The Magical Treatise of Solomon (Hygromanteia) and Delatte’s Anecdota Atheniensia

In 1927 the Belgian classicist Armand Delatte published the first volume of Anecdota Atheniensia, a collection of previously unedited Greek texts on religion and magic drawn mainly from manuscripts in Athens, with a supplement from libraries in London, Paris, Italy and Mount Athos. The volume includes divination by numbers and by lots, dream books, shoulder-blade and palm divination, magical recipes, exorcisms, a version of the Testament of Solomon, apocryphal and prophetic texts and the Physiologus. Its centrepiece is the Greek ‘Magical Treatise of Solomon’, often called the Hygromanteia, a Byzantine handbook presented as Solomon’s teaching to his son Rehoboam. It describes the planets and their hours, angels and demons, the plants and seals of each planet, and rituals for conjuring spirits, including divination with a bowl of water, from which the name hygromanteia (water-divination) comes. Scholars regard it as a key ancestor of the Latin Clavicula Salomonis or Key of Solomon, sharing its structure of planetary timing, purifications, knives, circles and conjurations. The online edition presents Delatte’s Greek texts, with French apparatus, as a resource for comparing the many manuscript recensions, among them Harley 5596 in the British Library and manuscripts in Athens and Paris. The standard English translation of the principal recensions is Ioannis Marathakis’s 2011 edition.

What it contains

• The Magical Treatise of Solomon in Athenian manuscripts
• Planetary hours, angels, demons, plants and seals
• Rituals of conjuration and divination with water (lecanomancy)
• Greek magical recipes and exorcisms
• Divination by numbers, lots, dreams, shoulder-blades and palms
• A Greek version of the Testament of Solomon and other apocrypha