Robert Turner did more than replace Latin words with English ones. His 1655 version moved the Arbatel into a London anthology headed by Agrippa’s name, recast its devotional vocabulary for an English reader, and flattened some of the Latin print’s visual emphasis. The aphorism numbers still preserve the work’s architecture, so a close comparison can show what the translation carries across and what its new setting changes.
- Latin witness
- Basel, 1575
- English edition
- London, 1655
- Translator
- Robert Turner
The anthology supplies a new reading order
The Library of Congress records a London 1655 volume printed by J. C. for J. Harrison. Its long title begins with a Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy under Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s name, then announces geomancy, the Magical Elements attributed to Peter of Abano, astronomical geomancy, the Nature of Spirits, and Arbatel of Magick. A buyer therefore encountered the anonymous Basel work after several texts with famous names and overt ceremonial subjects. That order encourages the reader to treat every component as one Agrippan system even though the title itself lists separate works. Turner is named as translator of the collection; he is not presented as the Arbatel’s original author.
The binding also changes the Arbatel’s genre cues. In Basel, the title and forty-nine aphorisms frame magic through wisdom, prayer, moral discipline, and divine permission before introducing the Olympic governors. In the London volume, a reader arrives from the pseudo-Agrippan Fourth Book and the Heptameron, where circles, exorcisms, and timed operations dominate. The same aphorism can consequently feel like commentary on a ceremonial manual rather than the opening of its own devotional program. This is reception history embedded in page order: neighboring texts supply expectations before Turner’s first sentence is read.
What Turner preserves, regularizes, and omits
Turner retains the numbered aphorisms, and that decision keeps the seven septenaries visible even when London page breaks differ from Basel. The numbers let a reader follow an argument from devotional rules in aphorisms 1–14, through the Olympic material in 15–21, and onward to classifications of secrets, spirits, and conduct. Yet translation changes texture. Peterson notes that Turner does not preserve the Latin edition’s patterned capitalization. Words such as DEI or SPIRITVM can carry typographic emphasis in the Basel print; in continuous English prose, that visual hierarchy recedes. “Arbatel of Magick” also becomes the familiar English title, although it belongs to this dated translation rather than to an ancient English witness.
The textual tradition is larger than two printed columns. Peterson identifies an apparently independent English Arbatel in British Library Sloane MS 3851, folios 10r–29v. That manuscript includes a drawn “Seal of Secrets” where the 1575 print describes the seal without illustrating it. The difference demonstrates that translation and transmission can add a visual solution as well as change wording. A modern diagram assembled from the manuscript is evidence for that witness, not a missing plate silently recoverable from every Arbatel. Turner’s print, the Basel Latin, and the Sloane version therefore preserve related but materially different ways of making the work usable.
Worked comparison: invocation becomes prayer in Aphorism 2
Aphorism 2 makes the translator’s choices visible. The Latin opens by telling the reader to invoke the Lord’s name, then says to undertake nothing without invocatio Dei through the only-begotten Son. Turner renders the first clause as “call upon the Name of the Lord” and the second as “without prayer unto God.” The movement from invocatio to “prayer” steers a potentially technical magical word toward familiar devotional practice. He nevertheless preserves the passage’s hierarchy: the spirits are to be used as ministers, without rashness or presumption, with reverence toward their Lord, and as God’s messengers. The operation is authorized from above rather than forced by the operator.
The ending preserves the ethical test as well. Both witnesses direct the remainder of life toward God’s honor and the benefit of the practitioner and neighbor. Read beside the anthology’s ceremonial neighbors, that sentence prevents the Arbatel from collapsing into a list of planetary services. Read beside the capitalized Latin, Turner’s smoother English also shows what disappears: the page no longer sets certain divine and spiritual terms apart by type. The worked comparison reveals a translation that domesticates the diction while retaining the source’s devotional logic. It also explains why an isolated Turner quotation can sound like generic English piety unless its numbered place in the Arbatel is restored.
Source records
- University Library Basel, Arbatel de magia veterum (1575), AN VI 37 ↗
- University Library Basel, complete 1575 scan (DOI 10.3931/e-rara-8789) ↗
- Library of Congress, Robert Turner’s 1655 collected English edition ↗
- Wellcome Collection, English collection and its Arbatel component ↗
- Joseph H. Peterson, parallel Latin and Turner English transcription ↗