Grimoires
Ars Paulina divides angels between planetary hours and zodiacal degrees, and its title masks a separate Latin Pauline Art.
Two arrangements within one book
Ars Paulina occupies the third place in the Lemegeton, but it is not a single short table of planetary angels. Its first division arranges figures by the twelve hours of day and twelve of night; its second assigns angels to individual degrees of the zodiac. Those are different organizing principles. In the first, the governing hour remains a position in a twenty-four-part cycle while its planetary office changes with the weekday. In the second, a degree in a birth figure points to an “angel of men” and an elemental region. Peterson’s transcription identifies British Library Sloane MS 3825 as its manuscript base and traces the two divisions to different bodies of source material. The book therefore joins an electional clock to a natal map rather than repeating one catalogue twice. An article that only lists the hourly rulers misses the zodiacal division; an article that reproduces 360 degree names without explaining the hour scheme makes the same mistake in reverse.
Worked example: what the 1641 seal is indexing
The first division repeatedly uses 10 March 1641 as an example, and that date exposes the text’s machinery. The reader begins with an hour counted from sunrise, identifies the angel assigned to that hour, then changes the relevant planetary office according to the weekday. The seal is not presented as the timeless autograph of one being: it incorporates the lord of the ascendant, planetary characters, and the sign rising in the twelfth house for the selected moment. It is then placed on the corresponding part of a larger table before a general conjuration is adapted with the proper names. Move the example from Wednesday to Tuesday and the first-hour angel can remain while the planetary attribution changes; move to another hour and the angel, subordinate list, and seal construction also change. This makes the diagram a generated time index inside the text. A modern set of twenty-four fixed “Pauline seals” can preserve the look of the manuscript examples while hiding the calculation those examples were meant to teach.
Dates hidden inside the text
The title sounds apostolic, but the English Lemegeton text repeatedly refers to 1641 and even to guns. These are clues against attributing this particular composition to the first-century apostle Paul. Its first division has close relations with the second book of Trithemius’s Steganographia. Peterson also points to seventeenth-century printed sources behind parts of the material. Meanwhile an older Latin text called the Pauline Art is a separate work: sharing a name does not make it the direct Latin original of this English book. That distinction is valuable whenever an online source cites “Ars Paulina” without a manuscript or an incipit. It might be referring to a different textual family. The seventeenth-century compilation invites investigation into borrowing and adaptation rather than a simple legend of ancient authorship.
Diagram and table variants
Text, manuscript drawings, editorial reconstructions, and later digital graphics preserve different versions of the diagrams. A tidy zodiac wheel is an effective navigation aid, but it can imply a consistency that manuscript copies do not have. The source of an individual name may be clearer than the history of the entire table; the two can follow different transmission paths. The edition’s introduction identifies another source for the degree angels through printed physiognomic and chiromantic material, showing that the second division may have a different immediate ancestry from the first. The diagrams show how premodern authors reused celestial categories, but their labels are not astronomical measurements or evidence of a supernatural effect at a given hour.
Questions to explore
- How does the English Lemegeton book differ from other Pauline Art texts?
- Does the figure belong to the hour series or the zodiac-degree series?
- Which dateable terms reveal the compiler’s period?