Necromancy in the Medici Library: An Edition and Translation of Excerpts from Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Plut. 89 sup. 38

153 Pages·2020·1.034 MB·English

by  Brian Johnson

Necromancy in the Medici Library
Copyright © 2020 Brian Johnson
Seals redrawn from the ms. by S. Aldarnay.
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
ISBN 978-1-907881-98-5 (Hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-907881-99-2 (Paperback)
A catalogue for this title is available from the British Library.
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Brian Johnson has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Hardcover edition printed by Biddles, Norfolk.
First published in 2020
Hadean Press
West Yorkshire
England
www.hadeanpress.com
Table of Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Introduction
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
N
o journey – whether mythic katabasis or archival investigation –
should be undertaken alone. I have enjoyed the aid of a handful of
boon companions on the present intellectual adventure, whom it would be
remiss of me not to recognize.
Many thanks to Dr. Alexander Cummins, for offering readers his own
illuminating observations and insights upon the text in a foreword to this
volume.
My manuscript transcription and translation were significantly improved
at key points thanks to Daniel Harms and his knowledge of obscure
lexicological matters and useful reference materials.
S. Aldarnay, with whom I have previously collaborated, once more
evinced a keen artistic eye and steady hand in reproducing the manuscript’s
magic circles in a form infinitely superior in aesthetics to the scribe’s own.
Other long-time co-conspirators are, of course, Erzebet Barthold and
everyone behind the scenes at Hadean Press, who have coordinated the
alchemical transmutation of my many and disparate drafts and revisions
into a fully realized book.
Finally, as a matter of historical interest, I would note that the research
and translation work for this book were largely conducted under conditions
of mass social disruption, travel restrictions, and institutional closures
during the early months of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and would not have
been possible had the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana not exhibited such
admirable foresight in their manuscript digitization efforts. Molte grazie.
Foreword
T
he present handsome tome you bear before you is a collection of
magical operations selected from a late-fifteenth-century Italian
miscellany of such sorceries. Brian furnishes us with some astute textual
genealogy and grimoiric context for this source material, concisely
analysing its consanguinity with influential texts as diverse as the Munich
Manual (MS Clm 849), the Hygromanteia, the Picatrix, the Livre des
Esperitz, the Pseudomonarchia daemonum, and even a few English books
of cunning. I will not bore you by repeating or attempting to summarise this
good work. This foreword instead thus serves to open proceedings with a
simple question: how necromantic are these rites?
The word necromancy can mean many a tenebrous thing, but we may
usefully consider this collection truly necromantic in at least three strict
senses, and even perhaps two further poetic senses. It contains a
necyomantic experiment that requires a corpse. Or at least, if not the whole
body, the right foot of a corpse. It includes sciomantic operations,
concerning conjuring the shades of deceased souls to teach you any and all
sciences and arts. By medieval standards, this little book of secrets certainly
details various nigromantic sorceries trafficking with unclean spirits, spirits
called “hot”, and straight-up demons. Each of these types of workings – the
neycomantic, sciomantic, and nigromantic – offer facets and components
both familiar and novel, and as such deserve a little further survey below.
Additionally, and certainly most broadly, this collection also has a
deathly rite that specifies fatal consequences for the nigromancer if their
operation is improperly performed. Finally, as Brian affirms, I believe it
fruitful to meditate on how resurrecting these unliving experiments from
dusty shelves and archived catacombs to living eyes and repertoires can
perform an act of textual necromancy of its very own.
But let’s talk corpses for a second first. Then ghosts. Then demons. Then
health and safety. And then the necromancing of necromancy itself.
Corpse Magic
This collection includes an operation utilising a corpse to transfer the
virtues of a dead body to an object; in this case, “an unused pin”. Here we
may of course note a traditional distinction between necyomancy (deriving
from the Ancient Greek root νέκυς, nékus, “corpse” i.e. magic employing
the physical remains of the dead) and sciomancy (divination by the soul or
shade of a deceased person) to find this collection to contain material
properly necromantic by at least the first definition so far. Distinct from
hauntings by the soul of the slain, or even weaponising the stain of death a
violent killing leaves in a place – the ghost of the act, one might say – this
working rather deals more directly in the potencies of a carcass itself.
This particular spell details a pin that may be employed to prevent a
woman “being known by a man”. Here I quite agree with the editor’s
assertion of this referring to “knowledge” in the colloquially Biblical sense.
We have context for such sorcerous technologies, and indeed a description
of a decidedly similar working from (in)famously regarded occult
authorities. No less a figure than Agrippa himself details a very similar
impotency operation which bears many of the features of the operation in
this collection:
Also it is said, that if a woman take a needle, and beray it with dung,
and then wrap it up in earth, in which the carkass of a man was
buryed, and shall carry it about her in a cloth which was used at the
funerall, that no man shall be able to ly with her as long as she hath it
about her.
—Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy,
trans ‘J.F.’ (London, 1651), 93.
These uses establish a highly relevant context for the deployment of the
occult virtues of a corpse, and the effects of corpse-adjacent materia
imbued with such virtues. The icy frigidity of death may freeze the life
from the heat of passion and violence. Male sexual potency was especially
framed as a hot and wet sanguine affair, further gravely decomposed by
cold and dry melancholia.
This familiar humoural context is actually extended in this experiment to
consider broader effects of the deathly pin: it can prevent people eating.
Digestion – frequently referred to in pre-modern sciences of the body as
concoction – was also envisioned in terms of a furnace heat stoking the
heart’s fire and vivacious warmth from our spark of life. As the pin bearing
the contagious refrigerative occult virtues of a corpse’s foot is placed under
the foot of the living operator, death robs the living of more appetites than
the strictly rapine or erotically libidinous.
Wraiths of Instruction
Most explicitly, the experiment attributed to Michael Scot contained in this
anthology centres around summoning a dead tutelary shade to
“benevolently, faithfully, and peacefully teach [one] all the knowledge” that
one wishes. Here arguably we find a divinatory core of necromancy: raising
ghosts to impart knowledge and reveal secrets.
The protocols for summoning such a tutelary spirit to appear (firstly, in
order to deliver its name) require dream incubation using a talismanic cloth
bundle. Significantly, the cloth is marked with the name of the spirit after it
has appeared and delivered it. The talisman is thus only “completed” by
working with the spirit, rather than before calling it. This mode of working
with a spirit is not a linear matter of preparation leading to a singular potent
manifestation at climax. It is an ongoing affair of multiple modalities of
interaction and effect. Spirit contact and communion weaves in and out of
preparations, conjurations, actions, and follow-up. Methods of dream
incubation and conjuration therefore also become means of confirmation
and, in this case, actually enable further steps in actions of empowerment.
The blade is sharpened by use.
This back-and-forth interplay is even en-mattered in a literal dove’s
blood “ink” of the dreaming bundle. The circle of the pact-talisman’s seal is
drawn with the still-bloody heart of the sacrifice. The dove’s blood is
offered – performing a myriad of complex functions – and, in the course of
making the offering, the working’s chief talismanic tool is developed and
attuned to its purpose, and becomes marked with the evidence of the
sacrifice itself, as well as imbued with the various virtues of the blood of
doves.
The nigromantic ritual technology evidenced in this text confirms a
simple truth: these forms of conjuration are not simple one-night stands. In
this case, the construction and consecration of a dreaming bundle is merely
the first step of the larger work with the tutelary spirit. As has been
remarked by many magicians before myself: grimoires typically actually
only teach how to first call, how to prepare the circle or lamen or
shewstone; or, in this case, the haunted pillow. Successful completion of