Of Keys and Gates (9)

Finished working over the Janua seals.  Decided to restore the Hebrew text that was omitted in the Sloane 3825 copy (the names of the Sephiroth & names of God corresponding, save for no. 2 which just had a single yod because there was no room for anything else in the centre of the pentagram at the size the thing was engraved -- less than 2cm across).

Some of the Latin mottos were abbreviated for space reasons in the printed Calendarium (the entire set of figures -- 20 circles all told -- were printed in a single row across the page, some 18" across including a column of text at left and right, and there was a limit to how much text even a legendary engraver like Matthäus Merian could physically fit in those designs).  The Sloane 3825 Janua, unsurprisingly, generally agrees with the print edition (some errors have been fixed and some introduced).

In the latest revision, full text has been restored for most, based on the images of the MS. posted at Twilight Grotto.

Some other minor alterations have been made for style & readability (e.g. having the things in the same typefaces I used in the main text).

The figure on the seal of Netzach was a heptagon in the printed Calendarium but turned into an octagon in the Sloane 3825 Janua, either in error or through laziness (constructing a regular heptagon by hand with compass and ruler is non-straightforward compared to drawing an octagon).  In the MS. one of the sides had a 7-pointed star instead.

The character for Geburah in the MS. is 9-angled; in this instance I went with the printed Calendarium.

I'm not sure I can face going over this lot again to make capitalisation consistent right now, though.

Variations in the names of the Angels from the printed Janua are retained: Großchedel used the Agrippa arrangement (the table does include, in its scale of No. 7, the characters of the Angels from the Heptameron, with Michael referred to Mercury, Anael to Sol and Raphael to Venus (the latter switch was an error by Merian, per Peterson -- see page already linked -- the MS. has them the other way round)).

I'm also not entirely sure what Großchedel's basis for assigning different geometric figures to the ten points of the scale was, in any case.  Only one matches the key scale number, and the circle for Sol and vesica / doubled crescent for Yesod / Luna are understandable.  The others, though, have no clear pattern.

Of Keys and Gates (8)

Well, was just chasing up something in connection with the figure of the "Magical Table of Solomon" in the Ars Theurgia-Goëtia, which, for reference (as redrawn by me from the Sloane 3824 copy) looks something like this:

As Joseph Peterson pointed out a long while ago, this design previously appeared in the Calendarium Naturale Magicum Perpetuum of Johann-Baptisa Grosschedel, a late-Renaissance emblem work printed in Frankfurt in 1618 by Johann Theodor de Bry from engravings by Matthäus Merian.  There, it appears thus:

The Calendarium includes tables based on, but expanded from, the tables of the scales of the numbers in book II of De Occulta Philosophia.  The "Table of Solomon" appears in the scale of the number 8, associated with the first letter heh in the divine name Yahweh va-Da'ath, the "poor in spirit [whose] is the Kingdom" among the "classes of the blessed" mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount, Mars among the Planets and the "dryness of fire" among the Elements.  In a MS. of the Calendarium (BL Harley MS. 3420, dated 1614 and identified as the original author's holograph in a study by Carlos Gilly), it is further associated with "wisdom."

Anyway, looking further down the Calendarium, in the scale of the number 10 we find some familiar looking circular figures in pairs, labelled Sigilla decem nomina Dei principalia Complectentia, with geometric figures inside the circular borders and writing in Latin and Hebrew: in short, these are the same designs found in the Sloane MS. 3825 copy of the Janua Magica Reserata (the Janua including derivations from the Calendarium was also spotted by Peterson in 2004 or earlier).

Since the Calendarium itself is a synthesis including identifiable derivations from earlier works, of course (besides materials from Agrippa, the sigils of the planetary Angels from the Heptameron / Lucidarium, the seals of the Zodiac from the pseudo-Paracelsan Archidoxes Magica and the characters of the Olympic Planetary Spirits from Arbatel de magia veterum also appear), it is not necessarily either the origin of these particular designs, or the immediate source for the redactors of the Lemegeton or the Janua.  The seals of the Zodiac in the Ars Paulina, for example, agree much more closely with those printed in Robert Turner's translation of the Archidoxes than with those of the Calendarium.  However, where the Harley MS. versions of the seals from the scale of the number 10 differ significantly from the printed versions, Sloane 3825 agrees with the printed forms.  While Peterson identified some individual designs of similar general morphology to the "Tables of the Fathers" in 16th-century MSS. such as Wellcome MS. 110 and BL Additional MS 36674, earlier instances of the full scheme have not been turned up.

Anyway, off to fix the versions of the seals in my transcription of the Janua, and add one for the "tenth key."

[Images from the printed Calendarium Naturale Magicum Perpetuum from a copy in the Bibliothéque nationale de France, posted here.]