Kircher on the Sigillum Dei Aemeth

The Sigillum Dei, or Seal of God, is an intricate circular diagram built from concentric bands of divine and angelic names, heptagons and a central pentagram or cross. It first appears in the thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Liber Iuratus (Sworn Book of Honorius), where it is the central instrument for obtaining a vision of God, and it later passed into many magical manuscripts and, in revised form, into John Dee’s angelic workings. Athanasius Kircher printed an engraving of the seal, with a Latin explanation of its names and construction, in the section on Hebrew magic in the second tome of his Oedipus Aegyptiacus. Kircher treats the figure as an example of the amulets and sigils by which Jews and Christians who misused Kabbalistic names tried to harness divine power; he decodes the names written around its rims and in its heptagons, relating them to the Hebrew names of God, the seven planetary angels and the letters of the Tetragrammaton, and he condemns its use as superstitious. Because Oedipus Aegyptiacus was a famous and widely distributed book, Kircher’s plate became one of the best-known printed images of the Sigillum Dei, alongside versions in manuscripts such as Sloane 313 and Sloane 3853 and Dee’s wax seals. The online page gives his text and image, and the archive links it to its broader collection of witnesses to the seal.

What it contains

• Engraving of the Sigillum Dei Aemeth
• Explanation of the outer ring of names and letters
• Interpretation of the heptagons and planetary angel names
• Kircher’s identification of Hebrew divine names in the seal
• His judgement on the seal as superstitious ‘Hebrew magic’