2021-05-15

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 (SalamiaOrphaniel, &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.

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