ARBATEL

The Arbatel of Magic — Arbatel de Magia Veterum, Summum Sapientiae Studium ("The Arbatel of the Magic of the Ancients, The Highest Study of Wisdom") — was printed in Basel in 1575 by Pietro Perna. The author is anonymous. Theories have attributed it variously to Paracelsus's circle, to the French alchemist Jacques Gohory, and to an unnamed Swiss Protestant magus; no attribution holds up under scrutiny. What survives is the work, not the writer.

Originally, the Arbatel was planned as nine tomes of seven aphorisms each — sixty-three teachings in total, plus an introductory section. Only the introduction survives, called the Isagoge or First Septenary. The other eight tomes were never published, may never have been written, or were lost in the religious turbulence of the late sixteenth century. What we have is the doorway, not the building.

What makes the Arbatel singular among Renaissance grimoires is not its angels or its sigils. It is the doctrine. The Arbatel is one of the only sixteenth-century magical texts that explicitly renounces goetia — the binding of evil spirits — and roots its entire system in prayer to the one God, virtue in the operator, and alignment with the planetary intelligences as servants of the divine will. Heinrich Khunrath read it. Robert Fludd cited it. The Rosicrucian manifestos echo it. The lineage runs Trithemius → Agrippa → Arbatel → Dee → Fludd, and the Arbatel is the cleanest statement of the Christian-Hermetic synthesis the Renaissance produced.

The Arbatel's most famous distinction. Aphorism II divides magic into kinds, and the distinction is the whole doctrine:

The magician who confuses these has already failed. The one who knows which they do, and does only the worthy ones, has begun.