Planetary seals and magical characters: from the papyri to Agrippa
A history of planetary seals: the charaktêres of the Greco-Egyptian papyri, the signs of medieval manuscripts and Agrippa's system in De occulta philosophia.
Long before planetary seals appeared in the printed books of the Renaissance, the Greek magical papyri of Egypt were already full of strange signs: stars, lines ending in little circles, distorted letters. Ancient authors called them charaktêres, and philologists still do. The history of talismanic seals begins with these very signs, which belonged to no alphabet and which, according to those who drew them, spoke directly to the invisible powers.
The charaktêres of the Greco-Egyptian papyri
The so-called Greek Magical Papyri, most of which reached European collections in the early decades of the nineteenth century and which date mainly from the second to the fifth century, contain formulas, invocations and drawings. Among them are characters whose strokes end in tiny rings, which modern scholars accordingly call “ring letters”. They also appear on engraved gems and on thin rolled sheets of metal found in various regions of the Mediterranean.
Their meaning is obscure. Some scholars have seen them as stylised stars or constellations, others as a cipher or as deformed Greek and Hebrew letters. What is certain is that they were copied with great care, a sign that their exact shape was considered important. The same principle, the idea that a well-drawn sign has value in itself, runs through the whole later history of seals.
From the Arabic tradition to the Latin Middle Ages
In the Middle Ages the characters passed into Arabic magical literature and then into Latin. Treatises such as the Picatrix associated particular figures and signs with each planet, and Latin translations spread them through European libraries. In many late medieval manuscripts the characters of the planets accompany astrological images, and the copyists reproduce them with considerable variation, sometimes almost unrecognisable from one codex to the next.
Alongside the planets came the signs of angels and demons. The books attributed to Solomon and other texts of ceremonial magic gave each entity a personal seal, a kind of graphic signature. Church authorities regarded these signs with particular suspicion: Thomas Aquinas argued that characters with no natural meaning could make sense only as messages addressed to separate intelligences, and therefore to demons.
Agrippa's system
The best-known form of the planetary seals today goes back to De occulta philosophia by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, printed in its complete version at Cologne in 1533. In the second book Agrippa presents, for each of the seven planets, a numerical square, a seal of the planet and the seals of its intelligence and its spirit. The signs are derived from the structure of the squares, so that drawing and number are closely bound together.
Agrippa also recorded mysterious alphabets, such as the script called “Theban” and those called “Celestial”, “Malachim” and “Passing of the River”, attributing them to the tradition of the ancient magi. Their real origin is unknown and probably late medieval. Thanks to the wide circulation of the book, these signs were copied for centuries and reached the occultism of the nineteenth century almost unchanged.
The history of planetary seals shows a surprising continuity. From the Egyptian papyri to medieval manuscripts and the engraved tables of the sixteenth century, the theoretical framework changes, but the conviction remains that a sign can hold a relationship with the heavens. For the historian, these drawings are valuable documents of how past cultures imagined the link between writing, number and cosmos.