Aratron

In the Arbatel de magia veterum, Aratron is the Olympic spirit given governance over the sphere of Saturn, and the text credits him with an unusually long list of offices. He is said to teach alchemy, medicine and the secrets of nature, to turn any matter into stone while it keeps its outward appearance, and to transmute treasures into coal and coal back into treasure again. The text also credits him with reconciling the spirits of the earth to human beings, granting familiar spirits with defined powers, causing invisibility, and making barren people, animals or land fertile while extending life.

Aratron is described as commanding a large court of subordinate kings, princes, presidents, dukes and ministers, the same nested structure of ranks the Arbatel gives each of the seven Olympic spirits, though the specific counts vary by copy and translation. His reign, like each of the seven, is reckoned in the Arbatel's scheme as one of seven successive ages of 490 years each, together spanning the history of the world from the text's own point of view. The Arbatel presents this material as instruction for a reader already trained in natural philosophy and framed as a description of what the spirit governs, not as a ritual script, and this entry describes that content rather than reproducing any operative working from it.

The Arbatel de magia veterum was first printed in Latin at Basel in 1575, anonymously, and stands apart from most Renaissance grimoires for its emphasis on piety and natural philosophy over demonology. Robert Turner translated it into English in 1655 and printed it alongside his own edition of the pseudo Agrippa Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, and Turner's translation became the version most later readers encountered, including Aratron and the other six Olympic spirits under those names and planetary offices.

The text influenced a line of later ceremonial magicians who read Turner's Agrippa collection as a single body of source material, and Aratron in particular is often singled out among the seven for the range of his stated offices, from alchemy to invisibility to extending fertility and life. Twentieth century ceremonial orders that drew on multiple grimoire traditions, including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's wider curriculum, treated the Arbatel as one source among several distinct systems, alongside John Dee's later Heptarchia Mystica and the Ars Goetia's seventy two spirits, each with its own separate origin, structure and cast of names that this atlas keeps distinct rather than merging.