The characters of the grimoires: seals, signs and spirit signatures

In the books of ritual magic that circulated in Europe between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, the so-called grimoires, the text is only part of the content. Beside prayers and descriptions appear circles, pentacles and above all characters: graphic signs attributed to planets, angels and spirits, sometimes called seals or signatures. They are the most visible legacy of a long tradition going back to the charaktêres of late antiquity and passing through Arabic and Jewish magic.

The Arabic legacy

One of the main channels through which magical characters reached Europe was the Picatrix, the Latin translation of an Arabic work entitled Ghayat al-hakim, The Goal of the Sage, probably composed in the eleventh century in al-Andalus. At the court of Alfonso X the Wise, in the thirteenth century, the text was translated into Castilian and then into Latin. The Picatrix contains descriptions of astrological images and figures linked to the planets and their celestial houses.

Beside the Picatrix circulated other texts of astral and talismanic magic of Arabic origin, attributed to Hermes, to Ptolemy or to Eastern sages. In these writings are found planetary characters that would enjoy a long fortune, taken up and transformed in the Latin manuscripts of the following centuries. The passage from Arabic to Latin was not a simple translation: the signs were recopied by hands that did not know the original script, and changed shape with each transcription.

Medieval and Renaissance grimoires

The Liber iuratus attributed to Honorius of Thebes, known from fourteenth-century manuscripts, contains a great seal of God, made of concentric circles, divine names and signs. The Clavicula Salomonis, the Key of Solomon, known above all from manuscripts of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, presents pentacles rich in characters, Hebrew letters and inscriptions. Its name recalls the legend of King Solomon as master of the spirits.

In 1575 the Arbatel de magia veterum was printed in Basel, a short treatise describing seven spirits called Olympic, each linked to a planet and endowed with its own character. In the seventeenth century, finally, the Lemegeton, or Lesser Key of Solomon, spread in England; its first part, the Goetia, lists seventy-two spirits with their respective seals. The best-known manuscripts are kept in the Sloane collection of the British Library.

What they represented

For the authors of the grimoires the characters were not mere symbols. They were regarded as the visible sign of an invisible entity, a kind of signature that identified it and made it present. According to tradition, knowing and tracing the character of a spirit was equivalent to knowing its secret name. Hence the importance attached to the precision with which they were copied, even though in practice every copyist introduced changes.

Many characters derive from distorted Hebrew, Greek or Latin letters, others from astrological signs, others still from numerical grids such as the magic squares of the planets. Their composite origin reflects the very history of the grimoires, layered texts that blend different sources and were reworked from generation to generation. Some recall the ring signs of the magical papyri, with their small circles at the ends.

Today the characters of the grimoires interest historians of culture, of writing and of religion. Studying them means reconstructing a network of translations and exchanges between the Arab, Jewish and Christian worlds, and observing how a sign traced on an Egyptian papyrus could, through a thousand passages, reappear in a seventeenth-century English manuscript.