Queen Christina’s Latin Sefer-Ha-Raziel Manuscript

Abstract

In the fall of 1650, Christina of Sweden’s artistic consultant in Amsterdam, the engraver Michel le Blon (1587-1658) offered the Queen some 20 manuscripts from R. Menasseh ben Israel. One of these was entitled Magia cabalistica; the Rabbi spoke highly of it, Le Blon pointed out, ‘duquel it fait très grand estat’.¹ Menasseh’s magical manuscript has never been conclusively identified, but there is a text now preserved in Queen Christina’s collection in Rome that brings us closer to evaluating Menasseh’s offer. The manuscript in question is a Latin translation of the four hundred page Hebrew text on angelic invocation, Sefer-ha-Raziel, now MS. Reg. Lat. 1300 in the Bibliotheca Vaticana. The text is carefully copied out and the first thing that strikes the eye is that the first letter of its first line is drawn in the form of a little devil. Not without reason this text is considered one of the rarest specimens of original angelic magic and offers a Hebrew cosmology that will be seen to have had some influence during the late Renaissance. The text was known at the Imperial court of Prague and as R. J. W. Evans observes there is a Czech translation of the Raziel by the Rudolphine courtier Johannes Polentarius ‘which is called the book of powers and mysteries, and here are seven treatises in the seven arts and the seven powers’.²

Article Footnote

Pone te in solum et scias quod ipse ponet se totum in te

Article Footnote

Michel le Blon to Christina, 1651, Riksarkivet, Stockholm. Cf. Susanna Akerman, Queen Christina and Her Circle. The Trans formation of a Seventeenth century Philosophical Libertine, E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1991. p. 145ff. The text was first published as Sefer Raziel, Liber cabalistico-magico, Amsterdam, 1701. For a modern transcript see M. Margalioth, Sepher-ha-Razim, a Newly Recovered Book of Magic from the Talmudic Period, Collected from Genizah fragments and Other Sources, (Jerusalem, 1966).

R. J. W. Evans, The World of Rudolph II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 238.