Phaleg

In the Arbatel de magia veterum, Phaleg is the Olympic spirit given governance over the sphere of Mars, and the text names him the Prince of Peace even though his office is martial. The Arbatel credits him with raising those who bear his character to great honor in warfare, in keeping with the standard association of Mars with military affairs across astrological tradition, and, like the other six spirits, with commanding a nested court of subordinate ranks and a 490 year reign as part of the shared seven age scheme.

Compared with the entries the Arbatel gives Aratron, Bethor or Och, the surviving text says comparatively little about Phaleg beyond his martial office, and later writers on the Arbatel have generally repeated this brevity rather than expanding it with material the grimoire itself does not contain. That relative silence is itself worth recording honestly rather than padded over with invented detail, since the point of describing a primary source is to describe what it actually says. Phaleg's title, Prince of Peace, set against a martial office, has drawn comment from later readers as one of the more striking pairings among the seven Olympic spirits, though the Arbatel does not explain the seeming contradiction in the text as it survives.

Phaleg belongs to the same 1575 Latin printing of the Arbatel de magia veterum at Basel and the same 1655 English translation by Robert Turner that carried all seven Olympic spirits to a wider readership, bound together with Turner's edition of the pseudo Agrippa Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy. Because the Arbatel gives Phaleg less individual material than it gives several of the other six, later summaries of the text tend to treat him briefly, usually as the Martial counterpart to Bethor's Jupiter and Och's Sun within the same sevenfold planetary scheme.

The name Phaleg is otherwise unrelated to the Hebrew Peleg of Genesis, a coincidence of spelling rather than a claimed identity in the Arbatel itself. As with the other Olympic spirits, this atlas treats Phaleg as belonging to the Arbatel's own distinct system, separate from John Dee's Heptarchia Mystica and from the Ars Goetia, three grimoire traditions from the same general period that are frequently confused in popular writing despite having separate manuscript and print histories. The Arbatel gives Phaleg no seal or sigil of his own in the text as it survives, unlike some grimoire spirits from later, more visually elaborate traditions, and later editions have generally left that gap unfilled rather than supplying an invented one.