Divinity Atlas

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Divinity, and the Creation of the World

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Divinity, and the Creation of the World

Orobas is said to answer on divinity and on the creation of the world. Astaroth discourses on the fall of the spirits. These two entries are the only places where the catalogue puts theology in a spirit's mouth, and they are worth reading together.

Both concern origins, and both concern matters on which the compiler's own church had settled positions. Asking a demon about the creation is not a neutral request for information; within a seventeenth-century Christian frame it is a request for testimony from a hostile witness about the doctrine the witness rebelled against.

There is an intellectual context for this, and it is not disreputable. The Renaissance revival of ritual magic ran through serious figures, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, who understood their work as natural philosophy and as a route to knowledge of the divine order rather than as trafficking. Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy of 1533 is the great synthesis of that programme and stands behind everything in this corpus. In that setting a spirit who explains the structure of creation is a source, and the demand is epistemological.

By the time the Lemegeton was compiled that programme had largely collapsed under Reformation and Counter-Reformation pressure, and what survived of it in the grimoires was decoupled from the philosophy that had justified it. The Goetia inherits the ambition without the argument.

Two lines about creation and the fall, in a book otherwise concerned with treasure and preferment, are what remains visible of it.

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