Archive for January, 2010

The Enochian Manuscripts

BY: Mark

The Magickal Review has put up digital copies of Dr. John Dee’s original journals. During the 16th century, Dr. Dee and his scryer, Edward Kelley, attempted to contact angelic beings, and the results of their efforts have passed the library of esoterica as the Enochian Calls.

The above link takes you to the introduction of the material, which includes MS.Sloane 3188, MS.Sloane 3189, MS.Sloane 3191, and MS.Cotton Appendix XLVI Part I and MS.Cotton Appendix XLVI Part II.

The Magical Review is currently preparing a complete edition of the Spirit Actions to be entitled The Angelic Conferences of Dr. John Dee & Sir Edward Kelley. Publication is not yet set, but this page will allow you to sign up for notification when the book is released.

Wandering the stacks at the Munich Digitisation Centre

BY: Mark

We’re giving this link its own post because there’s much to love here. The Munich Digitisation Centre at the Bavarian State College has an extensive collection of digitized books, including a number of medieval alchemy treatises. One of my favorite links is their tag cloud page. Talk about visual browsing. Each book has been carefully digitized, and each one is the sort of archaic manuscript that makes the book lover salivate.

Books on Alchemy .. Books on Magic .. Exegeses of the Bible ..

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

BY: Mark

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an Italian philosopher and scholar who lived from 1463 until 1494. During his short life, he studied theology and philosophy, dabbled in the Cabala, wrote an extensive series of treaties on all possible subjects (900 in all, collected as Conclusiones philosophicae, cabalasticae et theologicae in Rome). While some were vaguely heretical, they realistically just pointed out the lack of theological enlightenment of the era. He sought a synthesis of religion and philosophy, attempting to counter the spread of pure humanism with a bit of critical thinking. He saw Hebrew and Talmudic sources as viable texts and generally got into trouble over his eagerness and willingess to be a free thinker. His piece, “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” is one of the landmark pieces of the Italian Renaissance (some go so far as to call it a “manifesto”).

Parts of his Oration can be found here in Latin, Italian, and English. A complete translation can be found here.

Walter Pater’s history of Pico in context of the Renaissance can be found here.

The Book of Soyga

BY: Mark

The Book of Soyga is an anonymous 16th century magical treatise that is first mentioned by Dr. John Dee during one of his initial encounters with the angels of the skrying stones. “Oh, my great and long desyre hath byn to be hable to read those tables of Soyga,” Dee said to Uriel. “Et haec revelantur in virtute et veritate non vi,” Uriel replied, deferring any further conversation about the Book of Soyga to the archangel Michael who “est Angelus, qui illuminat gressus tuos.”

When Dee flees to Europe in the last few years of the 16th century, he is forced to leave behind his immense library which is pillaged. Presumably Dee took the Book of Soyga with him (records indicate that there were a number of crates shipped along his route to Eastern Europe and back) which meant that the manuscript wasn’t necessarily one of the ones that was surreptitiously purloined. Though, between 1583 and 1595, Dee had misplaced his copy of the Book of Soyga. There are two copies of the manuscript in existance now: one in the Bodleian collection at the University of Oxford (Bodleian 308) and one in the Sloane collection at the British Museum (Sloane 8). Jim Reed, in his discussion of the Soyga manuscript, argues that Sloane 8 is Dee’s personal copy.

How the manuscript hid in plain view for nearly four hundred years is a simple matter of the title page which bore the inscription “Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor” (the manuscript was catalogued as being the Book of “Aldaraia” and, well, there are lots of books catalogued out there). While portion of the Book of Soyga deals with the fairly standard fare of the era (tables of names of angels and demons, astrological charts, conjurations and invocations), a good portion of its emphasis is on the permutations and combinations of letter values, including the heretofore undeciphered tables in the back. (It is Reed who cracks the code by which these tables are generated, though no one has been able to explain the use of these tables. Reed connects them with the spreading fascination in that era with Cabala — the Catholic version of Kabalah.) Eight of these tables show up in Dee’s Book of Enoch (Sloane 3189), a clear demonstration of the Book of Soyga’s influence on Dee’s Enochian system.

One of Reed’s arguments is that, due to the transcription errors which appear in Sloane 8 and Bodleian 308, the existent copies of the Book of Soyga are generation “C” removed from an original “A.” Reed’s formula for the tables — X = N + f(W) where f(W) is taken modulo 23 — demonstrates errors in the existing tables and his comparison reveals enough common errors to argue that both versions were copied from the same “B” iteration (with the divergent errors in Sloane 8 and Bodleian 308 arising from their transcription).

So, we’ve got an anonymous 16th century manuscript that appears without any antecedents and with no authorial attribution and which concerns itself with the essential combination and re-combination of language and which is based on an even more mysterious manuscript that is still unknown. Most of the commentary I’ve been able to find on the Book of Soyga concerns itself with the contents of the manuscript and not its history. Or its use.

Well, gee, I’ve got a few ideas.

In the Beginning. . .

BY: Mark

In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram. Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae super faciem abyssi, et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas. Dixitque Deus: “Fiat lux”. Et facta est lux. Et vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona et divisit Deus lucem ac tenebras.
    —Genesis 1:1-4

It’s the “et divisit Deus lucem ac tenebras”–”and God separated light from dark”–part that concerns us here. That line that separates the light from the dark.