Thursday 10 January 2013

Collectanea of kabbalistic and magical texts.



Edit: from two sources (Lloyd Graham and Rabbi Yosef Cohen) I find this is the famous treatise  Sefer Shoshon Yesod Olam of Rabbi Yosef Tirshom.

This very interesting manuscript was made available in electronic format by the  Library of Geneva (Bibliothèque de Genève), where it is kept, under the name Comites Latentes 145. The extremely careful and comprehensive description on its website was made by Yael Okun, and its existence was brought to my attention by professor Lloyd Graham, to whom I am extremely grateful.
It contains magical, kabbalistical and other miscellanea ranging from the 15th to the 18th centry, by a multitude of scribes. 
This is a short overview of its contents:
Contents:
  • pp. 1-17 Israel Sarug Commentary on the Sabbath hymns by R. Isaac Luria.
  • pp. 21-598 Joseph b. Elijah Tirshom Kabbalistic compendium.
    • (pp. 22-58) Indexes
    • (pp. 60-84) Harba de-Moshe (Sword of Moses)
    • (pp. 85-92) Magical texts associated with Harba de-Moshe
    • (pp. 61-70) (lower margins) in a different hand: Sefer Razim (Book of Secrets).
    • (p. 61) (lower margin): The beginning of Ma'ase Bereshit Rabba.
    • (pp. 93-107) Seder Shem 'Ayin-Bet. A treatise in Arabic on the mystical uses of the Holy Name of seventy-two letters. Seven chapters.
    • (p. 97) An amulet attributed to a R. Menahem
    • (pp. 107-114) A treatise on the invocation of angels who have authority over the seven days of the week.
    • (pp. 115-118) Ha-Ne'elavim Treatise on magical therapies for the treatment of epilepsy.
    • (pp. 118-612) Collection of charms, amulets, holy names and other recipes, mostly magical or kabbalistic and dissertations on philosophical topics.
  • pp. 601-611 Divine Names, Biblical passages and permutations of letters for magical uses.
  • p. 612 At the bottom of a blank page, the copyist, Joseph [Tirshom] added instructions for asking a query of heaven in a state of awakeness, attributed to R. Simeon the Great and other formulas.
  • pp. 613-627 Charms (segulot), amulets, queries to heaven to be answered in dreams and short kabbalistic works in §§109.
  • p. 629 End of a treatise on astrology.
  • pp. 631-653 Collection of kabbalistic and magical pieces.
  • pp. 654-656 (in a different 17th cent. hand): Spells, including incantation bowels with drawings, instructions to exorcise possessing spirits from the book Or Tzach u-Metzuchtzach
  • pp. 657-668 Kabbalistic treatise on the Holy Names. End missing.
  • Pp. 629, 669-672 Treatise on astronomy. Incomplete. 

We reproduce here the pages of interest to us, namely the diagrams and seals (for larger versions, right click and view image).


p.115

p.116

 p.117

p.151

p.152

  p.169

 p.174

 p.205

p.221

 p.222

  p.223

p.238


p.263

 p.280

p.322

 p.323


p.324

 p.401

p.409


p.426


p.448

p.462

p.468

p.516

p.552
p.553


p.599

p.630

p.654


p.670

p.671 

p.672

1 comment:

  1. I believe that due to the size of the images, a few of them have broken links. I want to see if there are any more crashes in the following days. If there are, I will save them manually and re-upload them. Thank you for the patience.

    ReplyDelete