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.
