The fourth book describes a marked object, but “the Almadel” was never a single timeless diagram. Its English four-altitude form belongs to a wider medieval and early modern family.
The object is part of a text
The English Ars Almadel organizes an operation around a small wax table, supports, light, and four altitudes. The manuscript’s object is meaningful because the prose specifies where figures and names belong. A detached square drawing or product-style reconstruction removes that explanation. A folio drawing, a printed editor’s diagram, and a modern reconstruction are different kinds of images; only the first directly shows a manuscript page. The named angels and claimed results belong to the grimoire’s religious and ceremonial language, while the surviving evidence consists of texts and, in some witnesses, drawings of a prescribed device.
Why earlier versions differ
Peterson’s revised Almadel survey draws together a large witness list. The older Almandal family includes Latin and German material that differs in the number of divisions, material of the device, religious vocabulary, and arrangement of names. Some versions describe metal or a ground figure where the later English branch emphasizes wax. A possible Arabic prehistory has been discussed but is not an established direct provenance for every detail. The name can therefore cover related works without proving that one drawing is the earliest or most authentic. The four-altitude form belongs specifically to the English Lemegeton branch; earlier Almandal works were not always divided into four quarters. Even the spelling Almandal or Almadel can signal an editorial tradition rather than a simple error.
Dates and attributions
Trithemius mentioned an Almadel attributed to Solomon in a list of magical books by the early sixteenth century. That gives a terminus for one named work, not a date for the surviving English Lemegeton wording. Peterson’s edition also records late medieval German witnesses, including a manuscript identified as Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cgm 407. Cgm 407 is a separate held object, not a page of the English Lemegeton. Solomon’s name functions as an authorship claim inside a tradition that grew through translation and copying. The medieval German and later English versions belong to different branches of that tradition.
Worked comparison: one four-altitude instruction against an earlier Almandal witness
The English Lemegeton makes its first “altitude” an eastern operation. Its angels are Alimiel, Gabriel, Borachiel, Lebes, and Hellison, and the text assigns them fertility, increase, birth, and generation. Timing narrows the field: the work belongs to the day and hour of the Sun, and the first altitude is associated with the Sun in Aries. Four candles stand around a wax Almadel raised on feet made from the same wax; a separate golden seal rests at its center. The invocation is read only after the apparatus and the selected altitude agree.
An earlier Latin Almandal family divides the heavens into twelve altitudes rather than four. Its first eastern choir also concerns beginnings and fertility, so the English form preserves more than a title. Yet compression changes the architecture. Twelve perimeter positions become four broad quarters, and the English apparatus standardizes material and placement around a small wax table. A reader who projects the later four-part square backward onto every Almandal would miss that the earlier text maps a more finely divided celestial circuit.
Timing shows another layer of the compression. In the older twelve-altitude account the eastern and southern altitudes belong to the first half of the lunar cycle, while the western and northern belong to the second half. The English first altitude instead foregrounds the solar day and hour and the Sun’s passage through Aries. Both versions coordinate direction with celestial time, but they weight that coordination differently: the earlier rule spans waxing and waning halves of a month, while the English operation fixes one quarter through solar weekday, hour, and zodiac season.
The contrast becomes visible in the names around the object. The Latin description expects one divine name for each of twelve altitudes, while surviving drawings and lists do not always supply a clean set of twelve. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cgm 407, copied around 1496, belongs to this German Almandal branch and preserves a design close to the older Latin diagrams. The English copies instead organize their names through the four-altitude device and pair it with a triangular golden seal. Even where both traditions mention wax, candles, incense, and a central seal, their diagrams are not interchangeable plans.
The comparison shows adaptation by reduction and recombination. The English compiler retains an eastern fertility operation, sacred names, supported wax, candlelight, incense, and a central seal, but gathers the larger choir system into four directional and seasonal blocks. That is a meaningful continuity of ritual grammar alongside a major change in cosmological scale. “Almadel” therefore names a family whose members can share an operation while disagreeing about how heaven is partitioned.