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.
No comments:
Post a Comment