Scrying with the Seven Aerial Kings (Ghent MS 1021A)

This short Latin ritual, edited and translated by Joseph Peterson in 2021, comes from Ghent University Library MS 1021A, a mid-sixteenth-century magical miscellany that also contains one of the oldest Latin copies of the Clavicula Salomonis and one of the few surviving witnesses of the Lucidarium artis nigromanticae attributed to Peter of Abano. According to a note in the manuscript, it was found in 1835 hidden in a chimney at a hospital in Ghent together with remains of a magician’s instruments. The text is an ‘experiment’ for scrying in the operator’s palm or in a mirror in order to speak with the seven ‘masters of the days’ or aerial kings, the spirit rulers of the days of the week known from medieval works such as the Liber Iuratus and the Heptameron. After three days of abstinence, washing and clean clothing, the operator writes a figure on the left palm, anoints it with oil, recites a conjuration many times, and then calls on each king in turn, beginning with the ruler of the day, asking them to appear in the palm and answer questions while incense is burned; finally they are dismissed and the palm is wiped clean. A second section gives a ‘Seal of Solomon’ with a planetary circle and a long Christian conjuration. Peterson’s introduction relates the spirits to Trithemius’s catalogue of 1508 and compares the ritual with a mirror experiment in the Latin Picatrix.

What it contains

• Three days of preparation: abstinence, washing and clean clothing
• Figure written on the palm and anointing with oil
• Conjuration repeated before calling the kings
• Invocations of the seven aerial kings of the days
• Questions, incense and dismissal
• A ‘Seal of Solomon’ with a long Christian conjuration