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.