A Review of Annulorum Experimenta by Peter of Abano, translated by Regulus Hess

This is a review of the book Annulorum Experimenta or The Experiment of the Rings by Peter of Abano edited and translated by Regulus Hess. 

TL;DR, I like this book. It is delightfully enigmatic and has potential for exploration.  

One of the habits I've fallen into as I study the Mansions of the Moon is to encourage a tendency in myself to collect as much as possible about them. Whenever I hear that a book mentions the Mansions of the Moon I immediately try to acquire it. It is always a gamble in terms of quality. Some I have liked more than others, or, more accurately, some I have found more applicable to my tastes than others. A few I have found to be down right stinkers. But in my zeal to learn as much as I can I have justified collecting these volumes by saying that everything counts. Everything that exists about the Mansions exists by the grace of the spirits of the Mansions and therefore has a place in the lore about them. 

Annulorum Experimenta stands apart from other works that include the Mansions of the Moon. Other books, like Zoroastor’s Telescope and the Faustian grimoire Magia Naturalis et Innaturalis, seem to use Agrippa’s list of Mansion spirits without much context, as if a known spirit list was simply pasted into a system of magic to which it otherwise has no connection. 

Annulorum instead focuses on the Mansions by their number in sequence and attributes an idiosyncratic spirit list to each one.  

It is a slim volume at only 130 pages all together. This includes an introduction, a Latin version of the text followed by an English translation, three appendices, a bibliography, and an index. Essentially, the book consists of forty magical procedures attributed to the Mansions of the Moon (with more in the appendices). Some of the spells give the magician powers, like That Thou Shouldst Be Able Skillfully to Find Hidden Treasure, but a great many of them are to produce a vision, like That There Should Appear Manfully an Elephant Bearing a Castle.  

Most of the workings follow a pattern.

• creating a ring of a specific material; gold, silver, tin, etc.
• attaching written spirit name or names to it, often by stuffing a bit of parchment with the names written on it into a hollow space in the ring.
• suffumigating the ring in a specific setting with a specific incense, mistletoe in a meadow for instance.
• drawing out a symbol specific to the ring.
• praying to God to consecrate the ring.
• Store the ring in a specific material of a specific color. 

Then, when one wishes to employ the powers of the ring one does the following.

• bear the ring.
• touch the ring with spittle.
• redraw the symbol associated with the creation of the ring with the ring
• recite an invocation including the spirit names. 

Some of the spells give the magician powers, like That Thou Shouldst Be Able Skillfully to Find Hidden Treasure, but a great many of them are to produce a vision, like That There Should Appear Manfully an Elephant Bearing a Castle. Some of the spells seem to match what one might expect for the specific Mansion, like That There Should Appear A Great And Horrible Serpent for a working in the twelfth Mansion (Asarfa), but others seem to be unrelated to their Mansion, like That There Should Appear A River In The Air for the first Mansion (Al Sharatayn) which, to my knowledge, has strong fire connotations but not so much watery or airy. 

Some of them sound like complete nonsense but I contend that these spells and workings can be seen as clues and markers for deeper mysteries about each of the Mansions. The material, the setting, the suffumigation, the vision all point to elements of spirit working. Taken in this sense the nonsensical things become spirit symbols. A mouse dragging a millstone, for instance, is then a symbol of the spirits of Atarfa and can be used to produce talismanic images or as a basis for contemplative ways to work with that Mansion. 

The text itself seems to downplay the literal rites and the procedure by reducing all the oration and ritual action to essentially, "do the usual," as opposed to carefully laying out the specific words to say and actions to take. This suggests to me that those are of lesser importance than the material, the names, and the image/intent of the working. In sort, that improvisation is very possible.  

In a study of the Mansions of the Moon I think this work has a not insignificant place alongside other works even with as odd as it is. I suspect the real practical value will only come with prolonged exploration.