Sworn Book Manuscripts: Royal 17 A XLII and the Sloane Copies

The Sworn Book survives as unequal manuscripts: one witness preserves the five-treatise descent from divine vision to terrestrial spirits, another supplies the crucial seal drawing, and Royal interrupts and rearranges its translation with later ritual dossiers.

Sloane MS 3854: Honorius text, ff. 112–139
Sloane MS 313: Latin witness, ff. 1–26v in Boudet
Sloane MS 3885: Honorius text, ff. 58–96
Royal MS 17 A XLII: Partial English and Latin version

The witnesses preserve different versions of the work

The four principal British Library witnesses do not form a row of interchangeable copies. Sloane MS 3854 preserves the oldest and most coherent Latin text, on parchment at folios 112ra–139ra, copied around the middle of the fourteenth century. Sloane MS 313 is another fourteenth-century Latin witness, but it belongs to a different textual family. Sloane MS 3885 is a sixteenth-century descendant of the Sloane 3854 branch and stops after the third treatise. Royal MS 17 A XLII is a much later partial English translation, interrupted by Latin and enlarged with material not found in the older Latin copies.

Those relationships change what “missing” means. Because Sloane 3885 descends from the Sloane 3854 branch yet survives only through the third treatise, its shorter extent points to truncation or abridgement rather than an earlier authorial form; the evidence does not show whether the stopping was deliberate. If Sloane 313 breaks between folios 24 and 25, Boudet’s note that three leaves are physically absent warns against turning a damaged object into evidence for a shorter authorial version. Royal presents the opposite problem: what it adds can look original merely because English readers can reach it more easily.

Sloane 3854: the fullest route through the book’s argument

Sloane 3854 matters because its sequence lets the book’s changing ambitions remain visible. The first treatise begins with the construction and consecration of the Sigillum Dei and then expands into the long discipline for divine vision: purifications, fasting, repeated prayers, divine names, and petitions. The second turns from the nine celestial orders, which the text says cannot be constrained, to the lower “good” angels associated with the seven planets. The third classifies aerial spirits by planets, winds, and directions. The fourth descends to terrestrial spirits. A short fifth treatise explains how the previous divisions and ritual implements fit together.

This is not the neat ninety-two-chapter manual promised by the opening contents. Boudet observes that the first two chapters alone occupy roughly two thirds of the surviving work. Many later promises in the contents; knowledge of plants, changes of weather, distant transport, hidden treasure, and dozens more; receive no independent procedure. The manuscript therefore preserves a mismatch between an encyclopedic sales pitch and a much narrower executed text. Its real center of gravity is the seal and vision operation, followed by taxonomies and adaptable conjuration patterns.

Worked reading: why the seal is only the beginning

The opening operation converts a seventy-two-letter divine name into a circular band around pentagram, three heptagons, seven planetary angel names, crosses, and further names. Placement is textual: an error changes relations among name, angel, planet, and boundary. Sloane 3854’s missing drawing and Sloane 313’s surviving one cannot be treated as decoration.

The book then refuses to let the finished figure act as a shortcut. It surrounds the seal with confession, clean clothing, fasting, almsgiving, masses, fumigation, and long cycles of prayer. The first eight prayers prepare the operator; a ninth frames the desired effect, and later petitions repeatedly ask for purification of memory, speech, understanding, and intention. The climax comes after the prayers, when the operator is told to sleep and remain silent so that the celestial palace, divine majesty, and nine angelic orders may be seen. The sequence moves from written geometry to disciplined body, repeated speech, silence, and finally vision.

That order also explains the rest of the book. Its later planetary, aerial, and terrestrial catalogues do not sit beside the vision rite as unrelated lists. They descend through a hierarchy established by the opening ascent. The highest orders are approached through purification and petition because the text says they cannot be constrained; lower spirits are classified by planet, direction, appearance, and office so that they can be addressed through more coercive forms. The Sworn Book therefore argues that command below is legitimate only after the operator has placed himself beneath divine authority above.

The fifth treatise translates that hierarchy into ritual distance. Its summary says good angels require no whistle, wand, or sword and appear inside a circle while the operator stands outside it. Aerial spirits appear outside while the operator stands within a flat circle. Terrestrial spirits are assigned a separate concave circle nine feet from the operator’s own. The spatial grammar becomes stricter as the book moves downward: higher beings need fewer coercive implements, while lower beings are kept farther away behind an additional boundary.

Sloane 313: a second family, a damaged ending, and a crucial diagram

Sloane 313 cannot be treated as a junior copy of Sloane 3854. Boudet places it in another textual family and dates it to the second half of the fourteenth century. Its missing leaves and damaged final pages reduce what can be compared near the end, but where both early witnesses survive they expose meaningful variants in names, headings, and diagram instructions. That second line of transmission is what allows an editor to distinguish a reading shared by the tradition from an error or preference confined to one branch.

Sloane 313, folio 4, also preserves the Sigillum Dei drawing on which Peterson bases his modern reconstruction. He corrects parts of that image from verbal instructions preserved across the text. The Latin construction directions survive in Sloane 3854 although the drawing itself does not. A modern page that places the reconstructed figure beside wording from the other branch is therefore an editorial composite, not a facsimile of one complete medieval witness.

Royal 17 A XLII: translation, selection, and expansion

The British Library’s folio map shows that Royal is neither a simple opening excerpt nor a clean translation. Folios 2r–15r contain chapters 1–5; chapter 4 remains in Latin while the others are largely English. A suffumigation treatise and angel-and-spirit dossier interrupt the sequence at folios 15r–28v. The translation then resumes with chapters 6–11 and 13–96 at folios 29r–59v, continues with chapters 98–115:4 at folios 59v–72r, and stops before the later angel treatise and drawings on folios 72r–81r. Royal rearranges Honorius material and additions inside one working codex rather than simply placing a supplement after an unfinished opening.

The catalogue dates the physical manuscript to the fifteenth century, while Boudet dates the translated and interpolated compilation after 1510 and possibly after 1533 because folios 76r–v draw on Agrippa’s discussion of the seventy-twofold divine name. Those two assessments describe a real dating problem rather than a date that can be silently harmonized. The codex may contain distinguishable copying and compilation layers, and the present catalogue date and Boudet’s source-based argument do not point to the same moment.

The older Latin text spells out a chain of seventy-two letters around the seal and treats it as the great divine name. Royal’s later dossier places beside that inheritance a more systematic Renaissance explanation of seventy-two names. The juxtaposition interprets and updates received material; it does not report what the earliest scribe originally understood.

Worked comparison: Royal reaches the circle, then loses the invocation

Royal preserves enough of chapters 112–115 to lead an operator to the threshold of the planetary-angel rite. The sequence first specifies a paved working place and circle. On the first day the operator receives communion, recites the seventeenth prayer while walking from church, blesses the circle with the fifteenth prayer, and stops. On the second day he returns, burns pearls in censers, fumigates the chosen direction, the four quarters, heaven, and earth three times, then names the angels of the relevant day, hour, month, season, and astrological face. The surviving English finally instructs him to hold the consecrated Seal of God in his right hand, perfume the circle, the seal, and himself, kneel, and recite two more prayers. This is a timed preparation, not a loose list of equipment.

At exactly that point Royal breaks off. The Sloane 3854 continuation opens by saying that, once the prayers are finished, the angels are to be invoked. It names the planetary groups, tells the operator to raise the Seal toward heaven, asks them to appear in a perceptible and peaceable form within the marked circles, and requires truthful answers. The continuation then supplies a response to their expected question and closes the second treatise before turning to aerial spirits. Royal’s later angel dossier and drawings occupy the following folios, but they do not preserve that missing transition from preparation to direct address. A Royal-only reading can therefore mistake a consecration sequence for a complete rite; the Latin continuation shows that communion, fumigation, timing, circle, and seal are preliminaries whose ritual purpose is fulfilled by the omitted invocation.

Worked comparison: the planetary seals

The planetary section shows the same process at a smaller scale. The text assigns four principal angelic names to each planet, describes the spirits’ appearance, region, and offices, and then gives a seal in Royal. For Saturn, for example, the Royal-derived presentation supplies a seal beside names and a description of cold, sorrowful, northern qualities. The Sloane 3854 line preserves the verbal classification but omits the seal drawing. The online comparative edition notes that Royal’s planetary seals may have been supplied from material related to the Heptameron.

A reader who sees only Royal may conclude that a uniform set of seven planetary seals belonged to the earliest recoverable Sworn Book. A reader who checks the Latin witness sees a layered object: an older classification of planetary angels and subordinate spirits, plus later graphics that make the system look more complete. This is why absence and presence must be read together. Royal is valuable evidence for sixteenth-century expansion, while Sloane 3854 is stronger evidence for the fourteenth-century sequence.

Worked comparison: one plan, several stopping points

The announced plan divides the art into four works: six chapters on divine names and vision; twenty-seven on created things, angels, planets, and spirits; fifty-four practical chapters on constraining spirits and producing effects; and five final operations involving release, locks, treasure, and two rejected illusions. The surviving text instead names five treatises: divine vision, good angels, aerial spirits, terrestrial spirits, and an exposition of the preceding four. That internal correction suggests an attempt to reconcile two organizational schemes.

Each witness freezes a different point in that unstable design. Sloane 3854 carries the five-treatise sequence. Sloane 3885 stops after the aerial spirits. Royal interrupts, resumes, and rearranges its translated chapters around other ritual dossiers before stopping within chapter 115. Sloane 313 offers an independent early family but loses leaves near its damaged end. No single object supplies a pristine master copy. The contents of the Sworn Book emerge from comparison: the shared core is strongest where the early Latin branches agree, while later additions document how readers repaired, illustrated, and repurposed an already difficult text.

What spelling variants reveal about transmission

The book’s long strings of divine and angelic names are unusually sensitive to copying. The Saturn quartet makes the instability concrete. Royal reads Bohel, Casziel, Michathon, and Datquiel; Peterson’s Latin comparison gives Bohel, Cafziel, Michrathon, and Satquiel; Boudet’s apparatus records Sloane 313 forms including Cafzyel and Michaton. The office and planetary position stay recognizable while consonants, clusters, and divisions move. That pattern demonstrates unstable transmission, though it does not by itself prove that any one scribe consulted a second source.

The Sigillum Dei turns its seventy-two-letter name into geometry, where omission changes spacing and spelling. Boudet argues that the early compiler understood seventy-two letters rather than seventy-two triplets; Royal later adds Agrippa’s systematic Renaissance account. The later copy changes the sequence’s interpretation instead of simply neatening it.

Source records

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