Planetary Characters of Balenus (BAV Pal.Lat.1375)

BAV Pal.Lat.1375 fol.270v has some pretty... oh, excuse me. That sounds like gibberish. If I had someone explain to me all those numbers, I would have had an easier time studying and finding these manuscripts. 

What does that mean, you ask?

BAV means Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana. Meaning the Apostolic Vatican Church. The motherload of century-old knowledge. 

Pal.Lat. is the collection it belongs to, The Latine Palatine manuscripts. That tells us this manuscript, number 1375 of many thousands of manuscripts, is in Latin. 

Fol.270 v means we have to look for leaf number 270. But that has two sides to it: the 270 is written on the Recto side, and the back is unnumbered, but known as 270v, from Verso (back). 

So basically, on the back side of the 270th leaf on the 1375th manuscript in the Latin Palatine Collection of Vatican Library, we have this little gem: 

De imaginibus septem planetarum or Of the images of the seven planets of Belemith, a deformation of Balenus-Apollonius of Tyana. 

I found this jewel originally in Benedek Lang`s outstanding volume Unlocked books: Manuscripts of learned magic in the medieval libraries of Central Europe (Penn State University Press, 2008), page 117 and was naturally drawn to its potential. 

According to Lang (p.107), the manuscript was most likely penned by Johannes Virdung of Hassfurt (1463-1538), a noted astrologer and pen-pal of Trithemius, so we could date it to the end of the fifteenth century-beginning of the sixteenth century.  

The illustration was black and white and quite small and could not have formed the basis of the current graphical work, and the manuscript was not digitised then. But it is now. 

I tracked it down again, found it, and as luck would have it, the line used to mutilate these wonderful seals is not in black, but in red, which made my work of extracting the seals easier. Not easy mind you, just easier. 

First set of  Characters: Seals (Sigillis) 

Sun 

Venus 

Mercury 

Moon 

Saturn 

Note: The Seals are written left to right, so the top part of the series was the first and the bottom part was the last noted, in the division of the rows. 

Jupiter 

Mars

Second set of  Characters: Images (Ymagines) 

Sun 

Mercury 

Moon 

Venus 

Saturn 

Note: As above, the characters are divided for la lack of space, but the first symbols seem to be scribal mistakes regarding the first characters so I have not included them (see original image).

Jupiter 

Mars

On a superficial look, the First Set corresponds to the characters used in the Ghent and Folger Manuscripts, but that will require further examination.  

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