Bnaspol

Bnaspol is one of the seven Heptarchical Kings that John Dee recorded in De Heptarchia Mystica, the treatise drawn from his angelic sessions with the scryer Edward Kelley across 1582 and 1583 and preserved today as Sloane MS 3191. Bnaspol rules Wednesday and, by the system's own day and planet correspondence, stands under Mercury. His attendant is the prince Blisdon, and together they form the fourth of the Heptarchia's seven king and prince pairs, one assigned to each day of the week.

The Heptarchia is a separate stratum of Dee's angelic material from what most modern readers mean by Enochian magic. It predates the forty eight Calls that Dee and Kelley received later and that Meric Casaubon printed in 1659, and it predates the ninety one Governors of the thirty Aethyrs that occupy most twentieth century Enochian practice. Where the Calls and the Aethyr system organize the angelic hierarchy by elemental Watchtower and by aethyric grade, the Heptarchia organizes it by the seven day week and its planetary rulers, tying Dee's early angel work to an older current of Renaissance magic in which each day carried its own ruling spirits.

Unlike the Calls, the Heptarchia was never printed in Dee's lifetime or in Casaubon's seventeenth century edition of the diaries. It survived only in manuscript until Joseph H. Peterson's modern transcription and edition made Sloane MS 3191 broadly available, which is part of why Bnaspol and the other six Heptarchical Kings remain far less familiar today than the angels invoked through the later Calls.

Sources De Heptarchia Mystica (Sloane MS 3191), Joseph H. Peterson's editionJohn Dee, edited by Joseph H. Peterson with Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern OccultureEgil Asprem

Within De Heptarchia Mystica, Bnaspol is one member of a fixed sevenfold structure rather than an independent figure: a King ruling one day of the week, paired with a subordinate Prince who serves under him rather than ruling in his own right. Bnaspol governs Wednesday, correspondingly assigned to Mercury under the system's own day and planet scheme, and is recorded as paired with the prince Blisdon.

Assigning a ruling spirit to each day of the week, and pairing that day with a planet, was not a convention Dee invented. Renaissance ceremonial magic already had grimoires that organized angelic or planetary intelligences by day, the Heptameron long attributed to Pietro d'Abano among them, so Bnaspol's position in Dee's scheme belongs to a wider genre of period magic rather than to a system built from nothing. What distinguishes the Heptarchia within that genre is its source: not a printed grimoire compiled from older material, but a record Dee kept of what he understood the angels themselves to have dictated through Kelley in 1582 and 1583.

Because the Heptarchia was never absorbed into the Golden Dawn's later Enochian curriculum, which drew on the Calls and the Watchtower tablets instead, Bnaspol has been read mainly by scholars of Dee's own diaries rather than by twentieth century ceremonial magicians, and the office Bnaspol holds is best understood as part of Dee's own working system rather than as a figure later orders re-used.

Sources De Heptarchia Mystica (Sloane MS 3191), Joseph H. Peterson's editionJohn Dee, edited by Joseph H. Peterson with Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern OccultureEgil Asprem