Liber Trium Animarum (Book of Three Souls)

The Liber Trium Animarum, or Book of Three Souls, is a small medieval Latin prayer book of about fifty prayers built around sacred names of God and angels. It survives only inside the Summa Sacrae Magicae, the vast magical encyclopedia compiled in 1346 by Berengar Ganell, a Catalan working in Perpignan. Its title refers to its use for freeing souls from purgatory, but the prayers were also employed in operations of consecration, suffumigation, circle-making and the binding of spirits, and a closing list sets out each prayer's applications. The text is linked to the Sworn Book of Honorius: in Ganell's version of the Honorian ritual these prayers stand where the northern European Liber Iuratus manuscripts substitute prayers from the Ars Notoria. Joseph Peterson has suggested that this may be the original arrangement and that the book could be older than Ganell, perhaps even the Liber Sacratus that William of Auvergne condemned around 1230, though he presents this as a hypothesis. The edition rests on three witnesses of the Summa: the fifteenth-century Kassel manuscript once owned and annotated by John Dee, an early sixteenth-century Halle manuscript, and a German translation of about 1580 in Berlin. The book matters for understanding how angel magic, liturgy and penitential piety interlocked in the fourteenth century. Peterson published a critical edition with translation in 2022 after circulating a working version online.

What it contains

• Fifty-one prayers built on divine and angelic names
• Petitions for releasing souls from purgatory
• Litanies of saints and angelic choirs
• Seven named angels and their invocation
• Uses in consecration, suffumigation, circles and binding
• Concluding table of the uses of each prayer