A Goetia for Brother Enoch

My favorite copy of the Goetia of Solomon has seen better days. So I recently decided to compile my own and have a copy printed through lulu. I drew up the outline and started making font choices.

I slept about three hours that night and dreamed of two warriors with spears. The dream was narrated. The narrator explained these two warriors were demons trying to scare me.

The next night I was visited in dream by a giant bird. The flapping of its wings made a hot wind that knocked me down. I tried to look directly at the bird, but had to shield my eyes from the light which was on it or maybe behind it.

On the third night I dreamed of green butterflies. I have a friend among the green butterflies now.

Then, a few days later, on Wednesday, March 14, 2014, I went for a walk. In a tree right outside my door there was sitting a large crow. I stopped and looked up at him. He looked down at me. He studied my face. I smiled. He said "hello". My rational mind tells me it was just a low warbling sound, but the rest of me knows it was "hello".

The next night I drank hundred-proof moonshine for the first time in my life and right as my vision began to get blurry, I saw the pentagram of Solomon from the Goetia and tried to force my eyes to focus and read the words. In this state I read:
BALLATON (BILETH)
BEL-LVN
ELI
ELIJAH
OBEDIAH
SOLOMON

It is now nearly 11pm and two crows have sounded an alarm outside my window. My roommate says she has never heard a crow at night. She just said, "I don't know how, but you summoned them here." She has no idea what I am working on. But she may be right.

Edward Kelley and Paul Waring Raising the Dead

Yesterday I saw a picture come across my tumblr. It was an illustration of a scene showing Edward Kelley in a cemetery, calling up a ghost. The picture's description said it was Edward Kelley and John Dee performing necromancy. Of course I knew that was nonsense because John Dee stopped associating with Kelley because Kelley was practicing black magic. John Dee wanted to talk to angels, not dead people.

So I went to wikipedia and looked up necromancy. Yep, there's the illustration and the description reads:

"Engraving of occultists John Dee and Edward Kelley "in the act of invoking the spirit of a deceased person"; from Astrology (1806) by Ebenezer Sibly.

Going to google books and looking up Sibly's Astrology, we find it on page 1106 of the second volume. You can read about the scene depicted in the plate on page 1099. It seems Edward Kelley's companion in this picture is one Paul Waring.

Sibly got his story from John Weever's book on funeral monuments. Weever allegedly heard the story from Paul Waring himself.

If you were one of the many people who liked or reblogged the picture and caption I described, please make up for it by reblogging this post.

---

UPDATE:

I have been contacted about this matter in private message. There still seems to be some doubt as to the identity of the two men in the picture above. I am told I cannot prove that John Dee is not in the picture and therefore Wikipedia has to be right. I will now honor that abuse of logic with a short reply.

The story begins with Weever's book on funeral monuments. On page LXV, we find this story:

This story places Edward Kelley and a man named Peter Waring in the park of Walton in le dale. Peter Waring is Kelley's companion in deeds of darkness (not John Dee). Weever claims to have heard this from a gentleman who heard it from one of his servants. The servant claimed he helped dig up a dead body for this scene.

The story was later retold on page 1099 of the second volume of Sibly's Astrology:

Sibly spells Edward's last name differently and gives the name Paul Waring instead of Peter Waring. John Dee broke company with Edward Kelly because of Kelly's black magic and lack of morals. Edward Kelly and Paul Waring "went together to the church-yard of Walton Ledale, in the county of Lancaster."

If we look closely at the illustration in question, we see two men. One, with a book and wand who looks somewhat like other images of Edward Kelley. The other man looks nothing like John Dee. And the church in the background? As long as we are on wikipedia, let's go to the Wikipedia page for Saint Leonard's Church, Walton-le-Dale. Does that look like the church in the illustration?

After all of this I find that my anonymous critic still has a point. I cannot prove that the second man in the illustration is NOT supposed to be John Dee. I also can't see anything remotely suggesting it IS. As usual, I will now wait to be proven wrong (yes, it happens every now and then).

---

UPDATE:

Wednesday, June 18, 2014
A few days ago, on Fathers Day, I posted on the Solomonic Facebook page some information about a picture posted to the group. I said this illustration was from Sibly's Astrology. That doesn't seem to be true. The illustration is based on the one above, but appears in print at a much later date. The quality of the illustration is also much better than Sibly's.

Here it is in Raphael's The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century.

If you know of any other sources for this story or of illustrations of the story, let me know.

Friday, October 24, 2014:
This information has become quite popular on Tumblr. It is nice to see a little quality information in social media.  The Headless Hashasheen has added another source for this information:

[Edward Kelly] … upon a certain night in the Park of Walton in le dale, in the County of Lancaster, with one Paul Waring (his fellow companion in such deeds of darkness) invocated some of the Infernal Regiment, to know certain passages in the life, as also what might be known of the Devil’s foresight of the manner and time of the death of a noble young gentleman, as then in wardship. The black ceremonies of the night being ended, Kelly demanded of one of the gentleman’s servants what corpse was last buried in Law churchyard, a church thereunto adjoining, who told him of a poor that was buried there but the same day. He and Waring entreated this foresaid servant to go with them to the grave of the man so lately interred, which he did; ad withal did help them to dig up the carcase of the poor caitiff, whom by their incantations they made him (or rather some evil spirit through his organs) to speak, who delivered strange predictions concerning the said gentleman. I was told thus much by the said serving-man, a secondary actor in that dismal abhorred business; and the divers gentlemen and others now living in Lancashire to whom he hath related this story.
- Christina Hole, A Mirror of Witchcraft. (Chapter IV: “The Fairies and the Dead”. P. 86.)

Notes on the Magickal Alphabets Section of "Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard"

I mentioned Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard in a previous post. I have mixed feelings about the book. First off, I love the idea of a general magical text book for young readers. BUT, I see many things in the book that I would do differently. I also see many errors in the text. Although I could just move on and never write anything about the errors, I am bored. So, here's another post.

Being bored tonight, I opened the Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard and thumbed through. The table titled "Ancient & Magickal Alphabets" (page 145) really stuck out. I like the look of it. So I started reading the text.

Hermetic Alphabets: Chaldean; Malachim

Often called sacred or hermetic alphabets, these are used almost exclusively by Ceremonial Magicians, though occasionally you may find an individual Witch or Wizard using them on a talisman. The best-known scripts are: Passing the River, Celestial, and Malachim. Celestial is also known as Angelic or Enochian, and it is still used in the higher degrees of Masonry. It came from Dr. John Dee's work with Edward Kelly, who in 1581 produced a set of 21 symbols which he claimed had been revealed to him as the true alphabet of the angels, used to compose the names of the heavenly hosts. These symbols became the foundation of Dee and Kelly's Enochian system, used to invoke angels and demons. The figures of Malachim are said to be derived from the constellations--though which ones, it is impossible to say. Malachim is sometimes confused with the "Writing of the Magi."

Theban

The Theban script is also called Honorian in honor of its creator, Honorius III (Pope 1216-1227)."

This all sounds fine if you haven't done any reading, but breaks down on the slightest effort to check the facts.

If we open Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, we see several of the scripts mentioned by the Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard. Reading the text we see it is the Celestial script that is supposedly from the stars (thus the name), but is obviously based on Hebrew letters. It is the Malachim that is the writing of Angels.

The publication date of Agrippa's third book is 1533. What are the chances that Agrippa was referencing the work produced by John Dee in 1581?

The Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard credits Pope Honorius III with the creation of the Theban script. As I wrote about previously, this script was created by a man named Honorius who is from Thebes. Pope Honorius III was from Rome.

Triangle of Solomon (Take Three)

I previously wrote about "reconstructing" Solomon's Triangle of Arte.

Here's my updated version

Founded on TETRAGRAMMATON.
Through the power of the first (PRIMEumaton) unto the last.
Representing the AZoTh.

The Mystic Eye (Game)

Over the last twenty years or so I have experimented with Ouija boards, pendulums, automatic drawing, and other forms of automatism. I seem to have some sort of block against this type of thing, or maybe I just have not invested enough time to develop the skills required.

Earlier this week I ordered the "Mystic Eye Game" from Amazon. It arrived a few hours ago. It is a board with the words "YES" and "NO" along with numbers, the letters of the alphabet and various other words. The game comes with a pendulum that you hold over the center of the board. Then something odd happens... the pendulum will literally point to an answer.

I asked the Mystic Eye a few Yes/No answers to start out. It answered much more quickly than I expected. The first answer spun the pendulum around the circle three times in about a second and stopped abruptly on the "YES" section of the circle. It's kind of like a cross between a pendulum and a talking board except it is much more uncanny to look at. I still do not know if the answers to my first few questions were correct since they are still in the future.

My next questions required the Mystic Eye to spell out answers. For a few minutes I thought I was going to have to re-sell the game on eBay. The pendulum would spin and spin in circles in one direction and then spin in the other. Then the pendulum would move back and forth in arcs between sections of the board.

Then it spelled a name. It moved straight past plain pendulums and talking boards. You see, with all of my previous experiments I have not been able to get anything coherent out of a talking board (while using it by myself) and nothing other than binary answers (Yes/No, Day/Night, etc.) from a pendulum.

Like the Ouija and other talking boards, the Mystic Eye is sold as a game. I do appreciate the entertainment value of automatism, but I see much more potential in this "game".

Did I Make Up the Idea of Lesser Seals?

I recently received a message which was not very coherent. The sender was upset about a couple things in my post about the Explanation of the Pentagram and Hexagram of Solomon. The first objection was my identification of the word Bellaton (from the Pentagram) with Beleth, the 13th spirit of the Goetia of Solomon. That's fine with me. I was just putting it out there.

The second objection was actually a statement. I'm not going to repeat it here because the rest of my audience is not playing the role of drunken sailor and also because I deleted the message faster than a cyberman. Basically, I was accused of making something up. In this day and age it is good to be skeptical, but it is still bad to be a blathering idiot. So, I have formed my accuser's statements into the question he should have asked: "Did you make up the idea of Greater and Lesser Seals?"

And now I will set myself to the task of answering that question.

I was first introduced to the idea of Lesser and Greater (or Noble) Seals at the same time I did my study of the Triangle of Solomon, back in the '90s.

I am not going to go into the way the Lesser and Greater Seals worked in 16th and 17th century magick, but I'll show you there was such a distinction.

In the Mathers/Crowley Goetia we see a type of spirit compass showing the directions to face when calling certain spirits.

This diagram actually belongs to the second book of the Lemegaton. These names can be found in many old books on magic.

In the book Elizabethan Magic by Robert Turner, there is something very interesting in the chapter on Simon Forman. Robert Turner reproduces a text, "typical in form and representative of Forman's Age." The text is called Operation by the Regal Spirit Usiel. It opens with "The Great Seal of King Usiel". This seal is almost identical to the seal of Usiel found in Theurgia Goetia.

Next to this Greater Seal we find another Seal titled "The Lesser Seal According to Trithemeus".

Where did that come from?

Well, let's dust off our Steganographia and take a look at page 6.

Do those names look familiar? That's right, they're the same names as on the spirit compass thingy above! And those squigglies next to the names? Those are Lesser Seals!

The text reproduced in Elizabethan Magic gives the names and seals of 14 diurnal dukes under Usiel and 14 nocturnal dukes. It also gives the number of attending spirits for each duke. These dukes and their seals can be found in Theurgia Goetia.

These Dukes and the numbers of attending spirits (and a few seals) can also be found in Steganographia.

The Operation used Seals from the Lemegeton and Trithemeus, referenced Dee's Liber Scientiae Terrestris, and used conjurations like those in The Key of Solomon. The magical synthesis is impressive.

But I've really gone off target. No, I did not make up the idea of Lesser and Greater Seals.

The Salus/Hygiea Ring

Yesterday I was on Amazon when I noticed a recommendation for something free. Since ya don't see that every day, I clicked through. It was for an interesting looking Kindle book. I don't have a Kindle, but I noticed the Kindle software was a free download as well. A minute later I was reading The Book of Talismans, Amulets and Zodiacal Gems. It's a very interesting book packed with a lot of curious lore. My kind of book. The reader is very handy on my laptop and includes the ability to bookmark and make notes.

THE PENTAGRAM WITH THE WORD SALUS

While skimming I noticed a neat looking ring. It has a Pentagram inside an Ouroboros. Between the points of the Pentagram are the Roman letters SALVS (Latin for "Salvation"). This is the ring of the Roman Goddess Salus. Salus is a Roman form of the Greek Goddess Hygiea.

THE PENTAGRAM WITH THE NAME HYGIEA

The paragraph on page 85 reads:

"Salus Ring (Illustration No. 112, Plate VIII) was worn by the devotees of Salus, or Hygiea, daughter of Æsculapius, who was worshipped as the goddess of Health. Several holy days were appointed in her honour and worship, and she was publicly invoked for the welfare of the rulers and for the general peace and prosperity of the community; also for an abundant harvest. She is usually represented with a serpent as a tribute to her attainments in the art of medicine, and her symbol was worn for Health and Success in all undertakings, as well as for general Good Fortune."

Thomas, William; Kate Pavitt (2009-12-12). The Book of Talismans, Amulets and Zodiacal Gems (Kindle Locations 847-851). Evinity Publishing Inc. Kindle Edition.

If you actually go to the Wikipedia page for Salus you see the statement:

"She is sometimes erroneously associated with the Greek goddess Hygieia."

It's a good thing someone put that on Wikipedia because a lot of silly Romans seem to have made Salus' statues, Name/Pentagram, symbols and general attributes the same as Hygiea.

Roman Salus Coin

Roman Hygiea Statue