Necromancy for the Masses?

A Printed Version of the

Compendium magiae innaturalis nigrae

Stephen Gordon

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, Volume 13, Number 3, Winter 2018, pp. 340-380
(Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mrw.2018.0045

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/717887

Access provided by East Carolina University (7 Mar 2019 12:44 GMT)

 Necromancy for the Masses?
A Printed Version of the Compendium magiae innaturalis nigrae*

STEPHEN GORDON
University of Manchester

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, magic texts proliferated in
a great variety of forms. Alongside the dissemination of learned tomes on
Neoplatonic and kabbalistic theory, there emerged a ready market for differ-
ent kinds of magical operations, “experiments” that catered less to the intel-
lectual energies of philosophers and more to everyday practitioners who
wished to utilize the powers of the occult—specifically, the ability to conjure
and control demons—for more immediate, venal concerns. Although necro-
mantic compilations drew their rationale from such learned compendia as
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia libri tres (written c. 1510,
printed c. 1533), they operated on noticeably different registers. Utilized by
a wider range of readers, they advertised themselves as “learned” or “authori-
tative” in sometimes questionable ways. As print culture flourished in the
sixteenth century, so there existed greater opportunities to acquire illicit texts
that had previously circulated in manuscript form, or else to produce new
texts from the corpus of available data.1 Printing technologies enabled a much
more democratized engagement with ritual magic.
The Compendium magiae innaturalis nigrae (c. 1533; hereafter Compendium),
a rare necromantic experiment commonly attributed to the astrologer and
Arab-Latin translator Michael Scot (d. 1236), exemplifies the type of
Agrippa-inspired magical text that made the ready transition to print. The
aim of this article will be to conduct a close critical analysis of a hitherto
unstudied pamphlet copy of the Compendium recently sold at private auction

I would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful comments,
and Claire Fanger for her invaluable help with the Latin translations. Any errors
remain, of course, entirely my own.
1. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd Ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 50.

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (Winter 2018)

Copyright 䉷 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 341

in Prague, Czech Republic (hereafter “Prague Pamphlet”). Published some-

time after 1575, it is a paradigmatic example of the ways in which illicit
magical texts were emended for popular consumption. It is not my intention
to trace the full, convoluted history of the pseudo-Scot magical corpus—and
convoluted it certainly is—but to provide a brief sketch of the contents,
physical makeup, and potential ownership of this one specific item. The first
part of the investigation will, however, necessarily involve a brief discussion
of the difficulties involved in constructing a timeline for the Compendium
tradition. When discussing the Prague Pamphlet itself, the ornate Compen-
dium manuscript from the John Rylands Library in Manchester (Latin MS
105; hereafter “Rylands 105”) will be used as the main point of comparison.
Dated by M. R. James to roughly the same timeframe as the hypothetical
urtext (c. mid-to-late sixteenth century), Rylands 105 provides a secure
literary-historical foundation through which to analyze the Prague Pam-
phlet’s many redactions.2 Ultimately, it will be argued that the pamphlet, as a
distilled reinvention of the core Scot text, reflects a type of streamlined com-
mercial grimoire that flourished among the lay populaces of early modern
Europe.3

T H E COMPENDIUM MAGIAE INNATURALIS NIGRAE:

A BRIEF OVERVIEW

Among the many necromantic manuals that were produced in the late
medieval period, the Compendium magiae innaturalis nigrae (“Compendium of
Unnatural Black Magic”) is one of the most obscure. It seems to have
emerged in Franconia in the third decade of the sixteenth century and
enjoyed a long, if nor particularly widespread, circulation history, not extend-
ing much beyond the German-speaking world. In some respects it is quite a
mundane text, comprising a single set of instructions on how to conjure and
control evil spirits for personal gain. The most striking aspect of the Compen-
dium is the inclusion in some handbooks (most notably Rylands 105) of a
fake or degenerate Arabic text that purports to be the original experiment.
Further paratextual curiosities include the presence of a garbled Arabic prefix
to the Latin title—Alchuchabola, Absegalim, Alkaibi, Albaon—and, where the
“Arabic” and Latin texts are both present, the fact that the book reads from

2. M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Latin Manuscripts in the John Rylands

Library at Manchester, vol. 1, with introduction and additional notes by Frank Taylor
(Munich: Kraus, 1980), 187.
3. Owen Davies, “Grimoires” in The Occult World, ed. Christopher Partridge
(New York: Routledge, 2015), 606.

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342 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

Figure 1. Latin MS 105 (c. sixteenth century). Vellum; 193 x 132 mm. The John
Rylands Library, University of Manchester (copyright of the University of
Manchester). Page opening showing the end of the “Arabic” version of the
experiment (p. xvi) and the beginning of the Latin preface of “Michael Scot”
(p. xvii). Note that the booklet reads from right to left.

right to left (see Figure 1). In these elaborate manuscript copies, the diagrams
of the ritual paraphernalia and demonic sigils are included in the Arabic part
of the text and signposted in the Latin “translation.” Here, especially, consid-
erable (and costly) effort was made to invoke a sense of ancient Eastern
authority.
The ascription of necromantic texts to famous figures from history was a
further way of validating their efficacy. Alongside Michael Scot, Solomon,
Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, and Georg Helmstetter (the infamous
“Faust”) are just some of the names that became associated with books of
necromancy.4 Whilst the Clavicula Salomons (c. 1300), the pseudo-Bacon

4. Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2009), 49–61. See also W. R. Jones, “Bibliothecae Arcanae: The Private Libraries
of Some European Sorcerers,” Journal of Library History, Philosophy, and Comparative
Librarianship 8 (1973): 86–95.

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 343

Thesaurus spirituum (c. 1500), and the corpus of Faust magic books (c. 1600–
1900) have been the subject of much scholarly interest and, in some cases,
the beneficiary of modern English translations, scant research has been con-
ducted on the main magical text that bore Scot’s name.5 Oblique references
to the text can occasionally be found in modern biographies of Scot and
surveys on the Western grimoire tradition, but nothing substantial.6 My pre-
vious article on Rylands 105 was the first major interrogation of the Compen-
dium since the nineteenth century.7
The mythical Michael Scot was an appropriate choice to authenticate a
necromantic textbook. Even during his lifetime, such was his (perceived) skill
at foretelling the future that it was rumored he consorted with demons, a
reputation enhanced by the writings of Salimbene di Adam (c. 1280s) and
Dante Alighieri (c. 1320), amongst others.8 By the sixteenth century, Scot
was known less for his licit scientific discoveries and more for his skills in
illicit magic. Taking into account his supposed authorship of a second necro-
mantic text, the Experimentum Michaelis Scoti nigromantici (ca. 1450), men-
tioned in the appendix to Trithemius’s Antipalus maleficiorum (1508), Scot’s
malign reputation was well established by 1533, the earliest possible date for
the creation of the Compendium urtext and the subsequent composition of
Rylands 105.9 As will be discussed in more detail shortly, the influence of

5. The Key of Solomon the King (Clavicula Salomonis), ed. and trans. S. L. M. Mathers
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). The Thesaurus spirituum sometimes cir-
culated under the title Tractatus de nigromatia or De nigromancia). See De nigromatia
attributed to Roger Bacon: Sloane MS 3885 & Additional MS 36674 ed. and trans.
Michael A. Macdonald (Gillette, N.J.: Heptangle, 1988). For recent research on the
Clavicula, see Federico Barbierato, “Writing, Reading, Writing: Scribal Culture and
Magical Texts in Early Modern Venice,” Italian Studies 66 (2011): 263–76. For the
Thesaurus spirituum, see Frank Klaassen, The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned
Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance (University Park, Pa.: Penn State Uni-
versity Press, 2013), 120, 122.
6. Lynn Thorndike, Michael Scot (London: Nelson, 1965), 121; Davies, Grim-
oires, 37.
7. Stephen Gordon, “Necromancy and the Magical Reputation of Michael Scot:
John Rylands Library, Latin MS 105,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 92 (2016):
73–103; James Wood Brown, An Enquiry into the Life and Legend of Michael Scot (Edin-
burgh: Douglas, 1897), 191–93; M. A. Gessert, “Ein Höllenzwang von 1555,” Sera-
peum 5 (1844): 65–76.
8. Gordon, “Michael Scot,” 77.
9. A version of the Experimentum Michaelis Scoti nigromantici can be found in Plut.
89, sup. 38, from the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence (c. 1450), fol.
294v-298r. For a discussion of this text, see Jean-Patrice Boudet and Julien Véronèse,
“Si volueris per demones habere scientiam: l’Experimentum nigromantie attribué à

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344 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

Agrippa’s De occulta on the structure of the urtext experiment, particularly in

the rationale of the suffumigation ritual, cannot be underestimated.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century and the so-called Golden Age
of German grimoire production, two further pseudonyms had become asso-
ciated with the Compendium: J. C. Herpentil, a supposed Jesuit, and Johannes
Kornreuther, a supposed Augustinian canon. The main Herpentil recension
(c. 1600–1700) differed little from the Scot tradition, save for changes to the
paratextual data (e.g. the author preface, the design of the sigils, the demonic
names), the removal of the pseudo-Arabic components, and the fact that it
also circulated in print.10 A second, shorter Herpentil experiment, Inbegriff
der Übernatürlichen Magie, is uniquely transcribed in Johann Scheible’s anti-
quarian collection, Das Kloster (1846).11 As well as lending his name to
some seventeenth-century copies of the Compendium, the otherwise obscure
“Johannes Kornreuther” also became attached to a text called the Magia ordi-
nis, a more dramatic recension that seems to have emerged in the first few
decades of the eighteenth century and enjoyed a much wider readership than
the Scot-Herpentil branch. Indeed, the Magia ordinis finds explicit mention
in the October 16, 1748 edition of the Brunswick newspaper, the Braunsch-
weigische Anzeigen, giving us a reliable terminus ante quem for its creation.12
The Libellus Veneris nigro sacer (c. 1700) by pseudo-John Dee is another
magical text that uses the Compendium as a template, albeit in a much more
divergent and elaborate manner than either the Herpentil or Kornreuther
traditions.13

Michel Scot” in Rerum gestarum scriptor: Histoire et historiographie au Moyen Âge:

Mélanges Michel Sot, ed. Magali Coumert et al. (Paris: PUPS, 2012), 691–702.
10. The printed version, ostensibly produced in Salzburg, 1505, was transcribed
by Georg Conrad Horst into the vernacular in the Zauber-Bibliothek 2 vols. (Mainz:
Kupferberg, 1821), 1, 163, n.1. The rarity of the Salzburg print is also mentioned in
Gessert, “Ein Höllenzwang,” 65.
11. Johann Scheible, Das Kloster: meist aus der deutschen Volks-, Wunder-,
Curiositäten- und vorzugsweise komischen Literatur, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, 1846), 626–32. To
complicate matters further, this second experiment contains some of the spirit names
found in the main Scot texts (“Almischak”) and corruptions of others (“Almu-
chabzar” into “Amabosar” and “Aghizikke” into “Aschirika”).
12. An unnamed reader wrote in to ask three questions: “1) What is the Magia
Ordinis? 2) If it still exists, where can you find it? 3) What are its long and short
titles?” See Braunschweigische Anzeigen, October 16, 1748, col. 1669. The Magia ordinis
seems to have generated contemporary antiquarian interest. It is discussed in some
detail in Elias Caspar Reichard’s Vermischte Beyträge zur Beförderung, 4 vols. (Helmstedt,
1781), I., 11–23.
13. Indeed, the Libellus Veneris demon “Amabosar” is also mentioned in the Inbe-
griff der Übernatürlichen Magie, while “Methgazub” can be found in the Magia ordinis

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 345

It should be stressed that very few Compendium texts are known to exist in
special collection archives. Rylands 105 and HAAB F8476—a miscellany
from the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, Weimar, containing a Herpentil
text entitled Liber spirituum potentissimorum (“Book of the Most Powerful Spir-
its,” c. 1700)—are perhaps the most accessible.14 Historic library catalogues
from mainland Europe contain occasional references to a “Scot,” “Herpen-
til,” or “Kornreuther” manuscript, but, due to the upheavals of World War
II, many such works have been misplaced or destroyed.15 Aside from the
occasional reference to the Magia ordinis in eighteenth-century periodicals
(see the Braunschweigische Anzeigen, above), the main Scot-Herpentil experi-
ment seems to have been mostly ignored by magical practitioners in the
Enlightenment era. The main mode of transmission comes from transcrip-
tions made by Peter Hammer (1725), Georg Conrad Horst (1821), M. A.
Gessert (1844), and Rev. James Wood Brown (1897).16 Even then, Horst and
Gessert maintain that the text was extremely rare and almost unknown
amongst their scholarly contemporaries.17 It is telling that the infamous
“Leipzig Collection” of one hundred forty magical manuscripts sold at auc-
tion in 1710 contains versions of seemingly every major magical text available
in Germany at this time apart from the Compendium and its recensions.18 This
is why the abridged pamphlet copy sold at private auction on May 28, 2016
at Dorotheum in Prague—a photocopy of which is held by the National
Library of the Czech Republic—proves to be so fascinating. It is, to my
knowledge, the only known example of its type in the pseudo-Scot corpus.
Even the antiquarian writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seem

(albeit rendered as Mebhhazubb), suggestive of the close intertextual connections

between each. For the translations and Latin transcriptions of this text, see John Dee
Tuba Veneris, ed. James Banner (Seattle: Trident Books, 2010).
14. The HAAB copy has been fully digitised. See http://nbn-resolving.de/
urn:nbn:de:gbv:32-1-10014933398/.
15. For an incomplete list, see Gordon, “Michael Scot,” 95.
16. Sammlung der grössten Geheimnisse ausserordentlicher Menschen in alter Zeit
(Cologne: Peter Hammer, 1725), 351–65; Horst, Zauber-Bibliothek, 1, 162–76; 2,
103–7; Gessert, “Ein Höllenzwang,” 68–76; Brown, Michael Scot, 270–74.
17. Horst, Zauber-Bibliothek, 1, 160–61; Gessert, “Ein Höllenzwang,” 67.
18. The collection currently resides in Leipzig University Library. See Daniel
Bellingradt and Bernd-Christian Otto, Magical Manuscripts in Early Modern Europe:
The Clandestine Trade In Illegal Book Collections (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2017), 75–151. For digital access to the collection, see https://histbest.ub.uni-
leipzig.de/servlets/solr/select?q⳱cbu_shelfmark:Cod.mag.* For the catalogue that
forms Appendix A of Bellingradt and Otto see https://link.springer.com/content/
pdf/bbm:978-3-319-59525-2/1.pdf.

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346 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

unaware of its existence. Nor, indeed, is there much indication that it formed
part of a historic library collection, institutional or otherwise. This, perhaps,
is unsurprising. One of the major hallmarks of popular print culture is the
ephemeral nature of production. Works not destined for the courts or clois-
ters (or, indeed, works printed for clients who were highly cognizant of the
illicit nature of the item they owned) were not liable to survive in large
quantities.19 Indeed, as encapsulated by Agrippa’s retraction of his own occult
interests in the De vanitate (c.1530), official toleration of the occult arts dimin-
ished as the sixteenth century progressed. The printing of magical texts had
the potential to cause huge scandal, especially in Catholic-controlled areas,
leading to dire consequences for the publisher. And yet, despite the acknowl-
edged dangers, the market for such texts proved too lucrative to ignore.
Owen Davies astutely notes that the lay desire for “quick-fix” conjurations
led to the increased publication of streamlined magical material.20 Such an
eager but undiscerning client base comprised the main readership of the
Prague Pamphlet.

THE P RAGUE PAMPHLET O F THE COMPEND IUM:

SOME CONSIDERATIONS
Not much is known about the provenance of the Prague Pamphlet. Records
show it had previously belonged to the private collection of the writer and
printmaker, Josef Váchal (d. 1969) and, before that, the library of Kamill
Resler (d. 1963), a defence lawyer and bibliophile who had a keen interest
in the occult.21 The photocopy archived at the National Library of the Czech
Republic is mostly complete, except for the absence of three pages containing
the images of the ritual crown (p. xvii) and the sigils of the demons “Jalha-
bari” (p. xix) and “Suhub” (p. xx) (to be discussed in more detail shortly).

19. For an overview of this argument for specifically English contexts, see Peter
Stallybrass, “ ‘Little Jobs’: Broadsides and the Printing Revolution” in Agents of
Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron,
Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2007), 315–41. For the nebulous definition of “popular print culture” in mod-
ern academia, see Joad Raymond, “Introduction: The Origins of Popular Print Cul-
ture” in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 1: Cheap Print in Britain
and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–14.
20. Davies, Grimoires, 53. See also Bellingradt and Otto, Magical Manuscripts,
47–65.
21. See the Doretheum catalogue entry for the May 28, 2016 auction held at the
Prague Marriot, found online at: https://www.dorotheum.com/en/auctions/current-
auctions/kataloge/list-lots-detail/auktion/11772-art-and-antiques/lotID/532/lot/20
47974-compendium-magiae-1504/html?currentPage⳱21.

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 347

Figure 2. Frontispiece illustration and title page, Prague Pamphlet (Courtesy of

Dorotheum Prague).

The booklet itself measures 132 millimeters x 106 millimeters and num-
bers twenty-four pages in length, not including the title page and the
woodcut pasted onto the inside cover (Figure 2). Sometime in its early
history the pamphlet was hardbound in vellum, using a recto leaf from a
medieval Bible written in a large Gothic Quadrata and held together by
brass corners and a clasp. Although the front cover is much too worn to
gauge the Bible passage in question, the back cover is sufficiently free of
blemishes to suggest that Jeremiah 31:38–40 was used in the binding (Fig-
ure 3).22 Judging by the presence of (Latin?) text beneath a tear in the inside
cover, and the fact that the picture frame has been cut off at the left-hand
side of the page, it may be presumed that the woodcut was a later addition,
added during the binding process. And yet, there exist certain textual (and
intertextual) clues that suggest it indeed formed part of the original pam-
phlet design. Thus, before examining the frontispiece illustration and title
page in detail, it would be prudent to first provide an overview of the
experiment itself (a full transcription and translation of which has also been
included below as Appendix C).

22. The following text can clearly be discerned: ecce dies veniunt dicit Dominus
et aedificabitur civitas Domino a turre Ananehel usque ad portam Anguli et exibit
ultra norma mensurae in conspectus eius super collem Gareb circuibit Goatha et
omnem.

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348 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

Figure 3. Back cover faintly revealing lines from Jeremiah 31:38–40, Prague
Pamphlet (after 1575). Vellum binding with paper leaves; 132 x 106 mm. Private
collection (Courtesy of Dorotheum Prague).

Unlike contemporary handbooks such as the Thesaurus spirituum, which

contained a diverse catalogue of useful and dangerous spells—from the enlist-
ing of water demons to find treasure buried in rivers and lakes, to the creation
of a magic oil that would allow practitioners to see myriad good and bad
spirits—the Scot corpus details only a single experiment,23 the main focus of
which is to invoke the demon “Almuchabzar.”24 All versions of the text
begin with a prefatory statement purportedly written by Michael Scot. He
notes that the original experiment was written in Arabic, but due to his
ignorance of the language he had to enlist the help of a “certain Rabbi” to

23. Indeed, necromantic miscellanies were notoriously fluid with regard to their
form and content. See Frank Klaassen, “Unstable Texts and Model Approaches to the
Written Word in Medieval Ritual Magic” in Orality and Literacy: Reflections Across
Disciplines, eds. Keith Thor Carlson, Kristian Fagan, and Natalia Khanenko-Friesen
(Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2011), 217–43.
24. Gordon, “Michael Scot,” 88.

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 349

help him gain knowledge of its contents, which were then faithfully trans-
lated. He concludes with a commonplace warning that although the experi-
ment will prove useful for those who are sufficiently prepared and clear-
headed, it should never fall into the hands of ignorant men and curious
youths. Of course, Scot’s contemporary fame as an Arab-Latin translator casts
immediate doubt—if there ever was any—on the suggestion that he actually
composed these statements.25 His apparent distaste for necromancy substanti-
ates this point. The Liber introductorius (c. 1230), Scot’s most famous work,
may well contain information on the nature of spirits and the methods by
which one could use the stars to divine hidden knowledge, but he professes
to abhor the practice of demonic conjuration.26 Our pseudonymous author,
then, appears to possess knowledge of the nature of Scot’s academic outputs
—that is, his astrological interests and close relationship to the Islamic
world—but filtered through the necromantic mythos that was readily circu-
lating at this time.27
On a compositional level, the version of the introduction included in the
Prague Pamphlet is altogether unique. Aside from the clear grammatical and
spelling errors, the preface has been severely redacted in comparison to
Rylands 105 and, indeed, the transcriptions made by Hammer, Gessert, and
Brown. After the phrase rerumque contentarum notitam pervenissem (“and I
attained knowledge of its contents”), the pamphleteer omits the following
segment found in the Rylands text:

Quae vero exinde expertus nec non adeptus sum, et tu experiri adipiscique poteris, si
vir magnanimus, constans atque intrepidus sis moreve praescripto processeris; ast cum
spiritibus nequissimis, et astutissimis et humano generi infensissimis tibi agendum est:
quare cum praevia sane mentis deliberacione et cautela et providentia maxima pro-
cedas necesse est quod si vero rem rite tractaveris, et grandia et mirabilia perpetrare
et efficere poteris.

(What I had experienced and attained you also will be able to experience and attain,
if you are a brave, constant, and fearless man and proceed in the prescribed manner;
but you must work with evil spirits who are most cunning and hostile to the human

25. Charles Burnett, “Michael Scot and the Transmission of Scientific Culture
from Toledo to Bologna via the Court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen,” Micrologus 2
(1994):101–26.
26. Glenn Michael Edwards, “The Liber Introductorius of Michael Scot” (unpub-
lished Ph.D. thesis, University of Southern California, 1978), 208.
27. Gordon, “Michael Scot,” 79.

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350 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

race; for this reason you must go forward with sound deliberation of mind leading
you and with the greatest of caution. But if you manage to do the whole business
correctly, you will be able to accomplish and achieve great and wonderful things.)

The pamphlet preface resumes at reliqua opus ipsum (quod fidelissime interpreta-
tum habebis) te satis docebit (“the work itself, which you will have faithfully
translated, will teach you enough about the rest”). It then abruptly cuts off
after vel ignora[nti]um homin[u]m incidat (or let it fall [into the hands] of igno-
rant men), disregarding the more pertinent warning—contained in Rylands
105 and similarly unabridged texts—that practitioners should not attempt to
read the conjurations aloud when standing outside of a magic circle, lest they
be tormented and brought to ruin by evil spirits.28 The final line of the longer
Scot preface—quid quid agis prudenter agas, & respice Finem (whatever you do,
do it wisely, and be mindful of the end)—has been extracted and used as the
concluding line of the entire pamphlet, culminating in a floriated tailpiece
(xxiiii).
Unlike other versions of the experiment, the pamphleteer has also
neglected to include the full date by which “Scot” signs off his introduction.
Rylands 105, for example, concludes with Michael Scotus Prage in bohemia
pridie idibus February MCCLXI (Michael Scot, Prague in Bohemia, the day
before the Ides of February [the 12th], in the year 1261). Brown gives Febru-
ary 12, 1255 (Anno. Mcclv), while Gessert provides a date of Prid: Id: Febr:
C C
CI CCLV, which also seems to refer to 1255 (if “CI ” can be read as
“M”).29 Despite these discrepancies, the texts are uniform in giving the place
of composition as “Prag(a)e in Bohemia.” Of course, the fact that Scot died
in 1236 merely confirms that he had no involvement whatsoever in the cre-
ation of this text.30 The Prague Pamphlet and the Hammer transcription are
alone in using the more “realistic” dates of MDXXXX (1540) and MDXI
(1511) respectively.
In a similar manner to the introductory statement, the main pamphlet text
has been consciously streamlined. Nonetheless, care has been taken to retain

28. Magic circles were commonly used as protective devices in necromantic ritu-
als. See Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth
Century (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1998), 175.
29. Judging by the title of his article, Gessert seems to have misread the date as
“1555.”
30. Frederick II’s court poet, Henry of Avranches, composed an elegy in early
1236 intimating that Scot had recently died. See Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic
and Experimental Science, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923), 309.

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 351

the most salient (i.e. actionable) parts of the source experiment. It begins
with an instruction to construct a magic circle out of “virgin parchment”—
i.e. high-quality parchment not previously used—in the astrological hours of
Mercury and Venus. Next, the magician is advised to cut a stick of hazel to
three feet in length and create a breast plate (scutum pectoris) out of virgin
parchment, both of which should be inscribed with pseudo-Arabic symbols
using dove’s blood. The mention of the breastplate is unusual and may be an
interpolation, or simple misinterpretation, on the part of the printer. All the
extant Scot texts I have consulted instruct the magician to create a scapular.
Indeed, the diagram of the “shield” is even titled as such on page sixteen
(Figure 4).
There are a number of possible explanations for this. The printer may have
been working from an unknown manuscript that also included the phrase
scutum pectoris, or else they misunderstood the function of a scapular and used
their own discretion when editing the text and creating the diagram, albeit
neglecting to change the figure heading. As a point of comparison, the scapu-
lar from Rylands l05 (Figure 5) shows the base design that can be found in
all other Scot texts. Muddying the waters still further, the Magia ordinis also
refers to the creation of an apotropaic breastplate (in pectore vero habeat Scutel-
lum Sanguine Columbae Albae inscriptum nominibus quatuor Evangelistarum).31
The extent to which an intertextual connection can be made between the
pamphlet and the Magia ordinis is still to be determined.
Following the direction to wear a tunic that reaches down to the shoes—
described respectively as a Benedictine and Augustinian habit in the longer
Scot-Herpentil and Kornreuther traditions—the magician is then instructed
to create a suffumigation comprising celery seeds, black cumin, and saffron.
As a “quick-fix” conjuration devoid of the type of ritual extravagance ex-
pected by the scholarly elites, the ingredients were certainly less exotic (and
much less potent) than the poppy seeds and hemlock used in the longer
texts.32 The theory that the redactor was not a seasoned magical practitioner,
nor ensconced in the intellectual climate of renaissance occultism, is obliquely
confirmed by these amendments. The list of ingredients found in Rylands

31. See Cod.II.2.8.2 (c. 1750) from the archives of Oettingen-Wallersteinsche Biblio-
thek, now held at the Augsburg Universitätsbibliothek; and Iter italicum (accedunt alia
itinera): A Finding List of Uncatalogued or Incompletely Catalogued Humanistic Manuscripts
of the Renaissance in Italian and other Libraries, compiled by Paul Oskar Kristeller. Vol.
3, Alia itinera 1: Australia to Germany (Lieden: Brill, 1983), 569. A digitized copy
of this manuscript can be found at: https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bvb:384-
uba003078-2.
32. Davies, Grimoires, 54.

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352 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

Figure 4. Diagrams of the ritual wand and scapular, Prague Pamphlet (Courtesy
of Dorotheum Prague), pp. 15–16.

Figure 5. Diagram of the scapular, Rylands Latin MS 105 (copyright of the

University of Manchester), p. iv.

105—black poppy, hemlock, coriander, celery, saffron—seems to have been

directly influenced by Book One of Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia libri tres.
Chapter 43 (“Of Perfumes, or Suffumigations, their manner and power”)
relates how:

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 353

There are also suffumigations under opportune influences of stars, that make the
images of spirits forthwith appear in the Aire or elsewhere. So they say, that if of
Coriander, Smallage [celery], Henbane [nightshade] and Hemlock be made a fume,
that Spirits will presently come together; hence they are called the spirits Hearbs33

Agrippa also mentions that:

[I]f any one shall hide Gold, or Silver, or any other pretious thing, the Moon being in
conjunction with the Sun, and shall fume the place with Coriander, Saffron, Henbane
[nightshade], Smallage [celery], and black Poppy, of each a like quantity, bruised
together, and tempered with the juice of Hemlock, that which is hid so shall never
be found, or taken away, and that spirits shall continually keep it: and if anyone shall
endeavour to take it away, he shall be hurt by them and fall into a frensie.34

Even taking into account the textual and grammatical fluidity that occurs as
a result of the copying process, the longer Compendium texts all contain refer-
ences to a suffumigation of semen papaveris nigri, herbam cicutam, coriandrum,
apium, [et] crocum (black poppy seed, hemlock, coriander, celery, and saffron).
The author of the urtext must surely have consulted Agrippa in the formula-
tion of his own experiment. Not only did he choose the correct herbs to
make spirits appear (what Agrippa terms herbas spirituum), but even the phrase
“of each a like quantity” (aequis ponderibus) is repeated in the unabridged
Compendium manuscripts (e.g. Rylands 105: et hec in aequali pondere). It should
also be noted that the urtext author uses the same obscure signs for Venus
and Mercury on the scapular (Figure 5) as those included in Book Two,
Chapter 51 of De occulta, relating to the creation of celestial characters from
“geomantical” figures.35 The publication of Agrippa’s De occulta opened up
new repertoires of occult knowledge for practitioners of learned magic to
emulate.36
To return to the Prague Pamphlet: having completed the suffumigation
the magician is then advised to create a crown out of virgin parchment
(inscribed with esoteric symbols in dove’s blood) and, following this, to begin

33. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. Robert
Turner (London, 1650), 86. For the original Latin, see De occulta philosophia libri tres
(Cologne, 1533), 50–51.
34. Agrippa, Occult Philosophy, 87.
35. Ibid., 317. For a formal comparison between the two sets of astrological signs,
see Gordon, “Michael Scot,” 87.
36. For the idea of a magical “textual community,” see Klaassen, “Unstable
Texts,” 223.

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354 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

the construction of the sigils of the spirits he or she wishes to summon. Again,
these should be constructed out of membrana virginea, only this time the char-
acters are to be written out in raven’s blood. The sigil of the demon to be
invoked at any given time should be attached to a stick and placed before the
circle. Next, the pamphleteer gives a lengthy description of how the experi-
ment should commence (enter the circle in secret; retrieve the wand from an
altar; commence the invocations at the hour of midnight). If the invocations
have been performed correctly and without defect, the named spirit can be
expected to appear and ask why it has been summoned. To ensure the
demon’s obedience and to prevent it from fleeing, the magician is advised to
“beat its sigil” (verberat characterem suum) and recite the mystical words that
appear under the heading Institutio vel Constancia (Positioning or Stability)
intended to keep it bound to the material realm. Upon promising to fulfil
the magician’s request, the demon is made to swear an oath on the wand
before being allowed to depart with the valedictio (farewell) invocations.
Much like the Scot preface, the invocations (called citationes, “citations” in
the text) have been subjected to severe emendation and bear only scant
resemblance to those found in the longer Compendium texts. Suitably non-
sensical and mysterious, the prayers do on occasion lapse into the vernac-
ular. Interestingly, the repeated phrase “horet horet”—translating to “listen,
listen”—can be found in both the Prague Pamphlet and Rylands 105, acting
as further evidence of the urtext’s Germanic origins.
As noted previously, the main aim is to summon the principal spirit Almu-
chabzar. Unique to the Compendium corpus, the name “Almuchabzar” can
be read as an interpolation of Almuchabola, itself an imprecise rendering of
the Arabic word Al-Muqabala, or “comparison,” a term mainly used in alge-
bra.37 The exact nature of the relationship between mathematica (licit knowl-
edge) and matematica (illicit divination) had been a source of contention for
Christian theologians since the time of Augustine, given particular emphasis
by the English political theorist John of Salisbury (c. 1158) and, indeed,
Michael Scot.38 The inclusion of an overt “arithmetic demon” in an experi-
ment attributed to a scholar, Scot, whose mathematical skills were rumored

37. J. D. Latham, “Arabic into Medieval Latin,” Journal of Semantic Studies 17

(1972): 50. The spirits included in the Kornreuther recension are not as obscure and
provide clues as to the creator’s intertextual influences. The Magia Ordinis’s principal
demon “Astaroth” (sometimes “Ascharoth”) is referred to as “a great and strong
Duke, coming forth in the shape of a foul Angel” in Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of
Witchcraft (London, 1665 [1584]), book xv. chap. xi, 233.
38. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana 2.21, in Opera Omnia vol. 3, Patrologia
Latina 34, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1841), col. 51; Ioannes Saresberiensis, Policraticus, I-

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 355

Figure 6. Checklist of the demons invoked in the different recensions of the

experiment.

to derive from the patronage of demons, is certainly not accidental and speaks
to the erudition (and, perhaps, sense of humor) of the urtext author. Aside
from Almuchabzar, the pamphlet also gives instructions to conjure four
minor spirits, “Jalhabari,” “Suhub,” “Phuliphka,” and “Aghirikka.” These
names can also be found in Rylands 105 and the Hammer/Gessert/Brown
transcriptions (see the table in Figure 6). Curiously, the pamphleteer has
neglected to incorporate “Achnunhab” and “Baltuzaratz” into his schema.
Likewise, “Almischak” has been pointedly substituted for Aghirikka, who
has been relegated from his usual role as the final subaltern demon.39
Overall, the Prague Pamphlet adheres to roughly the same structure as
Rylands 105 and similarly unabridged Compendium texts. The main differ-
ences include the severely redacted preface, a more streamlined set of prepa-
ratory rituals (some of which are out of “normal” sequence), less emphasis
given to the construction of the paraphernalia in the days/hours of Mercury
and Venus, a reduction in the number of spirits, and a less convoluted set of
invocations. The invocation to bind Almuchabzar to the material plane pro-
vided under the subhead Institutio vel Constantia (Positioning or Stability) is
not included in the wider Scot-Herpentil corpus, where it is used only in the
context of fettering the four minor spirits (Rylands l05 uses Institio [vel con-
sistentia] spirituum as a subheading; HAAB F8476 employs the more grammat-
ically correct Institutio seu consistentia spirituum). Similarly, the specific
instructions on how to enter the magic circle and conduct oneself within it

IV, CCCM 118, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993), book 2, chap.
19 (111–17). For wider early modern attitudes to mathematical knowledge, see J.
Peter Zetterberg, “The Mistaking of ‘the Mathematicks’ for Magic in Tudor and
Stuart England,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 11 (1980): 83–97.
39. Gessert, “Ein Höllenzwang,” 66.

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356 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

do not correspond to any extant Compendium text and seem to be an original

creation, designed for performative clarity. There is much to indicate that
the printer’s edits resulted from a conscious re-creation of the core (but un-
wieldy) source material.40 The amendments were all supremely logical, espe-
cially if the owner/client did not have access to the required resources (e.g.
hemlock) or they were unable to work at the times of the day or week
prescribed in the longer ritual.41 The simplified invocations were also much
easier to recite. Shorn of all affectation—especially the fake Arabic script
(Figure 1)—the experiment was refined down to its critical, most salient
points.

RITUAL DIAG RAMS

The illustrations of the ritual paraphernalia are some of the most striking
aspects of any necromantic manual. The Prague Pamphlet is no exception.
Following on from the valedictio to the four minor spirits (xiii), we find full-
page, hand-painted representations of the magic circle (xiiii), wand (xv),
scapular/shield (xvi), crown (xvii), the characters of the five named spirits
(xviii-xxii) and, uniquely for a Scot text, a full-page woodcut of a raven
(xxiii).42 As noted above, the illustrator diverges markedly from the template
on some of these images. The sigils, especially, are much less intricate. See
for example the alterations made to the characters of Almuchabzar in Figures
7 and 8.
The use of a red-on-black color scheme is another major departure from
Rylands 105. To gauge potential influences, we need to consult the studies
made in the nineteenth century by M. E. Gessert and James Wood Brown.
Gessert records that he came across a Compendium manuscript in the home
of a Nuremburg antiquarian. Judging by the transcription, the Nuremberg

40. Davies, “Grimoires,” 606.

41. Rylands 105 explicitly states that the ritual objects should be prepared on “the
days and hours of Mercury and Venus,” meaning Wednesdays or Fridays, 5–6 AM,
12–1 PM or 7–8 PM. The pamphlet mentions only that the magic circle be con-
structed in the hours of Mercury and Venus, giving the practitioner much more lee-
way. See Gordon, “Michael Scot,” 101.
42. Images of ravens were a common motif in German magic books, providing
further clues as to the pamphlet’s central European provenance. See, for instance, the
raven woodcut found in a unique Faust text (c. 1765) from the British Library, D.
Fausts original Geister Commando der Höllen und aller ander Geisterzwang, ed. Hans Hen-
ning (Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1979). This work is discussed in Hans
Henning, “An Addition to the Faust Literature: An Unknown ‘Harrowing of Hell’
in the British Library, London,” The British Library Journal 4 (1978): 1–7. See also
Davies, Grimoires, 119.

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 357

Figure 7. Sigil of the demon Almuchabzar, Prague Pamphlet (courtesy of

Dorotheum Prague), p. 18.

Figure 8. Sigil of the demon Almuchabzar, Rylands Latin MS 105 (copyright of

the University of Manchester), p. viii.

text did not contain an Arabic original. The ritual diagrams were instead
incorporated into the main body of the Latin text in the manner of the
Herpentil recension. The pages also seem to be out of sequence and, as Ges-
sert readily admits, the image/instructions pertaining to the magic circle are
missing. Despite the manuscript’s flaws, the “kabbalistic seals and characters”

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358 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

were said to have been “precisely executed in cinnabar on a black back-

ground.”43 Pointedly, the preface also appears to have included an image of a
raven. Brown, meanwhile, states that his copy, which was delivered to him
from Germany, was unbound, the leaves of which were held in an envelope
made from a medieval choir book.44 “[W]ritten on parchment in a hand of
the seventeenth century[,]”45 this manuscript comprised both the Arabic and
Latin texts. He then goes on to say that:

Here and there, amid the strange characters of an unknown tongue, are designs of a
curious kind; parallelograms enclosed in bounding lines of red, and containing erratic
figures also in red, that show luridly against the black background with which the
outlines are filled. The Latin version explains that these are the signs of the demons
whom the accompanying spells have power to summon or dismiss.46

Although it would be disingenuous to claim that the pamphleteer worked

directly from the Gessert manuscript—or, indeed, that the Gessert was a deri-
vation of the Brown—the red/black color scheme and inclusion of the raven
woodcut suggest that some influences were indeed taken from the “1255”
branch of the corpus.
Judging by the otherwise intrusive legend Fig. Magistri (“the figure of the
master”) at the top of page three (i.e. the beginning on the experiment), it
would seem that the frontispiece illustration is indeed contemporary with the
design of the pamphlet (Figure 2), despite depicting an image of a woman
rather than, as might be expected, the male practitioner. However, this dis-
parity is not as incongruous as it may at first appear. Taking into account
that Mercury and Venus were the planets most closely associated with the
Compendium’s ritual process, there is a possibility that the typesetter mistook
the personification of Venus, holding a flaming sword and key in her left and
right hands, for the magister. While it is difficult to trace an ultimate source
for the frontispiece, there are definite iconographic similarities to the figures
of Venus included in emblem books, a genre of allegorical images/descrip-
tions popularized in Renaissance Europe following the publication of Andrea

43. “Die zwischen den Text geschalteten kabbalistischen Siegel und Charaktere
sind in Zinnober auf schwarzem Tuschgrund sauber ausgeführt und alle Blätter mit
rothen Leisten gerändert,” Gessert, “Ein Höllenzwang,” 66.
44. Brown, Michael Scot, 190–92.
45. By contrast, the appendix notes that the manuscript was written by a
sixteenth- or seventeenth-century hand. See Brown, Michael Scot, 270.
46. Brown, Michael Scot, 191.

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 359

Alciato’s Emblematum libellus in 1531.47 Guillaume La Perrière’s Le theatre des

bons engins (Paris, 1544), for instance, depicts a similarly wild-haired, bare-
breasted Venus facing the reader and holding a key in her right hand (emblem
XVIII).48
Although no such image is included in Rylands 105, similar representa-
tions of Venus can be found in other versions of the text. An entry in the
Handschriften-Katalog der Königlichen Universitäts-Bibliothek zu Erlangen (1829)
includes an ambiguous reference to “a fairly new copy” (ziemlich neue Absch-
rift) of the Compendium (c. 1750–1800?).49 This manuscript, which has a fic-
titious composition date of February 12, 1255 and contains both the “Kufic”
and Latin texts, included a separate leaf on which a “female figure” (wiebliche
Figur) is depicted holding a flaming sword.50 Wellcome MS 3129 (c. 1800), a
vernacular German Compendium text attributed to Johannes Kornreuther, also
includes a hand-drawn image of a figure on the inside cover; however, this
seems to be an unambiguous representation of the male magician. Whatever
its origins and however it was adapted over time, the frontispiece image was
a prominent (if uncommon) feature of the Compendium’s visual lexicon.
Keys are a commonly used motif in ceremonial magic, symbolizing the
revelation of hidden knowledge. The Clavicula Salomonis (“Key of Solo-
mon”) and the popular magical compilation the Lemegeton clavicula Salomonis
(“Lesser Key of Solomon”) make pointed reference to the key’s metaphysical
resonance.51 This, indeed, may have informed the printer’s specific choice of
a Venus emblem. The meaning of the flaming sword is more difficult to

47. For an overview of the history and function of emblem books, see Alain
Boureau, “Books of Emblems on the Public Stage: Côté Jardin and Côté Cour” in
The Culture of Print: Power and the Use of Print in Early Modern Europe, ed. Roger
Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989),
261–89.
48. Guillaume La Perrière, Le theatre des bons engins (Paris, 1544), emblem XVIII.
The epigram attached to the image notes that women should ideally remain in the
domestic realm, with the key symbolising their stewardship over the household (“La
clef en main, denote qu’avoir soing/ Doibt sur les biens du mary, par prudence”).
49. Johann Conrad Irmischer, Diplomatische Beschreibung der Manuscripte, welch sich
in der König universität-bibliothek zu Erlangen befinden, vol. 1, no. 55 (Erlangen: Palm
and Enke, 1829), 215.
50. “Eine Kabbala in eine Abart von kufischer Schrift, mit lateinischer Auslegung
des Michael Scotus [. . .]. Voran ist auf einem besondern Blatte eine weibliche Figur
mit einen Flammschwerdte gezeichnet.”
51. The Lemegeton usually comprises five key texts: the Goetia, Theurgia Goetia,
Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel and Ars Notoria. See Joseph H. Peterson, The Lesser Key of
Solomon: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (Newburyport: Weister, 2001).

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360 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

fathom. A possible explanation can be found in Claude Paradin’s near-

contemporary Devises Héroı̈ques (1551 [expanded ed. 1557]), a handbook of
aristocratic emblems that circulated widely in western and central Europe.
Among the designs included in the catalogue, Paradin records that a flaming
sword was used as a device by Cardinal Charles de Bourbon (d. 1590). Under
the motto Autor Ego Audendi (“I am the Author of Being Bold”) the follow-
ing interpretation is given:

L’espee versatile & flamboyante, que portoit en Devise Charles Cardinal de Bourbon, sous le
titre de saint Martin, representoit le vray Glaive des Prelats de l’Eglise, & Glaive de l’Esprit,
(selon saint Paul) qui est la parole de Dieu

(This flaming sword, which was borne as a device by Cardinal Charles de Bourbon,
under the title of Saint Martin, represents the true sword of the Prelates of the
Church, and the Sword of the Holy Spirit, which according to Saint Paul, is the
Word of God.)52

The reference to Saint Paul is taken from Ephesians 6:17: et galeam salutis
adsumite et gladium Spiritus quod est verbum Dei (“Take the helmet of salvation
and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”).53 Based, then, on
biblical precedents, there existed a common cultural code in which the image
of the flaming sword symbolized the divine authority of God. For necroman-
cers, who believed that their ability to control demons resulted from their
ritual and spiritual purity, it was an appropriate device to adopt.54 Taken
together, the key and the flaming sword, wielded by the emblem of Venus
(or, indeed, the magister), provide a useful visual shorthand for the belief that
fidelity to God and the ritual process is needed to attain hidden knowledge.

TITLE PAG E
From the outset, it is important to note that the name of the printer and place
of publication have been purposefully omitted from the title page (Figure 3).
Obscuring the true origins of a magical text was a common practice in gri-
moire production.55 As noted in my previous discussions of Rylands 105, the

52. Claude Paradin, Devises Héroı̈ques (Lyon, 1557), 55.

53. For an exegesis of this passage, see Robert A. Wild, “The Warrior and the
Prisoner: Some Reflections on Ephesians 6:10–20,” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 46
(1984): 284–98.
54. Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 168.
55. Sabine Doering-Manteuffel, “The Dissemination of Magical Knowledge in
Enlightenment Germany: The Supernatural and the Development of Print Culture”

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 361

pseudo-Arabic prefix Ahnuchabola, Absegalim, Alkakib, Albaon can be translit-

erated into Arithmetic (Al-Muqabala), Geometry (Al-Aqalim), Astronomy (Al-
Kawakib), Rhetoric (Al-Bayan), further highlighting—in an almost ironic
fashion—the mathematical basis of divinatory magic.56 The use of “Ahnucha-
bola” rather than “Almuchabola” seems to be the result of a typesetting error
and/or a misreading of the source text. A close examination of the full Latin
title reveals further idiosyncrasies. Not only has nigræ (“black”) been bow-
dlerized into Veræ (“real”), but the subtitles Liber spirituum potentissimorum and
Tizi Arbatel suggest a definite link to the “Herpentil” series of texts and,
indeed, provide further clues that the professed publication date of 1540 was
an intentional obfuscation.
Liber spirituum potentissimorum (“Book of the Most Powerful Spirits”) is the
title given to the handwritten HAAB copy of a text attributed to J. G. Her-
pentil. Transcribed at the turn of the eighteenth century, it is the first experi-
ment in a miscellany that also includes two works attributed to Faust, the
Höllenzwang (“Coercing of Hell”) and Schwartzer Mohren-Stein (“The Black
Moor-Stone”). Aside from changing the name of the supposed author, fur-
ther differences that set it apart from the Scot corpus include the complete
redaction of the Arabic paratextual data. Not only has the copier omitted the
Almuchabola prefix from the title, but the pseudo-Arabic symbols on the
magic circle and wand have been replaced by kabbalic names for God and
the phrase Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judeorum respectively.57 As noted above, the
experiment itself roughly corresponds to the Scot text, save for alterations to
the demonic names, sigil designs, and the number of demons to be conjured
(see Figure 6). Although the HAAB F8476 experiment does not contain a
preface or a full title page, this does not mean its source text circulated with-
out one. The incomplete vernacular transcription made by Georg Conrad
Horst from a print (Druckschrift) found in the archives of Arnsburg Abbey in
Hesse, central Germany, c. 1782, includes a lengthy introduction by “Her-
pentil,” a Jesuit priest who claims to have translated the original Arabic text
into Latin.58 Of course, given that the print was ostensibly published in Salz-
burg 1505 and the Society of Jesus was only founded in 1540, the attribution

in Beyond the Witch Trails: Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe, eds. Owen
Davies and Williem de Blécourt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004),
195.
56. Gordon, “Michael Scot,” 85–86.
57. Clockwise from the top, the names of God included in the circle include
Elohim, Adonay, El Zeboath, Agla, Jehova, Alpha, Omega, On.
58. Horst, Zauber-Bibliothek, 1, 160.

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362 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

is almost certainly spurious, intended to stress—most likely from a Protestant

perspective—the otherness of Catholic mysticism.59 And yet, the full title
page as recorded by Horst illustrates the close intertextual connections that
exist between the Prague Pamphlet, the Herpentil recensions, and the main
Scot corpus:

Horst text
Des hochwürdigen Herpentilis, der Gesellschaft Jesu Priesters,
kurzer Begriff der übernatürlichen schwartzen Magie,
enthaltendt Beschwörungen und Namen der mächtigsten Geister und deren Siggeln,
oder das Buch der stärksten Geister,
eröffnendt die großen Heimlichkeiten aller Heimlichkeiten.
Salzburg in Jahr 1505

(The venerable Jesuit Herpentil

a compendium of unnatural black magic
Containing incantations and names of the most powerful spirits and their sigils
or the book of the strongest spirits
opening up the great secrets of secrets
Salzburg, in the year 1505.)

Certain inferences can now be made: 1) Horst’s hypothetical print also

circulated under the name “Compendium of Unnatural Black Magic”;60 2) its
title page contained a derivation of the traditional Scot subheading Continens
Citaciones et Vincula Diversorum Spirituum (Containing Invocations and Bind-
ings for Diverse Spirits; 3) the HAAB F8476 title Liber spirituum poten-
tissimorum (Book of most powerful spirits) was included as an additional
subheading, much like in the Prague Pamphlet. Interestingly, the cryptic
statement about “opening up the secret of secrets” can also be discerned in
the title page of the pamphlet (Arcana Arcanorum).61 In any case, the abridge-
ments made to HAAB F8476 when compared to the Horst transcription

59. Davies, Grimoires, 53.

60. A supposition confirmed by the presence of two uncatalogued Herpentil com-
pendium magiae innaturalis prints in the archives of the Universitäts- und Landesbiblio-
thek, Darmstadt. See Kristeller, Alia itinera, 512–13.
61. Horst, Zauber-Bibliothek, 1, 162. Deriving from the pseudo-Aristotelian mysti-
cal treatise Secretum Secretorum (c. 1100), “secret of secrets” (and variations thereof )
was a commonly used phrase in early modern magical title pages. See Bellingradt and
Otto, Magical Manuscripts, 9–10.

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 363

confirm that printed magic books were sometimes used as models for hand-
written texts.62
The Prague Pamphlet’s remaining subtitle, Tizi Arbatel, is another point of
contention, obscuring its origins still further. The Arbatel de magia veterum
(“Arbatel: Concerning the Magic of the Ancients”) is a treatise on angel
magic (theurgy) written by an anonymous Protestant author and first pub-
lished in Basel in 1575.63 It gained prominence after being included as an
addendum to the English version of pseudo-Agrippa’s Fourth Book of Occult
Theology in 1655.64 Either the Prague Pamphlet contains the earliest attested
use of the word “Arbatel” in the Western magical tradition or, as indicated
above, the publication date of 1540 is an intentional fictionalization. If the
latter, then a terminus post quem of 1575 can tentatively be established. Ulti-
mately, it seems the pamphleteer had access to more than one text from the
Compendium corpus, perhaps a “1255” Scot manuscript and a rare Herpentil
print, and was suitably aware of the Arbatel’s resonance as a magical text to
make an intertextual connection on the title page.

MARGINALIA
Marginal annotations can provide a wealth of information with regard to
how necromantic handbooks were understood, handled, and read. Illicit texts
were not merely objects of curation, but palimpsests detailing many years—or
generations—of use. Magical miscellanies such as the Thesaurus spirituum are
notoriously fluid in this regard, filled with spells, charms, and incantations in
many different hands and languages.65 Written in a faint Kurrent script, the
annotations in the Prague Pamphlet may not be as numerous as those found
in longer, handwritten manuscripts, but they provide indications that some-
one, not necessarily well-versed in Latin, was making great efforts to interro-
gate the meaning of the text. Known colloquially as “Old German Script”
(alte deutsche Schrift), Kurrent was a form of Gothic cursive that emerged in
the early sixteenth century and was used predominantly in German-speaking
countries until it was suppressed by the Nazi authorities in 1941. Although
the small sample size makes it difficult to say for certain, the annotations

62. Stephen Bachter, “The Dissemination of Magical Knowledge in Enlighten-

ment Germany: Grimoires and the Transmission of Magical Knowledge” in Beyond
the Witch Trails: Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe, 199; Davies, “Gri-
moires,” 606.
63. Davies, Grimoires, 52–53.
64. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, His Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, trans. Robert
Turner (London, 1655), 169–206.
65. Klaassen, “Unstable Texts,” 219.

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364 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

Figure 9. Annotations referring to formation and dismissal of the four minor

spirits (left) and the diagram of the magic circle (right), Prague Pamphlet (Courtesy
of Dorotheum Prague), pp. 13–14.

appear to have been written in an eighteenth-century hand and, as such, are

not contemporaneous with the pamphlet’s publication.66 Pages eight and nine
detail the mystical words for invoking Almuchabzar and include the abbrevi-
ation btn (bitten, meaning “ask” or “request”) next to the subheadings Citatio
Prima, Citatio Secunda, and Citatio Tertia (meaning first, second, and third
invocations). Also on page nine, the subheading Institutio vel Co[n]stantia
Almuchabzar has been underlined and glossed with the word stellung, meaning
status or position. Something similar can be discerned on page ten, with
Valedictio being underlined and glossed as entlassung (“dismissal”). Finally, on
page thirteen (Figure 9), Institutio vel Constantia and Valedictio have been
underlined and glossed as stellung and entlassung respectively.
The act of translation betrays more than just a passive acceptance of the
experiment’s contents. Here, it can be suggested that the annotator, a later
owner, was not especially fluent in Latin, hence the need to gloss the instruc-
tions pertaining to the text’s oral performance.67 Knowing at a glance which

66. For a comparative chart of historical Kurrent script, see Karl Faulmann, Illus-
trirte Geschichte der Schrift (Vienna, 1880), 581–82.
67. Frank Klaassen, “Learning and Masculinity in Manuscripts of Ritual Magic of
the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 38 (2007):
49–76.

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 365

invocations were used for requesting the demon to appear, positioning the
demon, and giving it license to depart, was vital for ensuring the success of
the ritual. Either the owner was taking a purely antiquarian interest in the
booklet—a learned detachment from the practice of necromancy itself—or
else the vernacular translations were indeed used to aid the act of conjuration.
The increasing taste for ritual magic among the laity of eighteenth-century
Europe, especially in learned scholarly networks,68 lends credence to the the-
ory that, at one point in its textual history, the pamphlet was being used by a
non-Latinate (but otherwise clerically imitative) practitioner.69

CONCLUSION

The aim of this article has been to provide a brief sketch of the contents and
codicology of a previously unstudied pamphlet copy of the Compendium mag-
iae innaturalis nigrae. Scholars have long recognized that Scot-Herpentil-
Kornreuther handbooks are extremely rare and elusive.70 Modern magical
historians have made only slight incursions into this vague, complicated, but
still remarkably “closed” series of texts. Unlike other such grimoires pro-
duced in the early modern German-speaking world, the Compendium tradi-
tion seems to have been mostly resistant to the “unit construction system” of
textual production, whereby different incantations, sigils, demon names, and
attributions were fused together to create idiosyncratic and wholly individu-
alized spell books.71 Even if the elaborations of the Libellus Veneris nigro sacer
do indeed betray the inherent fluidity of grimoire construction and the cre-
ative use of the Compendium’s ritual structure, the contents of the three main
strands of the Scot corpus were, on the whole, diachronically and synchroni-
cally stable.72 It is telling that the Compendium’s principal demon, Almu-
chabzar, does not find mention in the more widely disseminated Faustian
grimoires such as the Höllenzwang or Geister-Commando. If, as speculated
above, the Compendium urtext originated in a textual community that had

68. By the turn of the eighteenth century, books of magic had become highly
desired objects for the German intellectual elite, particularly amongst physicians inter-
ested in non-empirical healing practices. For a further explication of this argument,
see Bellingradt and Otto, Magical Manuscripts, 35–36.
69. For a full overview of the proliferation of the use and collection of magical
manuscripts in the eighteenth century, see Doering-Manteuffel, “The Dissemination
of Magical Knowledge in Enlightenment Germany,” 187–93.
70. Horst, Zauber-Bibliothek, 1, 159; Gessert, “Ein Höllenzwang,” 67.
71. Doering-Manteuffel, “The Dissemination of Magical Knowledge in Enlight-
enment Germany,” 188; Klaassen, Transformations of Magic, 89–115.
72. Bachter, “Grimoires and the Transmission of Magical Knowledge,” 194–95.

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366 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

knowledge of the work of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, this may explain

the influence of the De occulta philosophia libri tres in the description of the
suffumigations, the astrological precision of the instructions, and the use of
the same obscure characters for Mercury and Venus in the scapular design
(Figure 5). The coherent nature of the text in Rylands 105—its textual and
paratextual logic—speaks to the depth of the urtext author’s immersion in
the traditions of renaissance magic. Likewise, the wry appropriation of Arabic
mathematical terminologies for the authoritative “Islamic” prefix and the
name Almuchabzar, combined with the choice of Michael Scot as a pseud-
onym, is a testament to the author’s awareness, however superficial, of the
ambiguous relationship between divination, mathematica, and necromancy.
The creator of the Prague Pamphlet belonged to a different socio-cultural
network entirely. Originating, perhaps, from a Herpentil print and a “1255”
manuscript from the Scot corpus, the experiment was shorn of all elaboration
and pretense, distilled down to its most practical elements in an error-ridden
and not particularly intelligible Latin.73 Magicians not inducted into the rar-
efied environs of scholarly Neoplatonism cared little for the pseudo-Arabic
paratexts, the subservience to astrological theory, or the intricate spells one
had to recite to compel the demons to appear. Neither was there a willingness
to conjure more demons than was strictly necessary. Almuchabzar and the
four minor spirits would suffice (Figure 6). And yet the inclusion of a refer-
ence to the Arbatel de magia veterum on the title page certainly increases uncer-
tainty about the date of publication. The Arbatel’s contemporary fame may
have invited an association between the two texts, offering further reassur-
ances to the client as to the efficacy of the spells contained within. Along
with the emblem-derived image of Venus, this is an oblique confirmation
that the printer had ready access to works other than the Compendium corpus
and was aware of a wide array of occult texts. If the Arbatel does indeed date
to 1575 and there were no manuscript copies in circulation in the 1540s,
then the true date of the Compendium pamphlet’s composition has been
intentionally obscured. This, as indicated above, was a common practice in
Germanic grimoire production. The date, location, and authorship of books
of black magic cannot be taken at face value. Even accounting for the fact
that the experiment itself was structurally “stable,” paratextual fluidity charac-
terizes the pseudo-Scot corpus just as much as internal scribal idiosyncrasies
inhibit any real attempts to trace direct filial relationships between specific
texts (for a tentative attempt, see Appendices A and B).

73. Davies, Grimoires, 56–57.

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 367

Although this article has raised more questions than it has answered, certain
conclusions can nonetheless be drawn: the Prague Pamphlet was published
no earlier than the late sixteenth century; the printer worked from a multi-
tude of source texts; the presence of marginal translations confirms that it
was used, i.e., interrogated for knowledge rather than simply curated. As an
economic venture, the distillation of the unwieldy core text into a brisk
twenty-four-page booklet involved little material outlay but had the potential
to generate considerable profit. Ultimately, the pamphlet can be read as a
prime example of the reinvention of necromantic experiments to suit the
needs of new practitioners at a time when ceremonial magic ceased being the
purview of the academic or cloistered elite. The inherent flexibility of
the urtext experiment—which specified only that the demon would do any-
thing that was required of it—meant that it could be used for a diverse range
of purposes, from the discovery of buried treasure to the divination of future
events. Whatever the aims of the printer or the intentions of the owner/
client, one thing is clear: the mystical authority of Michael Scot still carried
considerable resonance.

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368 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

APPENDIX A

The following diagram explores the tentative relationship between the magic
texts discussed in this paper. The main Scot branch of the corpus has been
outlined in bold, the Herpentil recensions have been italicised, while those
bearing the name of Kornreuther, including the divergent Magia ordinis tradi-
tion, have been underlined. The solid lines refer to clear (but not definitive)
intertextual connections, the dashed lines to slightly more oblique influences.
Brief explications of the texts are included as Appendix B.

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 369

APPENDIX B

Shorthand
Designation or
Printed or Archived Shelfmark Date Details

N/A Urtext (U) After The hypothetical original copy of the

1533 Compendium magiae innaturalis nigrae. Highly
influenced by the 1533 publication of
Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia Libri tres.

Manuscript in the John Rylands 105 (R) c.1530s– The manuscript is written in an ornate
Rylands Library, 1540s? sixteenth-century hand in red, green, black,
Manchester, UK. and gold ink. It is forty pages long,
comprising the “Arabic” experiment
(pp.1–16) and Michael Scot’s Latin preface
and translation supposedly completed in
1261 (pp.17–40). To highlight the
experiment’s ostensible Islamic origins, the
manuscript reads from right to left. Its recent
provenance cannot be traced back further
than the March 1859 London sales
catalogue of the bibliophile (and notorious
book thief ) Guglielmo Libri.

Printed in Rev. J. Brown (B) c.1550– Brown includes a transcription of a “1255”

Wood Brown, An 1600? Compendium text in the appendix to his
Enquiry into the Life and biography of Michael Scot. He notes that
Legend of Michael Scot the manuscript came to him in loose leaves
(Edinburgh: Douglas, (sixteen quarto pages) from Germany, and
1897): 270–74. was written in a sixteenth- or seventeenth-
century hand in red, green, and black ink.
In a similar manner to Rylands 105, it was
divided into separate “Arabic” and Latin
texts. Its unbound state suggests, perhaps, an
attempt by a later reader to rectify the issues
of reading from right to left.

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370 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

Shorthand
Designation or
Printed or Archived Shelfmark Date Details

Printed in M. A. Gessert (G) c.1600? Gessert’s transcription of a “1255”

Gessert, ‘Ein Compendium text is somewhat muddled. He
Höllenzwang von inserts the sigils and citationes for the four
1555,’ Serapeum 5 “minor” spirits before the author preface.
(1844): 65–76. The missing magic circle diagram further
suggests that the source manuscript was
misbound. According to Gessert, it was
thirty pages long and written in a highly
calligraphic hand in red, green, and black
ink. It did not contain the “Arabic” text.
The diagrams of ritual paraphernalia are
instead incorporated into the main body of
the Latin text.

Printed in Georg Horst ‘1505’ c.1600s Horst’s German transcription of what I

Conrad Horst, Zauber- Herpentil print believe to be the urtext for the Herpentil
Bibliothek, 2 vols. (Ho) recension is, curiously, split across the two
(Mainz: Kupferberg, volumes of the Zauber-Biblithek. This text
1821), vol. 1, 162–75; can be read as the first major evolution of
vol. 2: 103–7. the Scot experiment, the author having
dispensed with the overt Arabic paratexts,
changed the pseudo-authorship, and created
a new set of demonic names and sigils
(perhaps as a necessary function of its
transition into print). The paraphernalia and
sigils are included in the main body of the
text.

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 371

Shorthand
Designation or
Printed or Archived Shelfmark Date Details

Manuscript in the HAAB F8476 c.1700 A handwritten Latin Herpentil text from an
Herzogin Anna Amalia (Ha) early-eighteenth-century magical
Bibliothek, Weimar, miscellany that also includes two works
Germany. attributed to Faust. Thirteen pages in
length, the experiment contains neither a
title page nor an author preface. A
comparison with Rylands 105 shows that
the instructions and invocations are almost
identical to that of the Scot corpus. The
paraphernalia and sigils are included in the
main body of the text.

Printed pamphlet sold Prague After A distilled Scot print that seems to have
at a private auction in Pamphlet (P) 1575 been influenced by a variety of magical
Prague, Czech handbooks, including Horst’s unabridged
Republic. Herpetil print and a “1255” Scot text in the
Gessert/Brown mould. The paraphernalia
and sigils are included at the very end of the
booklet.

Description of Erlangen (E) c.1750– Irmischer calls this “1255” Compendium

manuscript in Johann 1800 manuscript a “fairly new copy.” Thirty-six
Conrad Irmischer, pages in length, it is said to contain both the
Diplomatische Arabic and Latin texts as well as an image of
Beschreibung der a woman holding a flaming sword. Its exact
Manuscripte, welch sich in relationship to the Prague Pamphlet’s
der König universität- frontispiece image is still open to debate.
bibliothek zu Erlangen Irmischer does not specify whether the
befinden, vol. 1 manuscript was read from right to left.
(Erlangen: Palm and
Enke, 1829), 215.

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372 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

Shorthand
Designation or
Printed or Archived Shelfmark Date Details

Printed in Sammlung der Hammer (Hm) 1725 Included in a large, anonymously-edited

grössten Geheimnisse volume of twenty-three magical texts, this
ausserordentlicher transcription of the Compendium again
Menschen in alter Zeit dispenses with the “Arabic” experiment and
(Köln: Peter Hammer, integrates the paraphernalia and sigils into
1725): 351–65. the main body of the Latin text.

Manuscript in the Wellcome MS c.1800 This vernacular German copy of the

Wellcome Collection 3129 (W) Compendium was transcribed in the early
Library, London, UK. nineteenth century and ascribed to Johannes
Kornreuther, a name usually attached to the
Magia ordinis (see below). The inside cover
bears an ink drawing of the magician.

Manuscript in the Magia ordinis c.1748 The Magia ordinis is a divergent textual
Universitätsbibliothek, (Mo) tradition that even so retains strong links to
Augsburg, Germany. the Compendium. It has the same basic
Other copies of this structure as the main Scot-Herpentil
version exist elsewhere. experiment, but the text, paratexts, and
visual schemas have been almost completely
revised. The version archived in Augsburg
(Cod.II.2.8.2, c.1750) is written in red and
black ink in a self-consciously Gothic script.

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 373

APPENDIX C
The following is a transcription and translation of the Prague Pamphlet. Some
of the most egregious typesetting errors have been emended, with reference
to the Rylands text, in brackets, with the original spelling included in the
footnotes. I have retained the grammatical idiosyncrasies of the Latin as much
as possible in order to acknowledge that it was produced for non-learned
consumption (and likely by a non-Latin speaker). The idiosyncrasies in the
punctuation have also been retained. To help with referencing I have also
included the original paginations in brackets.

ANHUCHABOLA, ABSEGALIM ALKAKIB, ALBAON.

Id est
COMPENDIUM MAGIÆ INNATURALIS VERÆ
LI[..]BER SPIRITUUM POTENTISSIMORUM
TIZI ARBATEL

Magia o[c]culta (Arcana Arcanorum) recta [..]ra Instructio & Interpretatio pro Disci-
pu[lis] vel Amatoribus Artis Magicæ. pro iis scilicet, ad quo[rum]74 manus post obitum
meum Libellus iste fort[uit]o75, aliquando [per]venturus76 est. M. D. xxxx

[i] Prologus vel Præfatio

Parvi licet Compendii Libellus iste sit, magni tamen momenti eundem experieris,
nam scias velim, Curiose Lector. Opus hoc in Arabica Linqua conscriptum esse, cujus
ego per multos quidem annos Possessor, virtu[t]is77 tamen ejusdem ob Linquæ insci-
entiam semper ignarus permanseram, donec tandem auxilio Judæorum (cujusdam
Rabbi) extraneam hanc linquam quam optime callentis perfecta ab eodem interpretat-
ione ad genuinum verborum sensum rerumque contentarum notitiam pervenissem.
Reliqua opus ipsum [ii] (quod fidelissime interpretatum habebis) te satis docebit:
unde ultimatim te o[b]servare78 moneo, atq[ue] ad- hortor ut Librum istum quam
optime custodias, ne forte in manus curiose Juventutis, vel ignora[nti]um79 homi-
n[u]m incidat. Vale! Michael Scotus. Pragæ in Bohöemie

[iii] Fig. Magistri

74. quod
75. fortitudo
76. venturus
77. virtudis
78. opservare
79. ignoratum

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374 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

Primo formetur Magister Circulum membrana virginea, in horas Planetarum Merc. &
Ven. & scribe cum sanguine columbæ verba sequentia ut fig. pag. xiiii videndum est.

Secundo scinde baculum de corylo qui habet in altitudine tres pedes, & scribe cum
sanguine columbæ hæc verba, ut fig. pag. xv videndum

[iv] Tertio debet Magister de membrana Virginea scutum pectoris facere & tale in
pectus ejus affigere, cum sanguine columbæ hæc signa formare, ut fig. pag. xxi mons-
trat.

Quarto debet Magister tunicam induere, qui pendet usque ad calceos, & talem opera-
tione induere, & hypnocaustum perfume sequentibus: Semen apii, nigrum cuminum,
Croccum

[v] Quinto debet Magister coronam membrana virginea fabricata in caput habere, &
sanguine columbæ signa in illo formare, ut fig. pag. xvii videndum.

Sexto debet Magister illum Spiritum qui vult citare, characterem suum sanguine
corvi, membrana virginea formare, & si operatio incipit, in baculum affigere, & ante
circulum ponere, ut fig. pag. xviii monstrat.

[vi] Si Magister omnia, bene facit intret in tentamen qui jacet adversus orientem ut
vero eum nemo sciat, videat vel audiat & [ponat se]80 in suum circulum & faciat tria
lumina in Mensam accipiat baculum suum, in manus ejus, incipiat citationem in hora
media nocte, quem cunque Spiritum ille cupit, esto vero animo forte si descendit ejus
vita facta est nam Tonitrua & Fulgura [audientur]81 & meminit, incidat Cöelum &
Terra, si vero hoc ante positum est apparebit ille Spiritus & eum alloqui, cur vocavit &
quid sit petitum ejus tunc respondebit illi & desiderium suum accipere, vult [vii]
Spiritus non o[b]edientiam82 dare, accipit baculum suum & [v]erberat caracterem83
suum & facit eum stare sequentibus verbis ut pag. ix videndum est.

Si Spiritus Magistro promissit petitum ejus in omnibus implendum, debet Spiritus in

baculo jurare, & remitte eum sequentibus verbis ut pag. x legendum est.

[viii] Citatio Principis Almuchabzar

80. ponatse
81. audeuntur
82. odedientiam
83. ferberat

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 375

Citatio Prima

Alip. hecon Alget Almetubele Segir Karapatta Merantantup Amias hally Actetena
horet horet Kylim ô Almuchabzar

Citatio Secunda

Redeki Thetaska wohet Rekidew humomeck nesergi niguel semene chilidum horet
horet kylim ô Almuchabzar

[ix] Citatio Tertia

Lahak Lawedy Mekutow chili Metow renei, metrahi liele saonta larewi milahak
Kumetow, horet horet Kylim ô Almuchabzar

Institutio vel Co[n]stantia84 Almuchabzar.

Sansahoe etoys limki, hirikka sano Amias actemoe Kramen.

[x] Valedictio Almuchabzar

Hioli. Inee Lehabelo Iohoga Thalhonga nevagomi sebagal Almuchabzar

Spiritus Jalhabari

[xi] Citatio Jalhabari

Helip. lihall Zarath jamay Zebette sabesan mesene kilites mesetha chilibee ô Jalhabari.

Spirit[us]. Suhub

Citatio Suhub.

Mikekal. milabee limki edoô, rapatka milimki sazurka lalimee hirigak ô Suhub.

[xii] Spirit[us]. Phuliphka

Citatio Phuliphka.

84. Coustantia

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376 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

Likigee segil reve mirisee, kälaka melmetha wehaloò balaon rihik sevat gelet Taran-
metup ô Phuliphka

Spirit[us]. Aghirikka

Citatio Aghirikka

Latebin sano Zelohabe ranethi loatte ēzeboe hetoys zozionoso daoma etebee ô Aghir-
ikka

[xiii] Institutio vel Constantia Spirituum

Heliel. gileki mesene sekilee relaki calihi Azurka Kiredew.

Valdedicto Spirituum

Hakal Waledy Kutow meloty Casazur hilla Karatta gelet labire metrahaz

[xiiii] Figura Circuli

[xv] Fig. Baculi

[xvi] Fig. Scapularis
[xvii] Fig. Coronæ
[xviii] Sigillum Principis Almuchabzar
[xix] Sigillum Jalhabari
[xx] Sigillum Suhub
[xxi] Sigillum Puliphka
[xxii] Aghirikka
[xxiii] Corvi nigerrimi

[xxiiii] Quid quid agis prudenter agas, & respice Finem.

Translation

ANHUCHABOLA, ABSEGALIM ALKAKIB, ALBAON.

i.e.
COMPENDIUM OF REAL UNNATURAL MAGIC
BOOK OF THE MOST POWERFUL SPIRITS
TIZI ARBATEL

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 377

Hidden magic (Arcana Arcanorum): a right and [true] Instruction and Interpretation
for Disciples or Lovers of the Magic Art, namely for those into whose hands this
Booklet shall arrive by chance at some point after my death.

[i] Prologue or Preface

Even though this Booklet may be of small Compass, yet you will experience it as
being of great importance; for you should know, Curious Reader, that this Work, of
which I was indeed Possessor for many years, was written in the Arabic Tongue, yet
I always remained ignorant of its power on account of my lack of knowledge of the
language, until at length, with assistance from a certain Rabbi of the Jews, I came to
a genuine sense of the words and knowledge of the contents of its doings, once an
interpretation to the best of his skill in this outlandish tongue had been completed by
him. The work itself [ii] (which you will have most faithfully interpreted) will teach
you enough of the rest. Whence I warn and exhort you finally to make sure that you
guard this Book as well as you can so that it does not fall into the hands of curious
youth or ignorant men. Farewell! Michael Scot, Prague in Bohemia.

[iii] Figure of the Master

First, let the Master Circle be formed on virgin parchment in the hours of the Planets
Mercury and Venus and write with dove’s blood the following words as should be
seen in the figure on page xiii.

Second, cut a wand of hazel that is three feet in length and write with dove’s blood
the words as should be seen in the figure on page xv.

[iv] Third, the Master should make a breastplate from the virgin parchment and fix
it to his chest, and form the signs with dove’s blood as the figure on page xxi shows.

Fourth, the Master should put on a tunic that hangs all the way to the shoes, and put
it on suffumigated with the following kinds of perfume: celery seed, black cumin,
saffron.

[v] Fifth, the Master should have a crown made of virgin parchment on his head and
form signs in dove’s blood on it as should be seen in the figure on page xvii.

Sixth, the Master should invoke the Spirit he wants, form his character in crow’s
blood on virgin parchment, and as the operation begins fix it onto [a separate] wand
and place it before the circle as the figure on page xviii shows.

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378 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

[vi] If the Master does all things well let him enter into the experiment facing
eastward so that no one knows, sees or hears him, and let him put himself into his
circle and set three lights on the Table and take his wand into his hand; let him begin
the invocation in the hour of midnight for whatever Spirit he wants; but be of good
courage if he descends, for Thunder and Lightning will be heard, [as when] his life
was made, and he becomes mindful that Heaven and Earth may fall; but if this [the
experiment] has been set out [as described] before, the spirit will appear; and [the
Master] should tell him why he called and what his request is; then he will respond
to [the Master] and accept his desire. [vii] [If] The Spirit does not want to offer
obedience, let [the Master] take his wand and beat his character and make him stay
with the following words as should be seen on page ix.

If the Spirit promises the Master that the request will be fulfilled in every respect, the
Spirit ought to swear on his wand and you should dismiss him with the words you
can read on page x.

[viii] Invocation of Prince Almuchabzar

First Invocation

Alip. hecon Alget Almetubele Segir Karapatta Merantantup Amias hally Actetena listen listen
Kylim ô Almuchabzar

Second Invocation

Redeki Thetaska wohet Rekidew humomeck nesergi niguel semene chilidum listen listen kylim
ô Almuchabzar

[ix] Third Invocation

Lahak Lawedy Mekutow chili Metow renei, metrahi liele saonta larewi milahak Kumetow,
listen listen Kylim ô Almuchabzar

Positioning or Stability of Almuchabzar.

Sansahoe etoys limki, hirikka sano Amias actemoe Kramen.

[x] Farewell to Almuchabzar

Hioli. Inee Lehabelo Iohoga Thalhonga nevagomi sebagal Almuchabzar

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 Gordon  Necromancy for the Masses? 379

The Spirit Jalhabari

[xi] Invocation of Jalhabari

Helip. lihall Zarath jamay Zebette sabesan mesene kilites mesetha chilibee ô Jalhabari.

The Spirit Suhub

Invocation of Suhub.

Mikekal. milabee limki edoô, rapatka milimki sazurka lalimee hirigak ô Suhub.

[xii] The Spirit Phuliphka

Invocation of Phuliphka.

Likigee segil reve mirisee, kälaka melmetha wehaloò balaon rihik sevat gelet Taranmetup ô
Phuliphka

The Spirit Aghirikka

Invocation of Aghirikka

Latebin sano Zelohabe ranethi loatte ēzeboe hetoys zozionoso daoma etebee ô Aghirikka

[xiii] Positioning or Stability of the Spirits

Heliel. gileki mesene sekilee relaki calihi Azurka Kiredew.

Farewell to the Spirits

Hakal Waledy Kutow meloty Casazur hilla Karatta gelet labire metrahaz

[xiiii] Figure of the Circle

[xv] Figure of the Wand
[xvi] Figure of the Scapular
[xvii] Figure of the Crown
[xviii] Seal of Prince Almuchabzar
[xix] Seal of Jalhabari

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380 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2018

[xx] Seal of Suhub

[xxi] Seal of Puliphka
[xxii] Seal of Aghirikka
[xxiii] A very black crow

[xxiiii] Whatever you do, do it wisely, and be mindful of the End.

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