Errata et corrigenda

Just uploaded an update to the 4th Book & Heptameron.  This fixes multiple errors in editorial material, trims some superfluous text in the bibliography, expands some notes and expands the "Testimonia" with Wier's denunciation of the Liber Quartus from the second and subsequent editions (not the first, as I incorrectly stated in the previous release) of De præstigiis dæmonum et incantionibus ac veneficiis and a brief excerpt from Thomas Willard's 2017 essay "How magical was Renaissance Magic?" touching on the Fourth Book.  There are still some minor tweaks that need to be made and a needlessly hostile passage that could use toning down / recasting.

I'm not planning on incorporating the material in the previous post into the Mathers-Crowley Goëtia, save for a general note referencing the Folger Offices of the Spirits.

In addition to the four BL Lemegeton MSS., a codex of similar content to Sloane MS. 2731 was in the possession of E.M. Butler, who reproduced one page from it as Plate II of her Ritual Magic (1949).  It is unclear if this was the same "private codex" mentioned by Mathers and cited as the source for his figure of the Circle.  Probably it is still in a private collection somewhere.

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The edition of Agrippa's Opera in Duos Tomos (which I suspect, though this is on the basis of a single typo, was the one used by Robert Turner), with the pillars & crown device and motto Firmant consilium pietas politia coronam (also read Consilium, pietas et politia coronam firmant which means the same thing but flows a little better), which device (as I remarked in a previous post) was used ca. 1600 by Cornelius Sutor of Oberursel, is attributed by some bibliographers to Eberhard Zetzner of Strasburg, "ca. 1630."  Eberhard, it would seem, inherited his father's printing business in 1616; a German catalogue of printer's devices shows this among those used by E. Zetzner (Table LI & facing text).  I haven't so far managed to find anything on the Zetzner imprint with this device so far, but that doesn't mean much as I've not really looked very thoroughly (as in, ran a search -- inpublisher:"Zetzner" -- on Google Books).

What I *did* find was this -- a per Beringos fratres edition of an "Appendix Apologeticus" to a "Lyon" edition of Agrippa's Opera in duos tomos, with the date 1605 and the distinctive device of Lazarus Zetzner (head & shoulders of Minerva on plinth with motto SCIENTIA IMMUTABILIS).  This suggests Zetzner was responsible for the "1600" edition.  Since Zetzner senior worked with Sutor prior to relocating to Strasburg (e.g. on the original three-volume edition of Theatrum Chemicum), it is within the bounds of possibility that his heirs wound up with Sutor's device.

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Pseudo-Agrippa's ritual for invocation of spirits of the middle / terrestrial order (p. 38 of CP edition, p. 61 ed. 1559, p. 68 in Turner, 1655) looks to be an ancestor of the procedure, mocked by A. E. Waite in Book of Ceremonial Magic (p. 302) in the Grimorium Verum (also the "1670" editions of the Grimoire of Honorius), "Pour faire venir trois demoiselles ou trois messieurs dans sa chamber après souper."

EDIT: actually, probably not.  While looking up some stuff in connection with some groups of 7 fairies cited in the Folger "Book of Magic" (where they appear with their queen, tacked on to the end of a Liber Officiorum version), Sloane 3851 (which incidentally contains English translations of the Heptameron and Liber Quartus independent from, and quite plausibly pre-dating, Turner's) and Folger X.d 234, turned up references to similar things in French folk tradition going back long prior to Agrippa's time (see for example K. M. Briggs, "Some Seventeenth-Century Books of Magic," published in Folklore in 1953; also the writings of Dan Harms concerning the "Table Ritual").  BTW, before attempting the procedure from Folger X.d 234, bear in mind that the 7 sisters were probably originally disease demons, as a very similar set of names is cited in 11th-century charms against fever.

Also, the same section of the Liber Quartus depends more heavily on OP III.32 than III.16, from which much of it is slightly paraphrased.

Contrary to my statement in a previous post, Joseph Peterson did remark on the citation in the printed Ars Notoria of Lemegeton as the name of a Solomonic text, in a set of corrections posted online after the print edition of the Lemegeton went to press.

No, the *other* Book 4 about Magick

De Occulta Philosophia, seu de Cæremoniis Magicis, Liber Quartus; cui accesserit Heptameron, seu Elementa Magica.

After much prevaricating, getting distracted, and fine-tuning of the balance of pedantry and sarcasm in the footnotes, the previously-threatened Latin text of the Fourth Book of pseudo-Agrippa and Heptameron seu Elementa Magica of pseudo-Abano, an important Renaissance work on ceremonial magic and possibly the first Grimoire to actually be printed (1559, if the date on the title page is to be believed), can now be read on Scribd.  While I did some cross-checking with the 1565 and 1567 printings (links are to copies on Google Books with everything that implies) and the texts included in various of the "per Beringos Fratres" printings of tom. i of Agrippa's Opera, this makes no pretence at being a critical text.  

I have inserted things like paragraph breaks and section headings into pseudo-Agrippa's walls of text,  rearranged some of the lists of names in the Heptameron into tables for ease of reference, identified (most of) the chapters of De Occulta Philosophia libri tres cited, added a bibliography as well as an overview of the "supplements to Agrippa," the collection of texts on magic, divination & the like that were bound up with various posthumous printings of De Occulta Philosophia.

What I have not (yet) done, is indicated quite how extensive the borrowings in the Heptameron from the Liber Iuratus Honorii (Sworn Book of Honorius) are, largely due to my lack of familiarity with the latter work.  While BL Royal MS. 17 A XLII (not 15th century despite what the BL catalogue claims, as it has multiple identifiable cribs from De Occulta Philosphia) almost certainly took the seals of the planetary Angels from the Heptameron, or possibly a Lucidarium MS. -- the sigils being AWOL in the earlier surviving Liber Iuratus MSS. (similarly for the names associated with the 4 seasons at fol. 72ro sqq.) -- the remaining parallels go way beyond the lists of names in the second part of the Heptameron.  In particular, a large chunk of the ritual procedure beginning with the "Prayer to God, to be said in the four quarters of the world, in the circle" through to the charge to the spirits, appears to have been taken, with variations and expansions on some points, verbatim on others, from cap. CXXXIII of the Liber Iuratus (see for example Joseph Peterson's online edition of the text, and apparatus ad loc.).

The strange phrase, on which I have previously remarked, "Bathat vel Vachat super Abrac ruens, supervivens [v.l. "superiruens," "superveniens"] Abeor super Aberer" appears in the equivalent passage of Liber Iuratus as "Bachac super Abrac ruens, Abeor super Aberor" (apud Hedegård; Peterson, apparently working from the same MS., has "Bathac" in his online text).

Grant us eyes . . .

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.