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Liber XXVIII · Solomonic Magic

Liber XXVIII · Solomonic Magic · Chapter VII: Other Grimoires

Ganell's Summa Sacre Magice: A Medieval Compendium of Magic

Berengar Ganell's Summa sacre magice (1346): the Catalan compendium of ritual and Solomonic magic, its sources, five books, manuscripts and John Dee's copy.

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The Summa sacre magice ("Compendium of Sacred Magic") is a vast Latin encyclopedia of ritual magic completed in 1346 by Berengar Ganell (Berengarius Ganellus), an otherwise obscure writer from the Catalan-speaking world. It gathers, quotes and systematises many of the Solomonic, angelic and astral texts that circulated in the later Middle Ages, among them the Sworn Book of Honorius and the Almandal. Lost from view for centuries and rediscovered by scholars around 2002, it is now recognised as one of the most important witnesses to learned magic in fourteenth-century Europe.

What the Summa Sacre Magice Is§

The Summa belongs to a recognisable medieval genre: the scholastic compendium that collects authorities on a subject and arranges them into an ordered whole. Ganell applied this method to the ritual magic of his day. Scholars describe the work as surveying both an ars vetus, the older magic inherited from Solomonic and Hermetic books, and an ars nova, the more recent practices of his own century. The result runs to several hundred manuscript leaves and is divided into five books, each with tracts and chapters.

What makes the Summa unusual is that its compiler names himself. Most medieval magical books were pseudepigraphic, attributed to Solomon, Hermes, Enoch or another ancient sage. Claire Fanger has noted that Ganell presents himself as a redactor working openly under his own name, a sign of how a learned practitioner might understand his task as editorial and scholarly rather than revelatory.

The work is also valuable because Ganell quoted generously. Several texts known only in late or fragmentary copies survive in fuller or earlier forms in the Summa, and historians use it to reconstruct the state of the magical literature around 1350, a generation or two after the Paris condemnation of 1277 had banned books of necromancy.

Berengar Ganell and the Catalan World§

Almost nothing is securely known about Ganell's life. His name and language point to Catalonia or the neighbouring lands of the Crown of Aragon, and researchers have associated him with Perpignan and with the court circles of the kingdom of Majorca, whose last independent king, James III, lost his realm in the 1340s. These links remain tentative, and it is not known whether Ganell was a cleric, a physician or a layman with Latin learning.

The Catalan context is nonetheless suggestive. The Crown of Aragon was a meeting point of Latin, Jewish and Arabic learning, and Catalan scholars of the period, from the physician Arnau de Vilanova to the philosopher Ramon Llull, engaged with astrology, alchemy and divine names. Ganell's interest in Hebrew names and his inclusion of Arabic and "Chaldean" alphabets fit this intellectual landscape. One of his diagrams, the Semamphoras table, frames divine names with four alphabets that he linked to four religious communities, Christians, Greeks, Jews and Saracens, as if the sacred names of all peoples together opened the spiritual world (see the catalogue entry).

Ganell's Sources: The Sworn Book, the Almandal and Solomonic Texts§

Ganell drew on a library of magical works, many of which have their own histories:

  • The Liber Iuratus or Sworn Book of Honorius. A thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century text centred on the vision of God achieved through prayer, purification and the Sigillum Dei, the "seal of God". Ganell quotes it extensively, and Jan Veenstra has studied how the Summa transmits its seal and prayers (see the Sworn Book).
  • The Almandal. A Solomonic text on a wax altar or tablet used to call angels, related to the later Almadel of the Lemegeton.
  • The Liber Razielis and Solomonic ring texts. Books on angelic names, the heavens and Solomon's rings and seals, in the tradition traced in our article on Solomon's ring.
  • The Liber trium animarum, the Magica of Toz the Greek and image magic. Texts on spirits and astral images, related to the Hermetic and Arabic image tradition that also produced the Picatrix.

Ganell also gives material on the Semamphoras, the Latin reworking of the Hebrew Shem ha-Mephorash, the explicit name of God, a theme explored in our article on the 72 angels. Throughout, he does not merely copy: he compares, harmonises and cross-references his sources, sometimes noting where they disagree.

The Five Books of the Summa§

Scholarly descriptions of the Summa broadly agree on the contents of its five books, although none of the surviving copies is complete:

  1. Book I gathers general invocations and prayers and the conjurations appropriate to the seasons and times.
  2. Book II treats the equipment of Solomonic magic, including rings, garments and seals, together with planetary prayers and the spirits and seals of the planets.
  3. Book III concerns the calling of spirits, the kings of the four directions and the Almandal.
  4. Book IV sets out the principles of magic, consecration and the Sigillum Dei from the Sworn Book.
  5. Book V contains astronomical and cosmological material: the names of the heavens, winds and stars, tables and a litany.

The work is therefore much broader than a single grimoire. It includes cosmology, a theory of the operator's purity and faith, catalogues of angelic and demonic names with their offices, and ritual procedures of the kind found in the Key of Solomon. Like the related Ars Notoria, it treats prayer and divine names as the core of the art. As a historical source it records the claims and methods of practitioners; it is described here for its contents, not as a practical guide.

Magic as Devotion: Ganell's Theology of Ritual§

Ganell called his subject "sacred magic", and the phrase was deliberate. Damaris Gehr, whose research did much to restore the Summa to scholarly attention, has argued that Ganell understood magic as a pious act that promoted God's kingship over the created order. In his view the spirits, good and evil, are subjects of God; the magician, made worthy through purity, prayer and the holy names, acts as an agent of divine authority in commanding them.

This position was exactly what theologians rejected. To them, any invocation of demons implied an implicit pact, whatever the intentions of the operator. The tension between the practitioner's self-understanding as a devout servant of God and the theologians' verdict of idolatry runs through the history of medieval necromancy, and the Summa is one of its richest documents. Ganell's insistence on fasting, confession and prayer echoes the Liber Iuratus, whose prologue imagined a council of magicians defending their art against ecclesiastical persecution.

Manuscripts, John Dee and Modern Rediscovery§

Three principal witnesses are known. The main Latin manuscript is in the University Library at Kassel; a second Latin manuscript is in Halle; and a sixteenth-century German translation survives in Berlin. Because each is incomplete or abridged in places, a full text has to be reconstructed by comparing them.

The Kassel copy has a remarkable history. It belonged to the Elizabethan mathematician and magus John Dee, who annotated it, and it later entered the library of Landgrave Moritz of Hesse-Kassel (1572–1632), a prince with strong interests in alchemy and the occult sciences. Carlos Gilly drew attention to Dee's ownership in 2002, and scholars have since asked whether the Summa's version of the Sigillum Dei helped shape the elaborate seal that appears in Dee's angelic magic, discussed in our article on Enochian magic. The connection is plausible but still debated.

Modern study of the Summa began only in the twenty-first century, with the work of Gilly, Gehr and Jan Veenstra. Gehr prepared a critical Latin edition, and Stephen Skinner and Daniel Clark published an English translation of the first books in 2024. The Summa is now regularly cited in surveys of medieval ritual magic as evidence of how systematic and self-conscious that tradition could be.

Frequently asked questions§

Who was Berengar Ganell?§

He was the compiler of the Summa sacre magice, finished in 1346. Little is known about him except that he wrote in Latin within the Catalan-speaking world, possibly in Perpignan or the circles of the kingdom of Majorca, and that he named himself as redactor of the work.

What does Summa sacre magice mean?§

It means "Compendium" or "Summary of Sacred Magic". The title reflects Ganell's view that the magic he described was a holy science based on prayer, purity and the divine names, rather than illicit sorcery.

Ganell quotes the Liber Iuratus, or Sworn Book of Honorius, at length, especially its prayers and the Sigillum Dei. His version is an important early witness for scholars reconstructing the Sworn Book's text and transmission.

Did John Dee own the Summa sacre magice?§

Yes. The Kassel manuscript bears Dee's annotations and later passed to Landgrave Moritz of Hesse-Kassel. Scholars have suggested that it may have informed Dee's understanding of the Sigillum Dei, though this remains under discussion.

Sources and further reading§