Theurgia-Goetia, on Gods and Demons

[BaguaKicksAss]

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Edited January 12, 2014 by BaguaKicksAss

[Zhongyongdaoist]

I hope to wind this up soon, if not with this post, then only one more.

 

Aside from the late dating of most of the manuscripts of the Lemegeton, there is another reason to argue for it being a relatively late collection and that is the fact that all of the its constituent books are mentioned elsewhere, but never as part of a larger work. Also important are the people who mention them. In his Vanity of Arts and Sciences, Agrippa mentions both the Pauline Art and Almadel and if I recall correctly the Ars Notoria in a section on theurgy, and his chapter on black magic is called Goecia (Goetia). His student Wier (Latinized as Wierus) gives most of the hierarchy that eventually appears in the Lemegeton's Goetia, in his own account, the Pseudo-Monarchia Daemonorum, which Wierus says is from a much older work, a De Officium Spiritum, which as I recall in my original, I cite a reference in E. M. Butler's Ritual Magic placing this work in the middle of the 13th Century. However by the time the time that the Goetia emerges, Wierus list of 69 spirits has changed a little and grown to 72, a number of some importance. Finally the spirit hierarchy of the Theurgia-Goetia is taken from Agrippa's principle teacher, the Abbot Trithemius. All of which indicates that every element that became part of the Lemegeton was known by people closely related by teacher student relationships.

 

I proposed in my 1980 article that a group either started by Agrippa or students of his, put these texts together in order to have a workbook for magic within an Agirppan framework. I also speculated that since Agrippa died in France (some of the Lemegeton manuscripts are in French) this group might have originated there and may have ended out in England because they were Protestants and during most of the 16ht and 17th Centuries the situation for Protestants in France was unpredictable and ever changing to say the least.

 

In order to demonstrate the point I was trying to make, I made the following equations:

 

Almadel = Sigillum Dei Aemuth as and approach to the super celestial wold

 

Pauline Art = Tabalu Bonorum/Heptarchia Mystica as an approach to Planetary Magic.

 

Theurgia-Goetia = 30 Aires as an approach to the magic of the medium between Heaven and Earth.

 

Goetia = the Evil spirits drawn from the lower parts of the Lesser Angles of the Four Watchtowers.

 

What is missing is a book of elemental magic, why that would be is not clear, but at the least the above equations point strongly in the direction of an attempt to create a magical workbook, that may have originated in a Protestant branch of Agrippa's French students who emigrated to England to escape the religious turmoil that existed in their native France.

 

In the article I also solved some problems which the original author to whom I was replying left unanswered, such as why the example seals which were given in the Lemegeton's Pauline Art, spoke of the tenth of March as the day that the Sun entered Aries. As a well read astrologer interested in the intricacies of astrological calculation, even writing programs for my own hand held calculators, marvels of the time, but a modern cell phone was more computing power, I was familiar with the history of the Calendar and knew that the discrepancy could be explained by the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar. The Gregorian Calendar being sponsored by the Pope and adopted universally in Catholic countries in 1583, and was naturally suspect among Protestants. Protestant England did not adopt it until 1752.

 

The Pauline Art also requires that one know the sign on the cusp of the 12th house of a chart, but there are several systems for calculating this and the main one used by English speaking astrologers since the 19th Century, that of Placidus, was not even created until the mid 17th Century and only introduced to England in the Late 17th Century. So one of the earlier systems had to have been used. I figured out from the examples which sign had to be on the 12th house cusp and then compared the 12th houses cusps for several systems at the longitude of London and arrived at the conclusion that it was probably the system of Regiomontanus.

 

I also pointed out that the origin of the seals of the Zodiac that are given in the second part of the Pauline Art is probably the Archidoxes of Magic of Paracelsus, another interesting point.

 

Well that is about as good an account as I can give from memory now, almost 33 years later. I hope this account is reasonable satisfactory to BaquaKicksAss, whose query set it in motion. Obviously to some people not familiar with the some of the technical language some of this series of posts must seem confusing. I am sorry for that, but as I mentioned at the beginning I am summarizing almost 30 pages and I cannot take the time to address all questions that these posts might generate. While working on these posts, I have had some other ideas which I may add as a postscript to these posts to summarize and point in some new directions.

[BaguaKicksAss]

Hmmm, I have found the Goetia crew to be most similar to some of the Seniors from the great table. I could call them in the same ways, do similar offerings, have similar conversations and so forth. I mean entity personality wise.

 

Very interesting article! Well Dee and Kelly also would have read Agrippa as well as many of the other older grimoires as they could get their hands on. I have noticed that the EE's like to put things in context of how you already go about things, or what you already know. In other words, I wonder if the EE's may have organized the system similar to the other grimoires for Dee and Kelly.

 

One of the other things that I noticed with Enochian is that those prayers to call the various spirits from the Great table, read very very much like a standard evocation from a grimoire. I mean having all of the same compenents, just a bit more of a personal prayer format.

 

Well I will definitely be looking at Enochian with a broader approach now, thank you.

 

So where do the cacodemons fit in? I personally don't see them as anything like the entities from the Goetia, verum, Gran Grimoire, etc.

 

Sure you may have lost some folks in the last post or two, but I'll bet a few will be checking over the various grims mentioned, as well as Enochian (please no GD Enochian, noooooo) .

[RiverSnake]

I found this article insightful: http://www.myoccultcircle.com/blog/natureofdemons

 

My 2 cents, Peace

[Esteam'd Punk]

Good Lawd. That's too much reading. I'll just save this page and read it when I get home, LOL.