The Heptameron (Elementa Magica)

The Heptameron, or Elementa Magica, is a short and practical manual of conjuration organised around the seven days of the week, giving for each day its ruling angel, the presiding spirits, and the colours, perfumes, seals and words of the magic circle, angelic and planetary in emphasis rather than demonic. It is attributed to Pietro d'Abano (Peter of Abano, c. 1250-1316), the Paduan physician and philosopher, but the attribution is doubtful: d'Abano was long dead when the text surfaces, and it is usually regarded as pseudonymous, a later work fathered on a famous name with a reputation for magic. It was printed in the late fifteenth or sixteenth century and is most often found appended to the spurious Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy ascribed to Agrippa, with which it travelled as a practical companion. Its careful, hour-by-hour, day-by-day tabulation of angelic correspondences made it a much-used working handbook and a direct source for the ceremonial magic of later centuries, including the Golden Dawn revival.

The Heptameron is short and it is organised as a timetable. Each day of the week has its angel, its planet, its colour, its perfume, its sigil and its conjuration, and the day is further divided into planetary hours each with its own ruling angel. The text supplies the circle to be drawn, the words to be said, and the correspondences to be observed, for each of the seven days in turn.

Its practical value is exactly that completeness. Where the Three Books of Occult Philosophy explain why angelic magic should work, the Heptameron tells an operator what to do on a Tuesday. That is why it travelled bound with the pseudo Agrippa Fourth Book and why the two are often treated as one work: between them they supply the missing operative layer of a philosophical system.

The angels named here, and the days and hours scheme, pass more or less unchanged into the Golden Dawn material and from there into modern ceremonial practice, so this small text has an influence out of proportion to its length.

The attribution to Pietro d'Abano, a fourteenth century physician and astrologer condemned by the Inquisition, is not sustained by the manuscript evidence.

Its scheme of planetary hours, in which the hours of daylight and darkness are each divided into twelve unequal parts that lengthen and shorten with the season, is the same one used across medieval astrology, and it is the part of the book still in general use.