Sigillum Dei Aemeth (Seal of God's Truth)

The Sigillum Dei, 'seal of God', often called by John Dee's name Sigillum Dei Aemeth, 'seal of God's truth', is a complex circular diagram of divine and angelic names arranged in concentric rings, heptagons and heptagrams around a central pentagram or cross. Its earliest known description is in the Liber Iuratus, or Sworn Book, attributed to Honorius of Thebes and usually dated to the fourteenth century, where it is the central instrument of a ritual for obtaining the beatific vision and power over spirits. The Liber Iuratus gives instructions for constructing it from the seventy-two-letter name of God, the names of the seven planetary angels and other sacred names. Many manuscripts preserve versions that diverge considerably, and Berengar Ganell's Summa Sacrae Magicae of 1346 contains several elaborate forms. In 1582 John Dee, dissatisfied with the variants he found in his own copies, received through his scryer Edward Kelley an angelic specification for a new version, which he had carved in wax as the base of his shewstone table; one of these wax seals survives in the British Museum. In 1652–1654 the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher reproduced and criticised a seven-sided Cabalistic amulet in his Oedipus Aegyptiacus, the image the archive presents with Peterson's notes. Through Dee the seal entered the Golden Dawn and modern Enochian magic and became an emblem of Western ceremonial occultism. Scholarship since Hedegård's critical Liber Iuratus (2002) and Veenstra's work on Ganell (2012) treats it as a family of related diagrams with a complex history.

What it contains

• Concentric rings of divine and angelic names
• Heptagons and heptagrams of planetary angels
• Central pentagram or cross with the name of God
• Construction from the seventy-two-letter name
• Use in the Sworn Book's ritual for the beatific vision
• Dee's angelically revised version for his scrying table
• Kircher's critique of a related Cabalistic amulet