Attention High-Tech Mages!

I have four Google Wave invitations left after giving the first four to my wife (naturally) and three friends. If you want one, e-mail me at the address on my Blogger profile. I reserve the right to choose who I will give them to according to my own criteria.

Everything Arbatel - Digest of Internet Links

Anyone who's ever tried to do on-line research on the Arbatel of Magic has discovered that information is thin on the ground. And not only is the information pretty scarce, but the researcher is confronted with the irritating Internet phenomenon of a proliferation of sites that think they are doing someone a service by repeating the same information that can be found on several dozen other sites. And most of that is simply a repetition of the handful of most significant pages from the primary source; the grimoire itself. And since I've read the grimoire, all of that is useless to me.

I'm not going to do anyone else the disservice of repeating information you can learn from reading the Arbatel yourself . It's short. There are more sites to download various versions of it from than you can shake a skinny custom-made almond-wood stick at.

What I will do is give you the benefit of my days (weeks!) of research, using several search engines and trying out various search terms. Some of these hits only came from using odd search terms, and wading through to the 100th hit in the results. I'm sure if I kept dreaming up search terms and kept combing through the hits to the 14th page, I'd come up with more, but I've had it for the time being.

It's not as if books are all that much better than the Internet on this subject. I found several scanned books in my search (Google Books and the like), and their chapters on the Arbatel just parroted information that can be found just about anywhere (including -- Duh! -- the primary source). It's incredible what some people consider publishing a worthwhile book.

The following is a list of the most worthwhile hits I found, along with a bit of description, and/or commentary.

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Primary Sources

The Turner Translation

A digital edition purportedly converted into a PDF by the eminent Benjamin Rowe himself. At least that's what it says on the second page.

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http://www.arbatel.org/ - This is Sadena Meti's Arbatel site. Although it's unclear who Sadena Meti is, or what his motivations were, Mr Meti endeavored to create an edition of the Arbatel that corrected Turner's translation mistakes, and the mistakes that had crept in when Turner's translation was copied and reprinted. He published a high-quality bound edition that was limited to 49 copies. Luckily, he also makes the high-quality PDF of that version available on the site as well. One of the best features of this edition is that it includes scans of the Olympic Spirits' sigils from the original Latin edition, which he acquired at his own expense.

If one can take the information on his personal website (http://www.sadena.com/) at face value, he is now an atheist nihilist anarchist, and presumably doesn't do magic anymore. Or is just me that thinks someone of that orientation can't do magic?

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The Secret Grimoire of Turiel

Supposedly acquired in East Africa by one Marius Malchus in 1927, this Grimoire, although dealing with the same spirits, is nothing at all like the Arbatel in either tone or content. Gives diagrams of specific magical tools and recipes for incenses. Much "darker" than the Arbatel.

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Theosophia Pneumatica

A grimoire derived from the Arbatel. Nearly identical, but with illuminating differences in the details. Unfortunately, it has never been translated from German, and even if you do read German, it's a challenge to read the fraktur script.

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Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy in Facsimile

The Max Planck Institut in Berlin offers this scanned on-line copy of Robert Turner's translation of the spurious Fourth Book of Agrippa's Occult Philosophy (1783). The Arbatel starts on page 263 and ends on page 319.

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Secondary Material

http://www.billheidrick.com/works/mcor.htm

Bill Heidrick's famous list of correspondences includes a unique rendering of the Olympic Spirits' sigils, and a few intelligent observations on the subject.

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"An Approach To The Operation Of The Arbatel Of Magic"

by Phil Legard

A description of a very simple rite to evoke the Olympic Spirits.

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http://www.sacred-texts.com/grim/bcm/bcm08.htm

The chapter on the Arbatel in A.E. Waite's tome The Book of Ceremonial Magic. Nothing too informative. Or it's informative, but I just can't understand what he's trying to say. It's Waite, after all.

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"The Little Book of Black Venus – Part Two

Olympic Spirits, the Cult of the Dark Goddess, and the Seal of Aemeth"

by Vincent Bridges and Teresa Burns

Illustrations by DARLENE and J. S. Kupperman

In the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition

Probably the most useful article I found in all of my Internet research, as far as gaining a deeper understanding of what or who the Olympic spirits are. This article presents a theory that the sigils of the Olympic Spirits found in the Arbatel are related to the symbols scrawled on countless stones and stone walls in the Camonica valley (Northern Italy) by a pre-Christian culture that used these symbols to commune with their gods. It suggests that John Dee came into contact with these symbols during his travels in that part of the world, and that this is the source of the seven symbols on the very outer edge of his Sigilum Dei Aemeth. This article is well researched, intelligently written, and well worth reading for anyone interested in Dee, the Arbatel, or the Black Venus grimoire.

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"Paganism in Provence:

How the Mother-Goddess Became the Mother of God"

by Vincent Bridges

Another JWT article citing the relationship between the sigils in the Arbatel to the symbols of the Neolithic Camonians

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http://www.septagram7.com/olympic-planetary-spirits/

Short article on a site called Septagram. This author is not just parroting other information available in books and on the web, but has obviously reflected a little. There are two thought provoking paragraphs on why the sigils are always presented without much other information to go with them, even in Regardie's Golden Dawn books, that say:

"I have a simple theory on why the knowledge of these sigils has been transmitted this way: because it is unlawful to do so in any other manner. That would mean the use of these sigils can’t be taught, but depend rather heavily on use of intuition in order to figure out what purpose they have.

"I have read a number of accounts where magicians have attempted to contact the entities directly, and I’m not sure this is the best way to go. If you draw out the sigils as meditative aids, their use might become more clear."

I have given much thought to these remarks, and have adjusted my practices accordingly.

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David Rankine

Although this is a self-promotion blog, it is worth noting that David Rankine makes approximately the same point as Frater RO does in this posting, i.e. that the Olympic Spirits seem to be more strongly connected to the material realm than beings identified as angels, which gives them more efficacy in the material realm.

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www.eye-of-horus.com/THE_OLYMPIC_HIERARCHY.ppt

A Power Point presentation on evoking the Olympic Spirits which is as cryptic as ppt presentations usually are without the script of the presenter. Nonetheless, it's apparent from this presentation that the author uses a very elaborate set-up involving several ritualists and invoking a whole hierarchy of beings.

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http://esotericbookreview.wordpress.com/2008/05/04/interview-with-aaron-leitch-2007-by-avalonia/

Interview with Aaron Leitch, in which the Olympic Spirits are briefly touched upon, and Leitch remarks, "I should also add that the Intelligences and the Olympic Spirits are very similar creatures."

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Evocation Records

Evocation of Bethor

By Brother M

This -- an account of an evocation of the Olympic spirit Bethor using all the bells and whistles of the Golden Dawn tool box -- is a study in overkill. The Arbatel counsels a simple ritual, and this one leaves no pentagram or hexagram untraced. Nonetheless, it seemed to have worked marvelously for brother M, so I guess I can't really argue with success.

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http://www.lawbright.com/logdos/phulevj.html

Short account of an evocation of Phul.

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London lodge of the Oxford Golden Dawn Occult Society (LOGDOS)

On this page there are links to the records of three evocations of Olympic Spirits: Phul, Ophiel and Hagith.

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http://www.dadamancer.com/topics/olympic-planetary-spirits/

A bizarre site called "dadamancer. This site contains records of evocations of five Olympic Spirits

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Evocation of Bethor

Account of an evocation of Bethor. I don't like the tone of this one, but it seems to have originally been posted on a forum, which explains its excessive casualness (almost to the point of flippancy). I thought if I didn't include this one I might be crossing the border between editing and censoring.

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http://www.sacred-magick.com/Main.html?http://www.sacred-magick.com/Evocations/Evocation%20of%20Ophiel.html

An account of an evocation of Ophiel, in which Ophiel suggests that it's not all that important to see him.

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http://www.llewellynjournal.com/article/413/

Article written by someone who evoked Hagith and found a woman to love.

Oh Holy Toilet Roll Tower!

Inspiration can come from the oddest places.

Just this morning I was in my children's bathroom when I noticed that the lazy bastards (I love and adore them, but they're still lazy bastards) hadn't bothered to take the empty toilet paper rolls out to the garbage (It's not customary to have a garbage can in the bathroom in Hungary. I don't know why not, but I've learned to live with it. That's just part of living in a foreign country. You encounter things you can't explain, and you learn to accept them. I guess it develops tolerance, and builds character.)

But the creative little buggers made a tower out of them.

As I contemplated the tower, I imagined it with four rolls on the the bottom, which would give it three on the second row, two on the third, and one at the top. Hmmm. And then I thought of that symbol so sacred to the Pythagoreans, the tetractys. Further, I thought of the formula it represents: 1+2+3+4=10.

Hmmm.

The mind wandered farther, and I thought of ten obviously being the kabbalists' "ten spheres our of nothing", i.e. the tree of life. "How," I wondered to myself, "does this mathematical formula manifest in the tree?"

Hmmmm.

As swift as thought the answer came to me.

1 is Kether.

2 is the duad of Chokmah and Binah.

3 is the triangle of Chesed and Geburah expressed in the the balanced sphere of Tiphareth.

4 is the astral world of Netzach and Hod expressed in the balanced sphere of Yesod and pouring into manifestation in the material world of Malkuth. It makes a wonderful sort of Pythagorean sense.

And four always expresses the elements. "How," I asked myself, "would that work out."

Hmmmm.

Ah!

1 is fire, which is indivisible.

2 is air (think dagger) which divides things (the observer from the observed, the earth from the heavens).

3 is water. There is always fluid movement between the points of the triangle.

4 is earth, the solid foundation.

I'm not sure about any of this, but I'll contemplate it and meditate on it. And it all came from observing the tower of toilet paper rolls my children had made in their bathroom.

The lazy bastards! Bless their hearts!

Breakfast with Agrippa

Old Cornelius Baby just isn't working out as bedtime reading, and not just because the gargantuan volume is so unwieldy. So after the morning chi kung, after making sandwiches and getting the brood off to school, after shaving and showering, the Scribbler sits down to a plate of cut fruit, with: The Book, a pencil and a pad of Postits. Before heading off to catch the tram to the office, I read one short chapter a day this way, but that's still progress.

Living in the Land of Angels

Place names can be so rich and colorful, and so often taken for granted. In my youth I traveled countless times through the heart of West Virginia on I-79 from Morgantown to Charleston, and was always amused by the folksy names displayed on the exit signs, among which were: Strange Creek, Big Otter, and - my personal favorite - Salt Lick. I always wondered what kinds of places these were, and how they got their names (OK, Salt Lick is pretty obvious). When I moved out to California in my twenties, I was amazed at how the place names suddenly sounded like something out of a cowboy movie: Red Bluff, Dry Gulch ("Gulch" is such a cool-sounding Western word).

Every time someone says the name of a place, those vocal vibrations elicit its presence in the mind of the hearer, and those sounds and that place become more and more tightly linked. Nomen est omen. There have to be certain platonic laws of poetic harmony that govern how things get named. And the names of places must also be clues as to their true inner nature. They must be allusions to the spirit that indwells and guards a place, which the Romans called the genius loci. Watch your step when in Woodland, California while walking down Dead Cat Alley. This is obviously a place where serious shit goes down. There's a street in Hanau, Germany that I walked many times in my childhood called Kastanienallee (Horse Chestnut Boulevard), and the vibe of that street, lined with well-tended horse chestnut trees, is like no other I know.

Now I live in a land where things are named in a strange Asian language transported to Europe in the middle ages (Hungarian), which possesses sounds that speakers of other European languages can't even pronounce.

Among the place names of my daily existence are the name of an ancient river, the Danube, or Duna in Hungarian. A name so old, no one knows where it comes from. Perhaps it's the name of an ancient goddess. And although most of Budapest's 23 districts are known only by their number, a few are known by their own unique name. Three years ago, when we became members of the property-owning class (we bought an apartment), I moved my family to a district just outside the outer ring road of Budapest, a district called Angyalföld. I've known for seventeen years that the name translates as "Angel Land," but as often happens with place names, I never really thought of its meaning, I just thought of its association with an area on the city map.

An area with a reputation for being sort of seedy, at that. It was an industrial sector, but the heavy industries it housed closed down over time, and the demise of state socialism stuck a fork in the last remaining factories, so the neighborhoods are either somewhat abandoned, full of crowded socialist-era apartment buildings, or in the process of being razed and gentrified. Seven new apartment blocks have been built within three blocks of us since we moved in three years ago.

But recently I started dwelling on the fact that I live in a place called Angel Land. I tried to do some research on why it bears this name, but beyond the fact that the name Engelfeld (German for Angel Field) appears on an 1830 map, I couldn't locate any information I felt was more than apocryphal. So, it seems to be another name whose origin is lost to the mists of time.

Doesn't matter, really. That's what it's called. I live in Angel land.

A few times recently my sons, who are in their early teens, have come to me to discuss some problem. I've taken them into my study/sanctum/temple and talked with them in the peace of that space. And once talk has accomplished all it can, I've lit a candle and turned out the lights. I tell them to imagine that the room is filled with a subtle light, and that there is a ball of light illuminating the room from above. The ball of light is surrounded by angels who are constantly coming and going up into the sky to God and back. When I recently saw the painting illustrating the beginning of this posting (Botticini's Assumption of the Virgin), I was reminded of the way I visualize the scene I describe to my sons.

My visualization is also inspired by William Blake's rendering of the Biblical story of Jacob's Ladder (which in Blake's vision is, interestingly enough, a spiral staircase).

I feel inspired by the fact that fate has led me to live in a place called Angel Land. I'm convinced it is man's fate, once he has evolved to that point, to be the bridge between the divine realms and the denser worlds of manifestation that we occupy in our day-to-day consciousness. And I could easily see it being something as sublime and beautiful as Blake's vision.

And where better for me to dedicate myself to the work of building that spiral bridge to the godhead, than right here in this rapidly changing seedy neighborhood known as Angel Land.

Reading Agrippa - Part III (Two Little Gems)

Two Little Gems

My mind was blown the other day by a posting Anthromama wrote about going crystal digging with her family. There's a place in Montana in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest called the Crystal Park Mineral Collection Area. You can dig in the sandy soil and unearth quartz crystals, just like the ones you buy in stores or from gem vendors at fairs. I once had a dream about digging in the garden and pulling out quartz crystals, but I thought that was something that only happened in my dream reality.

Plowing through the early chapters of Occult Philosophy is a little like digging for crystals. The ground is dry and sandy. They didn't write books back then the way they do now. There was no editor at the publishing house insisting that there should be funny anecdotes, or that the language should be simplified for the less sophisticated readers, or that it needs more practical exercises and bullet-point lists. Or to chide the translator, "Just because it's a translation doesn't mean it has to be awkward and sound like a translation."

And, as when digging for crystals, you have to break a sweat doing the spade work. Every sentence requires concentration to extract the meaning. And your critical faculties have to be engaged the entire time. The gems one is hunting in Agrippa are the ageless wisdom, but it requires sifting through the detritus of his milieu. You can't just take what's written there at face value.

On the one hand, you need to comprehend the universal meaning of the four elements (fire, air, water and earth), and figure out how they apply in our contemporary world, but on the other, you can't pretend you've never heard of particle physics or chemistry, or that you didn't learn about things like cells and organelles and DNA in biology. It's a real balancing act.

You know the gems are in there, but also have to be realistic and adjust your evaluation of the text with the knowledge that there were things Agrippa didn't know about, and had he known about them, he might have adjusted his views and approaches. Note that I say "adjust", and not "abandon." Any mystic, occult scholar or magician worth his salt knows (or should know) that although many ideas of the past have been made obsolete by modern discoveries, we shouldn't be so arrogant as to believe that all knowledge from the past is obsolete.

As I said: a balancing act. You have to keep your radar on a sensitive setting to pick up the valuable bits, but you also have to keep the mental filters strong enough to cut out the noise.

Agrippa followed one convention of his time that makes it a little easier to distinguish the important material from the less important: the reasoning employed in laying out his arguments is consistently deductive. He starts with the general principle and then lines up the specific examples that illustrate that principle. So it pays to read the first paragraph of each of the short chapters carefully. Perhaps more than once. If you understand what he is saying in that paragraph, then everything that follows in the rest of the chapter can be seen as illustration of his point. If a later paragraph in a chapter baffles you, go back to the first paragraph to recall what point the baffling paragraph is meant to illustrate. So the vital thing is that you understand what the chapter is about, not necessarily all the details of that chapter. I imagine that once you'd read the book, you could go back and read the first paragraph of each chapter and it would be like reading a book of aphorisms.

I'll confess: I can't wait to get to the sexier, juicier parts of the book where Old Cornelius Baby lays down the holy names and symbols and other goodies, but I don't want to disrespect the book. And I think there's a good possibility that I'll understand more about the nature of those high-altitude goodies and their potential function in my life if I also let Agrippa be my Sherpa in the foothills leading up there.

So what kind of gems can one find in the early chapters of Occult Philosophy? Here are two humble examples.

In Chapter VI - Of the wonderful natures of Water, Air, and winds - After discussing the life-giving qualities of water, and the cleansing qualities, there is a paragraph which reads:

"The gospel also testifies of a sheep-pool, into which whosoever stepped first, after the water was troubles by the angel, was made whole of the disease he had. The same virtue, and efficacy we read was in a spring of the Ionian nymphs, which was in the territories belonging to the town of Ellis, at a village called Heraclea, near the river Citheron: which whosoever stepped into, being diseased, came forth whole, and cured of all disease."

It is a principle taught by esoteric schools that one of water's unique properties is the ability to store and conduct psychic energies (energies often too subtle to measure with today's instruments). This is what makes holy water holy. It stores the blessings that have been shed on it. Recently, this property is being explored by the controversial figure Masaru Emoto, who is exploring the patterns water crystallizes into after exposure to various human vibrations, including minds focussed in prayer, music, and human speech. There is also rigorous scientific study being done on water's ability to Store and Amplify Subtle Energy Fields.

So this little passage indicates that Agrippa was well aware of this property of water, and suggests that it is important for the occult philosopher, i.e. the magician, to incorporate this feature into his understanding of that element. It's exciting to see the proof that this was already known by renaissance sages, and that they could cite biblical evidence that it has been known for a long, long time. It could even be a hint at a healing technique: have an angel "trouble" (meaning move or stir) some water and then use it as medicine.

The other little gem I ran across in the very same chapter, is part of his discussion of the element of air as the medium of mind. It goes like this:

"And hence it is possible naturally, and far from all manner of superstition, no other spirit coming in between, that a man should be able in a very little time to signify his mind unto another man, abiding at a very long and unknown distance from him, although he cannot precisely give an estimate of the time when it is, yet of necessity it must be within 24 hours; and I myself know how to do it, and have done it. The same also in time past did the Abbot Tritenius both know and do."

If you read this passage carefully you realize that he is talking about telepathy: "to signify his mind unto another man." And he is talking about direct thought transference, because it is done with "no other spirit coming in between." And 20th century parapsychologists thought they discovered ESP!

So, reading the early chapters of Occult Philosophy involves, admittedly, a lot of burrowing and grubbing about in medieval obscurity, aggravated by a convoluted translation.

But the gems are there. And I'm finding them!

Reading Agrippa - Part II

In The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis argued that it is nearly impossible for people of our day to truly understand the way medieval minds saw the world. As a result, this makes it particularly difficult for us to comprehend documents written during that time. Unless you are a scholar of that era, you just don't have many of the keys necessary for unlocking the tropes of medieval and renaissance literature. The writer of that era could assume his reader had read certain works, such as Ovid's Metamorphosis, Vergil's Aeneid, or St Augustine's City of God. And because of this assumption, he further assumed he could simply allude to these works and his reader would know exactly what he was talking about.

Agrippa's Occult Philosophy is no exception. Sure, I realize lots of people are just using it as a definitive source for sigils, seals, words of power, and other elements they need for their rituals, talismans and other magical activities, rather than finding them piecemeal in dozens of sources that themselves have Agrippa as their ultimate source. But even these scrap hunters will never completely escape the struggle of comprehending a text written in one bygone era and translated in another.

A concrete example: I've noticed that there are several words the translator, James Freake (hereinafter JF), used frequently in his translation, and I'll assume he consistently used these words to translate given Latin words. A cursory glance through the chapters I've already read yields: "operation" and "species." When I come across these words, I'm baffled as to their meanings, since JF isn't using them in any sense that I'm familiar with. Until you know what those words mean in this text, your understanding of any sentence they occur in is going to be fuzzy at best, totally mistaken at worst.

There are two choices for clearing this up. The first is to look them up in the Oxford dictionary and pinpoint what those words meant circa 1651. That's a drag, because I don't happen to own an Oxford, and since I live in Hungary I can't just run down the street to the local library. But my fellow corporate editor at work has one on his desk. I'll be paying him a visit this morning. "...and by the way: would you mind if I looked up a couple of words in your Oxford?" The other is to find the sentences in the Latin edition and see what word he was translating. I also don't have a copy of Occult Philosophy in Latin (I've looked for a digital copy on the Internet, but I haven't located one yet).

To be completely sure, you'd need to check both the Oxford and the Latin text. That's more work than most people want to put in, but when you decide to tackle Agrippa, you have to be honest with yourself about what it means to read a 400-year-old translation of a 500-year-old book. You're going to have to engage in a little serious scholarship.