. 17 A XLII (not 15th century despite what the BL catalogue claims, as it has multiple identifiable cribs from De Occulta Philosphia) almost certainly took the seals of the planetary Angels from the Heptameron, or possibly a Lucidarium MS. -- the sigils being AWOL in the earlier surviving Liber Iuratus MSS. (similarly for the names associated with the 4 seasons at fol. 72ro sqq.) -- the remaining parallels go way beyond the lists of names in the second part of the Heptameron.  In particular, a large chunk of the ritual procedure beginning with the "Prayer to God, to be said in the four quarters of the world, in the circle" through to the charge to the spirits, appears to have been taken, with variations and expansions on some points, verbatim on others, from cap. CXXXIII of the Liber Iuratus (see for example Joseph Peterson's online edition of the text, and apparatus ad loc.).

The strange phrase, on which I have previously remarked, "Bathat vel Vachat super Abrac ruens, supervivens [v.l. "superiruens," "superveniens"] Abeor super Aberer" appears in the equivalent passage of Liber Iuratus as "Bachac super Abrac ruens, Abeor super Aberor" (apud Hedegård; Peterson, apparently working from the same MS., has "Bathac" in his online text).

Meddling with the Goëtia again (4)

So anyone who's reading this and cares about this subject probably knows this already, but, while the Lemegeton as we have it is almost certainly a 17th-century English compilation, the title, over which E. M. Butler (Ritual Magic, p. 65) puzzled briefly, and which Joseph Peterson (2001) ascribed to the compiler's ignorance of Latin and desire for something meaning "Little Key of Solomon" (clavicula itself is a Latin diminutive form, so the Clavicula Salomonis is already the "little" or "lesser" key of Solomon), as the name of a magical work ascribed to Solomon, predates that compilation.

In the printed Latin edition of the Ars Notoria that was included in the "1600" and other "per Beringos fratres" editions of Agrippa's Opera, we find:

"[...] ideo est ars notoria, quia quibusdam notulis brevissimis omnium comprehensibiliter scriptorum edocet cognitionem, sicut etiam ait Salomon in  tractatus Lemegeton, hoc est, in tractatu spritualium & secretorum experimentorum" (see for example this copy on Google Books).

It's actually a little odd that Peterson didn't remark on this at the time [EDIT: he did -- see here], since this line appears in Robert Turner's 1657 English translation of the Ars Notoria which is included in full in his edition of the Lemegeton, by far and away the best print edition of this grimoire:

"[...] it is called the Notory Art, because in certain brief Notes, it teacheth and comprehendeth the knowledge of all Arts: for so Solomon also saith in his Treatise Lemegeton, that is, in his Treatise of Spiritual and Secret Experiments" (Peterson, p. 170; p. 18 of the 1657 first edition of Turner's Notory Art of Solomon).

The similar form lemogethon appears as part of a string of barbarous names in cap. LXXV of the Liber Iuratus Honorii (the Sworn Book of Honorius), which was in turn borrowed from the Ars Notoria ; in the printed edition it appears (as lemogethom) as part of an oration to be said before the third Note of Philosophy (p. 634 of the copy of Agrippa linked above, Turner p. 79).  The 13th-century Ars Notoria sive Flores Aurei at Yale (Mellon MS. 1) includes (fol. 6vo) a shorter version of the same oration, beginning Lemogeton.

In one of the BnF Ars Notoria MSS. (BnF Lat. 7154, dated 16th century) is a reference to "libro suo [Salomonis] quæ Lemogethon nominatur." (fol. 11ro).  I think, but am not sure (since I have practically no experience reading manuscripts of the period so am unfamiliar with some of the scribal abbreviations & letter-forms used) that some text similar to the passage I quoted in Latin above appears in the 14th-century BnF Lat. 7152, fol. 2ro., about halfway down the second column; the name of Solomon's treatise appears different, but I can't tell exactly what it is and I don't have access to Véronèse's critical Latin text.

[EDIT: later found a copy of L'Ars Notoria au Moyen Âge.  BnF Lat. 7152 belongs to what Véronèse calls "Version A"; Véronèse reads the names of Solomon's tract on secret and spiritual experiments as "Demegeton" in Sloane MS. 1712, "Lemogetan" in Mellon MS. 1, "Lemodegan" in BnF Lat 7152.]

None of this answers the question of what, if anything, the name means, but it does suggest that the 17th-century compiler assembled and redacted various texts attributed to Solomon under this title to meet the demand for a rumoured, but lost (or fictitious) work, quite likely spurred by Turner's 1657 publication.  Compare the various fake Necronomicons that have been produced since the 1970s.

More might follow if I ever get the hang of reading mediæval Latin manuscripts.

Meanwhile I see the Elucidation of Necromancy (Joseph Peterson's forthcoming edition of texts & translations of various magical MSS. that were turned into the Heptameron seu Elemental Magica) listed on a website called "Children's Book World."  I suppose it helps to get started young on this kind of thing, but still . . .