Well, I've finished doing the main key-entry on the additional excerpts from the Janua in Sloane 3824. Still needs some checking, layout work & a few more attempts at making out doubtful or near-illegible words. In some of the longer passages it seemed that the copyist's handwriting was gradually deteriorating as his brain melted at the sheer inanity of what he was transcribing, or the writer's tendency to go off on two-page diatribes at a complete tangent from whatever the ostensible point was. Or maybe I'm just projecting here.
In excerpt 'K', "Dr. R," if that really was the author's name, is so insistent on refuting the notion that the the spirits of the middle or terrestrial order were the souls or ghosts of dead humans, that amidst all the ranting and rambling we never actually get any indication of a positive view on what the damn things actually are.
Possibly these sections were not "additions" at all, but part of the original work that were deliberately redacted out by a later editor / copyist as adding little of value to it.
It is also hard to believe the statement "it is now June 1649" (fol. 48r) when the ensuing text is copied out of a book published a decade later, as Ashmole noted in the margin, complete with a page reference.
[In any case, Ashmole's copy was made in 1665 or later, since the previous item in the notebook demonstrably depends on the second edition of Robert Turner's translation of the supplementary texts to Agrippa (Henry Cornelius Agrippa his Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, of Geomancie, Magical Elements of Peter de Abano, &c. &c. &c.) published that year.]
Seriously though, reading those passages raises the question: who was the author talking to? It seems . . . unlikely that the Janua was written for publication (and of course it was not published until over 300 years after its composition). On the other hand, its form, and the level of structure & organisation shown, certainly in Sloane 3825, is utterly unlike what we find in magical MS works that appear to have been for the private use of individual practitioners (compare the Folger Book of Magic, the Munich Manual of Necromancy, BL Sloane MS. 3851, Bodleian Rawlinson D.252, Rawlinson D.253 & e Mus. 173) which are light on theory (a few roughly translated or summarised excerpts from Agrippa are in Sloane 3851) and lighter on multi-page screeds trying to justify their practices.
The material was perhaps a response to anti-magical polemics of the time, that best known today probably being Meric Casaubon's preface to his publication of Dee's spirit diaries, which latter characterised the spirit actions as "A Work of Darknesse" and argued at great length that Dee & Kelly's "Angels" were not fraud or delusion, but "false lying Spirits" sent by "the Divel of Hell (as we commonly term him)": & the main intent was to crush any doubts that might have existed in the minds of the readers (or indeed of the author) as to the compatibility of the angel-magic practices with whatever form of Official Christianity formed the basis of their religious faith. The response to polemics like Casaubon's also had a practical aspect: a significant part of the "Isagogicall Observations" following the Janua's theoretical section (Sloane MS. 3825 fol. 40r-47r) and most of the "Further Instructions" following the "First Key" (53v-56r) is taken up with the question of just how to distinguish such "illuding Spirits" from "Angels of Light,"[1] thus reassuring the reader that it was possible for them to tell the difference if they followed the correct procedure
[1] For a detailed study, based on the copy of those sections in Harley MS. 6482, see Egil Asprem, "False, Lying Spirits and Angels of Light: Ambiguous Mediation in Dr. Rudd's Seventeenth-Century Treatise on Angel Magic."
No comments:
Post a Comment