FULL TEXT SO FAR - 5/august/23 (Patreon)

A DISCUSSION OF TERMS

Magic: Magic is infamously difficult to define. Ask a Roman centurion, a Zhao dynasty scholar, an American revival preacher, for their definition of magic, and they will give you wonderfully varied answers. Magic changes depending on time period, culture, location, and historical moment. A book could be a tome of powerful magical secrets on one side of a river, and a text of ordinary, mundane knowledge on the other. A book can be added to a library as a mundane text, spend 100 years untouched on the shelf, only to be ripped off and burned as a dangerous magical text.

Magic has no stable definition, but it has a consistent identity. Today’s magic was influenced by Yesterday’s magic. To gain proper understanding, we have to track its meaning as far back as we can, back to the roots. However, we must also be careful not to mistake the seed for the tree. Attempting to explain the shape of that tree will be a major goal of this text.

Esoteric: Defined by Mirriam-Webster as “designed for or understood by the specially initiated alone.” Esoterica is material so complex that it requires specialized preparation beyond what is normally expected. Esoterica is not simply material one doesn’t understand. The key phrase here is “beyond what is normally expected.” A textbook of advanced biochemistry is not esoterica. But a textbook of biochemistry so specialized that other biochemists find you strange for studying it, that is esoterica.

The Occult: From the latin “occultus” meaning hidden, concealed, or secret. “The Occult” has gone through several definition shifts throughout history which will be discussed at length later in this text. For our purposes, The Occult will be used as a deliberately broad umbrella term referring to the interconnected web of strange religious history, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and con-artistry. The Occult contains both valuable information, and dangerous misinformation, both sincere believers, and cynical grifters. It is the field of information we will be exploring in this text.

Mysticism: Where a magician may attempt to harness divine power, a mystic attempts to interact with god directly.

–

Doctrine of Signatures

Magical Squares

NEOPLATONISM

The Neoplatonists were a school of Greek philosophers around 250 AD who drew upon Platonic and Neopythagorean philosophy to talk about God. While they were not magicians in and of themselves, their ideas about the nature of God and reality would be influential for everyone from the church fathers to jewish mystics to Islamic polymaths.

According to the Neoplatonists, we live in the sensible world. It is composed of all the things we can sense and understand. Things like rocks, trees, meat, dreams, ideas, and women, are all part of the sensible world. But where did it all come from? To answer this question, the Neoplatonists introduced three main ideas: The One, emmanation, and the many.

Think of yourself. You came from somewhere. You had parents who produced you, and they in turn had parents who produced them, and so on and so on all the way back to the biological Adam and Eve. But something had to cause them: be they sneezed into being by Atum, or evolved over time from some primordial froth, or shaped from clay by Ki. But something had to cause Autm, or Ki, or the primordial froth, and so on and so on until you reach the simplest, earliest, most original state of the world. This is The One. It is the simple, transcendent, and infinite cause of the universe that is furthest from comprehension.

But we live in the sensory world, the thing made of rocks, trees, dreams, ideas, and women, all things that are notably not transcendent. This is the many, the fragments of The One that make up the world. This raises a question: How does an Infinite, transcendent One become the finite, manifest world? The Neoplatonists answer: emmanation.

The One has to go through steps to break itself down into the world. These middle-states, called hypostates, are the bread and butter of why Neoplatonism has stuck around for the rest of magical history. Because no two Neoplatonists could really agree on exactly how many hypostates there were, what order they would happen in, or their relationship to each other. Discourse around how exactly the One became the many formed the basis for nigh on two thousand years of theological discussion.

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Early Christians interpreted Neoplatonic ideas as such, equating The One with the father, and the many with Christ, with the Holy Spirit serving as a hypostate between the two.

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Plotinus, as edited by Porphyry, posited some notably more complex hypostates.

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Sharp-eyed viewers may notice the similarities between these complex diagrams, and the kabbalistic tree of life, whose framers were undoubtedly influenced by neoplatonic ideas.

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WHO WERE THE GNOSTICS?

To explain Gnosticism, we have to talk about the formation of the Catholic Church. This will be the first of a repeating theme throughout history: Influential magical concepts being created from Catholic priests getting into fights.

The year is around 100 CE. Jesus is dead, and the “Jesus cult” is trying to figure out how to become the Catholic Church. Early Christians knew that the death of Jesus was pretty important, possibly the most important thing to ever happen. The death of Christ was an event of titanic, cosmic significance, but among the church founders, there was significant argument over what exactly it meant for the rest of us ordinary humans.

The crux of the matter was salvation. Did Christ’s death wipe the sin-slate clean? Were we all saved? Were only the believers saved? If you accepted Jesus as the son of god, were there extra steps we had to take? And what was the role of the church in all of this? Did you have to be part of the church to be saved? The answers to these questions would fundamentally shape the Catholic Church.

There were two big sides in this fight. The “orthodox” position, represented by church fathers like Ireneus, was that to be considered Christian you had to meet some requirements. One had to follow the teachings of the church, accept baptism, participate in worship, and obey the clergy. He said that for those outside of the church, “There is no salvation.” [1] Not everyone agreed with this. The other side of this argument, were people who taught that salvation could be acquired outside of the church, through the acquisition of secret knowledge. Irenaeus did not like these folks. The idea that salvation could be acquired outside of the church was a fundamental challenge to the validity of the burgeoning institution of Catholicism. Iraneus derisively referred to these heretics Gnostics, after “Gnosis”, the ancient Greek word for knowledge.

Gnosticism as a term did not originally refer to a religion, but what many Catholics understood to be a type of heresy. Because of this, there are many, many different texts, groups, and theologies that fall under the category of “Gnostic.” Texts are often described as ”Gnostic in character” or “a gnosticism” rather than “Gnostic”. Additionally, Gnostic texts are infamous for their complexity, and resistance to summarization. In the interest of time, we will discuss the sects and mythologies most commonly cited in modern magical thought.

[1] Pagels, xxiii

AN OVERVIEW OF GNOSTIC MYTHOLOGY, THE APOCRYPHON OF JOHN

Gnostic mythology can be difficult to penetrate. The stories themselves are often remixes or elaborations upon existing biblical mythology. Take a story that may be familiar to our Abrahamic readers; the Garden of Eden. There are many (conflicting!) Gnostic versions of this story, each with new characters, events, and cosmologies. If this weren’t enough, the original texts are often written in cryptic, poetic language that makes translation difficult. For the interested party, finding a good place can be a struggle.

The Apocyrphon of John is not a comprehensive overview of Gnostic mythology, but it is a good place to establish a base camp.

In the beginning, there was The Monad. It is infinite, supreme, absolute, transcendent in all ways. The Monad is inconceivable perfection. Eventually, The Monad has a thought. This first thought becomes a being known as The Barbelo, a divine androgynous being referred to as ”the mother/father”, “the holy spirit”, and “the first man”. She [1] is the first of a new class of being known as Aeons.

The Monad reflecting upon The Barbelo created Light, being called “Christ Autogenes” or “Christ the Self-created.” The gnostic trinity completed, Christ asked for a fellow worker, a being called Mind. The four work in concert to create further Aeons, each arranged into syzygies, or pairs. The sum of all these beings, the Aeons and The Monad, is referred to as The Pleroma, The Fullness. The Pleroma is perfect and good.

The last Aeon to be created was a being known as Sophia, or Wisdom. She attempts to create her own little micro-pleroma. This goes wrong. In some versions of the story, it is because she attempted to create something without the assistance of her divine partner. In others, it is because she wished to emulate The Monad, but could not due to her fundamentally lesser nature.

The result of Sophia’s mistake is imperfect, a malevolent being with the face of a lion and the body of a great serpent. She names it Yaldabaoth, a name likely based on the Imperial Aramaic yaldā bahôt, roughly translating to “Child of Chaos.” Seeing her creation is arrogant and malicious, Sophia attempts to hide Yaldabaoth from the rest of the Pleroma, and secrets him away inside a luminous cloud so he is ignorant of the higher gods.

Yaldabaoth is the first of a new class of being, the imperfect and malevolent dieties known as Archons. Yaldaboth is powerful enough to mimic the processes of the Aeons. He creates additional archons in his own image, and fashions his own little world out of darkness, animating it with a spark of light stolen from Sophia. The result is a world “neither light nor dark” (Apoc John 12) Yaldabaoth declares himself the sole and jealous god of this realm.

Sophia, realizing her error, finally fesses up to the rest of the Pleroma, who assist Sophia in redeeming her bastard creation. They devise a plan to reunite the sparks of the divine present in Yaldabaoth’s creation with the Pleroma. The Monad speaks to the Archons, the sheer magnitude of its voice shakes the foundation of the tiny universe, and leaves images on the “waters” that serve as its borders. The Monad says something along the lines of “Hey, you aren’t perfect sovereign here, there are sparks of the divine light running around inside of this thing, human spirits. You didn’t make those.”

The Archons, hoping to harness these divine sparks, create a “psychic vessel” a copy of the human spirit. But the vessels are only vessels, inanimate, motionless, and lightless. Seeing an opportunity, the Barbelo sent some angels to advise Yaldabaoth on why its creation was not moving. They instructed him to blow his mothers essence into the psychic bodies. Yaldabaoth does this, relinquishing the portion of his mothers spark, and animating Adam.

Realizing that they have been tricked, Yaldaboth and the Archons attempt to destroy their creation, but they cannot. Yaldabaoth attempts to draw the light from Adam’s body, but fails, accidentally creating the female form, and Eve. The Archons resort to trapping their creation in the Garden of Eden, a prison meant to keep Adam and Eve ignorant of the Pleroma.

Within this narrative, it was Christ who told Adam to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, giving him knowledge of his greater role in creation, and the ultimate goal of returning to the Pleroma.

Not to be outdone, Yaldabaoth gives humanity the ability to procreate, in the hopes that this will dilute and confuse the knowledge of humanity's possible salvation, hiding the path to salvation among lies.

ANCIENT JEWISH MAGIC

The recently-concluded second temple period saw Jerusalem in a period of bitter, divisive social upheaval. New institutions like new standards of kingship, the synagogue, and a new class of non-priestly Torah interpreters (what would eventually become the modern Rabbi) were popping up left and right. Judaism wrestled with sectarianism, dualism, the idea of the afterlife, and a new apocalyptic strain of theology. If you think all that is complicated for you, just imagine how they felt. (Period in history where people choice really mattered, complicated, chaotic. We just threw a bunch of words at threader, give them a humorous soft landing. )

Periods of social upheaval tend to be fertile soil for new religious and magical ideas. Due to the Roman conquest, the Jews were forced to socially upheave themselves all across the Mediterranean. A whole library could be written on the diaspora's effect on magical history alone. In the interest of time and accessibility, we will be summarizing.

The obvious starting place for any discussion of Jewish magic is the Hebrew Bible. The Tanakh does not discuss “magic” because for the time there was no unified or stable idea of magic, but it does place prohibitions on specific practices that we today would consider magic. This mild ambiguity leaves open a door for a diverse array of practices, as one could argue that they are not doing what is prohibited, but only something similar to what is prohibited.

Deuteronomy 18:10-11 states:

“Let no one be found among you who consigns a son or daughter to the fire, or who is an augur, a soothsayer, a diviner, a sorcerer, one who casts spells, or one who consults ghosts or familiar spirits, or one who inquires of the dead.”

The terms used to discuss these practices and their specific translations bear some discussion. First, Kosem, which is probably a general term for those who see the future, comparable to “diviner.” with gazerin being a similarly general term for “those who practice magic.” In particular, there are also me’onen, the soothsayers, and machesh, the enchanters, and mechashef, the sorcerers. Although it is also possible that kosem is also a specific term for astrologers, and that kesamim refers to the specific sort of divination that astrologers do. (ibn Ezra on deuteronomy.)

(ask that torah scholar what the proper way to cite rabbinical literature is)

A particularly striking passage is found in Moses and Aaron engaging in a magical duel with the Pharaoh’’s wizards in Exodus 7:10. Within the context of biblical law, there is clearly some meaningful difference between what Moses and Aaron are doing, and what the Pharaoh’s wizards are doing. When Moses throws down his staff, it becomes a snake through the action of god, however the Pharaoh’s magicians are also able to turn their staffs into snakes via some indeterminate “secret art.” This raises the question: If there is no power but god, what exactly did the Pharaoh's magicians do? Though the Pharahoh’s magicians ultimately lose their magical duel, this passage acknowledges the existence of metaphysical powers outside of god.

This passage raises another important question. Was Moses a magician? Were Jewish charismatic holy people, in the fold of Jacob, Isaiah, and Jesus, magicians? There is some evidence to claim that the working of miracles could reasonably be called magic. However, I will argue that there is a meaningful difference between the works of a charismatic holy person, and a magician. In Ancient Jewish Magic, A History, Gideon Bohak draws a key distinction: The charismatic Jewish holy men of history perform their works through an innate power, whereas magicians rely on an “acquired body of technical knowledge (27).” Simply put, a prophet cannot teach someone else how to be a prophet, but a magician can.

WHAT DID ANCIENT JEWISH MAGIC ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE?

The day-to-day practice of Jewish magic had three main types: exorcisms, magical amulets, and aggressive/erotic magic.

Exorcisms fall into three distinct types. The first is the use of animal, vegetable, or mineral products that possess a natural anti-demon effect, such as in the book of Tobit, when the heart of a certain type of fish is smoked to drive away the demon Asmodeus. The text is clear that it is specifically the smell that drives the demon away. There is no ritual or charismatic component to the fish heart’s effects beyond the smell of its smoke. The magic lies in the inherent properties of the fish, and in the laws of nature.

There were exorcists that did not consider natural or charismatic elements sufficient on their own. In Josephus’sThe Jewish War, he gives an account of an exorcism that involves natural and charismatic components with a significant degree of development. I would be remiss for not quoting the colorful passage in its entirety:

“In the ravine which encloses the town (Machaerus) on the north, there is a place called Baaras, which produces a root bearing the same name. The root has a flamelike color and towards evening it emits a brilliant light; it eludes the grasp of persons who approach with the intention of plucking it, as it shrinks up and can only be made to stand still by pouring upon it a woman’s urine or menstrual blood. Yet even then to touch it is fatal, unless one brings the very same root, suspended from one’s hand. Another innocuous mode of capturing it is as follows. They dig all around it, leaving but a minute portion of the root covered; they then tie a dog to it, and the animal rushing to follow the person who tied it easily pulls it up, but instantly dies – a substitute, as it were, for the one who intended to remove the plant, since after this, the root poses no danger to those who handle it. With all these attendant risks, it possesses one virtue for which it is prized; for the so-called demons – that is, the spirits of wicked men which enter the living and kill them unless aid is forthcoming – are promptly expelled by this root, if merely applied to the patients.”

The name of the plant, the ba’aras root itself, seems to be a transliteration of the Aramaic word for flame, and related to a similar Greek plant called aglaophotis, or “wonder-shine.” (Bohak 91) Josephus seems to emphasize the similarities between the two plants, the ba’aras and the aglaophotis, making it clear that both are “soul-drawing” roots, as in roots that will draw out the soul of any who tries to pick it. It is a trope that readers may recognize from the lore surrounding the Mandrake Root.

[PUT THE THING ABOUT JEWISH MAGICIANS LEARNING HERBIARY FROM ANGELS HERE ITS THE PERFECT TRANSITION, leave some commentary about how even with the razor of “magicians learn and prophets are,” the categories still blend together]

ANCIENT JEWISH CHARISMATIC EXORCISMS

Any magical practice that relies on the innate power of the practitioner can be difficult to study, as no two practices are ever alike. The Christian New Testament and rabbinical literature are both full of accounts of itinerant holy men performing miracles. They heal the sick, control the rain, ford rivers and lakes, raise the dead*, and occasionally even perform miracles on accident when someone touches their robes or shadow. (Bohak 94) These charismatic holy men generally model themselves after biblical archetypes like Elijah, Elisha, and Moses, but make ample use of exorcisms, which were outside the repertoire of such figures.

While these charismatic holy men rarely describe themselves or their practices, there is ample “outsider” (read: biased, corrupted, and apocryphal) evidence of others observing and commenting on their work. Descriptions of charismatic exorcisms run the gamut. In the Genesis Apocryohon we see Jesus make simple, repeated demands like “dumb and deaf spirit, I command you to come out of (the demoniac) and no longer enter him.” Rabbi Shimeon Bar Yohai and miracle-worker Hanina ben Dosa take a more involved approach, performing exorcisms through extended dialogues or negotiations with the demons.

RITUAL EXORCISM

Rather than relying on innate power or the occult properties of natural materials, some Jewish exorcists used elaborate rituals and incantations to expurge demons. These rituals were generally taught from master to student, handed down through generations of practitioners in writing. Thankfully for us, that means that much of what they wrote survives today.

The Book of Jubilees and the Book of Antiquities of the Bible each feature passages where a prayer is incanted aloud to drive away a demon. (They’re long quotes but they’re on Bohak 99) While Jewish exorcisms would evolve over time to become significantly more elaborate, the examples from Jubilees and Antiquities feature elements that would become commonplace in exorcisms well into the present day.

First, the exorcist addresses the demon in the second person accompanied by taunts, threats, and rhetorical questions. In earlier incantations the exorcist never spoke to the demon directly: this was an innovation. Second, the exorcist details the demon’s origins in the greater order of creation, chastising the demon for straying from its divinely intended place in the underworld.

Josephus makes a critical bridge between this type of ritual exorcism and the work of King Solomon:

“And God granted him knowledge of the art used against demons for the benefit and healing of men. And he composed incantations by which illnesses are relieved, and left behind modes of exorcisms by which the possessed drive out the demons so that they would never return.”

This passage makes several distinctions that will be critical in the development of western magic. First of all, though this knowledge is divine in origin, it is the sort of thing that can be learned and reproduced. Second, the incantations and modes of exorcism (read: spells) are things that Solomon composed. It is clear that while Solomon was given knowledge from God, it was given in a form that left room for application. It is as if God gave Solomon the knowledge that exorcisms can be performed by playing the lyre, but it was still up to Solomon to compose the song.

Josephus continues:

“And this was the mode of healing: He would bring to the nose of the demoniac the ring which had under its seal one of the roots prescribed by Solomon, and then, as the man smelled it, drew out the demon through his nostrils, and, when the man at once fell down, adjured the demon never to return, while mentioning Solomon’s name and reciting the incantations which he (i.e., Solomon) had composed.” (Bohak 101)

Here we see a mixture of the two previously discussed methods of exorcism. The ritual features both the manipulation of natural elements like roots alongside charismatic elements like incanting and adjuring the demon to leave.

The ring is a crucial ritual element of this exorcism. It is unclear whether the ring is necessary for the root to work, or is simply amplifying its power in some way. But the fact that it is there evinces a developing system of ritual jewelry, furniture, clothing, and other accouterments that will come to dominate western magic. Josephus does not describe the ring, but given King Solomon’s association with magical rings, we can safely speculate that it may have been inscribed with the tetragrammaton in some form of paleo-hebrew lettering. (Bohak 104) Similarly, Josephus does not describe the root in question, only mentioning that Solomon prescribed it for the ritual.

(we need a conclusion for this section)

AMULETS

So why the amulets? Well, for the time, it was understood that oftentimes exorcized demons would come back. Any exorcist worth their salt would provide some sort of countermeasure to ensure that the demon did not return.

This was not a belief common to the second temple period, however. Jesus never prescribed amulets to demoniacs, and in the book of Tobit, raphael assures Sarah and Tobias that the demon will never return again, so it is safe to assume that the production of amulets was a later invention. In fact, it is more than likely that the production of apotropaic amulets did not have its roots within jewish culture at all.

However, past a certain point in history, the writing of the tetragrammaton becomes an apotropaic mark par excellence. How exactly this became this case is a matter of speculation, but contemporary judaism already placed a deep spiritual importance on written text, so magical amulets inscribed with the name of god seems a natural fit.

Rabbinic sources from roughly the year 200 CE reference writing the Name on everything from ones body (but not tattooing it), to furniture, to utensils, to moses's staff, to the weapons of the Israelites at Sinai, to the ring and chain used by Solomon to capture Ashmedai. The sacredness of the Name gave way to several ritual practices within Judaism that utilized its unique power through inscribing it on objects.

JEWISH CURSES ET CETERA

Magic is not an easy thing to draw clear borders around. Any foray into a cultures magical milieu will reveal evidence of practices that don’t fit neatly into any one specific category. The term “curse” is broad and flexible. The jews besieged in the city of Jerusalem probably heaped many a curse upon Josephus, who was encouraging them to surrender to the romans, but their curses were likely more rude than magical.

It can be difficult to determine how “magical” a particular piece of “jewish magic” may be, but it is often equally difficult to determine just how “jewish” a practice might be. A good example would be a pair of graves on the island of Delos which feature the following inscription:

“I invoke and beseech the Most High God, Lord of the spirits and all flesh, against those who treacherously murdered or killed with pharmaka the wretched Heraclea, untimely dead, spilling her innocent blood in unjust fashion, so that the same would happen to those who murdered or killed her with pharmaka and also to their children. Lord who oversees all things and angels of God, before whom every soul humbles itself in supplication on this present day, may you avenge this innocent blood and seek [justice?] speedily.” (Bohak 126)

Tomb curses like these were extremely common in the Greek world, often invoking Helios, Nemesis, Isis, or the Syrian goddess. These graves are unique, in that they invoke the Jewish god.

ARAMAIC AND HEBREW MAGICAL PAPYRI

There are two types of written sources for Jewish magic in practice in this era. First, there are Magical Papyri, which are akin to magical cookbooks where “spells” are written one after another. Second, there are what Bohak calls books of Literary Magic, which are collections of magical knowledge framed within a story.

Some of the most famous Jewish Magical Papyri were recovered from the Cairo Genizah. (A genizah is a storage area in a Jewish synagogue or cemetery for storing damaged or worn-out texts and ritual objects so they can be ritually disposed of. They are treasure troves for religious scholars.)  The magical texts recovered were written on highly perishable materials like papyrus or vellum, and only survived due to being mummified by the dry air of northern africa. Even for the time, papyrus was not the sturdiest of materials, and texts like these had to be regularly copied by scribes to preserve the knowledge within.

Magical papyri are often abysmally preserved and poorly translated. They were generally owned by individuals, copied haphazardly, and discarded upon the death of the owner, but even through these myriad roadblocks, we find something invaluable: Multiple copies of the same text. We are given a firsthand look at how magical knowledge develops from generation to generation, how it lives and breathes. Prof. Bohak describes it well, and his words are worth quoting in their entirety:

“We may say that magical recipes are a bit like the DNA of a living organism, containing the information which enables the creation of a new organism, and the mechanism by which to replicate itself. Moreover, just like DNA, some of the longer spells are actually made up of smaller units or “blocks” which could be grouped together in different forms, so that a passage from one recipe or “finished product” bears close resemblance to a passage from another recipe or “finished product,” while the remaining parts of the two texts may differ.” (148)

This conception of magic holds true today. Ideas that practitioners like, ideas that fit within the broader cultural milieu, are reproduced to the next generation. Magic moves through the waters of history like cuisine, like music.

BOOKS OF “LITERARY” MAGIC

In stark contrast to the Hebrew and Aramaic magical papyri, there are also books of magic in the more common sense of the term “book”. These texts have a story with a beginning, an end, and a narrative structure in which the spells are embedded. It is here that we will encounter a repeating theme throughout magical history: dubious authorship. These texts are strange, attempting to place them neatly in any one cultural milieu or attributing them to any specific author with a specific agenda is risky at best and ahistorical at worst. Even attempting to date these texts is difficult. Attempting to find some untarnished, untranslated, untransformed, “original” is difficult, if not impossible. The texts must be taken as they are.

THE SEPHER HA-RAZIM

The Sepher Ha-Razim or “Book of Mysteries” stands out from other magical texts of the time because unlike the more common “recipe book” style of magical text, the Sepher Ha-Razim has a narrative structure. Mythologies are nothing new, but the Sepher Ha-Razim constructs its own mythology in such a way as to reinforce the importance (and power?) of its contents.

The text begins by establishing its supposed angelic origins: “This is one of the books of the mysteries given to Noah, the son of Lamech . . . by the angel Raziel in the year when he entered the ark, before his entry.” This acts as an appeal to the texts credibility, as well as a way to sidestep existing biblical prohibitions against magic, essentially claiming “This magic book is allowed because it came from angels, and the Jewish patriarchs of antiquity love it.” Magical texts claiming divine inspiration will be a recurring theme throughout the rest of magical history, with varying degrees of success.

The body of the text is structured as a description of the seven heavens. (bohak 171) Each heaven features a description of its interior structure, the list of angels that can be found within that heaven, and the “overseer” or “minister” angel who commands them. Following each list of angelic names is a short description of the role those angels play in creation, as well as a series of recipes that allow the practitioner to call on said angels should the need arise.

For example “the first heaven has seven “camps,” the fourth of which is commanded by the overseer KLMYYH, who has some forty-four angels serving under him – ’BRYH, ’YMRHY, DMN’Y, ’MNHR, and so on; they are all in charge of entertaining kings and grandees and granting grace and charm to whoever approaches them in purity.” (Bohak 171)

If the practitioner wishes to call upon this angel for assistance, they must perform an intricate ritual that involves standing before the planet venus, slaughtering a lion cub with a bronze knife, mixing the blood with wine and aromatics, and mentioning the name of the overseer and his underlings. (In this case, KLMYYH and company) If performed properly, “And when you finish reciting this adjuration twenty-one times, look upwards and you shall see something like a flame of fire descending into the blood and the wine.” (Sepher Ha-Razim)

What follows is a series of modifications for the same ritual, edited for applying that angelic grace and charm to different situations. Perhaps the practitioner wants to go before the king? Then the ritual should be modified in X way. Perhaps the practitioner wants to curry favor with the populace? They would modify the ritual in Y manner.

Through this, the Sepher Ha-Razim demonstrates a notably more complex interaction with magical ideas than was common for the time. What we see here is something new, a methodology, an attempt at optimizing magical rituals for specific purposes.

The seventh heaven features no angels, only the abode of god. As such, the text bares no description except for an elaborate hymn in praise of god. This is a structure we will see repeated later in our discussion of Merkava mysticism.

ALCHEMY

WHAT EVEN IS ALCHEMY?

Tat: “O pop-history esoterica blogger, what is Alchemy?”

C.T: “My student, alchemy can be neatly summed up as “proto-chemistry.” For most of history there have been people like yourself, those who wonder what the world is made of, how it fits together, and what are the rules that govern its transformations. These days, the people who study these questions are called chemists, but before there were chemists, there were alchemists.”

Tat: “So what’s the difference? What does a chemist have that an alchemist does not?”

C.T.: “The answer is roughly 1,700 years of accumulated knowledge and writing. Chemistry was built from the works of the alchemists.”

Tat: “Ah! So it is like how astronomy arose from astrology?”

C.T.: “Not quite. For astronomers and astrologers both still exist. Alchemy became chemistry. There are no more alchemists. Or, attempting to practice alchemy today, would simply be practicing chemistry.”

Tat: “But what about spiritual alchemy? Were alchemists not magicians?”

C.T.: “My student, there were thousands of alchemists throughout history, from dozens of time periods and cultures. Some were indeed mystics and magicians, but they were generally outliers. The vast majority of alchemists were more akin to glass-blowers and blacksmiths than oracles and magicians.”

Tat: “But alchemical writing speaks so much of gods and divinity!”

C.T.: “Many texts do! Many cartographers from history used elaborate biblical metaphors to describe their work, but you don’t see modern scholars claiming all medieval mapmakers were secretly mystics. The bible was something many were familiar with. Using biblical metaphors to explain complicated processes is simply good technical writing.”

Tat: “But, if most alchemists were not magicians or mystics, why discuss alchemy in this text? Isn’t this book about magic?”

C.T.: “Because few things have been more influential on western magical literature. Even entirely mundane, non-magical alchemical works are wondrously evocative. Even now, alchemical literature has a way of seizing the imagination. Many texts are literally occluded, written in code to protect the alchemists work. Even when alchemical literature is non-magical, it is deeply esoteric.”

Tat: “Why are they written that way?”

C.T. “To protect trade secrets! What if you discovered a new way to make stronger armor, or sharper swords? That information must be recorded, but it also cannot fall into enemy hands. Many alchemists protected their discoveries with intentionally complex metaphorical language that could only be understood by those with the required knowledge. This also makes them extremely difficult to translate into other languages!”

Tat: “I see! But how did it end? Chemistry is no longer discussed with esoteric metaphors, what changed?”

C.T. “It was a gradual change that took place over generations. But for the purposes of time, this text will consider the First Alchemist to be Maria Hebrea, and the Last Alchemist to be Sir Issac Newton.”

Tat: “But what about the alchemist-mystics? Will this text discuss them?”

C.T. “Indeed, my student. We will be discussing them at length.”

MARIA HEBREA, THE FIRST ALCHEMIST - 1 page

Alchemical history begins on the north shore of Egypt, in the city of Alexandria, with a Jewish woman named Maria.

It is around the 1st century A.D. Most alchemy in Egypt is heavily tied to the House of Life, the state temple system. Color was important to Egyptian religion. When one was building a statue of the gods, it was important to get the color just so. So, where later alchemists were concerned with the transformation of one metal into another, Egyptian alchemists were primarily concerned with the coloration of metal. The temple system was also effectively the government. This meant alchemical trade secrets were also state secrets.

The House of Life alchemists weren’t the only game in town. Alexandria also had a thriving Jewish quarter. Here, Maria likely would have worked with a guild associated with a local synagogue. Where the House of Life alchemists would have enjoyed state support, the Jewish alchemists likely needed to drive sales with entrepreneurship and innovation. Maria was one such innovator. She is credited with inventing several alchemical devices, as well as with laying out many of the foundational concepts of western alchemy itself.

The Tribikos: A type of alembic with three “arms” used to distill substances and collect their vapors.

The Kerotakis: When used properly, this device creates an airtight seal in which substances are continually distilled, congealed, and distilled again. This “circulation” process of purification is often depicted as an ouroboros, a serpent eating its own tail, which itself became a central image of alchemy. (for those familiar with chemistry, the kerotakis is essentially a Soxhlet extractor.)

The Bain Marie: If you’ve ever wondered who the “Marie” in “Bain Marie” was, here you go. What we now know of as the double boiler was used extensively by alchemists throughout the years when gentle heat was needed.

Let’s say you want to make a philosophers stone. Maria argued that the fundamental method was a process of distillation, sublimation, rectification.

The Inversion of Nature: To volatilize the fixed, and fix the volatile. Or, to make the solid into fluid, and to make the fluid into solids. This allows the alchemist to break apart substances into their constituent parts.

The Union of Opposites:

First and foremost, is the Axiom of Maria: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth.” This describes the process of splitting a substance into its constituent parts so that it may be recombined into a new form.

THE EMERALD TABLET

The legend goes that someone, be it Apollonius of Tyanna, or Alexander the Great, or occasionally even the biblical figure Sarah, discovered a tomb. Sometimes the tomb is near the Palestinian city of Hebron, sometimes its not. Inside the tomb was the skeleton of legendary sage Hermes Trismegistus, and clutched in his arms was a mysterious tablet made of pure emerald. Inscribed in an ancient language, sometimes Aramaic, sometimes Phonecian, was a poem that contained all of his earthly and divine wisdom.

Before we can discuss what we know about the Emerald Tablet, we must discuss its mangled and mysterious textual history. There is no emerald tablet. Or, more accurately, there is no singular emerald tablet. The likely earliest edition comes from the Kitab Sirr Al-Khaliqa, The Book of the Secrets of Creation, a 9th century text ascribed to Apolonius of Tyanna. The Arabic form of the tablet claims to be a translation from Syriac, which itself was a translation from classical Greek. This claim is considerably debated. Partially, because there are two more Arabic translations from the same period, which differ significantly. One from the Secretum Secretorum, and another from the Jabirian corpus, which is notably shorter and corrupt.

Generally, when you translate an alchemical text from Greek to Arabic, your translation will have words associated with the Greek terminology. What all these Arabic emerald tablets have in common, is a lack of Greek alchemical terms. So while they are likely based on an earlier text, their origins are firmly in the Arabic world, most likely the Isma’ili esoteric circles. This goes even further. Europe knows the tablet via the Latin translation of the Secretum Secretorum, the most corrupt Arabic original. This formed the basis for centuries of dead-end attempts at decoding by western esotericists.

So! We have no idea what the tablet means! Why are we talking about it?

What the tablet was interpreted to mean had a significant effect on occult history. Isma’ili Shia esotericists treated Trismegistus as a pseudo-prophetic figure who revealed knowledge in the form of scientific literacy. This also paralleled him with Idris, the Islamic parallel for Enoch, who ascended up to heaven to become an Angel. The Isma’ili helped to develop interpretations of Hermetic literature from a more mystical, gnostic transcendence angle.

THE RENAISSANCE

RENAISSANCE NEOPLATONISTS

It is May 29th, 1453. You are Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, and you have just taken the city of Constantinople. You’ve been scaring the daylights out of the Christian world for a while now, but now you’ve really gone and done it. Your little jaunt through Asia Minor is causing a bunch of Greek theologians to pull up and run further west into Europe. The Catholic Church already has their hands full with a whole mess of internal conflicts. You wonder how they’re gonna handle this influx of new ideas. Sure would be a shame if you accidentally contributed to some sort of reformation. You can’t think about that right now though, you’ve got to think of a better name for your cool new city. I might suggest Istanbul.

Meanwhile, back in Christendom, a sin is being committed. A sin so grievous and dangerous that it will eventually tear Western Europe in two: people are translating the Bible into Dutch.

This may not seem like the biggest deal, but back then, the Bible wasn't something you just read. Books were expensive. You couldn't just let any muck-shoveling peasant pick up and read the Good Book. The Bible was printed in Latin and only Latin. Maybe Greek if you were special. Masses were conducted in Latin exclusively.

Is the word of God something that can even be translated? Some in the church argued, “Sure, why not? If we translate the Bible into other languages, it would probably help with conversion, right?” Others argued, “Translating the Bible into vernacular languages isn’t theologically possible. Latin is the most pure, most proper form of the word of God and that’s that.”

This was a period of explosive change for the theological landscape of Europe, a process that was accelerated by the invention of the printing press in the mid 15th century. Bookmaking is now significantly cheaper, and suddenly it’s not so easy for the church to control the production of religious knowledge.

NOMINALISM VS REALISM

What’s the relationship between a thing and its name? For a while, the medieval world was split on this question.

Nowadays, we are nominalists. When we say the word “dog”, we know that the word “dog” is just a series of noises we use to represent the animal, the word has no direct effect on the furry creature known as a dog. This was not always held to be the case. The vast majority of medieval thinkers were “realists” in how they understood words. They believed that “dog” meant “the furry animal with four legs that barks” in the same sense that one plus one equals two.

For a moment, we must put ourselves in the jingly little shoes of a medieval person. For them, this debate had widespread consequences for the nature of reality. We know humans exist, but does the category “human” exist as a privileged part of the fabric of reality? If it does, how is it defined? What is it made of? If it doesn't, how can we be humans?

Practically, if everything in the universe has a True Name, that brings up the problem of how there are many languages on earth. If dogs have a True Name, how do we know which word is the true one? This becomes a real problem if you’re the Catholic Church and you need to translate the bible. If God wants to talk about a dog, what language does She speak?

AD FONTES!

If the Renaissance had a war cry, it would be this: Ad fontes! Back to the sources! In many ways, the entire Renaissance was built on the influx of classical texts slowly being translated into Latin at the library of Baghdad. Europe always had old classical texts floating around, but the 15th century saw Europe surfing a wave of hot new translations of old classics, never-before-seen sources, and thanks to the printing press, higher circulation than ever before.

But where did this knowledge come from in the first place?

If you asked most medieval scholars, they would tell you that knowledge came from the past. Knowledge came from tradition, or legendary teachers like Socrates. This was a bit of a problem for the Church. Plato and Aristotle didn’t have much to say about Catholicism, having died long before the birth of Christ; and if you go back far enough in the tradition of Catholicism, you end up in Judaism. In other words, Christian scholar’s oldest sources of knowledge were very often not Christian.

Up until the close of the 15th century, the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) was controlled by the Umayyad Caliphate. Often, when Christians reconquered a place, they demanded conversion from the populace. For some Rabbis and Imams, conversion meant they would be able to stay with communities they had been leading for their entire lives. Rabbis who converted were known as Conversos. This meant that Iberia had a relatively large academic population of Christians who spoke Hebrew, a population that would be a rich resource for anyone engaging in a radical syncretic project.

THE RENAISSANCE NEOPLATONISTS

By the time of the Renaissance, the Christian world was awash in new theological ideas. A synthesis of Neoplatonic, Orphic, Hermetic, and Kabbalistic works would form the basis of a new school of Christian esoterica. It would be assembled by Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin. Later it would be syncretized by Heirnich Cornelius Agrippa, and extrapolated upon by John Dee.

WHAT IS CHRISTIAN CABBALA?

This section will require some clarification of terms.

Kabbalah - Literally translates to “reception” or “tradition”. Kabbalah is an esoteric method and school of thought unique to Jewish mysticism. Kabbalah spelled with a ‘k’ will refer to the original, highly specific, school of Jewish mystical thought.

Cabbala - This will refer to “Christian Cabbala”, the form of 16th century Christian occult theology which incorporates dubious interpretations of Kabbalah, along with Neoplatonic doctrine, Orphic theology, and Hermetic mysticism.

Qabalah - This refers to “Hermetic Qabalah” the late 19th century esoteric revival system developed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn which incorporates elements from Egyptian mythology and numerous other esoteric sources.

MARSILLIO FICINO

After yet another failed attempt to heal the schism between the eastern and western churches, fabulously wealthy Italian banker Cosimo de’ Medici decided to revive Plato’s Academy except Italian and in Florence and without Plato. He needed the most Greek-obsessed scholar he could find, so he put Marsillio Ficino in charge and gave him a stack of Greek manuscripts so large you could fit a Trojan army inside. Notably, he was the first person to translate the works of Plato into Latin. But he was also the translator of a stack of works from Porphyry, Iamblicus, and Plotinus called Hermetica.

The trouble with this influx of new philosophies and ideas is that not all of them jived with the Catholic Church.  If you were the guy translating a work from Plato or Aristotle, you had to have a good argument that the text wasn’t heretical.

Ficino would come out the other end of the translating process as “A Catholic priest in 1492 with a deep and enthusiastic understanding of theologies that are almost definitely heretical.” However, he believed that Platonic philosophy was compatible with Christianity, a dubious proposition for the time: not impossible, but it would take some elbow grease. His masterwork was a book called Platonic Theology, which attempted to use Platonic ideas to logically prove the existence of the soul.

[get some about his mysticism. The divine mania and on the platonic theology]

PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA

Pico della Mirandola allegedly mastered Greek and Latin by the age of 13. In 1484 he met Marsillio Ficino and fabulously wealthy Italian banker Lorenzo De Medici, and charmed both of them. From Ficino, he gained tutelage, and from Lorenzo, he gained financial support. During his time in Florence he would write the 900 Theses, a text which claimed that not only were Plato and Aristotle reconcilable, but that they were compatible with Christianity. He was quite confident in the strength of his work. In fact, he was so confident that he ended the 900 Theses with the following announcement:

“THE CONCLUSIONS will not be disputed until after the Epiphany. In the meantime they will be published in all Italian universities. And if any philosopher or theologian, even from the ends of Italy, wishes to come to Rome for the sake of debating, his lord the disputer promises to pay the travel expenses from his own funds.”

His plan was to travel to Rome, have the theses published, hold a conference defending his work, defeat every challenger with facts and logic, and ride the wave of success to theological glory. On his way to Rome he stopped in the town of Arezzo, had an affair with the wife of one of Lorenzo de Medici’s cousins, attempted to run away with her, got beaten nearly to death, thrown in prison, and then released by order of Lorenzo himself. While recovering from his wounds, he became obsessed with magic.

When it comes to magic, calling Pico an eclectic is an understatement. While recovering from his injuries, he had time to read all the fresh manuscripts flowing into Europe. Orphic, Chaldean, Hermetic, Kabbalistic, you name it. Pico threw it all into the pot, but how exactly he cooked it will take some explaining:

For Pico, and most Catholics of the time, Christianity was inevitable. All of history was leading up to Christianity being the one true religion. This was simply taken as a given, a fact of life. However, the Christianity of Pico’s day was fighting with itself, constantly in danger of fracturing. When Pico dipped into all this ancient esoterica he made two big assumptions: One, that all these different forms of esoterica were actually just the same esoterica. And two, that the secret knowledge in this ancient magical tradition could be used to fix theological arguments tearing apart the catholic church. In mysticism, he saw religious unity, and in that unity he saw peace.

PERENNIALISM

Pico was what’s called a Perennialist. He believed that all the world’s religions share a single, metaphysical truth from which all doctrine grows, they are all branches of a single tree.

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with this idea. Religions share truths all the time. It’s a lovely idea in theory, but it tends to be applied in troublesome ways. In theory, all the world’s religious conflicts could be solved if only we all realized that they are simply different expressions of the same truth. In practice, perennialism functions by treating similarities as inherent truth, and differences as meaningless. More often than not, is a steamroller that flattens diversity of thought.

Additionally, Pico was a Catholic theologian in the 14th century. His idea of inherent truth is “accepting Jesus Christ as your lord and savior” Which did not go over well with Jews and Muslims. His perennial philosophy is first and foremost a tool of conversion, a way of planting Christianity into other religions rapidly and rationally (as in, in a way that can be argued logically as opposed to spiritually.)

The foundation of Pico’s radical synthesis is a theory called the Prisca Theologia. (literally “Ancient Theology”) In which he argues that God actually revealed himself to Pagans several times in the form of the Divine Logos (Mind) to guide humanity to the point where it would be ready for Jesus. Specifically, he names six historical figures as the Six Sages who gave us pre-Christian divine wisdom that was actually secretly Christian this whole time. They are: Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster, Orpheus, Agleophemus (Proclus mentions this guy. Supposedly he is the Thracian Orphic Initiator who taught Orphic secrets to Pythagoras), Pythagoras, and Plato.

PICO AND KABBALAH

(The Kabbalah chapter will be before this)

Pico getting his hands on some translated Kabbalistic texts will mark a sea change for occult history. Pico’s fascination, even admiration for Kabbalsitic theology would cement its place in occult history for better and for worse.

For Pico, Kabbalah was theological scrap that could be melted down into weapons of conversion against the Jews. In his work the Heptaplus, he literally states: “Oh, Christian brothers, I pray that you consider a little more diligently how true and sound is my exposition, when to you there will be furnished, against the stony hearts of the Hebrews, very powerful darts taken from their armaments.”

These “darts” will only be as effective as Pico’s understanding of Kabbalah. To understand how well Pico understood Kabbalah, we should take a moment to discuss Pico’s Jewish teachers.

Elia del Medigo, called The “Last Jewish Averroist” by his students, considered himself a staunch follower of Maimonides. He was a sober, down-to-earth sort with a notable distaste for Kabbalah. In fact, he became disillusioned with radical syncretism after a certain prominent student of his got beaten up and thrown in jail for sleeping with the wife of a Medici. He went so far as to write the Sefer Bechinat Ha-dath, a philosophical treatise against said student’s perennial philosophy.

Flavius Mithridates was a converso with a skill for oration, referred to by his colleagues as a “clever charlatan” who preached anti-Jewish ideas from the Pugio Fidei before the papal court. Known for the Bibliotheca Cabbalistica, a translation of over 70 kabbalistic works into Latin. Modern scholarly revisions of his works have found them to be “erratic” and it is likely that he added entirely fabricated christian elements to his translations to make his patrons happy. This is where Pico gets the majority of his Kabbalistic knowledge from.

https://www.ibiblio.org/expo/vatican.exhibit/exhibit/h-orient_to_rome/Orient_to_rome.html

And finally, Yohannan Alemanno. A full-blown astral magician, mystical syncretic, and the only actual kabbalist on this list. His works include everything from a Kabbalistic commentary on the Torah, to a treatise on magically achieving eternal life, to a book of fun anecdotes about King Solomon.

Given that Picos’s Jewish teachers were an anti-kabbalist who later disavowed him, a known charlatan, and an astral magician, it is safe to say that his understanding of Kabbalah was incomplete. His work on Kabbalah would go on to influence generations of occultists.

–

JOHANNES REUCHLIN

(Entry begins on 990 of the Haanegraf dictionary)

Johannes Reuchlin doesn’t quite fit into any one box. He was unique among the renaissance occultists in that his Hebrew was reportedly quite good. This was a christian theologian studying Hebrew during a time of extraordinary antisemitism, when Jewish people and their theology was regarded with extreme suspicion at best, and outright hatred at worst. His first Cabbalistic work, De Verbo Merifico (The Wonder-working Word) was published in 1494, two years after the Alhambra decree, which resulted in the expulsion of Jews from Spain.

So, when Gershom Scholem calls Reuchlin “first great Christian scholar of Hebrew” he deserves a fair amount of credit. At the same time, Wouter Hanegraaff also points out that “There is no inherent connection between Reuchlin’s endeavors as a Hebraist and his theological writings in the field of the kabbalah.” Reuchlin could read the words, but he didn’t necessarily understand them how they were intended to be understood.

Reuchlin’s work systemized Cabbala. He took what Ficino and Pico introduced, and fit it together into a comprehensive system. The core of Reuchlin’s proposed system is what he calls “soloquia” or magically powerful divine names. While the specific content of his work is highly complex and resists summary, Reuchlin does quite a bit of work to reinforce the centrality of language to magic.

To Reuchlin, magic, specifically his version of kabbalah-flavored magic, is the missing piece to Judaism. Reuchlin positions Cabbala as the thing that will finally “complete” Judaism. He illustrates this at great lengths in De Verbo Merifico, in which he uses Cabbalistic techniques to “complete” the tetragrammaton, adding the hebrew letter “shin” to the middle, turning the “YHWH” into “YHShWH”, claiming “Yeshua” to be the secret esoteric name of Christ.

While evocative, this did very little to impress jewish people, who generally didn’t see their religion as something in need of “completion”. It should also be noted that “YHShWH” does not actually spell Yeshua.

HEINEICH CORNELIUS AGRIPPA

Mercenary, feminist, lawyer, and occultist, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was likely the strongest wizard in European history. Not necessarily in terms of magical power, but in terms of physical bodily strength. He was also one of the most influential occult writers in history. Agrippa took every piece of esoteric history he could get his beefy hands on, and carefully assembled it into a single comprehensive system.

Born in 1486 to a family of the middle nobility in the service of the House of Hapsburg, Agrippa studied at the University of Cologne for three years before earning the title of Magister Artium. After earning his masters degree in 1508, he did the natural next move for his career and became a mercenary in the army of Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian I. This likely makes him the only occultist in European history who has killed people with a sword. He was good at being a mercenary too. He did so well that he was awarded the title of ritter, or knight.

His academic career began in earnest in 1509, when he was given the opportunity to lecture on Johannes Reuchlins De Verbo Merifico at the university of Dole. It was here that he wrote his first work, De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminae sexus (On the Nobility and Excellence of the Feminine Sex) a short serious-not-serious theological treatise which used concepts from Kabbalah and Neoplatonism to prove that women were inherently divinely superior to men. It was likely written to impress his then patron Margaret of Austria, the only daughter of Maximillian I. It should be underscored how radical this was for the time. The word “feminism” would not be coined for another few centuries, but De Nobiliate is often regarded as a proto-feminist work.

He did well as an academic, enough to earn him a doctorate. However, he was forced to flee Dole in 1510 under pressure  from Franciscan prior Jean Catilinet, who claimed Agrippa to be a Judaizing heretic. It was around this time that he began writing his major work, De Occulta Philosophia, a radical restoration of magic. He discussed this with his tutor, Johannes Trithemius, who told him to keep writing but to “talk about arcane secrets only with proper friends”, a lesson he promptly refused to take to heart.

After fleeing Dole, he continued to defend himself against the accusations of judaizing, claiming that his Christian faith was in no way incompatible with his appreciation for Jewish theology. Saying ‘I am a Christian, but I do not dislike Jewish Rabbis’ a downright radical sentiment for the time, especially for someone who just had to flee the country after being accused of judaizing by a powerful friar.

From 1511 to 1518, Agrippa settled in Pavia in northern Italy, and then in Metz, modern France. Here, he lectured on Neoplatonism and Hermeticism and got into more theological conflicts (this time with the Dominicans.) Additionally, in 1519, in his capacity as legal advisor to the magistrate of Metz, Agrippa defended a woman accused of witchcraft and got into serious trouble with the Inquisition.

The woman in question was accused because her mother was considered a witch, and the inquisition was arguing that the pact with the devil was passed down hereditarily. Agrippa argued that baptism was stronger than any pact with the devil, and that the woman could not be held responsible. However, he went his trademark extra mile, and implicitly accused the Inquisitor of acting against the spirit of human decency and Christianity, even implying that denial of the power of baptism was heretical. Although he did succeed in saving the woman’s life, he was forced to flee Metz.

After a period of rapid relocation, the death of his first wife, a series of new patrons, an expedition to Turkey, the death of his second wife to the plague, additional conflicts with church authorities, and a short stint in debtors prison in Brussels in 1531, Agrippa published the first book of De Occulta Philosophia. It got him in more trouble with church authorities, earning the text a denouncement from Konrad Köllin, Inquisitor of Cologne.

His last letter was published in 1533. For information on his final days, we are reliant on the recounting of his student Johan Weir. According to him, Agrippa moved to Lyon, where he was imprisoned by King Francis, but was released thanks to appeals from his friends. He died in Grenoble, and was buried, ironically, in the graveyard of a Dominican church.

The completed version of Three Books of Occult Philosophy was finally published in 1533. It is a comprehensive synthesis of the ideas of his predecessors. It focuses mainly on the work of Ficino and Reuchlin, but also contains ideas from lesser-known figures like Ludovico Lazzarelli. The texts real triumph, however, is its deft synthesis of ancient magical writings with modern esoteric discourse. Agrippa fits the three ostensibly unrelated fields of natural magic, astronomy/astrology, and ritual magic, into a single cohesive whole. The text is written with simple, accessible language, and Agrippa’s distinct dry wit.

In his dedicatory letter to Trithemius, Agrippa describes magic in his own words. To Agrippa, magic was something that the ancients considered to be the highest science, but also something that had been diluted by charlatans and false philosophers, who committed heresy and called it “magic” to disguise their superstition. Agrippa believed that magic, and all esoteric work, was an ancient, lost art in need of restoration. The point of reviving this art was to achieve a more pure form of religion. For Agrippa, a religion with no room for new ideas was by definition incomplete.

(Biographical information comes from the Haanegraaf biography published by Brill)

PARACELSUS

Sometimes, good ideas need a bastard. Doctor, lay-theologian, grandfather of toxicology, and quite possibly the most important alchemist in history, Phillipus Aruelious Theophrastus Bombastus von Hoenhiem –better known as Paracelsus– was a preeminent shit-talker in a Europe that already contained Martin Luther. He was the five-foot-nothing, always-armed-with-a-sword bastard who would shit-talk his way into laying the groundwork for modern medical science.

PARACELSUS THE DOCTOR

Before we discuss how Paracelsus changed medicine, we must discuss medicine before Paracelsus.

Welcome to the year 1530. You are a doctor in the city of Nuremberg. A sick person comes to you, and asks for healing. The first thing you do is consult your advanced, cutting edge medical textbooks. You’re a pretty wealthy and successful doctor, so you’ve got all three books: Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna. You, like your other respected contemporaries, are a humorist, meaning you understand that all bodies have a unique balance of four substances called humors. Blood, Phlegm, Black Bile, and Yellow Bile. If this person is sick, it means that their humors have become unbalanced in some way. Your job is to balance them again.

The first thing you would do is determine what type of illness they have. Is it hot or cold? Is it dry or wet? Their forehead is warm to the touch, and their nose is running. Bingo, this is a hot, wet illness. You’ve studied quite a bit, so you know which herbs are good, and which herbs are bad.  You need to prescribe them cold, dry herbs. You write them a prescription with dozens of ingredients. After all, the more different types of cold herbs in the medicine, the more effective it will be. Your patient will take that prescription to an apothecary, who will assemble the medicine for a price.

Someone comes to you with a huge infected wound on their leg. It needs to be amputated. You are insulted that they came to you. You’re not some lowly surgeon. Surgeons are glorified butchers, people who saw off limbs on battlefields. Maybe some surgeons have the good sense to learn anatomy at a university, but even then, they don’t garner anywhere near the respect that you do as a doctor.

Paracelsus thinks you’re an idiot. He hates your guts, and he tells you to your face every time he sees you. He calls himself Theophrastus, which is like calling yourself “Einstein 2.” Instead of Theophrastus, you and your other doctor friends call him Cacophrastus, literally “shit-speaker.” But what really pisses you off is that, infuriatingly, he is a better doctor than you and most of your friends.

Where humorists believed that all illness was the result of an imbalance of the humors, Paracelsus believed this was only scratching the surface. He believed that humoric imbalances were themselves only symptoms of a deeper problem; conflict between the fundamental forces that made up the body. Paracesus outlines three different types of disease:

One: There are natural diseases, problems which result from physical damage or imbalance of the body. A broken leg, a poisoning, starvation, etc. These were easily treated by keeping the patient clean and safe while the bodies natural healing abilities did their work.

Two: There are astral diseases, problems which result from the influence of the greater macrocosm. Meaning, Paracelsus believed that when the planet Mars passes over your country, it bathes that physical location in Mars Energy, an abundance of which can cause some materials to produce clouds of poison and corruption. This was his theoretical explanation for mass illnesses.

Curiously enough, this was also his explanation for psychological illnesses. Consider how an interaction with an angry stranger can ruin one’s mood for the rest of the day. Paracelsus points out the physiological effects of strong emotions on the body, and quite logically ties this into his hermetic theory of disease. If reading a nasty letter can affect the body, surely the signs in the stars also affect the body. These were tricky to treat, requiring a good deal of astrological math to produce metal amulets stamped with the signs of the planets to counteract the mix of astral forces causing the illness.

Three: Divine diseases. There are some illnesses which resist all attempts at treatment. God has decided that you must shit your brains out. Perhaps this is a punishment for some sin, perhaps it is not. It is not for the doctor to question the divine will. The only thing to do is pray.

[include the humor chart]

PARACELSUS THE ALCHEMIST

Paracelsus was a man who believed that wisdom can come from anywhere. He was a doctor, but he was also an alchemist, an astral magician, and a Hermetic mage. By the time he had established his practice in Strasbourg in 1526 he had already traveled Europe, learning medical techniques from military surgeons, barbers, bathers, village women, alchemists, monks and those regarded as magicians. [1, 29]

Medical knowledge at the time held that some substances were good, and others were bad. In practice, this led to medicines prescribed in poisonous doses. The logic was that if two aspirins are good for a headache, then two thousand aspirins will make you immune to headaches for the rest of your life. Paracelsus thought this was nonsense. He railed against apothecaries, saying “the poison makes the dose” and thereby inventing the field of toxicology. Without this foundational precept, toxicology as a field of science would not exist.

But Paracelsus didn’t pull this out of thin air. Paracelsus’s medical theories are a direct result of his interest in the recently-translated alchemical works of Hermes Trismegistus. The paracelsian body is a Hermetic microcosm, a small system governed by the same rules as the greater universe. Just as alchemists could use alchemy to chemically “distill” precious metals from ore, Paracelsus believed that a doctor should be able to distill the helpful essences from a substance, creating a more effective, pure medicine.

Paracelsus made what is likely the final great contribution to alchemy, the Sulphur-Mercury-Salt theory. First mentioned in his 1530 work Opus Paramirum, Paracelsus agreed that there were two alchemical substances: Sulphur, which gives substances form, and Mercury, which drives activity, but there is also Salt which denotes mass.

PARACELSUS THE MAGICIAN

In Paracelsus, we see elements of both the Hermetic school of thought, and the Christianity-influenced grimoire tradition. To the Hermetic mage, the body is a microcosm of the greater macrocosm. The dance of the planets and the movement of fluids through the body are, in some fundamental way, linked. Paracelcus theorized that particular types of disease were caused by the influence of particular planets. By inscribing the sign of a particular planet on a pendant, one could protect themselves from their unbalancing influences.

Paracelsus also held the St. Augustine’s conception of magic: . There was good, divine “Magie” and evil, diabolical “Zauberei.” To Paracelsus, a true magus always acted in concordance with God, combining what is natural with what is holy. BTo Paracelsus, becoming a mage required learning from books, but also a higher spiritual calling. [1, 159]

Paracelsus’s world was one governed by spirits. The atoms of the world were moved with intent by invisible beings in accordance with the divine plan. Perhaps there was a logic to their motion, but every minute change in creation was the result of a living, thinking, spirit.

Paracelsus was a Christian. He believed that all spirits came from God, but some spirits were closer to God than others. For most Christians, there were two sub-categories of spirits. There were the good spirits, the angels who helped administer creation, and there were evil spirits, the demonic entities who consorted with necromancers and witches. Paracelsus believed in a third type: the Elemental.

Paracelsus was a Hermetic. For the Hermetics, the material world was just about the least godly thing in creation, the furthest thing from the pure spirit of divinity. Paracelsus believed that the spirits who administered the basest four elements of the material world were so far removed from divinity that they should be considered their own sub-type.

In 1566, several years after his death, Ex Libro de Nymphis, Sylvanis, Pygmaeis, Salamandris, et Gigantibus etc.) was published. He argues that each of the four elements has its own type of governing spirit: g. Gnomes for earth, slyphs for air, nymphs for water, and Salamanders for fire. He depicts these spirits as much like us: they have societies, wear clothes, and are even capable of bearing children. However, they would occasionally give birth to monsters like dwarves, sirens, giants, and will-o-the-wisps.

Like any sensible being in Renaissance Europe, elementary spirits desired salvation through Christ. Unfortunately, elementals were not born with immortal souls, and the only way to get a soul is to marry a human. Mind you, elementals do not steal souls, but Paraceclsus warns against the dangers of consorting with them. Marry a salamander, and her nature will draw her back to the flame, causing her to vanish into the fireplace with her new soul in tow.

Paracelsus even recounts the tale of Peter Dimringer von Staufenberg, a nobleman who married a Nymph, only to denounce her as a devil and marry a new woman; a dire mistake, as the nobleman turned up dead shortly after the wedding. In Paracelsus’s eyes, this murder was entirely justified. By falsely repudiating his wife as a demon, God had granted the nymph the right to punish her husband for adultery. [1, 143]

PARACELSUS THE NECROMANCER, AND THE NECROMANCY OF PARACELSUS

Paracelcus and his followers were, much like Agrippa, hounded by accusations of nefarious magic throughout his life. This reputation as a necromancer would only increase after his death, as Paracelcus was no longer able to talk shit to defend himself. However, many of these accusations, and a large part of his enduring legacy as a magician, rest on a single work: The Archidoxes of Magic.

I will take an editorial stance, paracelsus did not actually write the Archidoxes of Magic. The text was published after Paraeclsus’s death by Robert Turner, a man now infamous for falsely attributing magical texts to prominent historical figures. He published Agrippa’s Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, which was not written by Agrippa. He published Peter D’abano’s Heptameron, which was not written by Peter D’abano. And now, he published Paracelsus’s Archidoxes of Magic, which was not written by Paracelsus.

Archidoxes is spurious but make no mistake, Paracelsus was absolutely a magician. His critics were right about one thing: he encouraged doctors to study magic, even evil magic! Especially evil magic! If maladies can be caused by nefarious magicians, is it not a doctor’s responsibility to cure their ills? If the world was full of evil sorcerers flinging spells at innocent Christians, the only logical response would be to protect and heal the afflicted.

So while Paracelsus’s cures were a revolutionary improvement on Galenic treatments like bloodletting, his treatments regularly included things like amulets made from planetary metals, stamped with the signs of planets, and charged with astral energies. Indeed, part of his success as a doctor was that his cures did nothing, while his contemporaries were actively bleeding their patients to death.

Paracelsus was not immune to this! His Hhermetic theories of medicine led him to occasionally prescribe tinctures that contained astrologically potent yet biologically toxic substances like mercury, or antimony.

DR. JOHN DEE

JOHN DEE

John Dee changed what it meant to practice magic. Occultist, Alchemist, Astronomer, Mathematician, Wife-swapper, Court Magician to Queen Elizabeth I, and quite possibly the most educated person alive at the time, John Dee represents the pinnacle of Renaissance magic and learning. He is a figure so influential, he threatens to take over an introductory text like this one.

The son of a wealthy Welsh textile merchant, young John Dee was characterized by two things: courtly ambition, and an overwhelming thirst for knowledge. He spent his early days studying, hopping from prestigious college to prestigious college where he rubbed elbows with the intellectuals of Europe.

By 1550, Dee was working as a teacher for the children of the nobility, eventually becoming personal tutor to a young Edward VI. Dee was a devout Protestant, and the deeply Catholic Queen Mary did not seem to like him all that much. Conflict between Protestants and Catholics was intense at this point in English history, as Henry VIII had recently disbanded every monastery, convent, priory, and friary in the country. None of this stopped Dee from proposing an ambitious plan for establishing a court library by collecting all the rare and valuable texts they could from the recently dissolved monasteries.

His proposal went unanswered, so he decided to do it himself, and promptly spent the next 30 years turning his estate at Mortlake into the most extensive private library in England, complete with an observatory and an alchemical laboratory.

When Queen Elizabeth I ascended to the throne, it opened a lot of doors for Dee. Elizabeth, a more religiously tolerant monarch, seemed to like Dee much more. He was given the task of astrologically determining an auspicious day for the coronation. Shortly after, he was able to publish his first academic text: Propaedeumata aphoristica, which provided an improved system for determining the positions of astronomical objects. For Dee, this was a foot in the door.

At this point in history, the distinction between astrology and astronomy had not formed. Whether or not astrology was a magical heresy was still a bit of a gray area. Astronomy-astrology (At the time, astronomy didn’t quite exist. What Dee did would have been called astrology) was regarded with suspicion, but it was also quite useful for nautical navigation. England’s globe-spanning empire was built on their ability to get huge ships across the world safely and efficiently in large part due to their understanding of the heavens. Dee’s work was vital to the British Empire, a phrase Dee himself coined.

Up to this point, Dee’s interest in astrology was not necessarily magical in nature. However, Dee came to believe that they were complimented by the Neoplatonic-Hermetic beliefs of the Renaissance occultists, specifically the works of Cornelius Agrippa, Francesco Giorgi, and Paracelsus. In 1564, Dee published his first magical work: The notably hermetic Monas Hieroglyphica.

ASIDE: A QUICK GUIDE TO THE MONAS HIEROGLYPHICA

John Dee’s lifelong goal was to “read the book of nature.” But to explain what that means, we must consider his perspective on the world. Put yourself in Dee’s shoes for a moment. You are an extraordinarily skilled mathematician, astronomer, and mapmaker. From the comfort of your writing desk at Mortlake, you can use math to make accurate maps of countries you have never been to. Without leaving your home, you can make maps of the seas that allow ships to reach their destinations faster. If you can do all of this, it follows that theoretically, you could do the same for all of natural philosophy. Theoretically, the beakers and flasks in your alchemical laboratory are unnecessary. Theoretically, you can perform alchemical experiments from your writing desk, using only a pen and paper. Theoretically, there is a logic underlying the entirety of creation that can be known and manipulated. When Dee says he wishes to “read the book of nature”, this is what he means. He wants a peek under the hood of creation. The Monas Heiroglyphica is how he thinks the engine works.

Consider the sun. If every drawing of the sun represents the same sun, those drawings are probably going to have similarities. Dee is arguing that if every depiction of the sun can be deconstructed into a few basic elements, that gives us an almost-universal sign for “the sun.” Dee is arguing that this ur-sign is metaphysically meaningful in some important way. Dee also extends this process to written language, as the word “sun” represents the same thing as any drawing of the sun.

Dee argues that this process of deconstruction can be applied to everything, that everything can be broken down to a small handful of essential signs and symbols, and that these symbols fit together into the MH.

This process can also be reversed. Sometimes, a drawing of a sun isn't just a sun. Sometimes, a drawing of the sun represents something like God’s love, alchemical perfection, or imminent death by dehydration. Dee argues that the essential sign of the sun also represents those things as well. Therefore, the entirety of creation can be derived from the MH.

The Monas Hieroglyphica was a flop. While the MH would go on to become a foundational prop for the Rosicrucians, he received little recognition for the text while he was alive. His contemporaries found it incomprehensible, perhaps rightly so. The ideas in the MH were a generation ahead of its time.

—

After publishing influential texts on navigation and geometry, and spending some time in an elite milieu of England's best and brightest to further the political aims of Elizabeth I, John entered his overtly esoteric period (Haanegraaf 303). Much ink has been spilled speculating why John became preoccupied with the occult, but it is important to remember that Dee did not “turn” towards the occult in the same way a modern scientist might. While attempting contact with angels was unorthodox, his investigations into esoteric authors were well within the bounds of a natural philosopher. Compared to now, natural philosophy and the occult were not entirely separate. What made Dee scandalous–the reason he hid his activities–were his dealings with the spiritual. For if one believes in angels, they generally believe in demons as well, and one can never truly be sure what is on the other end of a call.

John was aiming for perfect knowledge of natural philosophy. The logic seems reasonable: When you’ve read all you can, and you’re still in the dark, why not ask the angels –the beings who actually administer the universe– directly? As for how he contacted the angels, John was largely working from the Lesser Key of Solomon. John’s exact methodology is difficult to pin down, but it appears to be heavily influenced by earlier grimoire traditions like the Ars Notoria, and “Solomonic Magic.”

The rituals themselves would have resembled what we now call seances. A small, smoky room. Candles. A table covered in arcane symbols. A crystal ball, or polished mirror in which the images of the angels would appear. John uses of the term “scrying” or “scrying sessions” for this activity.

While the first proper angelic conversation would take place in 1581, things really kicked into high gear when Dee met a wandering alchemist and medium named Edward Kelley. (No relation.) The pair were a dream team. Their occult work together struck some magic balance of academic rigor and dramatic ingenuity that would revolutionize western occultism.

MEET EDWARD KELLEY

Our modern idea of a wizard has its roots in John Dee. The image of a wise yet eccentric old man with a robe and a long white beard surrounded by books and telescopes and flasks of bubbling fluids, fits Mr. Dee perfectly. But for the vast majority of history, wizards were not seen as wise and scholarly old men. Most wizards were not like John Dee. Most wizards were like Edward Kelley.

Alchemist, medium, con-man, counterfeiter, and man of ill-repute: Edward Talbot, better known by his assumed name, Edward Kelley, was John Dee’s medium-on-retainer, the man who spoke to angels.

Scholarship around Kelley’s early life is full of phrases like “claimed to be”, or “allegedly”, or “may have”. We know for a fact that he was born at Worcester on 1 August 1555, at 4pm, and that at some point in his life he was cropped, meaning had his ears cut off as punishment for a crime. Most accounts say he was cropped as punishment for counterfeiting. This cropping was supposedly the reason for his iconic cap, which covered the sight of his mutilated ears.

Dee was in contact with several scryers by this point, but had found them unsatisfactory. On March 8th, 1582, Dee was introduced to one Edward Kelley, a thick-set man who walked with a cane and wore a cowl. He was an angry drunk with a reputation for fighting, forgery, and necromancy. But Dee didn’t know that yet: all he knew was that Kelley was a gifted scryer.

Kelley claimed that not only could he see the various spirits and angels that populated the world, but that he could interact with them directly, and even allow them to speak through him. Dee allowed him a trial run, and was quite impressed. We don’t know what Dee saw that impressed him so much, but it was clear that Kelley knew exactly what Dee wanted. Kelley was in his element.

He was even able to detect the presence of an evil spirit within Dee’s current scryer, a man named Barnabas Saul. Kelley, out of the goodness of his heart and for no other reason, informed Dee that Saul was haunted by evil spirits! Saul was being tricked, and slandering Dee by way of these malicious spiritual interlopers. Barnabas left Mortlake quickly after this, leaving Kelley the sole recipient of Dee’s attention, and income. [Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels, 19]

Kelley was hired on a retainer of fifty pounds a year, nearly three times the yearly wages for a skilled craftsman for the time. For the next seven years, Kelley would act as Dee’s scryer, or medium, and the two would devote their lives to these “spiritual conferences” with the beings Kelley channeled.

Over the next few years, Dee and Kelley’s work would lead to some of the most influential esoteric texts ever written.

THE FIVE BOOKS OF MYSTERY

The Mysteriorum libri quinque, or Five Books of Mystery, can be thought of similar to forklift certification. It is a book of blueprints, techniques, tools, and general safety information for communicating with the angels of the lord. It is a graduated system. Angels are spiritually pure creatures, and each new set of tools and techniques requires greater and greater degrees of spiritual purification from the practitioner. These are the tools Dee would need to “read the book of nature.”

BOOK ONE: How Not To Hurt Yourself With An Angelic Conversation

The first book contains instructions for the Holy Table of Practice, what could be called a highly advanced ouija board. The instructions for producing one are extremely specific and shockingly expensive, requiring both a two yard square silk carpet, and letters written in “perfect oil” like the type used in church. On a particular day, the archangel Uriel lectures Dee and Kelley on the importance of observing the “Ritual Workplace Safety Protocols,” and makes an ominous warning that the grounds of Mortlake are haunted by a malevolent spirit named Lundrumguffa.

The very next morning, Kelley called Uriel. A being appeared with sparkling eyes, dressed in fantastic robes of purple and gold, a wreath of gold upon his head. When Dee asked if the table had been produced correctly, the being assured him that it was perfect, not a sigil out of place. When Dee asked if the spirit was indeed Uriel, another entity arrived, threw the apparition to the ground, beat him with a whip, and stole his clothes, revealing the entity to be none other than Lundrumguffa. Uriel then continued to beat the spirit, shouting “Lo, thus are the wicked scourged.” He then dragged Lundrumguffa by the legs, threw him into a pit, washed his hands with the sweat of his angelic brow, and appeared to the magicians in full radiance with his co-worker Michael. The angels blessed Dee and Kelley, encouraging them to continue the sessions.

You may be wondering what the angels get out of talking to a wizard through an earless con artist. In short: Subcontractors. As one reads the angelic conversations, it becomes increasingly clear that while the angels administer creation,they don’t actually understand humans. They don’t understand ideas like agency, desire, free will, linear time, or even physical distance. They need humans like Dee and Kelley, who have the curiosity, piety, and knowledge, to be the angels’ “man on the ground” for God’s plan. If the disparate churches of the world are middle management for the angels, Dee and Kelley were Research and Development.

BOOK TWO: The Sigillum Dei Aemeth

The second book explores the Sigillum Dei Aemeth, the now-famous symbol that forms the basis of the magical temple furniture. There were several extant versions of the symbol already, but Michael appeared to teach the magicians its “perfected” form. This will be a common theme for the Five Books of Mystery. Much of the early work is based around the angels “refining” and “correcting” concepts found in earlier magical texts. This process of synthesizing new ideas, while gesturing to a mythological past, is something we will see throughout magical history.

[We will need a picture here]

The Sigillum is made up of seven layers, one for each classical planet. As the layers progress inward, they map out the transitions from the celestial to the terrestrial world. It is here that Dee approaches something that is neither Jewish Kabbalah, nor Christian Cabbala, but a third branch: a Hermetic Quabala.

From the Outermost to innermost layers:

1. Seven names of God drawn from forty alphanumeric characters, and corresponding sigils.
2. Archangels of the planets, from a seven-by-seven magical square.
3. Seven names of God, from another seven-by-seven square.
4. A set of seven angels called The Daughters of Light, who appeared in green silk dresses, each carrying a blue tablet on their forehead bearing their name.
5. Another set of seven angels called The Sons of Light. These held a metal ball reminiscent of the planetary attributes, as well as a tablet of gold on the chest bearing their names.
6. The Daughters of the Daughters of Light. These appeared as children in white, with white ivory tablets bearing their names.
7. The Sons of the Sons of Light, also children, with robes of purple silk, long sleeves and scholar’s hats, and green triangular tablets bearing their names.
8. The inner pentagram, which bears the remaining angelic names.
9. The crosses, which were placed about the design after its completion.

This symbol describes the hierarchy of angels that administer the heavens. When God has a thought, this is how the angels hand down the divine marching orders. It should be said that symbols like the Sigillum Dei Aemeth don’t function like Agrippa’s planetary seals. This is not a magical sign in the traditional sense, something written to impart magical qualities onto an object. This is celestial magic, not natural magic. Think of the SDA as a combination of a phone directory, an access pass, and a conference room. Inscribing the SDA is akin to roping off an area with caution tape that says “Caution! Angels at Work!”

BOOK THREE: The Ensigns of Creation

Five weeks after being given the Sigillum Dei Aemeth, the magical table and lamen had not been made. The Archangel Michael chastised Dee and Kelley for not carrying out his instructions fast enough. Dee complained that he could not afford the gold, silver, and silk required to build the objects. Michael did not care, and responded with a vision of a mountain of gold covered in serpents, which he obliterated with a sword.

Next, Uriel revealed to Dee the seven Ensigns of Creation, a set of seven talismans, each corresponding to a different classical planet. They were to be made of purified tin, and be placed around the Sigillum on the Holy Table.

[include a picture here]

Uriel said that if they could understand these symbols, they would gain the ability to invoke forty-nine angels who could work to “quiet the estates”[Peterson, John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery, 170.], meaning they could pacify the quarreling crown heads of Europe.

Dee’s work is apocalyptic. At the time he was writing the Five Books, Europe was tearing itself apart. Nations and nobility were embroiled in conflicts between an increasingly violent Catholic church, an increasingly violent Protestant Reformation, and an Ottoman Empire that was getting way, way too close for comfort. Dee’s world was headed for apocalypse. An antichrist could be born at any moment, and the world would need protecting until Christ’s return. For Dee, assisting the Angels in “quieting the estates” was of not just political, but spiritual importance.

The Ensigns of Creation were Dee and Kelley’s access passes for the next stage of the Heptarchic system. They are a set of symbols that correspond to the seven angels, each corresponding to a planet, that administer the physical universe. These are, in short, the phone numbers of the angels that Dee must talk to to avoid apocalypse. Once he learned these by heart, he could graduate to the next step. [include the seals image]

BOOK FOUR: Heptarchic Princes

So far, the angels have spoken at length of angelic hierarchies, the aims of magic, and parts of the world in need of correction. The fourth book explains how all of these things fit together.

Here, Uriel explains that each age of the world is governed by a different spirit, and that the next age of the world would be governed by a spirit named King Camara (aka Baligon). Uriel then introduced the pair to King Camara, as well as their myriad attendants, who explained that they could be commanded, but only once their allotted age arrived. Uriel explains that the form of magic that Dee and Kelley were learning could be used to influence and command these Heptarchic Princes, thus giving Dee and Kelley significant influence over the realms of men that these spirits governed.

Crucially, Dee asked if magic could be used to influence, say, King Phillip II of Spain. Michael reassured him that as long as his intentions were good and glorified God, it could. He told Dee that this was only the beginning of what could be done with the Heptarchic Princes.

A common element of Solomonic magic is the lamen. These are paper-thin sheets of some material that have been inscribed with magical symbols, and worn about the neck like an amulet. Within Solomonic magic, they often function as magical hazard gear, protecting the practitioner from the spirit, or giving the practitioner a degree of power over it.

Dee and Kelley got an upgrade to the lamen they had been using to conjure the angels. The previous lamen, ones based on earlier Solomonic magic, were corrupt, given to them by evil spirits (even though the diaries say that they had been given by Uriel.) The new lamen were to be made of gold. Lamen in the Heptarchic system do function as protections from evil spirits, but they can also be conceptualized as divine access passes that show the angels that Dee and Kelley are allowed to talk to them.

They were to start with a seven-by-seven-by-seven square of 343 alphanumeric characters, and from this they could extract the names of the Heptarchic Princes. The names of these princes were assembled into the Tabula Bonorum. From the Tabula Bonorum, they would extract the characters of the new lamen. Crucially, the lamen were to be written in Enochian, not Latin. [include a picture of the second lamen, Empire 37%]

Dee and Kelley had systemized and overhauled Solomonic Magic into a new system: The Heptarchic system. Solomonic magic was a loosely organized collection of ideas, refined and expanded over centuries by various authors from a myriad of cultures. What Dee and Kelley did was create a synthesis of Solomonic magic and mystical ascension literature, and the glue holding it all together was the Enochian language.

Uriel and Michael also explained that Heptarcic magic was was only the first of a “threefold art” which would “join man with his knowledge of the world.” [Empire 37%] The remaining two parts being the Watchtowers and the Thirty Aethyrs.

BOOK FIVE: Enochian, and the Angelic Calls

Book five concerns the Enochian language. First, the angels relayed the Enochian alphabet, along with each letter's name and corresponding latin letter.

On Good Friday 1583, an angel thrust its sword from the scrying stone and pierced Kelley’s head. The scryer immediately broke into a sweat, saying he felt something “creeping within his head.” [Sic. Peterson Heptarchia 287]

Dee and Kelley had made quite a bit of progress with the angels. After receiving what I can only imagine was a positive angelic performance review, the wizards were allowed to commune with some higher-ranked beings. Angels named Me, Nalvage, and Illemese, would each give them a new element of the system.

The angel Me revealed the Liber Loageth, or “Book of the speech of God.” Transcribing the text would take Dee and Kelley several months of painstaking work. When the book was complete the following year, it spanned forty eight manuscript pages, each featuring a grid of forty nine by forty nine characters for a grand total of 115,000 squares. These were the “primal calls”, the divine marching orders given by God to the angels in the earliest moments of creation. [Skeptic Cap] The Liber Loageth remains “untranslated.” Linguistic analysis has revealed the text to largely be gibberish, with no detectable pattern.

The angel Nalvage then explained a key element of the system: Each of these 49 Primal Calls correspond to 49 “gates of understanding” that must be unlocked one by one if Dee were to gain the knowledge he would need. Nalvage explained that Dee could be given 48 keys to the 49 gates, as “one is not to be opened.”

The angel Illemese then gave the 19 Angelic Calls, short poems that, when spoken aloud in the right ritual setting, would unlock the first 19 gates. This is where the Enochian language becomes truly important to Dee’s metaphysics. The Calls were given in both Latin and Enochian, as the act of speaking aloud in Enochian was itself a magically important act. Reading the calls aloud in Enochian would “cast the spell.”

Let’s say you wanted to talk to the angels, and learn about the structure of reality. Michael and Uriel are messengers. Their job is to interact with humans, so it’s pretty easy to talk to them. Even so,they are low on the divine ladder. They don’t know everything. If you really want to start working with the angels, you’ve got to learn how to talk to the angels that administer the physical world, the angels in charge of doing things like “making fire hot” or “making water wet.” These guys are gonna be much harder to talk to, they’re not designed to speak English like Michael and Uriel.

To these entities, we might as well be ants attempting to interact with humans by wiggling our little antennae. But if we learn Enochian, we can call up humans, and speak to them through a ritually-constructed metaphysical ant telephone.

The first 19 Gates of Understanding concerned the material world. The 19 Angelic Calls are the divine phone numbers that allowed the practitioners to speak to, and petition the angels for their knowledge.

(Crowley, Aleister; DuQuette, Lon Milo; Hyatt, Christopher S. (1991), Enochian World of Aleister Crowley: Enochian Sex Magick, Scottsdale, AZ: New Falcon Publications)

(James, Geoffrey (1983), The Enochian Evocation of Dr. John Dee, Gillette, NJ: Heptangle Books,)

WHAT IS ENOCHIAN?

Enochian is an occult language constructed by John Dee and Edward Kelley. The pair claimed that they learned it from angels, and it has since become a cornerstone of western ceremonial magic. Dee never calls the language “Enochian” primarily calling the language “Angelical”, but also "Celestial Speech", "First Language of God-Christ", "Holy Language", or "Language of Angels", and “Adamical.” Later writers settled on “Enochian” due to Dee’s assertion that the biblical patriarch Enoch was the last human to speak the language.

The remarkable thing about Enochian is that it is not just a set of words: it is a functioning language. This is an innovation in western occultism. There are plenty of earlier examples of occult alphabets–several are featured in Agrippa’s work–but they are largely one-to-one replacements for letters from an existing alphabet. Enochian has its own grammar, syntax, and conjugation. It is a small and incomplete language, with barely 250 words to its name, but it is a language. Even if this was not a divinely revealed angelic language, Dee and Kelley underwent the time and effort to create an entire new language from scratch, something that very few people had ever even attempted before.

Enochian represents the pinnacle of Renaissance magical thought.

It is the metaphysical, semiotic bridge between divinity and humanity. If Dee wanted to “read the book of creation” (empire of the angels), here was the language it was written in. If one can read the book of creation, it follows logically that with the right tools, one might be able to reach in and alter the story.

Dee saw himself as a prophet, but he would never say that. His diaries are full of dire warnings from the angels, heralding a looming apocalypse that must be avoided with Dee’s help. Enochian was one of the angelic tools given to Dee for the purpose of getting creation back on track. For all his eccentricities, Dee was a devout Christian. The idea of attempting to rewrite reality in his own vision, against the will of God, would have been unthinkable. In his mind, Dee was not trying to bend the world to God’s will, but to assist in fulfilling God’s plan.

Laycock, Donald (2001). The Complete Enochian Dictionary: A Dictionary of the Angelic Language As Revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley. Boston: Weiser. ISBN 1578632544.

REAL LIFE CALLS

In 1583, close to the completion of the Five Books of Mystery, John Dee was visited by a Polish nobleman named Olbracht Òaski, a bizarre man known for his interest in the mystical, who was quite interested in Dee and Kelley’s mystical dealings. Dee and Kelley trusted him enough to allow him to sit in on a few of the scrying sessions, and Òaski was impressed enough to invite Dee and Kelley to return to Poland with him, and continue their experiments there. In 1584, they obtained the permission of the Queen, and relocated their mystical dealings to the continent. England is a small, isolated island. The continent would give Dee and Kelley something crucial: access to more people who might give them money.

Łaski was a voivode under the service of Stephen Báthory, uncle of infamous alleged serial killer Elizabeth Báthory. His station gave him ample legroom to experiment with alchemy and magic without drawing too much ire from church officials. He was known as a generous, sweet man with expensive fashion choices, an impressively long beard, and a talent for languages.

He was also a bona fide scoundrel. In the words of Polish Historian Jan Kasprzak “ [Łaski] would do anything in order to obtain money. He squandered his wives’ dowries and ruined their lives, and at one time, he kidnapped the wife of a nobleman, whom he kept imprisoned at his estate and tortured. A contemporary historian, who recorded Łaski’s infamous deeds, complained bitterly that there was no crime which Łaski would not have committed.” [Zantuan, “Olbracht Łaski in Elizabethan England,” 10.]

Moving to the continent to do highly illegal magic with a wizard and a mad Polish aristocrat would be stressful for anyone, and Kelley had the emotional stability one would expect of an earless alchemist who talks to angels.

While serving as patron to Łaski, Kelley became enraged with a servant named Alexander, and threatened to cut off the man’s head. After a momentary apology, Kelley learned that Alexander spoke ill of him, and subsequently attempted to kill Alexander in the street with a rapier. It took Dee and two other men to stop Kelley from killing the man. The stress was getting to him.

This was a bad time to be a traveling wizard in Europe. The Protestant Reformation just happened. Witch burnings were at an all-time high. The Catholic Church in the 1580s was, in a word, touchy.  As the pair and their families traveled Europe, receiving patronage from Rudolph II and King Stefan I of Poland, they gradually attracted the attention of the Catholic Church. On 27 March 1587 the wizards were required to defend themselves in a hearing with the papal nuncio (a diplomatic representative of the Pope). While Dee weathered the questioning with composure, the nuncio found Kelley infuriating, and at one point considered throwing him out a window. [3]

WATCHTOWERS, AETHYRS, AND A TRUE AND FAITHFUL RELATION

True and Faithful relation, originally published by Meric Casaubon, picks up five days after the completion of the Five Books of Mystery.

The Watchtowers:

Let’s say you’re a whiz at Heptarchic magic. You can speak Enochian with the best of ‘em, and send messages wherever you like up the angelic chain of command. Now you’re ready to meet your boss. You want to ascend to the throne of God. First problem: You’re made of meat, and that meat is made of some combination of the four elements. For you to ascend, you need to gain the permission of the angels that administer your meat.

The Watchtowers and the Thirty Aethyrs are another concept that threaten to overwhelm an introductory text like this. On June 20th, an angel clad in feathers woke a sleeping Kelley by patting him on the head. It showed him a vision of the world with four great towers at each cardinal direction, from which ranks of angels flowed to the center. This diagram describes how angels enter and administer the physical world.

Put simply, the watchtowers are the angels in charge of the laws of physics. There are four of them, one for each element and cardinal direction. But they’re not just angels. A watchtower is a spirit, a multitude of spirits, an office of spirits, a rank a spirit can hold, a metaphysical location, and an organizing principle of the universe. Imagine if the idea of the x-axis was an entity that you could speak to, and that entity was what administered the divine clockwork behind mathematics. Also, that entity is a physical location you can visit through astral projection.

Think of Enochian angels as massive anthills. The anthill is itself an angel, made up of dozens of smaller angels whose being is contiguous to the larger whole. Additionally, an anthill is a place. You can interact with an anthill, but you can also stand inside of an anthill.

The Aethyrs:

Let’s say you’ve successfully run your way through the first 18 angelic calls. You’ve successfully gained permission from the watchtowers to temporarily leave your meat, and ascend up to the Celestial Plane. Good job making it to the Celestial plane, but you’ve still got a ways to go before you hit the throne of God. It’s time for you to make the 19th, and final call. This one opens the way to the 30 Aethyrs.

The Aethyrs are the angels who administer the space between the celestial plane, and the throne of God. In Dee’s metaphysics, the Aethyrs administer the will of complex things like nations and peoples. They are the clockwork behind politics, fate, and history. Specifically, they were the angels who watched over the scattered tribes of Israel, who must be brought together for the world to be saved. Dee only wished to contact the Aethyrs for the purpose of averting the apocalypse. Later occultists would have other ideas. Where Agrippa layed out a comprehensive metaphysical theory for western magic, Dee and Kelley created a practical structure for navigating it.

DEE, KELLY, AND CON-ARTISTRY

When Dee died, his Mortlake estate was purchased by an antiquarian named Robert Cotton. Among its considerable library were Dee’s personal diaries, containing his meticulously recorded conversations with angels. These were given to Meric Casaubon, who published them not out of admiration for Dee’s work, but out of spite. A devout Protestant and opponent of Queen Elizabeth while she was on the throne, he was no friend to people like Dee. In the preface he denounces the magician, depicting him as a bumbling fool who dealt with devils and mistook them for angels.

Was Kelley a con artist? Absolutely. His past as a convicted fraudster, his erratic behavior, and the fact that he abandoned Dee the moment he was financially independent are all points under the “Edward Kelley was a con artist” column.

He arrived at Mortlake as a man pretending to speak to angels with theatrical confidence in the hopes that he could charm a few pounds out of some wealthy aristocrats. A good-old-fashioned, salt-of-the-earth con. But one day he met John Dee, a man with money, and one of the greatest occult libraries ever assembled. Something happened to Kelley that changed him. He was still a grifter, but now he wasn’t entirely a grifter.

Many of the rituals contained in Dee’s library ask the practitioner to do things like fast for several days, or forgo sleep for significant periods of time, things that have significant physiological effects on perception. causing what are generally referred to as altered states of consciousness (ASC). It is entirely conceivable that Kelley started off not believing, and something happened that made him seriously question himself. It would be easy to see from “I definitely don’t see angels” to “I’m not sure what I saw.”

THE DAUGHTER OF FORTITUDE

By 1587, Dee and Kelley were tired. After barely escaping questioning by church authorities and several failed attempts to garner new patronage, the pair had settled in Trebon with their money dwindling, their political influence exhausted, and their prospects scant. Kelley was at his psychic limit. Dee began to doubt, writing he found “much halthing and untruth” in Kelley’s work, fearing that he was under the influence of improperly-repelled spirits. [1] Yet, he remained firm in his belief in angels.

When the Angel Madimi appeared, and said that Kelley had to be punished for taking a wife against the angels wishes (even though the angels asked him to in the first place), the pair were confused. When Madimi said the wizards had to share their wives, the pair were even more confused. They asked if the angel meant spiritually, or sexually. Madimi responded “I speak concerning both.” [2] Later, it was explained that this act would unify Dee and Kelley as a single being, which would usher in the first phase of the apocalypse.

On May 22nd, the coupling commenced. Kelley and Jane Dee consummated, but Dee himself could not, and simply spent the night with Joanna Kelley. The next morning, during their scyring session, one of the most important events in all of magical history occurred.

There appeared a spirit, a man astride a white horse in gleaming white armor. He held a flaming spear in one hand, and a long sword in the other. A steel target hung on his back by a length of blue lace around his neck, and upon the shield were painted circles of cherubim with faces like burning gold. He said:

HORSEMAN: “Kelly, was thy brother’s wife obedient and humble to thee?”

E.K.: “She was.”

HORSEMAN: “Dee, was thy brother’s wife obedient unto thee?”

DEE: “She was obedient.”

HORSEMAN: “Even as you were one obedient unto another, even so shall the Lord deal with you.”13

At this, there appeared a green woman. She asked Dee if he had carried out the deed. He confirmed that he did not. Suddenly, there was a new spirit before Kelley. An entity with a crystal cross upon her forehead, neck and breasts exposed, naked down to a girdle of beaten gold, and a pendant of gold that reached to the ground. This was the Whore of Babylon, the mother of demons referenced in the Book of Revelations. She spoke:

“I am the Daughter of Fortitude, and ravished every hour, from my youth. For behold, I am Understanding, and Science dwelleth in me; and the heavens oppress me, they covet and desire me with infinite appetite: few or none that are earthly have: embraced me, for I am shadowed with the Circle of the Sonne, and covered with the morning Clouds.” [cont. Its short, we should include the entire DoF speech.]

Dee and Kelley had now attained wisdom. “No man is illuminated, that is not sanctified: neither is there any man perfectly sanctified, that is not joyfully illuminated,” the angels explained. [3] This link between the breaking down of inhibitions, and spiritual enlightenment, would become a foundational element of western occultism for centuries to come.

[1] Casaubon, Dr. John Dee’s Spiritual Diaries, 587.

[2] Skinner, Key to the Latin, 281–83.

[3]. Casaubon, Dr. John Dee’s Spiritual Diaries, 603.

THE END AND LEGACY OF JOHN DEE

The divine wife-swap, and subsequent conversation with the angels, would prove too much for Dee and Kelley. Dee had burned through his reputation, and was regarded as a crank by the nobility of Europe. At the same time, Kelley had found some success with practical alchemy. The balance of power in the relationship had shifted. Dee was now the social outcast, and Kelley had the marketable skill.

Kelley was pulling away. In fact, it is likely that the only reason he continued to associate with Dee at all was access to his library. Kelley had borrowed a copy of The Bosome Book, the alchemical text that was the source of his newfound talents. If this weren’t enough, Jane Dee was pregnant, possibly by Kelley. She would give birth to his newest son Theodore in February of 1588.

Dee’s then-patron Rožmberk all but threw him out of Trebon. Dee gave up on his former partner after learning that Rožmberk had made Kelley a baron of Bohemia. After six years of magic and adventure on the continent, Dee returned home to Mortlake on December 3, 1589. To his horror, he found his estate picked over, his library gutted, and his laboratory sold off for parts. Elizabeth, for her part, found Dee some gainful employment with the church, but Dee was in such poverty that he was forced to rent from his brother-in-law Nicholas Fromoundes, the man who gutted Mortlake in the first place.

Dee would attempt to rebuild his life at Mortlake, even continuing the angelic sessions with another scryer, though few records survive. Meanwhile, Kelley succumbed to another of his manic rages and killed an imperial officer in a duel. He was thrown in prison, where he was forced to continue his alchemical work. This was a fate shared by many alchemists of the time. Kelley died as he lived, a victim of his own legend.

As Dee neared his final years he was not destitute, but his finances were meager. By 1605 he lost his wife and three of his children to disease. For a time, Dee was kept relatively safe from the religious and political turmoil of the court, but Elizabeth could not protect him forever. With the ascent of James I to the throne, Dee saw the writing on the wall. It was time to leave england. He sold off his library, and even relinquished Mortlake to build funds for another expedition to the continent. He never made it, and died on the witching hour of March 26th, 1606.

A year later, William Shakespeare staged The Tempest. Prospero, the reclusive court magician, is the spitting image of Dee. He is an exile from court. He muses on the legacy of the magician, on power, and death.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yes, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.