Thomas Rudd

Harley MS 6482 in the British Library carries a title crediting its contents to Thomas Rudd, and later cataloguing and modern editions have followed that title in calling the whole manuscript tradition the Goetia of Dr Rudd. What the manuscript actually contains is a version of the seventy-two spirits of the Ars Goetia, each set against an angel of the Shem ha-Mephorash holding the same numbered position, a scheme found nowhere in the Ars Goetia itself.

Whether Rudd wrote it is a separate question from whether his name belongs on it. The surviving witnesses, Harley 6482 and 6483, Sloane 3824 and Wellcome 3203, are compilations rather than a single authored composition, no manuscript names its own compiler with certainty, and the material bears the marks of copying and recopying across at least one seventeenth century generation. A title page crediting a known figure was one of the period's ordinary ways of lending a compilation authority, whether or not that figure had a hand in it.

The man the title names was real: an English mathematician and military engineer working in the first half of the seventeenth century, in a period when mathematics, surveying, astrology and ceremonial magic were not kept in separate rooms. That biography is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the narrower claim, that this particular pairing of demon against angel was his own arrangement rather than a name later copyists borrowed. The atlas records the pairing under his name because that is how the tradition transmits it, and records the doubt in the same breath, because the doubt is part of what is actually known.

The scheme attributed to Rudd takes two lists that exist independently of each other, the seventy-two spirits of the Ars Goetia and the seventy-two angels of the Shem ha-Mephorash, and pairs them position for position: the first Goetic spirit against the first Shem angel, the second against the second, and on through all seventy-two. Neither source text asks for this. The Ars Goetia assigns no angel to any of its spirits, and the Shem ha-Mephorash, a much older Jewish angelology built from three-letter names extracted from a sequence of biblical verses, has no demonic counterpart of its own.

The effect of the pairing is to give each demon a specific angel understood to hold it in check, so that the demon of a given degree is set against, and restrained by, the angel of that same degree. Bael, first of the seventy-two, is paired with Vehuiah in this scheme, one of the clearest examples of the pairing at work. The pairing turns a list of spirits to be commanded into a list of spirits balanced against a countervailing power, which is a different kind of magical object from either source list alone.

The scheme had a long afterlife independent of the question of its own authorship. It travelled through the Sloane and Wellcome manuscripts, was picked up by later systematizers of the grimoire tradition, and remains the standard reference point whenever a modern practitioner or writer wants to set a Goetic spirit against a governing angel rather than treat the seventy-two spirits as free-standing figures with no counterweight at all.