2022-06-25

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).

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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.

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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.

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