Meddling with the Goëtia again (6)

As I remarked in my endnotes, the compiler of the Goëtia evidently left it up to the Magician to work out which of the four Kings of the Quarters was set over each of the 72 spirits, as an explicit rulership or assignment to a quarter was only given for a few (#1: Bael & #2 Agares — East; #32: Asmoday & #33, Gaäp — Amaymon; Amaymon also mentioned in passing in the entry for #13, Bileth).

The Folger "Offices of the Spirits,"[1] deriving from a somewhat divergent line of the MS. tradition to the version that was published in an incomplete form by Wier, is some help on this count.  It follows on the initial list of 82 spirits (the three chiefs and the four Kings of the quarters are counted in that number), the Queen of the Fairies and seven sisters subject to her (p. 81) with lists of names under the four Kings (some apparently repeated from the first section).  Obviously, there is a less than 100% overlap between this list of names and that in the Goëtia, but a fair few of them match or are similar enough in orthography, description and office that the identification is reasonable.

[1] Folger Shakespeare Library, MS. V.b. 26, "Book of Magic with instructions for invoking spirits," a.k.a. "Theurgia M.S."; images of MS. viewable online here, transcription by Joseph Peterson here, print edition (edited & Latin passages translated by Daniel Harms & Jospeh Peterson, illus. by James R. Clarke) as The Book of Oberon, Llewellyn, 2015.  The "Offices of the Spirits" appears on pp. 73-84 of the MS.

Also someone (17th century or later) wrote numbers next to the names of several of the spirits in the margin of the Folger MS. which appear to be cross-references to their numbers in Scot (which are one less than those in Wier after #3); a note in the same hand and colour next to the entry for Baall reads "According to Scot p: 277 4to 1651."

Under Oriens,[2] King of the East: 

[2] Since Oriens is simply the Latin for "east," this is possibly a euphemism or honorific title rather than the actual name of the ruler. Some versions of the scheme, e.g. in the Key of Solomon versions in Wellcome MS. 4666 (18th c.), Wellcome MS 4659 ("mid-18th century") and La Véritable Magie Noir ("179?," a textually corrupt and woefully incomplete printed edition), have Asmodée or Asmodiel as one of the kings of the quarters instead of Oriens; however in the Trinity, Folger and Wier-Scot-Goëtia Liber Officiorum versions (which disagree on many things), Asmoday consistently appears as one of the subordinate spirits distinct from the four kings, usually subject to Amaymon.  Oriens sometimes appears as Uriens (e.g. in the 16th-century Clavicula Salomonis version in Vadian Slg MS 334, p. 69, which notes the more common reading in the margin).

• Baall = Bael, #1
• Agaros = Agares, #2
• Barbas = Marbas, #5 (Marbas alias Barbas in Wier)
• Star — not in Goëtia (name possibly a copyist error for Scor alias Skor; can render men blind, deaf, and insane; brings money; appears in likeness of a swan; speaks hoarsely)
• Semper — probably Vepar, #42 (Vepar alias Separ in Wier; same powers; the Goëtia spirit appears as a "mermaid" (similis syreni per Wier), as opposed to Semper's "likenes of a mayden").
• Algor — probably Eligos, #15 (Eligor alias Abigor in Wier)
• Seson — possibly Purson (Pursan alias Corsan in Wier), #20 (similar appearance and offices)
• Maxayn — not in Goëtia (teaches virtues of herbs and stones, fast travel, appears as bear with serpent's tail)
• Neophon — not in Goëtia (can tell all things past and future, and all secrets; gives favour of the powerful, appeases enemies, gives dignity & riches, appears as a dog)
• Barbais — probably Barbatos, #8 (similar appearance -- "a wild archer," compare Wier's in signo sagittarii sylvestris, similar offices)
• Amon = Amon, #7
• Suffales — not in Goëtia (starts fights, gives false answers unless strongly constrained, appears as a spark of fire).

Under Amaymon, King of the South:

• Asmoday = Asmoday, #32
• Bileth — Beleth (alias Bileth) is #13 in Goëtia but stated offices are completely different; the Folger Bileth teaches the Liberal Arts & invisbility, and makes consecrations evil & good.
• Astaroth = Astaroth, #29
• Abech — apparently not in Goëtia (teaches "7 sciences" (i.e. the "liberal arts") & all languages, gets friendship, gives true answers, appears like an old king but only head visible)
• Berith = Berith, #28
• Mallapas = Malphas, #39 (same appearance and offices)
• Partas — possibly Foras, #31 (Forras alias Forcas in Wier; similar offices.  The Goëtia spirit appears as "a strong man" (forma viri fortissimi), the Folger spirit as "a wood bear")
• Busin — apparently not in Goëtia (answers all questions, can move dead bodies around and cause spirits to animate them, appears as a fair woman, speaks hoarsely)
• Oze = Osé, #57 (Oze in Wier)
• Pathin — name suggests Bathin, #18, but description & offices completely different (the Folger spirit can make a man wise and tell secrets, appears with 3 heads, a serpent in his hand & a pin of burning iron in his mouth with which he sets fire to things; there are some similarities with #23, Aim (Aym vel Haborym in Wier), who appears with 3 heads, rides a viper, carries a firebrand, can make one witty (ingeniosum), gives true answers of private matters (de abstrusis rebus)  and also sets fire to things)
• Cambra — not in Goëtia (teaches virtues of herbs and stones, tames birds, appears as a swan)
• Gamor — possibly Amy, #58 (name poor match but description and offices very similar).

Under Paimon, King of the West (who himself is #9):

• Belial = Belial, #68
• Bason — possibly Balam, #51 (offices and description similar)
• Gordonsor — apparently not in Goëtia (can tell the truth of all things, mighty in doing errands, appears as angel with a dark face)
• Balath — apparently not in Goëtia (can make men sick & deprive them of senses and wits; teaches liberal arts, gives love and dignity, can carry one from place to place; appears as a "mishappen image")
• Mistalas — possibly Stolas, #36 (same appearance, similar offices).
• Lecher — apparently not in Goëtia (knows secrets of "7 sciences," gets friendship; appears as knight with red lion's face, speaks sadly)
• Sagayne = Zagan, #61
• Caleos — Sallos, #19 (Zaleos in Wier), has a similar description but different offices (Wier omitted this spirit's offices so the compiler of the Goëtia either guessed, made something up, or called up the spirit—said in the Folger list to be very false in all his answers unless well constrained and mastered—and asked).
• Cagyne (or Cogin) — possibly Samigina, or Gamigin, #4 (similar appearance and offices)
• Suchay — not in Goëtia (teaches languages, provides fast travel, gives love of women (widows in particular); appears with a fair face like a woman)
• Reyall — probably Vual, #47 (same form, very similar offices; marginal note in MS. has "65" which correspond's to this spirit's number in Scot's list)
• Zayme — Räum (Raum vel Raym in Wier), #40, has some points of similarity in form and office.

Under Egin, King of the North (with one doubtful exception, these do not appear to be identifiable with spirits in the Goëtia):

• Ozia
• Uriell
• Vsagoo — possibly Vassago, #3, but offices are completely different
• Synoryell
• Fessan
• Goyle
• Auras
• Othey
• Saranyt
• Muryell
• Hinbra (also appears as Umbra due to errors by 17th / 19th / 21st century copyists)
• Anaboth

OK, that's still only about a third of the 72, even counting the more stretched identifications, but it's a start.  No idea why Egin doesn't get any of those in Wier's list.  Anaboth, Mureril, Caleos (also appears as Calchos), and Sonenel, possibly a variant of Synoryell, along with Vassago, Agares and Barbaros (possibly a variant of Barbatos or Barbais), are among a group of twelve spirits cited in treasure-hunting processes in Sloane MS. 3824, (fol. 5v-13r & 89-102).  Also, several of the above (again, with minor variance in the spelling of the names) appear as "Presidentiall Councellors" and "Messengers" of the Kings in Sloane MS. 3824 fol.117v (in fact, that whole section of 3824 has significant derivations from the De Officiis tradition represented by V.b. 26, although the conjurations have been re-written to be Protestant and the description of Egyn has been unaccountably heavily truncated, ending at the description of his nostrils).

OFC, as previously remarked, Wier (and hence Scot and the Goëtia) gives a different set of names of the kings of the quarters; only one name is in common with the traditional set (as per Agrippa, the Folger "Book of Magic," & most of the other Liber Officiorum versions not deriving from Wier that mention them at all), and that name assigned to a different direction, but since Wier (like Waite three centuries later) admitted to deliberately tampering with the text in the hopes of making it unusable, this can probably be safely disregarded.

BL Additional MS. 36674 fol. 65r (transcription by Joseph Peterson here) contains a Liber Officiorum fragment listing 13 spirits (rather, by the looks of it, two fragments nailed together; the first six entries are in Latin and also appear in the Pseudomonarchia; the remaining 7, (3 under Oriens, 2 under Amaymon, 2 under Egin) are in English and appear in the Folger list with variations in names that can be chalked up to copyist errors: Scor (Star), Algor, Sefon (Seson), Partas, Gamal, Umbra (Hinbra), Anaboth.  This fragment, incidentally, was the source of the list of the "Globes of Yog-Sothoth" in the Hay-Turner Necronomicon (an infamous literary-occult hoax of the late 1970s).

A French Liber Officiorum version with 47 spirits (again, counting the three chiefs and kings of the quarters in that number) survives in a manuscript in the collection of Trinity College, Cambridge (o.8.29).  Noticed briefly in E.M. Butler's Ritual Magic (p. 36), a detailed study and typeset by J-P Boudet was published in the Spring 2003 issue of Médiévales ("Les who's who démonologiques de la Renaissance et leurs ancêtres médiévaux").  An English translation of the text was included in Pandemonium by Jake Stratton-Kent (Hadean Press, 2016), a study of "spirit catalogues" which cross-references it with the Wier-Scot-Ars Goëtia line, the Folger "Offices of the Spirits" and the Grimoirum Verum (the list of spirits in the GV itself derives at least partially from a Solomonic text in Latin, the De Secretis, which survives in multiple 17th-century MS. versions, but that's a subject for another post).

[The link to view the MS. online at Trinity's own website was throwing errors last I checked.  A PDF of the relevant pages of the MS. can be downloaded from  the "Books of Magic" blog which has a summary of the text.]

A 15th-century manuscript in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Firenze (Plut 89 sup 38) contains a version of the Liber Officiorum in Latin at fol. 303r sqq. (going on the numbers written lightly at the bottom right corners of the pages, which appear to be those used by the website's interafce).  Boudet (op. cit., §25) gives a list which collates spirit names between this version, the Trinity version and Wier, as well as the selection in the "Munich manual of Demonic Magic" (Clm 849).

An earlier part of Plut 89 sup 38 (fol. 47v-51r) gives 100 characters for spirits, but this appears to be independent from the Liber Officiorum version and only a few names are common to both.  They are generally simpler than the elaborate sigils of the Goëtia, and for the few names that appear in both there is little resemblance: compare

with

(Belial, Bilet, Berit, Amon and Paimon are other names shared between the two lists.  There are also characters for the other Kings of the quarters, at the top of fol. 47v.)

[EDIT: that set of characters belongs with a De Officiis variant in Italian which is missing several pages including about 80% of the catalogue of spirits.  What remains of it, begins at fol. 35r.]

While Wellcome MS. 110 (late 16th cent.), which contains some extracts from an "Officium Sprituum" text (Flores extracti de libello qui nuncupatur 'Offitium spirituum') at fol. 32r and 101r on, is available online, it appears to have been very hastily written and I have insufficient experience reading Elizabethan secretary hand to pick out more than a handful of words from the relevant sections.  Joseph Peterson has transcribed the two entries in English from fol. 32r here.

The De Officiis Spirituum version in MS. Coxe 25 (formerly part of the Ritman Library as BPH 114) has not, as far as I am aware, been published or digitised; while it is frequently cited, I am not aware of any studies on it specifically.

One of the studies in the Routledge History of Medieval Magic (2019) mentions that Boudet was, at the time of writing, preparing "an edition of the catalogues of demons, often attributed to Solomon or which make mention at least of the wise king's ability to bind spirits."  (J. Véronèse: "Solomonic Magic").  It has not so far been published to my knowledge.

[EDIT: according to a comment on Dan Harms' blog in 2017, Boudet has been working on this (under the title Les catalogues de démons attribués à Salomon et à saint Cyprien) for over a decade.]

A Hebrew De Officiis Spirituum version is extant in a MS. (dated mid-19th century) in the collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, under the title Sepher Hokhmat Shelomoh (Book of the Wisdom of Solomon).  Description and link to images of manuscript here.  What the linked article doesn't mention, is that the 100 spirits described (including the familiar four Kings of the Quarters, but only one chief infernal spirit, Beelzebuth set over them, although Lucifer appears, twice, further down the list) are the same ones mentioned above which appear in BML Plut 89 sup 38, fol. 47v sqq.  Skimming through the first 20 or so, the names appear to be similar, and were probably transliterated from a Latin list (even in the case of names that were originally of Hebrew etymology, like Beelzebuth, Astarot, &c.) and the seals are mostly recongisable, though not identical.

Meddling with the Goëtia again (5)

[This is an updated / corrected version of a post under the same title of a couple of days ago, as the original somehow got flagged and deleted by Blogger while I was trying to edit it.]

After all these years, I only just noticed I forgot to transcribe how many legions #70, Seere, rules (26, for what it's worth).  And while turning the sigils into a TrueType font seemed like a good idea at the time (I lost count of how many times the drawing program I was using crashed while I was editing the vector art), it had the unfortunate effect that those mapped to lower-case letters accidentally got changed in a few instances by MS Word's auto-correct capitalising them.  I think they're all fixed in the most recent upload.

So, as is well known, there are four spirits in the Goëtia that do not appear in Wier or Scot: #3 (Vassago), and #70-72 (Seere, Dantalion, Andromalius).  Vassago, as I had previously remarked (citing A.E. Waite's Book of Ceremonial Magic (p. 197 n.), which cited no source), was reportedly also called on in ceremonial crystallomancy in a ritual tradition distinct from Solomonic / Goëtic conjurations (simply calling it "White Magic" in scare-quotes would have been insufficient for Waite: his actual phrasing was "[...] White Magic--as the most dubious of all arts is called in the scorn of its professors").

Anyway, in the course of looking for other instances of a group of planetary angels mentioned in the conjurations in the Heptameron (Salamia, Orphaniel, &c.) but not elsewhere in the same text, I turned up a reference by Joseph Peterson to an earlier work by Waite, The Occult Sciences (Kegan Paul et al., 1891) where Waite treats of more detail on the subject (p. 107), alluding to MSS. copied by Frederick Hockley.  One of these -- published as facsimile and typeset as The Clavis or Key to the Magic of Solomon (Lake Worth, FL: Ibis Press, 2009), edited and introduced by Peterson -- includes an "Experiment of Vassago," with the variant sigil (similar to, but significantly less elaborate than, that in the Goëtia) printed by Waite, in which the spirit is called to appear in a "Crystal Stone or Glass."

[Copies can also be found in Wellcome MSS. 2842 and 3203.]

This "experiment" was not, though, written by Hockley, nor by his source, Ebenezer Sibley; a version appears in BL Sloane MS. 3824 at fol. 110r-112v (the notebook containing this is mid-seventeenth century, has identifiable cribs from printed works such as J. French's translation of De Occulta Philosophia (pub. 1651) and Casaubon's True and Faithful Relation (pub. 1659), but also features material from multiple earlier sources such as the 16th-century English MS. traditions compiled in Folger MS. V.b. 26 or put into print by Scot in Book XV of the Discoverie of Witchcraft).  This MS.'s close proximity to those numbered 3821 and 3825 (the latter containing the earliest known complete Lemegeton) in the collection predates their cataloguing by Hans Sloane's librarian; all three were previously in the possession of John Somers (d. 1716) and after him, Sir Joseph Jekyll (d. 1738), and according to an account by David Rankine who edited a partial typeset of 3824 (The Book of Treasure Spirits, London: Avalonia, 2009) and had previously co-edited works drawing on the other two, portions of all three are in the same hand [1].  The "experiment of Vassago" is immediately followed by a similar one for Agares (#2 in the Goëtia as well as the Wier / Scot Liber Officiorum).  

[1] 17th-century handwriting is scarcely my specialism, but based on the copies I have seen (after first writing the above), the first half or so of 3824 (fol. 3-79), along with many notes, corrections, &c. to the originally independent texts in the latter part; the prayers on fol. 188-193 of 3821 along with some corrections and an inserted leaf of notes to the text on fol. 1-157, and some corrections to the texts in 3825, are in the hand of Elias Ashmole, who probably owned all three prior to their acquisition by Somers.

Later in 3824 (fol. 114r-120v) is found what looks to be part of a different Liber Officiorum version.  This has a lengthy account of a spirit called Bleth, "who is mostly called upon and appeareth of a glass of water" and shorter accounts of subordinate spirts: Sonoryan (said to have been the familiar of Cardinal Richlieu), Mamon, Seere, Asmodiah, Dantalion, Andromalius and Sondenna alias Sendenna.  Seere, Dantalion[2] and Andromalius[3] are, of course, the three other spirits not in the Wier / Scot list that were added to the Goëtia to make the number up to 72.  Their offices are more or less as in the Ars Goëtia, descriptions of their appearances and numeration how many legions they rule are omitted, and the characters recognisably similar to, but far less elaborate than, the Lemegeton forms.  Of Sondenna alias Sendenna, it is said "This Spirit was the Servant and familiar to Mr. E.K." (i.e., Edward Kelley) and whose description is copied from A True & Faithful Relation, p. 185 (Cotton Appendix xlvi part i fol. 201v, where the first 'n' in both forms of the name looks more like a 'u';[4] not (?) to be confused with SONDN, one of the ruling names of the upper right lesser angle of MOR).

[2] A probable variant of "Dantalion" appears as Dentalion, cited alongside Lucifer and Sathan in a process in Sloane MS. 3851 (date uncertain, likely mid 17th century) fol. 59v-60r; the procedure (which the scribe claimed to be "proved") is a coercive agoge "love spell," consistent with the offices of Dantalion in the Ars Goëtia.

[3] A probable variant / antecedent of "Andromalius" appears as Andrew Malchus, mentioned as a spirit called up by treasure hunters in Norfolk during the reign of Henry VIII.  Also Andromalcus or Andromalchus is cited in minor procedures in 16th & 17th-century magical MSS. such as Sloane MS. 3846 (fol. 83v), BL Additional MS 36,674 (fol. 89v) and Bodleian Rawlinson D. 252 (don't have exact reference), typically involving recovering stolen goods or identifying or punishing a thief.  The orthography Andromalius perhaps originates from an ink blot, piece of dirt or squashed fly above an ill-formed 'c' being taken as the dot on an 'i'.

[4] While Dee's scrawl in Cotton Appendix xlvi is frequently extremely hard to read, this name was lettered out fairly carefully, and Soudenna as a mis-hearing of Seudenna (Dee initially wrote the name as he heard it spoken during the Spirit Action, then added the marginal note with the second spelling following a later discussion with Kelley) is more believable than Sondenna as a mis-hearing of Sendenna.

Following this truncated catalogue of spirits is a page and a half with "The names of Severall spirits, both with and without their Characters" (omitted by Rankine and barely readable in the crappy images of the MS. that I'm currently working from) followed by (117r-120v) an account of the demon kings of the four quarters, and the three chief infernal spirits, Lucifer, Beelzebub and Satan (the first of whom, we are informed, cannot be called up directly although it is implied he should be cited in summoning and binding lesser demons), which appears to have been part of the Liber Officiorum tradition that was redacted out by Wier and remained largely AWOL in the Goëtia.[5]  This has parallels to the start of the "Offices of the Spirits" section of Folger MS Vb 26 (p. 73 sqq.) and the French Le Livre des esperitz (Cambridge Trinity MS. O.8.29 fol. 179ro-182vo).

[5] This section was also included by Skinner and Rankine in their earlier Keys to the Gateway of Magic (Golden Hoard, 2005), the bulk of which is a typeset of the Janua Magica Reserata.

In fact, the discrepancy in Wier between the number of spirits actually listed (69) and the number said to have been sealed up by Solomon in the br^H^Hglass vessel (72) could be accounted for by the missing three being the remaining Kings of the quarters, Oriens (E), Amaymon (N), and Egyn (S), since Paimon (W) does get an entry as #22 in the Pseudomonarchia.  Of course Wier also gives an almost completely different set of names for the Kings (Amaymon appears among them, but assigned to a different quarter), which was perpetuated into the Goëtia, but he also openly admitted to tampering with the text to make it unusable.

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).

Meddling with the Goëtia again (4)

So anyone who's reading this and cares about this subject probably knows this already, but, while the Lemegeton as we have it is almost certainly a 17th-century English compilation, the title, over which E. M. Butler (Ritual Magic, p. 65) puzzled briefly, and which Joseph Peterson (2001) ascribed to the compiler's ignorance of Latin and desire for something meaning "Little Key of Solomon" (clavicula itself is a Latin diminutive form, so the Clavicula Salomonis is already the "little" or "lesser" key of Solomon), as the name of a magical work ascribed to Solomon, predates that compilation.

In the printed Latin edition of the Ars Notoria that was included in the "1600" and other "per Beringos fratres" editions of Agrippa's Opera, we find:

"[...] ideo est ars notoria, quia quibusdam notulis brevissimis omnium comprehensibiliter scriptorum edocet cognitionem, sicut etiam ait Salomon in  tractatus Lemegeton, hoc est, in tractatu spritualium & secretorum experimentorum" (see for example this copy on Google Books).

It's actually a little odd that Peterson didn't remark on this at the time [EDIT: he did -- see here], since this line appears in Robert Turner's 1657 English translation of the Ars Notoria which is included in full in his edition of the Lemegeton, by far and away the best print edition of this grimoire:

"[...] it is called the Notory Art, because in certain brief Notes, it teacheth and comprehendeth the knowledge of all Arts: for so Solomon also saith in his Treatise Lemegeton, that is, in his Treatise of Spiritual and Secret Experiments" (Peterson, p. 170; p. 18 of the 1657 first edition of Turner's Notory Art of Solomon).

The similar form lemogethon appears as part of a string of barbarous names in cap. LXXV of the Liber Iuratus Honorii (the Sworn Book of Honorius), which was in turn borrowed from the Ars Notoria ; in the printed edition it appears (as lemogethom) as part of an oration to be said before the third Note of Philosophy (p. 634 of the copy of Agrippa linked above, Turner p. 79).  The 13th-century Ars Notoria sive Flores Aurei at Yale (Mellon MS. 1) includes (fol. 6vo) a shorter version of the same oration, beginning Lemogeton.

In one of the BnF Ars Notoria MSS. (BnF Lat. 7154, dated 16th century) is a reference to "libro suo [Salomonis] quæ Lemogethon nominatur." (fol. 11ro).  I think, but am not sure (since I have practically no experience reading manuscripts of the period so am unfamiliar with some of the scribal abbreviations & letter-forms used) that some text similar to the passage I quoted in Latin above appears in the 14th-century BnF Lat. 7152, fol. 2ro., about halfway down the second column; the name of Solomon's treatise appears different, but I can't tell exactly what it is and I don't have access to Véronèse's critical Latin text.

[EDIT: later found a copy of L'Ars Notoria au Moyen Âge.  BnF Lat. 7152 belongs to what Véronèse calls "Version A"; Véronèse reads the names of Solomon's tract on secret and spiritual experiments as "Demegeton" in Sloane MS. 1712, "Lemogetan" in Mellon MS. 1, "Lemodegan" in BnF Lat 7152.]

None of this answers the question of what, if anything, the name means, but it does suggest that the 17th-century compiler assembled and redacted various texts attributed to Solomon under this title to meet the demand for a rumoured, but lost (or fictitious) work, quite likely spurred by Turner's 1657 publication.  Compare the various fake Necronomicons that have been produced since the 1970s.

More might follow if I ever get the hang of reading mediæval Latin manuscripts.

Meanwhile I see the Elucidation of Necromancy (Joseph Peterson's forthcoming edition of texts & translations of various magical MSS. that were turned into the Heptameron seu Elemental Magica) listed on a website called "Children's Book World."  I suppose it helps to get started young on this kind of thing, but still . . .

This is it, which the Angels wish you'd stop pestering them about.

So I just uploaded the first update of my Enochian bibliography in 3 years yesterday, and have already found something calling for further remark.  Actually got round to skimming through Skinner & Rankine's typeset (Practical Angel Magic of John Dee's Enochian Tables) of "The Practice of the Tables"[1] from Sloane MS. 307 (regrettably it's some way down the BL's priority list for digitising and placing online, although they teased us with a photograph of one page five years ago).  The third set of conjurations in this are headed Janua Orientalis (or Occidentalis, &c.) Reserata and have strong parallels, beyond the title, to another English work of angel-magic of the period, the Janua Magica Reserata.[2]

The Janua scheme is based on the nine orders of Angels from the Celestial Hierarchies of pseudo-Dionysius, referred to the Kabbalistic Sephiroth excluding Malkuth (based on the scale of the number 10 in De Occulta Philosophia lib. II cap 13); however phrases from the English of Dee's Claves Angelicæ appear in the conjurations ("the servants of the same your god," "make us partakers of undefiled knowledge," "in power and presence, whose works shall be a Song of honour and the praise of your God in your Creation.") and Dee's interrogation of Ave (TFR p. 169), slightly paraphrased, is used as an example of how to ascertain the genuineness of supposed angelic manifestations (Treatise on Angel Magic, p. 185 ed, 2006, section "To know who it is").

At the moment I'm not sure who borrowed from whom; both definitely borrowed from TFR independently of each other, "The Practice of the Tables" much more extensively.[3]

EDIT: Well . . . on checking again, "To know who it is" in the Harley MS. 6482 Janua is not in the Sloane MS. 3825 version, the entire "Second Introduction" preceding the preliminary prayer and the Nine Celestial Keys is an interpolation by Smart or "Rudd."  There is a near-parallel section in the first "Introduction" (McLean p. 176-177, cf. Sloane MS. 3825 42vo-43ro), which does not follow the TFR passage so closely; there is still some similar or identical phrasing, but Ave's responses are not quoted.

EDITED AGAIN: blech, still didn't check carefully enough.  The "Second Introduction" wasn't interpolated by Smart / "Rudd," just moved from its original position after the "First Key," and added  / changed section headings.

[1] I use this name as a convenience.  Sloane MS. 307 has no overall title; it is described in the BL catalogue as "Magic. On the invocation of angels"; the defective and mucked-about version of Dee's "Tables of Enoch" which begins that copy is headed Clavicula Tabularum Enochi which name is sometimes applied to the whole work and was also used as the title of an edited extract from this work (omitting the verbose and repetitive conjurations that occupy about 80% of the page count in the typeset) circulated in the Ordo R.R. & A.C. as manuscript "H."  "The Practice of the Tables," denoting a copy of this work, appears in as the first item of a contents list written at the start of Sloane MS. 3821, in a different hand to the main text; this most likely derived from internal section titles in the work where the first of the three sets of conjurations were headed "The Practice of the East Table," "The Practice of the West Table," &c.  Skinner & Rankine called it Tabula Bonorum Angelorum Invocationes, a name previously used by Ashmole for the final untitled "book" of Dee's magic digests (Sloane MS. 3191 fol. 52vo-80vo). 

[2] Versions of this text survive in Sloane MS. 3825 and the early 18th-century magical miscellany Harley MS. 6482 (the latter completely omitting the preliminary theoretical part, which in any case was mostly plagiarised from Cornelius Agrippa), in both cases followed by a version of the Lemegeton: typesets in Skinner & Rankine, Keys to the Gateway of Magic (mainly based on Sloane 3825 but incorporating interpolations from Harley 6482 and with a section on the demon kings of the quarters from a Liber Officiorum Spirituum fragment in Sloane MS. 3824 bolted on to the end) and McLean, A Treatise on Angel Magic (Harley 6482).  Additionally, the conjurations or "Celestial Keys" were copied into the records of a group trying to contact various angels mentioned in Dee's spirit diaries, which survive in Sloane MS. 3628.  For a discussion of Harley 6482, see E. Asprem, "False, Lying Spirits and Angels of Light" in Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft 3:1 (2008).

[3] Well, the more I've looked at this, the more I'm inclined to believe they are of common authorship.

Just in case -- though it's pretty unlikely -- the intersection of people who care about this subject and people who haven't worked it out yet is not an empty set, the title of this post and others on similar subjects is a parody of a line in Michael's description of the wonder-working "Ring of Solomon" in Mysteriorum Liber Primus (Action of 1582.03.14, Sloane MS. 3188 fol. 12ro).  The header image is taken from the same MS. (images at www.bl.uk/manuscripts/).

EDITED (rather than making a new post and having to come up with another variant on the title)

Moving forward 200 years or a bit more, one of the things that the version of "Enochian Magic" taught and practiced in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (well, strictly, the "Second Order" to the H.O.G.D., the R.R. et A.C.) has been criticised and mocked is that the version of the Tables of Enoch published by F.I. Regardie and writers who cribbed from him, and apparently those used in the original organisation, feature up to four letters on a number of squares.  Practically, the reason for this is quite simple: the source documents used by Mathers and Westcott (Sloane MS. 3191, Casaubon's True and Faithful Relation and Sloane MS. 307 apparently being the main ones) disagreed on a number of squares, and even the "fair copies" in 3191 have a number of corrections and crossings out, or instances of one letter being written in small below another.  This study gives a rather dry run-through these variations and suggests possible ways of dealing with the issue in practice. 

Meddling with the Goëtia again (3)

To be clear, it's not (well, not just) a Heavy Metal Umlaut in my preferred orthography of the name (one of very few things in which I follow A.E. Waite -- see the title page to Book of Ceremonial Magic), rather my remorselessly pedantic streak making it clear that the 'o' and 'e' are pronounced distinctly, representing Greek οη, rather than Latin œ.

The writer of an ongoing blog covering MS. and printed works of magic, observes in a discussion of the Abramelin texts that the French MS. of Abramelin (Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, MS. 2351) used by Mathers left many of the magic squares incomplete, with more than a few only having the top and left edge squares lettered; the "KODSELIM" square which Crowley prefixed to the Goëtia being one of these, suggesting that thus incomplete, "the intended effect of its associated spell (“To undo any magic soever”) would fail"; however, Crowley's rationale for prefixing it to the Goëtia was essentially to make the whole thing useless (compare the MACANEH square, "to hinder Sorcerers from operating" prefixed to "Handbook of Geomancy").  While we're on the subject, it appears that the description of the CASED AZOTE square as "should never be made use of" was down to the translator / scribe of the Arsenal MS. of Abramelin and not a piece of censorship by Mathers (in the German version, its purpose is apparently to cause liver damage).

The meddling with my edition of the Mathers-Crowley Goëtia continues.  Given how long it takes to rebuild the bookmarks every time I re-generate the PDF, not going to upload the updates until I've got it to a reasonably satisfactory state.  For example, my attention was recently drawn to the fact that the entry for Belial in the Pseudomonarchia Dæmonum refers to Solomon sealing up the 72 demon kings and their legions in vase vitreo, "in a glass vessel," mis-translated "in a brasen vesell" in the Scot version of the Offices of the Spirits.  This reading was not only perpetuated into the Goëtia but influenced an elaboration of its praxis.

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.