Liber Iuratus Honorii: A Critical Edition of the Latin Version of the Sworn Book of Honorius

337 Pages·2002·8.367 MB·English

by  Gosta Hedegard

ACTA UNIVERSITATIS STOCKHOLMIENSIS
Studia Latina Stockholmiensia
------------------------------------XLVIII------------------------------------
LIBER IURATUS HONORII
A Critical Edition of the Latin Version of the Sworn Book of Honorius
by
GOSTA HEDEGARD
£
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GOSTA HEDEGARD
LIBER IURA TUS HONORII
A Critical Edition of the Latin Version of the Sworn Book of Honorius
ACTA UNIVERSITATIS STOCKHOLMIENSIS
Studia Latina Stockholmiensia
---------------------------------XLVIII---------------------------------
LIBER IURATUS HONORII
A Critical Edition of the Latin Version of the Sworn Book of Honorius
by
GOSTA HEDEGARD
ALMQVIST & WIKSELL INTERNATIONAL
STOCKHOLM/SWEDEN
A Dissertation for the Doctor’s Degree in Latin
Stockholm University
Department of Classical Languages
SE-106 91 Stockholm
Abstract
Hedegcird, G., LIBER IURATUS HONORII. A Critical Edition of the Latin Version of the
Sworn Book of Honorius.
Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Studia Latina Stockholmiensia 48.
Pp. 337
ISBN 91-22-01970-7
The Liber iuratus Honorii, or the Sworn Book of Honorius, as it is often called, has been the
focus of a steadily growing interest ever since the occult revival in the late 19,h century. This
exponent of pseudo-Solomonic magic has been mentioned from time to time in the literature
on magic up to the present day. Unfortunately, scholars have hitherto had to rely far too much
upon a poor edition of a partial English translation of this work, which is, in fact, originally in
Latin. The contents of the book include complex magic rituals, a list of one hundred names of
God, presentations of angels, spirits, and demons of diverse orders, instructions on how to
prepare and use magic seals and circles etc.
The present work is the editio princeps of the Latin text, and it is accompanied by an index
of so-called voces mysticae and of divine, angelic, and demonic names. Furthermore, a partial
edition of the Ars Notoria text Flores aurei Apollonii, which has turned out to be one of the
sources of the Liber iuratus Honorii, is appended.
The introduction includes a description of the manuscript tradition, a discussion of the date
and attribution of the text and of its relation to other texts within the same genre, an analysis
of its contents and structure, and a description of how the rituals contained in the book were
performed. One of the conclusions reached is that the three extant Latin manuscripts represent
a closed recension which can be described in stemmatic form, and that even other witnesses to
the text can be fitted into this tradition. It is further proved that the Flores aurei Apollonii is
one of the major sources of the Liber iuratus Honorii.
Key words: the Sworn Book of Honorius, Liber iuratus Honorii, Liber sacer, Liber sacratus,
Solomon, pseudo-Solomonic texts, Ars Notoria, the Notory Art, Flores aurei Apollonii, ritual
magic, ceremonial magic, mediaeval magic, theurgy, magic seals, the Seal of Solomon,
Christian Kabbalah, divine names, angels, spirits, demons.
© Gosta Hedegard 2002
ISBN 91-22-01970-7
ISSN 0491-2764
. i Die of Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Iatroduction 9
1 The Purpose of the Present Work 9
2. The Date and Attribution of the LIH 11
3. The Textual Tradition 13
3.1. Description of the Manuscripts Containing the LIH and Other Witnesses
to the Text 13
3.2. The Interrelations between the Manuscripts A, B, and C, and their Rela­
tions to Royal and Sloane 3853 21
- The Contents and Structure of the LIH 26
5. How the Rituals were Performed 30
6. Texts Related to the LIH 40
" Principles for establishing the Text 43
8. Textual Criticism 45
8.1. The LIH and the FAA 45
8.2. Angelic and Divine Names 48
8.3. Critical Problems 49
- Presentation of the Text 51
9.1. Italicized Passages 51
9.2. Chapters, Paragraphs, and Headings 51
9.3. Orthography, Punctuation, and Abbreviations 52
9.4. Critical Signs 53
9.5. The Apparatus Criticus 54
Conspectus siglorum 57
Edition 60
Plates 213
Index 219
Bibliography 293
Appendix: Partial Edition of the ‘Flores aurei Appolonii’ 298
Acknowledgements
As is meet, my gratitude is first and foremost due to the person without whom this book
■ ould have been a lot worse and my scholarly pursuits a great deal drearier, my supervisor,
the incomparable Prof. Monika Asztalos. Her constant encouragement, her kindness, wit,
icumen, learning, and almost horrendous capacity for work have been a great support to me
through my years as one of her proteges, and I sincerely wish I can live up to the high
standards that she sets.
I also owe many thanks to Jan Oberg, former professor of Latin at Stockholm University,
ho encouraged me to stay at the Department of Classical Languages, taught me the value of
exactitude in details and supported my choice of subject for the doctoral dissertation. His fine
sense of humour and vast knowledge within the field of Latin philology made my choice of
career a lot easier.
My indebtedness to Dr Claes Gejrot, my good friend and colleague at the National Archives
of Sweden, is almost immeasurable and the gratias that I ago him here is merely a small
token of my appreciation for all the help he has given me in various ways.
Furthermore, I would like to thank Leif Gidlof at the National Archives of Sweden for
enabling me to finish this book in peace and quiet and my friends and colleagues Dr Peter
Stahl and Dr Roger Andersson for cheering me along on the final lap.
Many thanks are also due to my dear friends at the Department of Classical Languages in
Stockholm, professors and ordinary mortals, for help and encouragement along the way, and
to the Department as such for enabling me to spend a month in the fall of 1992 at Harvard
University in Cambridge and, further, for financing a journey to London in the autumn of
2001. By the same token, I would like to thank Stockholm University for giving me the grant
that enabled me to stay in London for two weeks at the time mentioned in order to pursue
manuscript studies at the British Library.
I warmly thank Prof. John Murdoch at the Department of the History of Science, Harvard
University, for giving me the nominal position as his assistant during my stay in Cambridge in
-92, thus opening all doors to the rich depositories of books around the campus, and Prof.
William Newman of the University of Indiana for showing interest in my work and lending
me his microfim copy of MS Clm 276.
I thank the Latin seminar of Stockholm for bearing with some of my impossible papers and
still being able to offer critical remarks, help and advice, my friend Georg Stenborg in
Uppsala for supplying me with photocopies of some rare prints, all my friends at Uppsala
7
University for invigorating and cheerful discussions, my friend and colleague at the National
Archives of Sweden, Prof. Eva Odelman, for help and valuable remarks concerning my work,
and, besides, a great many people who I have forgotten for the moment, and who have
probably forgotten me.
Finally, I thank the staffs of the University Library and the Royal National Library of
Stockholm for their kind help, the staff of the Department of Western Manuscripts at the
British Library for supplying me with microfilm copies of various manuscripts in their
holdings and for helping me out during my visit in 2001, and the British Library for letting me
reproduce material from their manuscripts in this book; unfortunately, the quality of the
illustrations is due to the staff of reproduction services at the same venerable institution, and
the fact that there are any illustrations at all is entirely thanks to the photographic services of
the National Archives of Sweden.
I dedicate this book to my wife, Annelie, without whose love and support my work would not
have been possible. Puss, alskling!
Introduction
1. The Purpose of the Present Work
For the serious student of mediaeval magic, Lynn Thorndike’s A History of Magic and
Experimental Science is still, by far, the best and certainly the most comprehensive survey
available, although its scope goes well beyond both magic and the Middle Ages. Admittedly,
there are more recent, and concise, handbooks and studies of the subject', but Thorndike’s
assiduous probing of the primary sources makes his magnum opus an invaluable treasure-
trove of information about texts that are still unpublished and available only in collections of
codices around the world. For despite an increasing interest in the arcana and esoterica of the
mediaeval period, not least among scholars, very few attempts have been made at editing the
vast manuscript material of magical texts2.
In his seminal chapter on Solomon and the Ars Notoria, Thorndike discusses a number of
rseudepigraphic works on magic circulating as books written by King Solomon during the
High Middle Ages and mentioned by authors of that time3. One of the treatises to which he
attracts our attention, and, in fact, the one which is accorded the greatest interest, is a book
that is variously known as the ‘Liber sacer/sacratus’, the ‘Liber iuratus Honorii’4, or, simply,
the ‘Liber iuratus’, but which is most often referred to by its English title the ‘Sworn Book of
Honorius’5. In the Latin text itself, the work is called ‘libellum ... sacrum sive iuratum’ (I 18)6
and iiber sacer vel liber angelorum vel liber iuratus’ (CXLI 1), but we are also told that that
Two examples being Kieckhefer 1989 and Flint 1991. A study from a somewhat different angle is Russel 1972.
Books on ritual/ceremonial magic worth reading are, for instance, Waite 1972, Butler 1979, and Fanger 1998,
-ough Waite and Butler are not exclusively concerned with the Middle Ages. Two collections of special studies,
- hich I have, as yet, been unable to examine, are Burnett 1996 and Ferreiro 1998.
- Setting aside non-academic publications, I can think of only five modem editions of Latin texts, viz. Al-Kindi:
De radiis’ (d’Alvemy - Hudry 1974), ‘Almadel’ auctor pseudonymus: 'De firmitate sex scientiarum' {Pack
'. 975), Picatrix - The Latin Version of the Ghayat Al-Hakim (Pingree 1986), Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's
■ 'jr.ua I of the Fifteenth Century (Kieckhefer 1997), and most recently The Book of Angels, Rings, Characters
i-.d Images of the Planets: attributed to Osbern Bokenham (Lidaka 1998), none of the editors being a Latin
philologist, as far as I know.
See Thorndike 1923 - 58, II, pp. 279 - 289. Complementary to Thorndike’s account is K. Preisendanz’s article
: - seudo-Salomonica, mostly Greek and unedited, in Pauly - Wissowa, Suppi. VIII, s.v. ‘Salomon’, coll. 660 -
704.
' The attribution of the book will be discussed in ch. 2 below.
See, for instance, Waite 1972, p.31, Butler 1979, p.90, Kieckhefer 1989, p.170, Fanger 1998 a, pp.viii - ix, xi,
xr. - xvi, Klaassen 1998, p.9ff, 19f, Mathiesen 1998, p.l43ff, and Kieckhefer 1998, p.250ff.
References are to chapters and paragraphs of the present edition.
9
the book is ‘ab angelis ... sacratus’ and ‘sacratum a Domino’ (I 19). The primary reason for
the predominant use of the English title seems to be the existence of a manuscript in the
British Library (Royal 17-A-XLII) containing a (partial) English translation and later
redaction of the Latin text, referred to as the ‘Swome Booke of Honoryus’7, upon which
scholars have relied far too heavily in the past. This text has been published twice, first by
Daniel Driscoll in an edition8 that is quite worthless from a scholarly point of view, and most
recently by Joseph H. Peterson in digital form on CD-ROM9, a fairly accurate (though,
palaeographically, somewhat unsatisfactory) transcription of the manuscript text with
additional variant readings from three other codices. However, there is still no edition of the
original Latin text. The primary purpose of the present work is, therefore, to provide scholars
with a critical edition of this most interesting work, which I have chosen to call the Liber
iuratus Honorii (henceforth abbreviated LIH).
The Ars Notoria, or the Notory Art, is a method of gaining knowledge about things human
or divine from God and his angels by means of mystical prayers, invocations, and magical
figures10. If one compares the LIH to works within the tradition of the Ars Notoria, it is
evident that Thorndike was right in connecting the two. He refers to the notory art of Solomon
and that of Solomon, Machineus, and Euclid on the one hand, and the ‘Golden Flowers’ of
Apollonius on the other, and notes that there seems to be little difference between the three".
An investigation of two manuscripts, British Library, Sloane 1712, folia 1 - 22, and
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 276, folia 1 - 26, undertaken by me in the process of
writing this dissertation has proved Thorndike right in that the ‘Ars notoria Salomonis,
Machinei et Euclidis’ and the ‘Apollonii flores aurei’, which he cites, are, in fact, one and the
same text, a text for which I will use the title Flores aurei Apollonii (henceforth FAA). A
comparison of this particular specimen of the Notory Art with the LIH has revealed such close
and interesting likenesses between the two that I have chosen to include relevant parts of the
FAA in an appendix to this book12. There also exists a printed version of the FAA, included in
7 See ch. 3.1.
8 Driscoll 1977.
5 Peterson 2000.
10 Called notae or notulae, whence the term ‘Ars Notoria’. On the Notory Art, from different perspectives, see
Klaassen 1998, pp. 14-19, Camille 1998, and Fanger 1998 b.
" Thorndike 1923 - 58, II, pp. 281 - 282.
12 See ch. 8.1 and my appendix, pp. 298 - 336.
10