Quick Answer
A short Latin manual giving, for each day of the week, the angel who rules it, the spirits under him, the seal, the incense, the wind, the hour and the exact words to say. It is the most usable operative text in the Western magical corpus, it supplied later ceremonial practice with most of its furniture, and the medieval philosopher whose name is on it did not write it.
Key Takeaways
- The attribution is false, and repeating it uncritically is the commonest error made about this text.
- It is pure procedure. Tables, seals, timings and words, with no theory and no explanation of any of it.
- It gave later magic its furniture: the circle, the planetary hours, the weekday angels and the fumigations.
- It was printed alongside the Arbatel, which disagrees with it fundamentally about what magic is.
- The tables contain errors that have been copied for four hundred years.
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What This Book Is
The Heptameron, or Magical Elements is a short Latin text, perhaps thirty pages in a modern setting, and it is one of the most practically detailed operative manuals in the Western magical tradition.
Its organising principle is the week. For each of the seven days it supplies the presiding angel, the angels of the air who rule that day, their subordinate ministers, the wind associated with it, the seal to be drawn, the incense to be burned, and the conjuration to be spoken.
Around that core it provides the construction of the circle, the consecration of the garment and the implements, tables of the hours of day and night with their names and rulers, and the attribution of the seasons and their angels.
What it does not supply is any account of what any of this is or why it should work. It is a set of instructions.
On the name: heptameron is from the Greek for seven days, on the model of the hexameron, the six days of creation in Genesis, which was a standard subject for theological commentary. The title announces the structure and quietly borrows some authority from the biblical form.
The Man Whose Name Is On It
Pietro d'Abano was real and interesting and had nothing to do with this book.
Born around 1250 near Padua, he became a physician, a philosopher and an astrologer, taught at the University of Padua, travelled to Constantinople and Paris, and produced substantial works of medicine and natural philosophy. His best-known book attempted to reconcile the disagreements between Arabic medicine and Greek philosophy, and it was widely read.
He also had trouble with the Inquisition, more than once, on charges that appear to have concerned heresy and the practice of magic. Accounts of the end of his life differ, and he seems to have died around 1316 while proceedings were unresolved. There are reports of a posthumous condemnation and of his remains being dealt with accordingly.
That combination, a learned physician with an astrological reputation who was pursued by the Inquisition and possibly condemned after death, made him exactly the kind of figure whose name a later magical text would want.
Why the Attribution Is Wrong
The scholarly position is that the Heptameron dates from the fifteenth or sixteenth century, well over a hundred years after Abano died, and that his name was attached for authority.
This was entirely standard. The magical literature of the period is a forest of false attributions: books assigned to Solomon, to Moses, to Hermes, to Albertus Magnus, to Agrippa. A manuscript circulating anonymously is worth little; a manuscript by a famous condemned magician is worth a great deal.
The text first appears in print in 1559, appended to an edition of the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, which is itself attributed to Cornelius Agrippa and is itself not by him.
So the Heptameron entered print bound to a forgery, under a false name of its own, and both were subsequently read for centuries as the works of the men named on them. Anyone who cites this text as medieval, or as evidence of what a thirteenth-century philosopher believed, has repeated a mistake with a very long history.
Seven Days
The structural choice is what makes the book usable, and it is worth appreciating as a piece of design.
The Solomonic manuals are organised by spirit: here are seventy-two entities, here are their seals and offices, here is how to summon any of them. That requires the operator to decide which spirit is appropriate, which requires knowledge the manual does not supply.
The Heptameron is organised by time. You do not begin by choosing a spirit. You begin by asking what day it is and what the matter concerns, and the day determines everything else: the angel, the ministers, the seal, the incense and the words.
Underneath this is the whole apparatus of planetary correspondence that ran through medieval and Renaissance natural philosophy. Each planet governs a day, and also metals, plants, colours, parts of the body, temperaments, hours and types of undertaking. Choosing the right time is choosing the right set of sympathies.
The practical consequence is that the Heptameron can be followed. Almost uniquely in the corpus, a reader can work out what they would actually do.
The Weekday Angels
The attributions given are the standard ones and they are worth setting out because they recur everywhere afterwards.
Sunday belongs to the Sun and to Michael. Monday to the Moon and Gabriel. Tuesday to Mars and Samael. Wednesday to Mercury and Raphael. Thursday to Jupiter and Sachiel. Friday to Venus and Anael. Saturday to Saturn and Cassiel.
Under each are angels of the air ruling that day, and under those, ministers, with named spirits at each level.
Two observations. The first is that these are angels rather than demons. The Heptameron is not a book of demonology; it addresses beings presented as ordered parts of a divine administration, and the conjurations invoke divine names to compel their attendance.
The second is that the compulsion is real. Unlike the Arbatel, which asks and waits, the Heptameron commands, adjures and constrains, using the names of God as the instrument. Angels or not, the relationship is one of authority exercised over them.
The Planetary Hours
The tables of hours are one of the most consequential things in the book.
The system divides daylight into twelve equal parts and darkness into twelve equal parts. Because day and night lengths change through the year, these hours are unequal and vary continuously, which is why the tables are necessary.
Each hour is ruled by one of the seven planets, in the fixed sequence of the Chaldean order, and the rotation is arranged so that the first hour of each day belongs to the planet that rules that day, which is where the order of the days of the week comes from in the first place.
The Heptameron gives names for each hour of day and night, which are used in the conjurations.
This material is old, considerably older than the text, and runs back through Arabic astrological magic to Hellenistic sources. What the Heptameron did was package it in a form a practitioner could pick up, and that packaging is why planetary hours are still in use in ceremonial and folk practice today.
Notice what the timing system assumes. It holds that occasions have qualities, that some moments are fit for a given undertaking and others are not, and that the fitness is calculable in advance. That is a serious proposition about the structure of time and it was held by educated Europeans for well over a thousand years. Whatever you make of the magic, the underlying idea that when you do something is part of what you are doing has survived the loss of the cosmology it came from.
The Circle and the Consecrations
The Heptameron gives a detailed circle, and the circle is the piece of equipment everyone recognises.
It is not one circle but several, concentric, with the spaces between them filled with divine names, the names of the angels of the day, and the name of the season and the hour. The operator stands within it. It is constructed at the appropriate hour and with the appropriate preparations.
The function is protection and definition. Inside the circle the operator is in a delimited space under divine names; outside it is everything else.
Consecrations are given for the garment, which should be clean and of specified material, for the pentacle, and for the other implements, each with its own form of words.
The material is close kin to the Key of Solomon tradition, which shares the circle, the consecrations and much of the vocabulary, and the two families of text plainly draw on a common stock.
What the Operator Must Do First
Before any of this, the text requires a preparation period, and its character is worth noting.
Abstinence from certain foods. Chastity. Fasting. Confession. A specified number of days of this before the operation. Cleanliness of body and of clothing.
What is striking is what this is for. In the Arbatel, the requirements on the operator are moral and continuous: be honest, avoid vanity, do your work, be of service, and expect nothing you have not deserved. In the Heptameron, the requirements are ritual and temporary. They establish fitness for an operation, in the way that liturgical purity requirements do, and they end when the operation ends.
This is a genuine difference in the conception of what magic is. One text thinks the practitioner's character is the mechanism. The other thinks the practitioner's ritual state is a precondition for the mechanism, which lies in the procedure.
The Words
The conjurations follow a stable pattern and it is the pattern that matters more than any individual formula.
An invocation of God under a series of names, often Hebrew or Hebrew-derived, sometimes garbled by transmission. A statement of the operator's authority to act. An adjuration of the named angels by those divine names. A command that they appear in a fair and comely form, without terror, without deceit, and without harm to the operator or to any creature present. A statement of the purpose. And a licence to depart at the end, dismissing the spirits and closing the operation.
Two features are worth extracting. The insistence on appearing without terror and doing no harm is a constant of the genre and tells you what practitioners were worried about. And the licence to depart is treated as essential; a great deal of the folklore about magic going wrong concerns operators who failed to close properly.
A necessary note. This article is a review of a historical text and not instruction. The Heptameron is a working manual and it is written to be followed, which most texts in this genre are not, and that makes it the one most likely to be picked up and used by someone with no context. Extended fasting, sleep deprivation, isolation and intense ritual expectation are a combination that reliably produces altered states, and people have been badly frightened and worse. If this material interests you, read the history, and be especially wary of anyone offering paid instruction, initiation or the removal of consequences.
Bound to Its Own Opposite
One of the more entertaining facts about the English magical tradition is that its two foundational imports arrived in the same volume and contradict each other.
Robert Turner's collection of 1655 contained the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, the Heptameron, the Arbatel, and further material on geomancy and the natures of spirits. It was the single most important source of Latin magical material for English readers for the next two hundred years.
The Arbatel says: there is no procedure. Be honest, avoid vanity, pick one vocation, pray plainly, and receive what you are given, which may be nothing. Coercion is impious and unnecessary.
The Heptameron says: here are the tables, here is the circle, here are the names, here are the words, and here is how to compel attendance.
English practitioners read both, in the same book, and drew on both. The subsequent tradition largely took the Heptameron's procedure and quietly dropped the Arbatel's argument, which tells you something about which of the two answers people wanted.
Where the Furniture Went
The Heptameron's influence is out of all proportion to its length or quality, and the reason is convenience.
It is short. It is complete. It requires no interpretation. Everything needed for an operation is present, in tables, and can be copied out.
Francis Barrett drew on it heavily for The Magus in 1801, which was the compilation through which the nineteenth-century occult revival received most of its material. From Barrett the weekday angels, the planetary hours, the fumigations and the circle construction passed into the Victorian magical orders, and from those into twentieth-century ceremonial practice and into a great deal of modern popular occultism.
If you have encountered a correspondence table assigning an angel, an incense, a colour and a metal to each day of the week, you are looking at this book's descendants. Most people using that material have never heard of it.
The Errors in the Tables
An honest note that practitioners and historians both need.
The text has been copied by hand, then set in type, then reprinted, then translated, then reprinted again, for around five hundred years. Names have been garbled. Hebrew and pseudo-Hebrew divine names, which were poorly understood by many copyists, are particularly corrupt. Tables disagree with each other and occasionally with the text around them.
The Heptameron is also internally inconsistent in places, which suggests it was assembled from more than one source rather than composed as a whole.
Joseph Peterson's edited text notes many of these problems. Anyone comparing two versions will find variants, and anyone treating a particular spelling as significant should know that the spelling may be a copyist's slip from 1590.
What Is Not In It
The largest thing to say about this book is what it leaves out.
There is no theory. It does not say what the angels are, in what sense they exist, what their relationship to God or to the operator is, why divine names should compel them, what the circle actually does, or what any of it is for.
Compare the philosophical magical literature of the same period. Agrippa's Three Books construct an entire cosmology first and derive practice from it. The Picatrix embeds its operations in a theory of celestial influence. The Arbatel gives a theology of gift and unworthiness.
The Heptameron gives you a recipe.
Whether that is a defect depends on what you want. As a historical document it is unusually revealing precisely because it is unphilosophical: this is what the practice looked like at the level of what people actually did, stripped of justification. Most of our evidence about magic comes from its defenders and its critics, both of whom are arguing. This is a manual, and manuals tell you about practice in a way arguments do not.
Where to Read It, and Who Should
Robert Turner's 1655 English translation is out of copyright and freely available online. It is the version that shaped English practice and it is the one to read first, in its seventeenth-century idiom.
Joseph Peterson has produced an edited text with notes on the sources and the transmission problems, and that is the scholarly resource.
Print editions vary considerably in quality, some are assembled without any editorial involvement, and some are in languages other than English, including the edition linked below, which is Italian. Check before ordering, and note that the free English text is more useful to most readers than any of them.
Read it if you are interested in the history of Western ceremonial magic and want to see where its standard apparatus came from. This is the source of a great deal that is now attributed vaguely to tradition.
Read it alongside the Arbatel, in the same sitting, because the contrast between them is the most illuminating thing in the corpus.
Read it if you want to know what an early modern magical operation actually involved, hour by hour and object by object, rather than what its defenders said it meant.
Do not read it as a medieval text. Do not attribute it to Peter of Abano. Do not treat the tables as authoritative without checking them. And do not use it, for the reasons above.
The most interesting thing about this book has nothing to do with angels. Two texts arrived in English in the same volume in 1655, one arguing that results come from what you have become and the other supplying a procedure that works regardless of who you are. The tradition took the procedure and left the argument, and four centuries later most popular occultism is still tables and correspondences with the character question quietly removed. That preference is not a fact about magic. It is a fact about people, and it recurs in every field where a method and a discipline are on offer and only one of them is quick.
Seven days, seven angels, and a circle you stand inside.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. We recommend books we have read and think are worth your time, and we say plainly when we think parts of them are weak. The linked edition is an Italian-language printing; Robert Turner's 1655 English translation is in the public domain and freely available, and is what most readers should use.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Heptameron?
A short Latin manual of angel magic, organised around the seven days of the week, giving for each day the ruling angels, their seals, the incense to burn, the wind and season involved, and the words of conjuration. It is one of the most practically detailed operative texts in the Western magical tradition.
Did Peter of Abano write it?
Almost certainly not. Pietro d'Abano was a real physician and philosopher who died around 1316 and who acquired a posthumous reputation as a magician. The Heptameron is generally dated to the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and his name was attached to it for authority, which was standard practice.
What does the title mean?
Seven days, from the Greek. The organisation of the whole text is by weekday, with each day assigned its own angel, spirits, seal, fumigation and conjuration, which is what distinguishes it from the Solomonic manuals organised by spirit or by operation.
Which angels does it use?
The standard planetary attributions: Michael for Sunday, Gabriel for Monday, Samael for Tuesday, Raphael for Wednesday, Sachiel for Thursday, Anael for Friday and Cassiel for Saturday, each with subordinate spirits of the air and ministers under them.
What are the planetary hours?
A system dividing daylight and darkness each into twelve unequal hours, with each hour ruled by one of the seven planets in a fixed rotation. The Heptameron supplies tables of them with names, and this is one of the principal routes by which the system entered later ceremonial practice.
How is it different from the Arbatel?
Completely. The Arbatel is forty-nine aphorisms about character with almost no procedure. The Heptameron is nearly all procedure: circles, seals, tables, timing and words, with almost nothing about the operator beyond ritual purity requirements. They were printed in the same English volume and they disagree about what magic is.
How did it reach English?
Through Robert Turner's translation of 1655, in a composite volume that also contained the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy falsely attributed to Agrippa and the Arbatel. That collection was the most important source of Latin magical material for English readers for the following two centuries.
What preparation does it require?
A period of days of abstinence, chastity, fasting and confession before the operation, together with consecrated garments, a consecrated circle and prescribed fumigations. The purity requirements are about ritual fitness rather than moral development, which is a meaningful difference from other texts in the tradition.
Why was it so influential?
Because it is short, complete and usable. It gives everything needed for an operation in a few pages of tables and formulae, it was printed early, and it travelled bound to popular books. Francis Barrett drew on it, and through him it entered nineteenth and twentieth-century ceremonial magic.
Are the tables reliable?
Not entirely. Errors entered during centuries of manuscript and print transmission and have propagated widely, and the text is inconsistent with itself in places. Modern editions note the problems, and anyone comparing sources will find variant spellings of names and discrepancies in the tables.
What is missing from it?
Any theory. It does not explain what the spirits are, why the procedure should work, what the operator is doing, or what the enterprise is for. It is a set of instructions without a rationale, which distinguishes it sharply from the philosophical magical literature of the same period.
Where can I read it?
Robert Turner's 1655 English translation is out of copyright and freely available online, and Joseph Peterson has produced an edited text with notes. Modern print editions vary in quality and some are in languages other than English, so check before ordering.
Read the two of them together
Find Turner's 1655 volume, which is free, and read the Arbatel and the Heptameron back to back in an hour. One tells you that nothing you do compels anything and that what you receive depends on who you have become. The other hands you the tables. They were printed together, read together, and the tradition kept one and dropped the other. Watching that choice being made on the page is worth more than any amount of writing about what magic is, and it is a choice people go on making in every field where a shortcut and a discipline are both on the table.
Sources & References
- Heptameron, seu Elementa Magica, attributed to Petrus de Abano, first printed 1559.
- Turner, R., trans. (1655). The English Heptameron, in the composite volume with the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy and the Arbatel.
- Peterson, J. H. Edited text and notes on the Heptameron and its transmission.
- Barrett, F. (1801). The Magus, which carried the material into the nineteenth-century revival.
- Agrippa, H. C. Three Books of Occult Philosophy, for the theoretical framework the Heptameron lacks.
- Scholarship on Pietro d'Abano, his genuine works and his posthumous reputation.
- Studies of pseudepigraphy and false attribution in the magical literature of the period.