Lack of progress report 2022.08.01

Latest version of Longobardus (Sloane MS. 3824) is now on Scribd.  This now includes all the text sections but still omits the second collection of talismanic figures as well as the page of circular designs with planetary characters in the middle of "Magical Elements."  It also now has a bibliography.  A bunch of notes on the various names of spirits cited therein (mainly regarding their occurrences in English magical works of the period & century or two preceding) is still under construction.  

Also, after uploading it I managed to track down a source for the first of the "Dr. R" interpolations into the Janua Magica Reserata: Excerpt "A" is taken, with minor paraphrasing and verbal alterations, from the 1633 third edition of The Philosophers Banquet (first pub. 1609 as The Philsophers Banquet: furnished with few dishes for health, but large discourse for pleasure &c. &c. &c., in turn represented as an English translation of the Mensa Philsophica of "Theobaldus Anguilbertus" (Michael Scot, fl. early 13th cent. c.e.)).  The third "book" of this work is a miscellany of material for "after-dinner conversation," wandering over various topics.  That particular passage wasn't in the 1614 second edition (I couldn't find a copy of the first edition online) and was probably added by the "translator," known only as "W. B., Esquire."

Lack of progress report 2022.07.27

Well, have Internet back since last week (kinda-sorta had it before then but the idea of updating this blog on a touch-screen phone isn't all that appealing) although my situation is still somewhat precarious & I'm now in a different city -- hopefully fairly short-term, so won't be changing the imprint just yet.  Been pretty slack the past month (& also tired most of the time owing to only drinking a fraction of the amount of coffee I used to).  

Anyway, after another extended period of slacking and minor tinkering with various documents, made another start at Longobardus (Sloane 3824), largely this meant giving it some semblance of a proper bibliography.  Maybe I'll read Religion and the Decline of Magic next & see if it contains any clues to the social / religious background that produced the "Invocation of Angels" texts.

Lack of progress report 2022.06.30

This will likely be the last update for a while as I have to be out of the place where I'm currently set up today, and do not currently have anywhere long, or even medium, term to relocate to: so rectifying that is going to be something of a priority.

Recently put out an update to On the Invocation of Angels; this is mostly relatively minor tweaks / fixes, though: added the invocation of "L.B.S." from Longobardus to the appendix to "Operations of the Angles of the Air" but the rest is just updated notes / bibliography.  The work still needs a general introduction even if that does end up snowballing into an MA thesis (I can dream...).

My head hurts.

So, I've been going over the Longobardus and Invocation of Angels texts, mainly in preparation for the next updated release of the latter, and decided to run a more detailed comparison of the Sloane 3821 text of "A Select Treatise" with the fragment in Sloane 3825.  So here's the thing:

* The opening of the conjuration of Agiel in 3825 (fol. 99r, v) is with one or two exceptions (e.g. it has "art" for "are" at one point) word for word (i.e., differing on spelling, capitalisation and punctuation) identical to that in 3821.

* The fragment in 3824 (fol. 37r), which was part of the above (handwriting is the same and the page numbering and text continues directly from where the 3825 copy breaks off) until Ashmole detached the sheet on which it was written from the rest of that book and appended it to his "Longobardus" notebook, deviates significantly from the 3821 text before trailing off.

3824: "[…] same to transmit your true & reall presence, Corporally, in your Appearances plainly & Visibly, to the Sight of our Eyes, & Voyces to our Ears, that We may also as plainly & Visible see you & Audibly here you, speake unto us: or otherwise to Appear out of the same Visibly here before us, as it shall please God & you his Servants, or Servants as Messagers of his paterniall grace, & mercy, Seemeth Most Meet, proper, pertinent, or best befitting this action, Appearance, Occasion or Matters &c."

3821: "[…] same to transmit youre true and reale preasance In splended Appearance plainely unto the sight of our Eyes uter your voyces unto our Eares that we may not only visible see you but audibly heare you speake unto us and that we may Convers with you or otherwise forthwith Appeare out of them visibly upon this Table or ffairely upon the flore and shew plainely & visibly unto us A Suffitient signe or teste of youre Coming and Appearance" [&c. &c. &c.]

This almost suggests that the introduction, description of Agiel and the opening of the conjuration was written by one writer: that either the original writer left it unfinished, or whoever was copying it after the 3825 Janua gave up a short way into the conjuration of Agiel, and that the work was subsequently completed by someone else based on that copy after Ashmole detached one sheet.

This is it, which the Angels won't give you a Google Maps link for

In addition to the scheme of the angels and divine names of the four Watchtowers, Dee's "Table of the Earth" contains another set of names, read not on horizontal or vertical straight lines (well, one of them is) but according to a set of angular sigils or Characteres Symmetrici.  These are tabulated in Dee's Liber Scientiæ, Auxillii et Victoriæ Terrestris (book of earthly knowledge, aid and victory), in Sloane MS. 3191 fol. 14r-31r, with the arrangement of characters on the table appearing on 55v-56r.

The seven-letter names thus read are variously characterised as being the names of "Ninety-one Princes and spiritual Governers, to whom the earth is delivered as a portion" (T&FR, p. 139) or "names of the parts of the earth, divinely imposed" (Partium Terræ Nomina, Divinitus imposita) as contrasted with "names of the parts of the earth, imposed by men" (Partium Terræ Nomina, ab Hominibus imposita) (column headings in Liber Scientiæ).  These 91 names are split up into 30 Bonorum Principum Aëreorum Ordines Sphærici with 3-letter names such as LIL, ARN, ZOM, &c.

In Dee's 48 Claves Angelicæ MS. (Sloane 3191, fol. 12ro), immediately prior to the "Key of the 30 Ayres" for invoking these orders, is a diagram showing the orders of "Aërial Princes" as concentric circles with TEX, the 30th, as the innermost and LIL, the first as the outermost, each divided into 3 (or four for TEX) corresponding to the parts of the earth comprehended therein.  This seems to have suggested to some later commentators that the Ayres are something like the Aeons or layers of Heaven of certain Gnostic traditions, which eventually was elaborated into a conception of the scheme (on which, for example Crowley's entire "The Vision and the Voice" working was founded) that managed to completely disregard everything else said about it in the Spirit Actions including the words of the Key and the title of the book in which the whole thing was tabulated.

For example, in the Action of 1584.05.21, Nalvage declared:

There are 30 calls yet to come. These 30 are the calls of Ni[nety-one] Princes and spiritual Governors unto whom the earth is delivered as a portion.  These bring in and again disp[ose] Kings and all the Governments upon the Earth, and vary the Nature of things …… with the variation of every moment.  Unto whom, the providence of the eternal judgment is already opened.  These are generally governed by the twelve Angels of the 12 Tribes: which are also governed by the 7 which stand before the presence of God.  Let him that can see, look up: and let him that can hear, attend, for this is wisdom. They are all spirits of the Air, not rejected, but dignified; and they dwell and have their habitation in the air, diversely and in sundry places, for their mansions are not alike, nor are their powers equal. Understand, therefore, that from the fire to the earth, there are 30 places or abidings: one above and beneath another, wherein these Creatures have their abode, for a time.

(T&FR p. 139-40; spelling modernised; as Turner (Elizabethan Magic, p. 83-4) points out, the entire scheme of Ayres belongs to the "Aërial" realm of the geocentric mediæval / Renaissance magical cosmology, and hence in the sublunary sphere of things subject to change.)

This is doubtless the source of Crowley and others referring to the 7-letter names as being those of "governors" of the Ayres; however, a passage in Latin immediately following appears to suggest that it is the Angels of the 12 tribes who are the governors of the 91 parts, some having many, some fewer, under their rule:

Per tota terra distributa sub 12 Principibus Angelis, 12 Tribuum Israel: quorum 12 aliqui plures, aliqui pauciores partes habent sub sua regimine ex 91 partibus in quas tota terra hic demonstratur esse divisa.  Apocalypsi Johannis Testimonium, de 12 Angelis 12 Tribuum, Cap. 21.

Quando dividebat Altissimus gentes, quando separabat filios Adam, constituit terminos populorum, juxta numerum filiorum Israel [Deut. xxxii: 8]: Hoc igitur hinc egergiè patere.

suggesting that the seven-letter names are the names of the Parts of the Earth themselves and not those of angels associated with but distinct from the Parts.  In the subsequent pages of T&FR where the seven-letters names are given, on two occasions they are explicitly said to be names of parts of the earth, or parts of the world on earth, each governed by one or another of the 12 angels of the 12 tribes.

In Ave’s “expounding” of the vision of the Watchtowers (T&FR p. 170) we are told of

… the Angels of all the Aires, which perfectly give obedience to the will of men, when they see them.  Hereby you may subvert whole countries without Armies […] By these you shall get the favour of all the Princes […] Hereby you shall know the secret Treasures of the waters, and unknown Caves of the Earth.

Compare the Call:

… ye are mighty in the parts of the Earth, and execute the Judgement of the Highest […] your God […] provided you for the government of the Earth and her unspeakable variety, furnishing your with a power understanding to dispose all things […] govern those that govern, cast down such as fall …

The implication being that the twelve Angelic Kings, or, if we continue to insist on them, the “Governors,” are set over the various parts of the surface of the Earth (“The earth, let her be governed by her parts…”).  The 7 before the presence of God are the angels on the outer heptagon of the seal of Æmeth.  The Aires themselves serve mainly as containers for the 91 parts.  Egil Asprem (Arguing with Angels, pp. 24-25) remarks of this:

The intention of this system seems to be that by ‘calling’ the right Aires […] the magician can gain the authority over the geographical entities and presumably the power to control great geopolitical events (thus indicated by the title of the book, “terrestrial victory”).  In other words, this was a form of magic most desirable for Dee, being the occasional counsellor to the Imperial Elizabethan throne.

As regarding the specific attributions to the world's surface -- Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia and other places taken from Ptolomey's Geography via Cornelius Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia (lib. I cap. xxxi), as well as place-names unknown prior to the Spirit Actions such as "Tolpam," "Onigap" and "Coxlant": prior to the delivery those names (T&FR pp. 153 sqq.), Nalvage attempted to point them out on “a great thing like a Globe, turning on two axell-trees.”  

Dee, finding this insufficiently precise, objected:

We beseech you to bound or determine the Countries or Portions of the Earth, by their uttermost Longitudes and Latitudes, or by some other certain manner.” 

Nalvage responded: 

Our manner is, not as it is of worldlings: We determine not places after the forms of legs, or as leaves are: neither we can imagine any thing after the fashion of an horn: as those that are Cosmographers do.  Notwithstanding the Angel of the Lord appeared unto Ptolomie, and opened unto him the parts of the Earth: but some he was commanded to secret: and those are Northward under your Pole.  But unto you, the very true names of the world in her Creation are delivered.

At the conclusion of this Action (p. 158), Dee queried regarding several lands known to him that were apparently not included in the 91 mentioned; some, he was told, were to be reckoned under “Sauromatia” (#46) and “Brytania” (#61), “and so it is of the rest.”  On being pressed about “Atlantis and the annexed places, under the King of Spain called the West Indies?” (referring, by context, to the North American continent and adjacent islands), Nalvage retorted “When these 30 appear, they can tell you what they own.  Prepare for tomorrow’s Action.”

No Action took place the next day.  Kelly and Dee quarrelled, Kelly pointing out that the names of the provinces and countries appeared in “one Volume of Cornelius Agrippa his works,” from which “he inferred, that our spiritual Instructors were Coseners to give us a description of the World, taken out of other Books: and therefore he would have no more to do with them.”  After some argument, Kelly refused to undertake another skrying session, and the next Action, on the 28th, treated of other subjects entirely; Nalvage drops out of the record for a while, reappearing in July for the completion of the Claves Angelicæ.

While one commentator (Robin E. Cousins, in the geographical appendix to Turner et al., Elizabethan Magic), suggested that “those 30” indicated the existence of another 30 Parts corresponding to areas unknown or vaguely known in Dee’s time, this would raise all kinds of problems with the system; considered rather in the context that the reeling off of the Ptolemaic names followed Dee’s rejection of the initial attempt to indicate the terrestrial locations, and Nalvage’s refusal to use human measurements, the instruction could rather have been to call up the 30 Ayres in turn to find out.

It might further be considered from the earlier statement of Nalvage already quoted, that the terrestrial governance of the 91 parts is subject to change over time, and so the list given, even if valid in 1584, is not necessarily still applicable today.

Lack of progress report 2022.06.25

Hardly anything done since last update: have been distracted by other things, and currently have some RL stuff that absolutely needs to be dealt with by next Thursday.

On a whim, ran a Google search on an obsolete word occurring in some of the magical texts in Sloane 3824; this turned up, besides copies of my own typesets and some pirated copies of Skinner & Rankine's books, a passage from Joscelyn Godwin's Theosophical Enlightenment (p. 93-4) in turn citing a 1987 Hermetic Journal article by Ron Heisler, mentioning as among items in the possession of Thomas Britton (1644-1714, a London charcoal merchant better known as a host / promoter of musical concerts) that were sold off in 1694, a collection of ritual paraphernalia and magical MSS. including a table of practice for "the Spirit Pamerfiel" (sic), and a "A brief Introduction explaining the Uses of the magical tables.  The practice of the East Table.  The regal invocation, together with the practice of the West, North, and South Tables..."  The former was almost certainly the "Table of Solomon" from the Ars Theurgia-Goëtia; the latter is either the MS. now known as Sloane 307 (Hans Sloane, per the Wikipedia page on Britton, acquired much of Britton's remaining collection when it was sold after his death) or another complete or partial copy of the Clavicula Tabularum Enochi.

[It is tempting to suggest that the other of the "two Magical Tables or Leaves about a yard square" was a copy of Dee's table of practice, but the description given makes this unlikely, even if we allow that the author of the sale catalogue could have mistaken the Angelic script for "Hebrew or Chaldee."]

Since this sale occurred after the death of Elias Ashmole, it's no help in establishing a date for the Clavicula Tabularum Enochi, of course.

Other items described in the sale catalogue including "a round solid Christal Glass, 3 inches and more diameter, and fixed on a solid Brass Stand" strongly indicate that Britton was actually practicing this stuff (whereas Sloane collected works on magic in order to study the subject as a department of psychopathology, or to debunk it).

Also turns out that a typeset, along with a German translation, of the Clavicula Tabularum Enochi (rather, the introductory section and the "Practice of the Tables" invocations) from Sloane 3821 was printed in 1993, in a book called Henoch Iadnah Mad, Das Wissen Der Götter by Ralf Löffler.  My knowledge of German is minimal, but this book also appears to be heavily founded on G.D. "Enochian magic" and includes several illustrations lifted from Liber Chanokh ("das Wissen der Götter" is simply a fairly literal German translation of iadnah Mad).

* * *

Also, finally finished re-doing the vector art of the Circle from the Mathers-Crowley Goëtia.  I Initially attempted to use Unicode Hebrew for the text, but trying to adjust text on a path which switches between right-to-left and left-to-right character order repeatedly was a complete nightmare, so kludged it by using the old NIHebrew face which maps the letters to ASCII.

* * *

I was wrong in my stated belief in a post earlier this year that "A Select Treatise as it was first discovered to the Egyptian Magi"  (Sloane MS. 3821 fol. 205-225), included in On the Invocation of Angels, had not previously been typeset: an edition by David Rankine was printed in 2018 as part of a Hadean Press chapbook series under the title Conjuring the Planetary Intelligences, supplemented by some materials from Agrippa and pseudo-Agrippa relating to the forms of planetary spirits, the magic squares of the planets, &c.  This edition appears (going on the preview of the Kindle ebook at Amazon) to omit the original title and a portion of the introduction.

Meddling with the Goëtia again (11)

My extended period of slackness continues and I currently need to work out where the hell I'm going to be living from the end of next month, but finally got the latest updates to the Mathers-Crowley Goëtia into a publishable form: mainly this includes finally adding a bibliography.

I'm still not entirely happy with the figure of the Circle but can't face fixing it right now.  As of this version the colour plate of the Hexagram, Pentagram and "Ring or Disc" (which as the author of the "Brother Enoch's Goetia" blog pointed out years ago, was almost certainly originally meant to be a plain band ring with the three names engraved around its inner and outer face and not the flat disc with the names in concentric circles as in the Mathers figure) are embedded bitmaps; but since Inkscape can export PDF files directly it should be possible to turn the entire plate into vector graphics.

I'll repeat here the suggestion I made in my endnotes to the Goëtia about those figures: that the scheme of coloured washes described by Mathers, and the serpent containing the spiral of names around the Circle (sourced by Mathers to an unspecified "private codex") were artistic / talismanic flourish due to Frederick Hockley.  My basis for this claim:

• There is a direct and fairly short line of transmission from Hockley through Kenneth MacKenzie to the founders of the Golden Dawn.
• Hockley made a lot of copies / compilations of magical MSS. for personal use, for friends and as work-for-hire, and his higher-effort productions (several of which have been published from extant copies in private collections) frequently have elaborations of this kind in figures.
• Hockley had in his hands a copy of the Lemegeton (omitting the Ars Notoria) and made copies.  The Wellcome collection includes material deriving from these, including incomplete copies of the Goëtia and Theurgia-Goëtia made by Henry Dawson Lea from a Hockley copy in Wellcome MS. 3203, and the fragmentary Magia de Profundis seu Clavicula Salomonis Regis (Wellcome MS. 4665).
• Both the above-mentioned Wellcome MSS. contain the outline description of the parts of the Lemegeton which closely matches the fourth parallel column in the Mathers-Crowley Goëtia (including the omission of the words "of Spirits" at the start of the description of the third book): far more closely than any of the parallel texts match any of the BL Lemegeton copies.

I don't currently believe the redactor of the Lemegeton and the author(s) of the "Invocation of Angels" texts and "Longobardus" were the same person, but they were writing around the same time, probably knew each other (and Ashmole) and exchanged MSS. and ideas, and both were likely attempting to create comprehensive systems dealing with various "worlds" of mediæval-Renaissance magical cosmology which also were consistent with the particular flavour of Official Christianity to which they subscribed.

Lack of progress report 2022.04.09

Very little done since the last update, mostly just minor tinkering.

Since right now I can't face giving the remaining figures from Sloane 3824 a proper re-drawing, and I have completed the text, uploaded a provisional release of the "Trithemius Redivivus" (Steganographia) and "Magick and Magical Elements" (Heptameron) sections to Scribd.  This still omits a page of figures from the latter work, but as those are not part of the original Heptameron, have no caption, and are not explained or even mentioned in the text in which they appear, I suspect they're just something that was already on the MS. sheet when Ashmole or whoever started copying "Magical Elements."  It also doesn't have a proper bibliography.

EDIT 2022.04.11: Also uploaded the last round of fixes to the Theurgia-Goetia.

Lack of progress report 2022.03.15

Initial release of Ars Theurgia-Goëtia is now up on Scribd.  There are some minor typos I've already discovered since posting it, but not enough to currently warrant doing a full rebuild of the thing.  Because the antiquated version of Word I'm using doesn't play nice with the vector graphics software I'm using (i.e. I can't simply copy and paste .svg vector objects from Inkscape into Word 2007), all figures have been turned into 300 dpi bitmaps.

Possibly going to take another stab at the remaining bits of Longobardus (i.e. my typeset of Sloane 3824).  The only text still to be transcribed is the latter half of Trithemius Redivivus (about five leaves), but a large number of talismanic figures still remain to be redrawn (those forming the bulk of the second division of the codex, and a page embedded in the reworked Heptameron but nowhere explained or even mentioned in the text).

While working on the Theurgia-Goëtia I turned up a few things that suggest that the original redactor used Trithemius Redivivus (not the Sloane 3824 copy -- it has some errors in spirit names not found in the Lemegeton, not to mention it breaks off abruptly in ch. 13) rather than a printed Latin Steganographia.  Specifically this is based on the rearrangements of some of the tables of "Dukes" under the chief spirits, which as set out in the 3824 copy do not generally preserve the arrangement from the printed Steganographia but are set out in two columns for day and night, and in the specific case of those under Raysiel, disarrange the order, displacing Lamas and Thurcal to the bottom of the list of nocturnal spirits, in which position they appear in the Theurgia-Goëtia (compare Sloane 3824 fol. 130r with p. 41 of the 1606 printing).

Lack of progress report 2022.03.07

Been slack & getting sidetracked as usual (e.g. creating & fiddling with the above design).  In any case, all spirit characters from the Ars Theurgia-Goëtia have now been re-drawn.

Since there are notable differences in the orthography of the spirit seals even between the three Sloane Lemegeton texts, never mind later copies like Harley 6483 or Wellcome 3203 (the latter woefully incomplete anyway), I had to make a bunch of judgement calls redrawing them.  One of these is to try to keep the style as uniform as possible throughout.  While Sloane 3825 is probably the least corrupt Lemegeton MS. known, it still has a bunch of copyist errors in both text and figures, and style in the figures is uneven: as can be seen by the images posted by Peterson, some have very heavy line-work, leading in some cases to loss of details; others appear to have been drawn with a much thinner pen.

The planned appendices also mostly done: mainly just need to check the bibliography and actually finish the introduction.

Lack of progress report 2022.02.24

Plodding on with redrawing the spirit seals from the Ars Theurgia-Goëtia, and while taking a break from that knocked up the above cover design as a pastiche of Crowley's Goetia cover.  Not totally happy with it: I wanted the background to be a gradiant fill rather than a flat grey, but the program I used to do the text layout has limited options for that, and attempting to export the page with such a background made a mess of it.

Current progress: all main text transcribed; seals redrawn for 17 of 31 principal spirits and 287 of 482 subordinates; introduction half-written; some appendices done, one (listing variants in the names from the different BL Lemegeton MSS.) part done, a couple more planned but not started (one of those will be the passages from the Ars Goëtia referenced in the text, another some diagrams from the Steganographia).

Of Keys and Gates (9)

Finished working over the Janua seals.  Decided to restore the Hebrew text that was omitted in the Sloane 3825 copy (the names of the Sephiroth & names of God corresponding, save for no. 2 which just had a single yod because there was no room for anything else in the centre of the pentagram at the size the thing was engraved -- less than 2cm across).

Some of the Latin mottos were abbreviated for space reasons in the printed Calendarium (the entire set of figures -- 20 circles all told -- were printed in a single row across the page, some 18" across including a column of text at left and right, and there was a limit to how much text even a legendary engraver like Matthäus Merian could physically fit in those designs).  The Sloane 3825 Janua, unsurprisingly, generally agrees with the print edition (some errors have been fixed and some introduced).

In the latest revision, full text has been restored for most, based on the images of the MS. posted at Twilight Grotto.

Some other minor alterations have been made for style & readability (e.g. having the things in the same typefaces I used in the main text).

The figure on the seal of Netzach was a heptagon in the printed Calendarium but turned into an octagon in the Sloane 3825 Janua, either in error or through laziness (constructing a regular heptagon by hand with compass and ruler is non-straightforward compared to drawing an octagon).  In the MS. one of the sides had a 7-pointed star instead.

The character for Geburah in the MS. is 9-angled; in this instance I went with the printed Calendarium.

I'm not sure I can face going over this lot again to make capitalisation consistent right now, though.

Variations in the names of the Angels from the printed Janua are retained: Großchedel used the Agrippa arrangement (the table does include, in its scale of No. 7, the characters of the Angels from the Heptameron, with Michael referred to Mercury, Anael to Sol and Raphael to Venus (the latter switch was an error by Merian, per Peterson -- see page already linked -- the MS. has them the other way round)).

I'm also not entirely sure what Großchedel's basis for assigning different geometric figures to the ten points of the scale was, in any case.  Only one matches the key scale number, and the circle for Sol and vesica / doubled crescent for Yesod / Luna are understandable.  The others, though, have no clear pattern.

Of Keys and Gates (8)

Well, was just chasing up something in connection with the figure of the "Magical Table of Solomon" in the Ars Theurgia-Goëtia, which, for reference (as redrawn by me from the Sloane 3824 copy) looks something like this:

As Joseph Peterson pointed out a long while ago, this design previously appeared in the Calendarium Naturale Magicum Perpetuum of Johann-Baptisa Grosschedel, a late-Renaissance emblem work printed in Frankfurt in 1618 by Johann Theodor de Bry from engravings by Matthäus Merian.  There, it appears thus:

The Calendarium includes tables based on, but expanded from, the tables of the scales of the numbers in book II of De Occulta Philosophia.  The "Table of Solomon" appears in the scale of the number 8, associated with the first letter heh in the divine name Yahweh va-Da'ath, the "poor in spirit [whose] is the Kingdom" among the "classes of the blessed" mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount, Mars among the Planets and the "dryness of fire" among the Elements.  In a MS. of the Calendarium (BL Harley MS. 3420, dated 1614 and identified as the original author's holograph in a study by Carlos Gilly), it is further associated with "wisdom."

Anyway, looking further down the Calendarium, in the scale of the number 10 we find some familiar looking circular figures in pairs, labelled Sigilla decem nomina Dei principalia Complectentia, with geometric figures inside the circular borders and writing in Latin and Hebrew: in short, these are the same designs found in the Sloane MS. 3825 copy of the Janua Magica Reserata (the Janua including derivations from the Calendarium was also spotted by Peterson in 2004 or earlier).

Since the Calendarium itself is a synthesis including identifiable derivations from earlier works, of course (besides materials from Agrippa, the sigils of the planetary Angels from the Heptameron / Lucidarium, the seals of the Zodiac from the pseudo-Paracelsan Archidoxes Magica and the characters of the Olympic Planetary Spirits from Arbatel de magia veterum also appear), it is not necessarily either the origin of these particular designs, or the immediate source for the redactors of the Lemegeton or the Janua.  The seals of the Zodiac in the Ars Paulina, for example, agree much more closely with those printed in Robert Turner's translation of the Archidoxes than with those of the Calendarium.  However, where the Harley MS. versions of the seals from the scale of the number 10 differ significantly from the printed versions, Sloane 3825 agrees with the printed forms.  While Peterson identified some individual designs of similar general morphology to the "Tables of the Fathers" in 16th-century MSS. such as Wellcome MS. 110 and BL Additional MS 36674, earlier instances of the full scheme have not been turned up.

Anyway, off to fix the versions of the seals in my transcription of the Janua, and add one for the "tenth key."

[Images from the printed Calendarium Naturale Magicum Perpetuum from a copy in the Bibliothéque nationale de France, posted here.]

Lack of progress report 2022.02.15

Not entirely sure why I did this, but have made a start on a edition of the Ars Theurgia-Goëtia of the Lemegeton, mainly drawing on Sloane 3825 but also incorporating additional material from "The Second Part of the Arte of King Solomon" in Sloane 3824, which AFAIK was passed over by previous typesets.  Of course, re-setting the text is the easy part of this: the tricky bit will be redrawing the 500+ spirit seals.  Six out of 31 of the larger & more elaborate ones, for the chief spirits, done so far, and 59 of the underlings.

Meddling with the Goëtia again (10)

So, I've finally decided to give the CP edition of the Mathers-Crowley Goëtia a bibliography (since that edition is in large measure being used as a vehicle for some of my researches / studies on the Lemegeton tradition and 17th-century English magick generally) & I'm also working over the breakdown of the other books of the Lemegeton.  In the process of doing so, noticed a few things:

1. Of the four parallel texts Mathers gives of the introductory breakdown of the compilation, none is identical, or even close, to the BL Lemegeton texts (Sloane MSS. 2731, 3648, 3825; Harley MS. 6483 lacks the short description of the five parts).  The fourth is probably from a Hockley copy: it omits all mention of the Ars Notoria, and the Wellcome 3203 and 4665 versions both agree with it in the omission of the words "of spirits" at the start of the description of the Ars Paulina; but the Sloane copies all contain the reference to "20 chief spirits" in the Ars Almadel, omitted in the first three of Mathers' parallel texts; nor does any contain the more elaborate account of the Ars Theurgia-Goetia that appears in Mathers' second column.

2. In addition to the "By the figurative mystery" prayer for robing, there's another close-to-verbatim parallel between the Lemegeton and "anti-Scot," the collection of magical processes interpolated at the start of book XV of the 1665 "Third Edition" of the Discovery of Witchcraft.  Towards the end of the Ars Paulina, the subject turns to the invocation of the personal "genius," apparently defined as the Angel governing the astrological sign and degree of the magician's birth, concluding with "an Exorcisme to call the genius into the christall stone": the example prayer given (it is specifically stated to be "set for an Example"), runs as followeth (Sloane MS. 3825 fol. 145r):

O thou great and blessed N. my angell guardian, vouchafe [sic] to descend from thy holy mansion that is celestiall with thy holy Influence and presence into this Cristal Stone, that I may behold thy glory, and enjoy thy Society, aide and assistance, both now and for ever hereafter, O thou who art higher than the fourth heaven and knoweth [sic] the secrets of Elanel, Thou that rideth upon the wings of the winds and art mighty and potent in thy celestial and superlunary motion, do thou descend and be present I pray thee, and I humbly desire and entreat thee That if ever I have merited thy society or if any of my actions and Intentions be real and pure & Sanctified before thee bring thy external presence hither, and converse with me one of thy submissive pupils, By and in the name of great god Jehovah, whereunto the whole quire of heaven singeth continually O Mappa La-man Hallelujah Amen.

Book XV, ch. 7 of the "third edition" of Scot is titled, "How to obtain the familiarity of the Genius or Good Angel, and cause him to appear."  The preliminary instructions and rubric are completely different: the magician is referred to "the Rules of Travius and Philermus" to find out the name of the personal daimon, as well as the appropriate "Character and Pentacle, or Lamin": while earlier in the chapter the magician is instructed to personally "compose an earnest Prayer unto the said Genius," which is to be repeated regularly for a week prior to the main invocation, for the ritual proper (likewise an invocation to crystal) the following form is prescribed:

O thou blessed Phanael my Angel Guardian, vouchsafe to descend with thy holy Influence and presence into this spotless Chrystal, that I may behold thy glory and enjoy thy society O thou who art higher than the fourth Heaven, and know'st the secrets of Elanel.  Thou that ridest upon the wings of the wind, and art mighty and potent in thy celestial and super-lunary motion, do thou descend and be present I pray thee, and desire thee, if ever I have merited thy society, or if my actions and intentions be pure and sanctified before thee, bring thy external presence hither, and converse with thy submissive pupil, by the tears of Saints  and Songs of Angels, in the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, who are one God for ever and ever.

The citation "By the tears of Saints and Songs of Angels," while at least vaguely poetic, probably got redacted out in the Ars Paulina as smelling too strongly of Catholicism for the compiler of the Lemegeton.  The final citation in the Lemegeton version, as Skinner & Rankine observed in a note on a similar phrase being used in the Janua Magica Reserata, likely derives from a Dee-Kelly Spirit Action (T&FR p. 82).

3. The main conjuration of Part I of the Ars Paulina shares some phrasing with the "Invocation of Angels" texts, which of course could simply mean that that phrasing was a commonplace of English magical texts of the period: it doesn't share as much with them as they do with each other, and it doesn't have the same level of verbosity or legalism.

EDIT: the main conjuration of the Ars Almadel of the Lemegeton seems to have more phrasing shared specifically with the Janua.

4. Even if the prayer cited above derived independently from the same MS. tradition rather than being copied from anti-Scot, there are other considerations making it doubtful that the Ars Paulina of the Lemegeton significantly pre-dates 1665: it is possible, though this is currently speculation, that is was concocted at the time of the original compilation of the Lemegeton and the redaction of the first two books (the Ars Notoria of the Lemegeton definitely pre-dates the compilation: not having studied the Latin Almadel texts I'm not sure how heavily, or when, the Lemegeton version of that was worked over from the mediæval prototypes) prompted by Agrippa mentioning the "ars paulina" alongside the ars almadel and ars notoria in cap. 46 of De incertitudine et vantitate scientiarum (the work to which he was referring is a more heavily Christian derivative of the Ars notoria and has no connection beside the name with the third book of the Lemegeton).

EDIT: Joseph Peterson's account of the Ars Almadel indicates that the Lemegeton version has been drastically simplified from the Latin Almadel family, reducing twelve "Altitudes" to four, for example.  Further, the concluding lines of the main conjuration are simply repeated from that in Part i. of the Pauline Art of the Lemegeton.

5. Someone in the MS. transmission at a fairly early stage couldn't tell his 'R's from his 'L's: in three of the four BL texts the spirit is conjured by the "Chief Prince of the Seat of Apologia in the Ninth Region" (well, the copyist of Sloane 3648 eye-skipped from one "seat" to the next, giving (fol. 9r) "ministers of the Tartarean seat of Apologia in the 9th Region."  Waite (Book of Ceremonial Magic, p. 227) also has "region" and a bunch of other textual garbling in the first conjuration (e.g. "Baralamensis, Baldachiensis, Paumachie, Apoloresedes") although it is unclear if this was due to carelessness, an issue with his source MS., or deliberate--like Wier 400 years or more before, Waite admitted to tampering with the texts he printed in order to make them unusable.

6. The Pauline Art of the Lemegeton is not to be confused with "Paul 'n' Art," of whom it is sung, And the people bowed and prayed, to the neon god they made.

Lack of progress report 2022.02.01

Current working on another "Meddling with the Goëtia again" post, & will soon(TM) upload another revision of the actual text, finally giving it a proper bibliography (checking the date-stamp on the file, it's now over 18 years old).

In the meantime I've uploaded the images of Sloane MSS. 3821, 3824 and 3677 that I've been using for the Longobardus and On the Invocation of Angels projects to Scribd (the copy of 3825 is on that site already, but these three are harder to find online and the copy that is doing the rounds has the three bundled into a single file with the pages out of order).

Lack of progress report 2022.01.21

Well, back to Sloane 3824 for now.

The second set of talisman designs are going to be a nightmare to redraw: much of the writing on them is borderline-legible and some of them were very hastily scrawled with more detail crammed into the circle that was reasonable given the size of the thing, the pen being used and the scribe's general standard of line-work: many have notes by the side indicating some detail to be corrected.

With that in mind I switched instead to working on the variant Heptameron at the end instead.  This is also making my head hurt in trying to work out its stemma.  Like printed Heptameron, it is split into two parts, but their order has been reversed: the "considerations" of the seven days with their specific conjurations make up the first part (fol. 131-139), followed by some summary tables of names and examples of the Circle design; then there is:

An Introduction, teaching the use of the foregoing treatise & thereby other experiments & operations of the like nature orders or offices as a president refer'd to the Spirits of the Atr, being a sufficient exemplification for any Phylosopher Skillfull in the Art of Magick, & well Knowing how to make a trew & racionall distinction beetweene the Cœlestiall blessed Angells, or inteligence, and the Cœlestially Dignified Elementall Angells, or Spirits of light, & also of other Elementall powers, or Spirits, both of light & darkness;  & so by nature and office, both good & Evill, together with others, called wandering spirts of the Aijr, of the like nature & office, but of no orders, mansions, or proper place of Residence; but moving even like as flies in the son, without sensible subjection any superiour powers; together with Infernall powers, called spirits of Darkness, or Devils, who are saide by nature & office to be wholly evill, & therefore of themselves not to be invocated, Moved, or called forth to visible Appearance, as the other Elementall powers, or Spirits are; & may bee; but other Spirits of their nature, orders, & offices may by them, & the power given to them (by Divine permission in the blessed Trinity) & in their names be moved & called forth to visible Appearance, for such, or those purposes, which may, & usially doth serve to the benifit of mankind; &c.

. . . and that's just the title, for the general rubric and conjurations (fol. 141-154), starting with the composition of the circle, corresponding roughly to the first part of the printed Heptameron.  The two sections almost seem to be by different authors: the second part, as previously remarked, completely cuts loose bloating pseudo-Abano's text with verbiage, as well as adding an entire additional section of increasingly strongly worded constraints with accompanying rubric for uncoöoperative spirits, whereas the former has some minor rearrangements and paraphrases (and incorporates the description of the forms familiar to the spirits of the Planets from pseudo-Agrippa) but is nowhere near the Invocation of Angels level of verbosity.

In the former section, while there are a few hints that the redactor used the 1655 Turner text in some respects, the bulk of it appears to have been independently translated from the Latin, either from a printed edition, or from a manuscript copy (various magical MSS. in English and Latin of the late 16th & early 17th century contain substantial copies from pseudo-Abano, usually untranslated).  Possibly the planetary section significantly pre-dated the second part and was copied and slightly modified by the redactor of the Invocation of Angels series (for example, replacing the conclusion of the conjurations of the days with wording that strongly recalls the Claves Angelicæ) prior to going all-out.

The matter is further complicated by the fact that on closer examination it's not entirely clear whether passages that I initially tagged "sec. man." were in fact by someone other than the original copyist of the text that now forms the last article in Sloane 3824: that is to say, the text that is clearly in the same scrawl as the first major division of that MS., is not confined to marginalia or intralineal corrections, but includes substantial parts of the body: problem is, the alternative explanation is that the copyist (i.e. Ashmole) randomly switched handwriting style for no clear reason between different sections.

[Header image: Heptameron circle for the first "magical hour" of the day on a Friday in Winter -- well, 2 out of 3 ain't bad.]

On the Invocation of Angels

On the Invocation of Angels: A collection of 17th-century works on Angel Magic.  

Comprising:

• Janua Magica Reserata: invocations of the nine orders of the pseudo-Dionysian celestial hierarchy, with a lengthy theoretical preface mostly cribbed from Agrippa.
• Clavicula Tabularum Enochi: invocations of the angels of Dee & Kelly's Table of the Earth or "Tables of Enoch" based on T&FR and the author's imagination.
• The Operations of the Angles of the Air: conjurations of the Demons Kings of the quarters and their subordinates, deriving from the Solomonic Liber Officiorum tradition; supplemented by related material from Sloane MS. 3824 and the Folger "Book of Magic."
• Celestial Confirmations of Terrestrial Observations: invocations of the planetary archangels, possibly for the purpose of talisman consecration.
• A Select Treatise as it was first discovered to the Egyptian Magi (conjurations of the planetary Intelligences from Book II of De occulta philosophia).
• And, as a "bonus tract," the (as far as I am aware) previously unpublished treasure-hunting conjuration from Sloane 3677 that starts off as a ghost story involving one James Knuckles.

Includes bibliography and nearly 500 remorselessly pedantic footnotes.  Could use further proof reading, polish, and a proper general introduction, but primary key-entry on the main texts is now complete, with certain caveats.  Some of these texts have been typeset before, others to my knowledge haven't been, although the images I was using have been circulating online for a while.

A few months ago I described this as being in "vague wish list" territory owing to issues with my source materials.  I may have over-stated that, and in any case found work-arounds for most of them, although if I ever actually get hold of decent images of the MSS. this will get a working-over.

Lack of progress report 2022.01.13

Plodding on with "Invocation of Angels" & have updated the incomplete preliminary version on Scribd.  Currently have a mostly complete, though not entirely satisfactory, typeset of the theoretical section of the Janua as well as the introduction to the practical part, preliminary prayer and "First Key"; Clavicula Tabularum Enochi is still missing most of the conjurations of MOR and OIP, although barring minor verbal variations these just change the names and references to directions of those for ORO and MPH.  Also the PDF bookmarks are a mess, being just whatever the Word plugin automatically generated from headings in the document.

Still needs a bibliography and general introduction.  Also to concoct some excuses for why "Operations of the Angles of the Air," addressed to the Demon Kings of the quarters and their minions, is in a book titled On the Invocation of Angels, beyond simply the fact of its being bracketed under that heading in the BL catalogue entry for Sloane MS. 3821.

UPDATE: All of the first set of conjurations ("Practice of the Tables") of Clavicula Tabularum Enochi now done: a bit over halfway through the "Celestial Keys" of the Janua although the text is currently somewhat Frankensteined and certainly not satisfactory as a scholarly edition: owing to the primary set of images I'm working from being nearly or completely unreadable in places (typically the bottom half of each page of the MS: possibly the codex got water damaged at some point in its history resulting in ink fading to the point where it was below the threshold to actually show up in those 1-bit scans), text has been reconstructed in places by a level of copying and pasting (since large chunks of the Keys are repeated with only the hierarchical names changes and other minor verbal variations) and cross-referencing the text in Sloane 3628, of which I have legible images (this has variations in spelling, punctuation & capitalisation and omits the "Replications" but on a word-for-word level is very close, if not identical, to the 3825 copy).

Errata et Corrigenda (2)

On further examination, it appears that the cancelled passage on fol. 37r of Sloane 3824 (i.e. the one piece of text in that division, barring the contents list by Sloane's librarian at the start, that isn't in Ashmole's hand) isn't--as I had previously suggested--a cancelled draft of part of the "Celestial Keys" of the Janua Magica Reserata, but is a direct continuation of the fragment of "A Select Treatise as it was first revealed to the Egyptian Magi" that follows the Janua in Sloane 3825: that copy looks never to have been finished, and it seems that Ashmole, while copying the passages from a variant Janua, detached that sheet (and possibly some more blank sheets with it) and added them to the "Longobardus" notebook.

This also resolves the difficulty I'd created for myself, as to why two draft passages from the same work--since the loose leaf that is now fol. 109 of Sloane 3824 manifestly does contain drafts of Janua passages--would be in different handwriting.

Of Keys and Gates (7)

Small addendum to the earlier post about the sources of the Janua.  While 18 of the 19 "Beneficiall Aphorisms" are adapted to a greater or lesser extent from De Occulta Philosophia and Arbatel de magia veterum, and the latter exhibit enough variation with the Robert Turner edition (first pub. 1655) to make independent translation possible, the one that isn't traceable to either of those two sources is nigh-verbatim from Robert Turner's Henry Cornelius Agrippa his Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, of Geomancy &c. &c. &c. (London, 1655): Aphorism #16:

"Vertue is no Vertue, unlesse it have some like, in Ruling whereof It may shew and Exercise its power: for as Victory Cannot Stand without Vertue, so neither can Vertue subsist without an Enemy, which Vertue no sooner had the Almighty Endowed Man withall, but he forthwith Added unto him an Enemy, Least that Vertue should lose its nature, being stupefied with Idlenesse; So that a magician cannot attaine to the more materiall perfection of things, unlesse he have an Active hand, And Likewise that he shall Establish, and build up his Salvation, with a Continued warfare & Contention, &c."

(Sloane MS. 3825 fol. 13r) turned out to be a quote, with a few minor verbal alterations, from Turner's translation of De materia Daemonum by Georg Pictorius of Villingen, printed in Latin at Basel in 1562, and in 1578 and subsequently included in the first volume of Cornelius Agrippa's collected works along with De Magia Veterum and other works on magic and divination.

"Pollux," one of the speakers in this rather tedious dialogue on demonology, in attempting to explain "why God permitteth the devils to work Miracles," cites "Firmianus" (the 3rd-century Christian apologist Lactantius) in De opificio Dei (Of the works of God), saying that:

"[...] vertue is not vertue, unless if have some like, in ruling whereof it may shew and exercise its power [...] As Victory cannot stand without Vertue, so neither can Vertue subsist without an Enemy; which vertue no sooner had the Almighty indued man withal, but he forthwith added unto him an enemy, lest that vertue should lose its nature, being stupified with idleness.  [...] a man cannot otherwise attain to the highest step, unless he have always an active hand; and that he shall establish and build up his salvation with a continual warfare and contention: for God will not that mortal men shall come to immortal blessedness with an easie journey [...]" (p. 131-2, ed. 1655).

This means that even if the material from the Arbatel was independently translated, the redactor of the Janua still used Turner.

* * *

I've uploaded an incomplete draft of the "Invocation of Angels" collection to Scribd: this currently omits the vast bulk of the Janua, and the conjurations of the West, North and South angles from Clavicula Tabularum Enochi, though the latter are nigh-identical to those for the East with the names and references to the direction changed.  It also still needs a bibliography.  It does, however, now contain the whole of the "Operations of the Angles of the Aire" with related material from Sloane 3824 and Folger V.b. 26, "Celestial Confirmations of Terrestrial Observations" (minus the rubric that is unreadable in my copy) and "A Select Treatise," which latter two, to my knowledge, have not previously been typeset.  

[EDIT: I was wrong on that last count about "A Select Treatise"; David Rankine edited a typeset of this which was published in 2018 under a different title.]

I've decided to include the "Enoch Prayer" from Sloane 3821 as an appendix to Clav. Tab. as there are enough stylistic and thematic similarities to suggest common authorship even if it wasn't originally bound up with it (not to mention a chunk of borrowings from T&FR); to "Operations of the Angles of the Air" I've appended the related text from Sloane 3824 and the corresponding account of the chief infernal spirits and Kings of the Quarters from the Folger "Book of Magic" which has enough parallels to indicate it as belonging to the same MS. tradition, albeit 80+ years earlier and prior to the whole thing being worked over to remove overtly Catholic material (such as conjuring a minion of Oriens by the blessed virgin Mary, or the underlings of Egyn by Mary Magdalene).

* * *

I'm also adding the treasure-hunting conjuration from Sloane 3677 as a "Bonus Tract" to Invocation of Angels: a case might be made for putting it with "Longobardus" instead, but the scope of that project is consciously limited to that single MS. codex, and despite the mundane concerns (which it shares with passages of Clavicula Tabularum Enochi) it is explicitly addressed to the Angels of the Table of the Earth rather than the demons of the Solomonic Liber officiorum tradition cited in the similar conjuration of Longobardus.

* * *

I've just turned up another source for the Janua that wasn't Agrippa or T&FR, but this is no help in dating it: some of the short paragraphs in the section "Of Angels and Spirits" (fol. 16r-19r) are cribbed from the section "Angels" in Politeuphuia: Wits Common-Wealth, a collection of prose quotations on various subjects, first printed in 1597: Google copy of a 17th-century reprint here.