So, on the plates for the Mathers-Crowley Goëtia as originally printed, at the bottom of the figure of the Hexagram, is a barely-readable note mentioning that the glyph in the bottom point is "often reversed."
In fact, on checking, it turns out the "reversed" form appears in all three copies of the Lemegeton in the Sloane collection, as well as the 19th-century copy in Wellcome MS. 3203, made by a friend of Fred Hockley from a copy Hockley made from a late 17th-century MS. in two volumes (lacking the Ars Notoria), suggesting the form in the main figure was an error by Mathers or the engraver who made up the plates. The figure (along with several others) is completely missing in the late & mucked-about Lemegeton copied by the infamous Peter Smart (Harley MS. 6483).
At the bottom of p. 212 of the Folger "Book of Magic" (Folger MS. V.b. 26, late 16th century, roughly contemporary with the publication of Scot's Discoverie & significantly pre-dating the redaction of the Lemegeton) occur two figures which appear to be earlier versions of the hexagram and pentagram of the Ars Goëtia (the similarity was noticed by a 20th-century owner of the latter part of the MS., who copied the figures from the De Laurence piracy of the Goëtia onto the back flyleaf). The version of the hexagram lacks the letters A G L A outside, and TE / TRA / GRA / MA / TON (sic) is arranged around the lower five points, with SIGNUM in the upper. Where the Ars Goëtia version has AGLA, the Folger version has four glyphs, the lower two bearing a close resemblance to the characters in the bottom point of the Ars Goëtia hexagram before Mathers flipped it.
The same four glyphs appear, in a row, as to be inscribed on the blade of a sword or dagger, on p. 213 of the Folger Book of Magic. And also as part of two magical diagrams in a 15th-century magical miscellany, Bodleian MS. Rawlinson D. 252. And eventually understanding dawns . . . they're the Tetragrammaton, IHVH, stylised practically beyond recognition through repeated copying, to the point where the designer of the figure in the Folger MS. didn't realise they were Hebrew and so read them left to right to arrange around the hexagram.
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So, while it's been generally recognised for a long time that the Second Conjuration of the Goëtia was an adaptation of the exorcismus spirituum aërorurum of the Heptameron (with most of the final section displaced into "The Constraint"), I only recently realised just how far the antecedents of that go.
The Heptameron, as Peterson and Véronèse have shown, is basically an edited and rearranged version of the pseudo-Abano Lucidarium (variously Lucidarium in arte Magica, Lucidarium artis nigromantice, Elucidarium Necromantiæ, "Elucidation of Necromancy"), which in turn borrows from the Liber Iuratus, Liber Salomonis (Sepher Razielis) & other sources.
Now in the other main source for the Goëtia, the Pseudomonarchia Dæmonum, we find in the description of two of the higher-ranking spirits (Byleth and Belial) references to something called the vinculum spirituum (Spirits' Chain), which the exorcist might need to read in order to get them to submit. The redactor of the Ars Goëtia, working from Scot's English translation, evidently was aware that this was needed for the ritual, but had no idea what the hell it was, so just made something up.
The joke is, if you get to the point in the Goëtia ritual where you're instructed to read the "Spirits' Chain," you've already rehearsed the vinculum spirituum.
In the Antipalus Maleficorum of Trithemius (written 1508 but not published until much later), the Abbot of Spanheim lists various works of demonic magic that were circulating in manuscript at the time, some now known, others possibly lost to the ravages of time and the zeal of the Inquisition. Among these (immediately after the De officiis spirituum attributed to Solomon) is the Vinculum Spirituum, by which, we are told, many arrogant and lost folk believe they can constrain daemons to obey them. The opening words of which text, are said to be De vinculo spirituum non est silendum.
Well, it turns out that one isn't lost. Texts with that title and incipit, or something very similar (reading solvendum for silendum) are extant in two 15th-century manuscripts in the Bayern Staatsbibliothek at Munich, to wit Clm 849, the famous "Munich Manual of Necromancy" (from which the above image is taken), and Clm 10085, ostensibly an orthodox manual of exorcism. Clm 849 also refers to the text as Vinculum Salomonis, under which title it is cited in a 16th-century Key of Solomon version in English and Latin that survives in BL Sloane MS. 3847.
After a brief prologue, the actual text begins. In Clm 10085: Per potentissimum et corroboratum nomen domini dei el forte et admirabile vos coniuro et exorzio et contestor . . . [at which point my ability to read heavily abbreviated mediæval Latin blackletter gave out, but I could make out "per eum qui dixit et facta sunt" a bit further on]. Fortunately, a typeset of Clm 849 has been published (Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, Stroud: Sutton, 1997; reprinted Penn State University Press, 2012). On examination of which, it turns out that the general structure of the Vinculum is a long string of citations of names of God, of Hebrew, Greek or unknown origin, by which various figures from the Jewish legends are said to have become wise, been saved, wrought various wonders, &c.; and later, a threat to curse the spirit, deprive it of its office, joy and place, hurl it into the abyss & and bind it in eternal fire and a lake of fire and brimstone until the day of the last judgement unless it gets its arse in gear and appears before the circle, sine mora.
In other words, it's an ancestor of the Exorcismus spirituum aërorum of the Lucidarium / Heptameron, and thence of the Second Conjuration and Constraint of the Ars Goëtia.
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EDIT: Every. Damn. Time. I upload the updates & then find something significant I missed. Taking another stab at the Vinculum version in Clm 10085, I find (fol. 6v, lines 8-11): et per annulos Salomonis signa (?) et sigilla cum quibus inclusit trecentos septuaginta duos reges dyabolicos cum eorum legionibus. Assuming I read that trecentos correctly, looks like this version of Solomon was a bit more ambitious that the one in the Liber Officiorum version copied by Wier, who only managed to seal up 72 kings with their legions in a glass vessel. Either "72" was earlier and someone in one line of transmission decided that it wasn't impressive enough, or "372" was, but "trecentos" got misread as something else at some stage of transcription.
Also in a different procedure in Clm 849 (fol. 45v) we find et per hac duo nomina Ioth & Nabnoth per quæ Salomon constringebat in vase vitreo demones.
On the other hand, the Solomon cited in a spirit binding in Cambridge Additional MS. 3544 (typeset in F. Young, The Cambridge Book of Magic) was less ambitious, only managing tres dæmones in vase vitreo.
[Images from Clm 849 & 10085 taken from posts at https://bildsuche.digitale-sammlungen.de/ -- released under Creative Commons Attribution / Non-commercial / Share-Alike license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).]
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