So I've been going through the Heptameron and 4th Book again lately, and finally accepted that my schoolboy Latin (well, formally, equivalent to undergraduate 1st-year I think, but it was a long time ago and I've forgotten a lot of it) really isn't enough to provide an improvement on Robert Turner's translation of the latter, but I have nearly completed a re-set of the texts with some annotations that may or may not be helpful, as well as a more thorough bibliography than the excuse for plugging his own books that Stephen Skinner appended to his 2005 re-set of Robert Turner's translation.
The 1559 printing of the Heptameron includes in its conjurations appeals to "Bathat vel Vachat," "Ima vel Ina" and the planetary Angel, "Caphriel vel Cassiel." As another example of this phenomena, I cited "Kos, or, some say, Kosm" -- which is not, in fact, from a Grimoire at all but is part of a prayer recited by a character in a 2015 video game called Bloodborne.
So the simplest explanation for this kind of thing that I could come up with, is that scribal glosses, notes on variant readings, or queries of doubtful or unclearly written words get incorporated into the main text of repeatedly hand-copied documents. The name Buné, one of the spirits of the Goëtia, for instance, appears as Bimé in Sloane MS. 3648 and Harley MS. 6483, probably due to the name being written cursively in their source text and a piece of dirt or squashed fly on the MS. being taken as a dot on an 'i.' Bathat sometimes appears as Bathal owing to the final 't' being indistinctly crossed (compare comments in previous post about "Seal of Adonay"). Caphriel is written Cafriel in at least one of the proto-Heptameron MSS., and a cursive fr might have been taken for ß, the German double-s ligature (which in the earliest print editions is used to write the name Cassiel). [The forms "Cafziel" and "Casziel" apparently occur in some copies of the Liber Iuratus Honorii, an earlier magical text which includes many of the same names of Angels &c. as the Heptameron.]
If the name is genuinely ambiguous, the scribe might put the most likely reading in the main text and asterisk it with a note on the other possibility in the margin; alternatively, the scribe might have access to more than one copy, with different readings; for example, the version of the Goëtia in Sloane MS. 2731 has marginal notes by the names of seven of the spirits such as "in another copy Sabnock," "other copy Gromory," &c. When, in order to save time or ink, the variant reading is accompanied by simply "or," "vel," "some say," and the like, there arises a risk that this gets incorporated into the text by a subsequent copyist.
So, here is the not-entirely-serious in-universe origin of that line in Micolash's prayer. One scribal abbreviation used to save time / space / ink in mediæval-renaissance Latin manuscripts (also appearing in printed works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) was a tilde ~ placed above a letter, usually but not always a vowel, to indicate an 'n' or 'm' to follow (this sort of thĩg, for exãple). So someone wrote out that prayer, with only the name 'Kos.' Then a squashed bug on the MS. above the 's' caused a later copyist to read it "Kos̃," pronounced "Kosm." Other copies made prior to this persisted; a second copyist, aware of both readings, kept the first in the main text but put a marginal note "or, some say, Kosm" ("say" since it was a liturgical formula used by members of the sect). Then copyist #3, possibly tired or light-headed from excessive consumption of the blood of eldritch abominations, takes the marginal note as an insertion and incorporates it into the main text, producing the version Micolash recites.
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