Reference material

THE SOURCES

two books, both linked, both checkable

A citation you cannot follow is decoration. Every quotation in every document on this site comes from one of two public-domain editions, cited by book and chapter - and here they are, so you can read the passage yourself and decide whether we represented it fairly.

I · The editions

What is quoted, and where it comes from

II · What is not in here

The texts we could not get honestly

The Testament of Solomon

The 36 spirits read as a symptom catalogue is the best story in this corpus, and it is missing. Conybeare's English translation is not reachable as public-domain full text; the alternative is McCown's 1922 Greek edition. Rather than quote a modern translation we have no right to, we left the subject alone.

Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum

The 1652 alchemical anthology is on disk and public domain, but the scan's OCR is too corrupt to quote verbatim with a straight face. A citation we cannot guarantee character-for-character is not a citation.

III · The vocabulary

The words these texts use

Kamea

A magic square - every row, column and diagonal summing to the same number. Agrippa assigns one to each classical planet in Book II ch. xxii.

Clavicula

Latin for little key. Clavicula Salomonis is the Greater Key of Solomon - a different book from the Lesser Key, the demon catalogue it is constantly confused with.

Pentacle

In the Key, a figure carrying a divine Name, angel names and a scripture versicle. Not a five-pointed star by definition, and not a magic square.

Versicle

The short scripture line ringing a pentacle. The Key names chapter and verse for each, which is why it can be checked.

Chaldean order

The planets ranked by apparent speed - Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. Walking it hour by hour is what produces the names of the weekdays.

Unequal hours

Daylight split into twelve parts and night into twelve more, so an hour's length moves with the season and your latitude. The system the grimoires assume.

Ayanamsa

The offset between the tropical and sidereal zodiacs, about 24 degrees today. The Lahiri value is the one Indian astronomy standardised on.

Nakshatra

One of the twenty-seven lunar mansions of Indian astronomy. Your Moon falls in exactly one, and which one is arithmetic.

IV · The method that uses them
Rite. Instrument. Honest gap.

How a quotation becomes a page, and why the unverifiable part gets printed instead of deleted.

Read the house method