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Liber XIII · High Magick

Liber XIII · High Magick · Chapter VII: Ritual & Symbolism

The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy and Turner's 1655 Edition

The pseudo-Agrippan Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy and the Heptameron: their origins, contents and Robert Turner's 1655 English edition of practical magic.

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The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy is a short Latin manual of ceremonial magic, first printed in 1559 and falsely presented as the practical sequel to Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy. It was usually printed with the Heptameron, a conjuration handbook attributed to Peter of Abano, and in 1655 the London physician and translator Robert Turner put both, with several related texts, into English. That volume brought the working methods of Renaissance magic to English readers and shaped British ceremonial magic for the next three centuries.

The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy Explained§

Agrippa's De occulta philosophia libri tres, published complete at Cologne in 1533, was a learned synthesis of natural, celestial and ceremonial magic, but it was more a philosophy of magic than a practical manual (see our article on Agrippa's Three Books). Readers who wanted to know how the theory was put into practice found an answer in a Liber quartus, a "fourth book" subtitled "on magical ceremonies", which began to circulate in print in 1559 and was soon included in collected editions of Agrippa's works.

The book claimed to supply the key that Agrippa had deliberately withheld: the rules for finding the names and characters of spirits, for making the instruments of the art and for calling spirits to visible appearance. Its brevity and apparent authority made it popular, and it travelled through Europe bound with other short practical texts.

A Spurious Agrippa: Marburg 1559 and Weyer's Verdict§

The authenticity of the Fourth Book was challenged almost at once. Johann Weyer, who had lived in Agrippa's household as a young man, declared in his De praestigiis daemonum (1563) that the book was not his master's work and should be rejected. Modern scholars agree. Its style and method differ from the Three Books, and it contains nothing that requires Agrippa's authorship.

Who did write it is uncertain. Thomas Willard and Joseph Peterson have suggested the French Paracelsian Jacques Gohory as a possible author or editor, the same figure Peterson proposes for the Arbatel, but no evidence has settled the question. The pseudepigraphy was typical of the age: practical magical texts gained credibility from famous names, and Agrippa's reputation as an arch-magician, already shaped by legends of a demonic black dog, made his name especially attractive to printers.

Spirit Names, Pentacles and Consecrations§

The Fourth Book is concise and systematic. Its main subjects can be summarised as follows:

  • Spirit names and characters. Using tables of letters arranged by the planets and signs, the operator was to extract the names of good and evil spirits from the astrological figure of a nativity or a moment, and derive their sigils from magical squares.
  • The appearances of spirits. For each planet the book describes the shapes in which its spirits were thought to appear and the signs of their presence, a catalogue later copied into many manuscripts.
  • Pentacles and the book of spirits. It explains the making of pentacles bearing divine names and verses from Scripture, and of a consecrated book in which spirits' names and seals would be recorded.
  • Consecrations. It gives forms of blessing for water, fire, oil, incense, places and instruments.
  • Invocation and necromancy. It discusses calling good and evil spirits into a circle or a crystal and, briefly, the ancient belief that the souls of the dead could be called back, citing classical examples.

These passages are historically important as a compact statement of what Renaissance readers understood ritual magic to involve; they are summarised here as evidence of the book's content, not as instruction. The catalogue entry for the text is the Fourth Book.

The Heptameron of Pseudo-Peter of Abano§

The text most often bound with the Fourth Book was the Heptameron, seu Elementa magica ("Heptameron, or Magical Elements"). It carries the name of Peter of Abano (c. 1257–c. 1316), the Paduan physician and philosopher who acquired a posthumous reputation as a magician, but the attribution is false. Joseph Peterson has shown that the printed Heptameron is an abridged and rearranged form of a longer Latin work, the Lucidarium artis nigromantice, also attributed to Abano (see the Lucidarium).

The Heptameron is organised around time. It explains how to draw a circle whose inscriptions vary with the hour, the season and the day; gives the names of the angels of the hours and seasons; supplies consecrations of the circle, perfumes, fire and garments; and then, day by day from Sunday to Saturday, names the ruling angel, its seal, the aerial spirits under it and the corresponding incense. The angels of the days are Michael (Sunday), Gabriel (Monday), Samael (Tuesday), Raphael (Wednesday), Sachiel (Thursday), Anael (Friday) and Cassiel (Saturday), a scheme explored in our article on planetary angels. The catalogue entry is the Heptameron.

Robert Turner and the English Volume of 1655§

Robert Turner was an English medical writer and translator of the Commonwealth and Restoration period, active from the 1650s to the 1660s, who specialised in bringing Latin occult and Paracelsian texts into English. In 1655 he published in London a substantial volume titled Henry Cornelius Agrippa his Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, which in fact contained six works:

  1. the Fourth Book itself;
  2. a treatise Of Geomancy attributed to Agrippa;
  3. the Heptameron, as "Magical Elements of Peter de Abano";
  4. an Astronomical Geomancy attributed to Gerard of Cremona;
  5. Of the Nature of Spirits, a dialogue by the German physician Georg Pictorius;
  6. the Arbatel of Magick.

Turner followed it with an English Ars Notoria in 1657 and later published Botanologia (1664), an English herbal. His translations were not always accurate, but they were fluent and influential. The 1650s, a decade of loosened censorship and intense interest in astrology and prophecy, saw a flood of English occult publishing, including the English translation of Agrippa's Three Books (1651). Turner's volume completed this picture by supplying the practical rituals Agrippa had omitted. The two geomancies also made it an important source for English divination.

Influence on English Magic: Lemegeton, Sibly and Barrett§

Few books shaped English ritual magic as much as Turner's collection. Its material appears throughout the manuscript grimoires of the later seventeenth century, including the Lemegeton or Lesser Key of Solomon, whose conjurations draw on the Heptameron. Cunning-folk and astrologers copied its circles and day-angels into their notebooks, and the eighteenth-century astrologer Ebenezer Sibly reproduced material from it.

In 1801 Francis Barrett incorporated large sections of the Fourth Book and the Heptameron, lightly modernised and unacknowledged, into The Magus, through which they reached the occultists of the Victorian revival. Frederick Hockley transcribed related texts, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn drew on the same stock of angelic names and planetary correspondences. Stephen Skinner's facsimile-based edition of 1978 returned Turner's volume to print and made it a standard reference for modern students of the grimoire tradition.

Frequently asked questions§

Did Agrippa write the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy?§

No. It was published in 1559, long after Agrippa's death in 1535, and his former pupil Johann Weyer rejected it as spurious in 1563. Modern scholars agree that it is pseudepigraphic, though its real author is unknown.

What is the Heptameron?§

The Heptameron is a late medieval handbook of ritual magic organised by the days of the week, giving the circle, consecrations and the angels and spirits of each day. It is falsely attributed to Peter of Abano and is an abridgement of the longer Lucidarium artis nigromantice.

What did Robert Turner translate in 1655?§

Turner's 1655 volume contained the pseudo-Agrippan Fourth Book, a geomancy attributed to Agrippa, the Heptameron, an astronomical geomancy attributed to Gerard of Cremona, Georg Pictorius's treatise on spirits and the Arbatel of Magick.

Why is the Fourth Book important?§

It became the main printed source of practical ceremonial magic in English. Through manuscript grimoires, Ebenezer Sibly and Francis Barrett's The Magus, its methods and angel names reached the nineteenth-century occult revival.

Sources and further reading§