Do Origins Matter Anyway?

(At least) three manuscripts of the "D.O.M.A." text (Physica α & ω Metaphyisca et Hyperphysica D.O.M.A.), the source of many of the emblems in Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, are viewable online.

A late 18th-century copy (including many figures not in other versions, but probably cribbed from the Altona printing), formerly from the collection of Michael Innes, is now in the Warburg Institute at the University of London and a PDF of images can be downloaded.

A copy (ca. 1780?) formerly in the possession of Manly Palmer Hall (printed with an English translation in his Codex Rosæ Crucis: D.O.M.A.), now in the possession of the Getty Institute, can be viewed here.

Another copy, dated only "18th century," in the collection of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, can be viewed here.

What "D.O.M.A." stands for is unclear, although in the Warburg and Hall MSS. the title is followed by a brief Latin doxology beginning Deo Omnipotenti laus &c.  Hall suggested Deo Optimo Maximi Altissimo, and observed that the initials appear at the head of the title page of many works by alchemist Andreas Libavius (ca. 1550-1616), who was somewhat at odds with the Rosicrucians (he was an admirer of Aristotle and Galen who were implicitly attacked in the Fama, critical of the theories of Paracelsus though accepting some of his methods, and his last writings included responses, varying from flat-out hostile to apparently friendly criticism or "well-meaing observations," to the Rosicrucian manifestos).  The initials also appear at the top of the engraved frontispiece (not the main title page) of the Thesaurus et armanentarium medico-chymicum of Adrian von Mynsicht, generally believed to be "Henricus Madathanus" whose Aureum Seculum Redivivum was incorporated into the Geheime Figuren.

(And all this turned up at the end of a series of tangents that started with me trying to identify the printer of one of the editions of Cornelius Agrippa's Opera in duos tomos bearing the -- generally regarded as fake -- imprint, "Lugduni: per Beringos fratres."  The edition in question (somewhat ropy Google Books copy of vol. I here) has on its title page a printer's device showing three pillars and a crown with the motto "Firmant Consilium Pietas Politia Coronam."  This turned out to have been used by a German printer, Cornelius Sutor (Sutorius) of Oberursel near Frankfort (examples here, here and here) on works dated 1599-1602 (one of which, a commentary on Machiavelli's The Prince, was later placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum at the order of Pope Clement VIII).  Sutor also printed the the 1602 edition (comprising only the first three volumes) of the massive alchemical compendium Theatrum Chemicum.)

Minor fixes, continued

Finally managed to fix an extensive compositor's error, if such it may be called, dating back to 1887, in The Rosicrucians: their Rites and Mysteries.  The final chapter of that work (in the 4th edition, which is the basis for the CP re-set) consisted mostly of a series of excerpts in Latin from tom. I of Kabbala Denudata.  One such excerpt was interrupted in mid-sentence and concluded with the last sentence and a bit of a previous excerpt, followed by the repetition of another whole excerpt.  Since Jennings was rather sparing about giving page references and even the first volume of Kabbala Denudata runs to nearly 1400 pages and the OCR software available to me wasn't really up to dealing with the typography of the work, I was unable at the time to locate and restore the truncated paragraph.

So, I just discovered that Google Books has page images of both volumes of the rare 1887 third edition of The Rosicrucians (vol. 1 / vol. 2), the first in which that passage appear (though, owing to how appallingly badly indexed Google Books is when it comes to older printed books, it took me a while to find vol. 2).  The same editorial error occurred in the 3rd edition; however Google has better OCR software and by picking out a phrase without any long 's's complicating matters I was able to find the passage in Kabbala Denudata and restore it.  Since the omitted text (assuming the quote was meant to continue to the end of the paragraph in the original work) was significantly longer than the spuriously duplicated text, this meant that pagination and layout on the last six pages is no longer conformed exactly to the print edition.

The 2003 Celephaïs Press edition of the second edition of The Rosicrucians is seriously flawed and should not be re-posted / mirrored.  It appears that the omission of the circled cross emblem from the title page which appears, rubricated, on the original printing of the second edition, was because someone had for some unknown reason blanked it out on the crappy page images (a copy here) I was working from.

Meddling with the Goëtia again (2)

OK, this gets murkier.  For years I had glibly asserted that the conjurations in the Goëtia derived from Robert Turner's translation of the Heptameron that was bound up with the Fourth Book of pseudo-Agrippa.

On examining a facsimile of the 1655 edition posted at the Internet archive, it turns out that Turner didn't translate the conjurations at all, but (with the exception of the "Prayer to God, to be said in the four parts of the World, in the Circle") left them in the original Latin.  The translated conjurations do appear in a reprint of the Turner translation, "with great Improvements" issued without publisher, place, or editor's name, dated 1783 on the title page.  This of course significantly post-dates the Lemegeton MSS.; it now seems more likely that the compiler of the Goëtia did their own translations from pseudo-Abano (the additional sections from the Heptameron interpolated into the variant Goëtia in Harley MS. 6483, the "Dr. Rudd" Lemegeton, are verbatim with Turner, barring some minor variations in spelling).

EDIT: dammit my head hurts now.  Skinner apparently used an earlier and less complete printing of Turner's translation as the basis for the facsimile (Askin, 1978).  The translated conjurations do appear in another edition, dated 1665 (neither this nor the 1783 edition are mentioned in the chapter on Robert Turner in Elizabethan Magic by Robert Turner et al., which incorrectly describes the Askin facsimile as the "second edition").

The 1783 edition was the source for Barrett's The Magus: in the conjuration of Wednesday, Animalium in the Latin was misprinted as Ammalium, leading to et per nomen sedis Animalium, habentium senas alas being translated by the nonsensical "and by the name and place of Ammalium," which reading was then further corrupted by Barrett to "and by the name and place of Ammaluim" (I erroneously stated in an edition of the Heptameron I issued many years ago and which still lingers on in the dark corners of the Internet that the garbling was due to Turner or Barrett; in fact Turner (1665) translated it correctly).  Steven Skinner's 2005 re-set of Turner reverted "Ammalium" to "Animalium" but kept the rest of the citation.  "Animals having six wings" is probably a reference to the Apocalypse.

However, my characterisation of passages as being "identically or near-identically worded" to the Turner translation was based on the Mathers-Crowley edit, and not on any BL MSS., and Mathers took liberties with his texts that went beyond modernising English spelling and attempting to revert corruptions in Divine Names of Hebrew origin.

For example: in the Second Conjuration, after the reference to Moses calling on the name ADONAI to summon a plague of locusts, in the Mathers edition there follows: "and by the name SCHEMA AMATHIA which Ioshua called upon, and the sun stayed his course."

In the Exorcism of the Aërial Spirits in the Heptameron of pseudo-Abano, some texts (not the "Marburg, 1559" printing or the edition of Agrippa's Opera used as the basis for the 1970 Georg Olms facsimile, but it is in at least three of the other "per Beringos fratres" editions of Agrippa including that used by Turner), the reference to the plague of locusts is followed by et per nomen Schemes amathia, quod Iosua vocavit, et remoratus est Sol cursum.  Turner translated this: "and by the name Schemes amathia, which Joshua called upon, and the Sun stayed his course."

In the four BL Lemegeton MSS. (Sloane MSS. 2731, 3648, 3825, Harley MS. 6483) the citation appears slightly earlier, after the reference to Aaron becoming wise after hearing and speaking the name Anepheneton (or Anaphexaton, Anephexeton, &c.), and is worded (with minor variations in spelling): "and by the name Schemes-Amathia which Joshua called upon and the Sun stood still."

Conclusion: Mathers used the Turner Heptameron in the process of editing the Goëtia.  How heavily the original redactor did is less clear.

There is one noticeable variation in wording between Turner and Mathers & Crowley: in the three references in the second conjuration to Moses calling plagues on Egypt, Mathers or Crowley deleted specific references to, well, Egypt:

Compare:

Sloane MS. 3825: "And by the name Zebaoth, which Moses named, & all the Rivers and waters in the land of Ægypt were turned into blood; and by the name Escerchie Oriston, which Moses named, and the rivers brought forth froggs, they went into the houses of the Egyptians, Distroying all things [...] and by the name Adonay, which Moses named, & there came up locusts throughout all the land of Egypt and devoured all that the Haill at [sic] left"

Turner: "And by the name Zebaoth, which Moses named, and all the Rivers and waters in the land of Egypt were turned into blood; and by the name Ecerchie Oriston, which Moses named, and all the Rivers brought forth frogs, and they ascended into the houses of the Egyptians, destroying all things [...] and by the name Adonay, which Moses named, and there came up Locusts, which appeared upon the whole land of Egypt, and devoured all which the Hail had left"

Mathers & Crowley: "And by the name ZABAOTH, which Moses named and all the rivers were turned into blood; and by the name ASHER EHYEH ORISTON, which Moses named, and all the rivers brought forth frogs, and they ascended into the houses, destroying all things [...] and by the name ADONAI, which Moses named, and there came up locusts, which appeared upon the whole land, and devoured all which the hail had left."

And let's not get started on how entire heresies and schisms can arise from scribes neglecting to dot 'i' s or cross 't's.  It's quite clearly "seal [or 'seale'] of Adonay" in three of the four BL Lemegeton MSS., Sloane 2731 (at least in the badly digitised microfilm I'm using) is ambiguous, it could be a 't' or 'l' but it's not clearly crossed and differs from the scribe's other terminal 't's; but the corresponding citation in the Heptameron is sedem Adonay.  Turner's translation, as printed, has "seal" although the Latin is given correctly.  Suggestion: either Turner (assuming he was responsible for the additional translations in the 1665 printing, which is possible but by no means certain; Robin E. Cousins in the account of his works in Robert Turner's Elizabethan Magic suggests he died during the plague that year) neglected to cross the 't' in 'seat' or the typesetter misread his handwriting, and the error was perpetuated into the Lemegeton.

And so I come back to the stance I was on the point of recanting at the start of this post: the Goëtia (as distinguished from Book of the Offices of the Spirits) depends on and thus post-dates, not merely the Heptameron (a prototype of which under a different name but with the same pseudoepigraphal author credit apparently existed half a century or more prior to the Fourth Book), but a specific printing of a specific English translation of the Heptameron.

EDITED AGAIN: Blech, I can't read.  The second printing of Turner's translation was dated 1665, not 1655.  The above has been corrected accordingly.

Meddling with the Goëtia (again)

Following the recent work on the Greek text of the Stele of Jeu for Liber Samekh, the corrected transcription has now been incorporated into the Celephaïs Press edition of the Mathers-Crowley Goëtia, and a bunch of other upgrades to the editorial endnotes and general formatting made.  

For various reasons I had to change the blackletter face used for the Preliminary Invocation and Enochian conjurations, as all accented letters in the font I previously used (Jeff Lee's JSL Blackletter) failed to render in the PDFs generated by the Word plugin I'm using, rendering large parts of those texts actually unreadable.  The replacement is not quite as good a match for the face used in the print edition.

On re-checking, it turns out that (a) the Pseudomonarchia Dæmonum was printed in 1577, first appearing in the fifth edition of Wier's De Præstigiis Dæmonum, and (b) the MS. of the catalogue of spirits printed by Scot in the Discoverie of Witchcraft, by "T.R." (who cannot have been Captain Thomas Rudd, he was born the year the first edition of the Discoverie was published) is said to have been dated 1570; therefore, either (a) the translation was made from an earlier MS. copy of the Liber Officiorum Spirituum and not Wier's publication, or (b) the MS. was back-dated (the reference to the Pseudomonarchia in the margin of lib. xv. cap. 1 of the Discoverie could simply have been Scot noting the similarity; Scot reportedly drew on De Præstigiis Dæmonum et Incantionibus ac Veneficiis for the Discoverie).  It is unclear just how far back this MS. tradition goes (a 1508 work of Trithemius includes  a list of works on magic that were circulating in MS. at the time, citing De Officiis Spirituum attributed to Solomon ("excerable and entirely diabolic") and also a Liber Officiorum which divides up demons into four Imperatores and multiple Kings, Dukes, Marquises and Counts under them); however, the Ars Goëtia in its familiar form remains clearly (a) composite, (b) of English origin and (c) no older than the latter half of the seventeenth century.

EDIT: It's not clear how and when Scot acquired the "T.R." MS., but given Wier openly admitted to omitting portions of the text of Liber Officiorum in the Pseudomonarchia in order to render the whole thing unusable, and was probably responsible for interjections about various spirits being deceived in their hopes to return to their pre-Fall place and rank, and given that the only major variation between the Wier and Scot versions of the text (barring garblings due to mis-translation) is the omission in the latter of one spirit,[1] the "back-dated MS." explanation looks more likely (either that, or the Pseudomonarchia was printed independently of De præstigiis prior to the fifth edition of the latter work).

Have some links to copies of De præstigiis dæmonum et incantionibus ac veneficiis:

• 1563 first edition at archive.org
• 1564 second edition at Google Books.
• 1566 third edition at archive.org
• 1568 fourth edition at Google Books (not indicated as "fourth" on title page but adds a sixth "book" to the 1566 edition).
• 1577 fifth edition at Google Books.
• 1583 sixth edition at Google Books.

It will be observed that the Pseudomonarchia only appeared in the 1577 and later editions.

Another possibility is that the "T.R." manuscript of the Liber Officiorum is a phantom, that the translation in the Discoverie was commissioned by Scot from Wier's printing (Joseph Peterson suggests the translator was Abraham Fleming, who translated other texts from the Latin for Scot) and that the marginal note at the end of Book XV ch. 2 (p. 393, ed. 1584) describing the "T.R." MS. was placed there in error (or as a misdirection) and belonged with one or more of the other magical texts printed by Scot in Book XV.

[1] A significantly divergent version of the Offices of the Spirits, roughly contemporary with the Wier and Scot publications, including information on the four Kings of the quarters (there called Oriens, Paimon, Amaimon & Egyn) appears in an English magical miscellany (ca. 1580) in MS. (Folger Shakespeare Library, Folger MS. V.b. 26, prosaically catalogued as "Book of Magic, with Instructions for Invoking Spirits, &c." -- the overall title, if it ever had one, is lost along with the first 14 pages -- and published as a typeset with translations of Latin passages as The Book of Oberon, ed. Daniel Harms, James Clark, Joseph Peterson; Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2015).  High-quality images of the MS. can be found online at the Folger's website; Peterson's transcription of the text (PDF link) is on his Esoteric Archives site.

I am he, the Truth, who hate that iniquity be wrought in the kosmos

 

Uploaded a bunch of revisions and corrections to the version of Crowley's Liber Samekh on Scribd.  Mainly this means that the text of the "Stele of Jeu the Hieroglyphist" (the Graeco-Egyptian ritual of exorcism which was turned, via various layers of translation, paraphrase, mis-copying and creative mangling, into Samekh), has been re-set in Greek Unicode, many typos in my previous transcript fixed and a few notes on the text added.

As alluded to in my previous post, it turns out that digital photographs of the whole of London Papyrus 46 a.k.a. PGM V can be found on the British Library website; based on these images I have expanded my notes on the text, added a more accurate rendition of the "beneficial sign" & decided that I no longer agree entirely with either Preisendanz's or Goodwin's transcriptions.

[Header image taken from photographs of London Papyrus 46 fol. 2 ro., source as link above.]

This is it, which the Angels have issued a DMCA strike on

To be clear, the post title is hyperbole and I *haven't* been issued with a DMCA strike in connection with the images of the BL microfilms of Sloane 3191 that I posted on the CP Scribd page a decade ago; I deleted them voluntarily as they are now entirely redundant.

I recently discovered, initially while working on improvements to my re-set of Crowley's "Liber Samekh," that high-quality digital photographs of selected items from the British Library's manuscript collection are now viewable online (bl.uk/manuscripts).  In addition to London Papyrus 46, a.k.a PGM V, this includes the whole of Sloane MSS. 3188 (Dee's early spirit diaries) and 3191 (the digests, containing the Angelic Keys, De Heptarchia Mystica, Liber Scientiæ Auxilii & victoriæ terrestris and the book of supplications and invocations) are now viewable, and these are far superior quality to those digitised microfilms; so now you only have Dee's scrawl and 400+ years of deterioration to the manuscripts to worry about.

EDIT: the addition of Sloane MS 3188 was apparently relatively recent (September last year), per this BL blog post.  The pseudo-Dee "Rosie Crucian Secrets" (Harley MS. 6485) has apparently been up since 2015 or earlier.

Quod est inferius, est sicut quod est superius.

Missed this when I last posted an update of the Mead Hermetica, but turns out that in 2018 Cambridge University Press published Hermetica II, represented as a continuation of Brian Copenhaver's 1992 (many reprints) translation of the Corpus Hermeticum and Asclepius.

This comprises annotated translations of the 29 Hermetic excerpts and fragments from the anthology of Stobæus that were in tom. iii & iv of Nock & Festugière's 1946-54 edition of the texts, as well as the "Vienna fragments" mentioned by Copenhaver, fragments of Hermetic texts from a papyrus at Oxford discovered in 1991 and multiple brief quotations and references by writers of late antiquity, as well as citations from early mediæval Arabic writers, and the famous Emerald Tablet.

Litwa, M, David: Hermetica II: the Excerpts of Stobaeus, Papyrus Fragments, and Ancient Testimonies in an English Translation with Notes and an Introduction.  Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Unfortunately this has yet to see the kind of accessible paperback reprint that Copenhaver got; the print edition lists for over £70 new.