2021-06-20

Of Keys and Gates (5)

After much prevarication, I've uploaded the Janua material from Sloane 3824 to Scribd.  There are almost certainly typos & transcription errors remaining in this, but running a spellcheck on it is of limited use given that I took a conscious decision not to modernise or standardise spelling in the transcript.

As for the rest of the MS., currently about 2/3 of the way through the page count on text transcription, but lagging some way behind that on cleaning up / redrawing figures.

On closer examination, the material on fol. 22-29 looks less like an intermediate stage in the Heptameron being turned into the conjurations & rubric of the Goëtia (as I originally conjectured on skim-reading it) and more like someone took material from those two works and crudely nailed them together: it follows the Heptameron closely, with certain modifications and omissions in the rubric, and the design of the Pentacle garbled, up to the end of the Exorcism of the Aërial Spirits, then cuts into the conjurations and rubric of the Ars Goëtia beginning with "The Constraint" that follows the second conjuration and carrying on to the end, then adding a concluding prayer.  It also, owing to a heavy dependence on the 1665 Robert Turner translation of the Heptameron (the 1655 edition left most of the conjurations &c. in Latin, remember), gives an earliest possible date for that section of the MS., and probably the following 50 leaves too.

The "Second Parte of the Art of King Solomon" on fol. 53-71 appears to be an incomplete copy of a variant version of the Ars Theurgia-Goëtia.  There are comments apparently indicating lists of spirit names and seals were in the source text but not copied; Ashmole also left a large space on fol. 54r for the figure of the compass, and wrote in the caption for the diagram but didn't copy the figure itself.

[EDIT: Fixed a copy-paste error I made when first redrawing the diagram.  There is a much more serious issue with the figure, dating back to the original compilation of the Ars Theurgia-Goëtia: the 16 "Princes" with fixed compass points should be evenly distributed around the compass, i.e. Padiel in ESE, Aseliel in SSE, Gediel in SSW, &c., as they are in Lib. I of the Steganographia (see table and figure at end of the first chapter) from which the whole scheme derives.  This is likely a result of a level of lost-in-translation with terminology for intermediate compass directions.]

Passages that also appear in the Sloane MS. 3825 Lemegeton generally closely agree with that copy, but conjurations for the chief spirits are given at length (there are minor verbal variations, but they generally differ only in names and compass directions), whereas the Sloane Lemegeton MSS. just give the opening of each conjuration, with a general form at the end with names and the opening lines to be varied as appropriate, completely different from the formula in Sloane 3824.

The transcription cuts off abruptly at the bottom of fol. 70r, in the conjuration of the 16th spirit, Cabariel; there is a catch-word at the bottom of the page, but the verso is apparently blank.  On fol. 71 is what appears to be a form of oath to be sworn by a summoned spirit once you've actually got it to show up (not in the Sloane Lemegeton versions).

No comments:

Post a Comment