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 copy of the Lemegeton, 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.

On the Invocation of Angels

On the Invocation of Angels: A collection of 17th-century works on Angel Magic.  

Comprising:

• Janua Magica Reserata: invocations of the nine orders of the pseudo-Dionysian celestial hierarchy, with a lengthy theoretical preface mostly cribbed from Agrippa.
• Clavicula Tabularum Enochi: invocations of the angels of Dee & Kelly's Table of the Earth or "Tables of Enoch" based on T&FR and the author's imagination.
• The Operations of the Angles of the Air: conjurations of the Demons Kings of the quarters and their subordinates, deriving from the Solomonic Liber Officiorum tradition; supplemented by related material from Sloane MS. 3824 and the Folger "Book of Magic."
• Celestial Confirmations of Terrestrial Observations: invocations of the planetary archangels, possibly for the purpose of talisman consecration.
• A Select Treatise as it was first discovered to the Egyptian Magi (conjurations of the planetary Intelligences from Book II of De occulta philosophia).
• And, as a "bonus tract," the (as far as I am aware) previously unpublished treasure-hunting conjuration from Sloane 3677 that starts off as a ghost story involving one James Knuckles.

Includes bibliography and nearly 500 remorselessly pedantic footnotes.  Could use further proof reading, polish, and a proper general introduction, but primary key-entry on the main texts is now complete, with certain caveats.  Some of these texts have been typeset before, others to my knowledge haven't been, although the images I was using have been circulating online for a while.

A few months ago I described this as being in "vague wish list" territory owing to issues with my source materials.  I may have over-stated that, and in any case found work-arounds for most of them, although if I ever actually get hold of decent images of the MSS. this will get a working-over.

Lack of progress report 2021.12.02

Latest tweaks and edits to the Mathers-Crowley Goëtia have been uploaded, incorporating material based on the recent post.

The conjurations of "Celestial Confirmations of Terrestrial Observations," one of the "Invocation of Angels" texts from the Sommers / Jekyll / Sloane collection (BL Sloane MS. 3821 fol. 166-177) that AFAIK hasn't been published yet, have been keyed; unfortunately the rubric (including about 7 lines of text at the start and an uncertain amount at the end) is completely unreadable in the copy I'm working from and so working out the actual purpose and intended method of working of the thing is largely a matter of guesswork.  These texts include substantial amounts of phrasing near-verbatim from the "Celestial Keys" of the Janua Magica Reserata and were credibly of the same authorship, also they do not appear to be based around evocation to crystal: rather, the intent seems to be to call on the planetary Angels to "dignify and give full effectual power, virtue, force and influence" to a talisman or some other material basis.   

The section on the Demon Kings from 3821 (fol. 158-165, 178-187) has also been typed, but needs to be properly collated with the corresponding material in Sloane 3824 (which is somewhere above and close to it in the stemma) and the Folger "Book of Magic" which while nearly a century earlier belongs to the same tradition and has much material that was either redacted out or omitted by accident (e.g. most of the description of Egyn).  

The other unpublished text from that group, "A Select Treatise as it was first discovered to the Egyptian Magi" (conjurations of the Planetary Intelligences from Agrippa: Sloane 3821 fol. 205-225, a fragment also appears in Sloane 3825 immediately following Janua Magica Reserata, but the bulk of that copy got detached prior to the Janua being bound up with the Lemegeton), hardly anything has been done on.  (EDIT: have now keyed the introduction and the conjuration of Agiel.)

[EDIT: in fact, the Sloane 3825 copy of "A Select Treatise" was never finished: the sheet that was detatched prior to the Lemegeton being bound up with it is still extant and was attached to the "Longobardus" notebook by Ashmole: the continuation trails off after half a page.]

Also did a bit more of "Practice of the Tables" (keyed all of "Practice of the East Table,"--the West, North and South sections are pretty much the same with the names changed, and some of the conjurations of ORO from the second and third set), but this one is out there already, and also founded on an earlier and more accurate MS. copy than the one I've been using (Sloane 307 hasn't been digitised and posted yet to my knowledge): whatever my issues with the editorial treatment, it is important to the history of English magic & by manifesting it the editors did a service to those of us who don't have the resources / connections to directly examine the originals.