Name seals in the grimoires: a history of magical writing

In the magic manuals of medieval and early modern Europe, the grimoires, the name of an angel or spirit is not simply written: it is often accompanied by a seal, a linear drawing representing its identity. These signs, apparently arbitrary, have a history that can be reconstructed. Some derive from operations on letters and numbers, others from much older models, transmitted and distorted from one manuscript to another over the centuries.

Characters and ring letters

The Greek magical papyri and the engraved gems of the imperial age already display the so-called charaktêres, signs made of strokes ending in small circles, which German scholars have called “spectacle letters”. They belong to no known alphabet and were regarded as a script addressed to the divine powers, intelligible to them rather than to humans. This script survived in Byzantine, Arabic and Jewish magic, and reached the Latin grimoires of the late Middle Ages.

Agrippa's planetary squares

One of the most influential sources was the De occulta philosophia of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, published in its complete form in 1533. In the second book the author presents the magic squares attributed to the seven planets, grids of numbers in which every row, every column and every diagonal give the same sum, and beside them he reproduces planetary seals and signs attributed to the intelligences and spirits of each planet.

The principle, set out by Agrippa in theoretical terms, links the Hebrew letters of a name to their numerical values and these to the cells of the square: the seal is the geometric trace that results. It was a way of giving visible form to the correspondence between name, number and star typical of Renaissance thought, which saw the cosmos as a system of analogies in which each level mirrors the others.

The Clavicula and the Lemegeton

The Clavicula Salomonis, the “Key of Solomon”, circulated in many manuscript versions from the late Middle Ages onwards, in Latin, Italian, French and other languages, and contains pentacles with divine names and biblical verses arranged in concentric circles. The Lemegeton, or Lesser Key of Solomon, is instead an English compilation of the seventeenth century: its first part, the Goetia, assigns a different seal to each of the seventy-two spirits it describes.

Scholars have shown that many of these drawings were transformed from copy to copy, with errors and variants, so that the same seal can look very different in two manuscripts. Other signs derive from older sources, such as the Liber iuratus attributed to Honorius of Thebes, of the thirteenth century, which contains the Sigillum Dei, a complex diagram of divine names arranged in circles and a heptagon, taken up in the sixteenth century by the English scholar John Dee as well.

The history of seals shows learned magic as a culture of writing: copyists, compilers and scholars worked on letters, numbers and geometric figures, inheriting and transforming signs born centuries earlier. Today these drawings interest historians of the book and of ideas precisely for what they reveal about the transmission of manuscripts, exchanges between cultures and the hopes of those who copied and read them.