The Summa Sacra Magice of Berengarius Ganellus

(A Brief Introduction to the Text)

Few works in the history of Western occultism are as imposing or as enigmatic as the Summa Sacra Magice of Berengarius Ganellus. Written in 1346 in the Latin of the medieval Catalan world, it is at once a massive compendium, an initiatory roadmap, and a testament to a strange and enduring ambition: to catalog, systematize, and sanctify the art of magic. Over two hundred thousand words in length and sprawling across five books and eighty-five chapters, the Summa is one of the largest magical treatises ever composed, and it has remained largely inaccessible for centuries, cloistered in the reading rooms of European archives, its pages yellowed and its Latin dense with esoteric turns of phrase. Only in recent years has the text begun to emerge from obscurity, revealing itself not merely as a curiosity of the Middle Ages, but as a foundational text whose influence runs beneath the surface of later grimoires and ceremonial systems, from the Solomonic tradition to the Renaissance revival of angelic magic.

To approach the Summa Sacra Magice is to step into a world where theology and thaumaturgy were not separate pursuits but overlapping modes of inquiry. Ganellus, about whom frustratingly little is known beyond his name and his work, composed his treatise in the Crown of Aragon, a crucible of cultures where Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions met, collided, and fertilized one another in unexpected ways. It was a place where scholasticism lived alongside the remnants of Andalusian learning, where translators carried Arabic philosophy into Latin monasteries, and where merchants trafficked not only in goods but in stories, symbols, and incantations. Out of that rich and sometimes turbulent soil, Ganellus produced a text that aspired to nothing less than a total summa—the Latin scholastic term for an authoritative synthesis—of sacred magic. The title is deliberate: this was not to be a mere manual, but a compendium that would stand alongside the great scholastic summas of theology and law, except here the subject was the working of spirits, the manipulation of divine names, and the crafting of talismans capable of bending the order of the cosmos.

The Summa is structured with a remarkable internal coherence, which makes its relative neglect in occult historiography all the more surprising. It is divided into five major books, each of which tackles a different aspect of what Ganellus conceived of as the sacred magical art. The first lays out the philosophical and theological foundations, situating magic within a framework that is unflinchingly Christian yet deeply syncretic, drawing on the wisdom of the Solomonic legends, on fragments of the Jewish mystical tradition, and on older, unnamed currents of ritual knowledge. The later books delve into increasingly specific—and, by medieval standards, increasingly daring—territory. One encounters the Shemhamphorash, the ineffable seventy-two-fold name of God, broken into ritual formulae. One finds detailed instructions for crafting the Almandal, a magical device of wax and metal that serves as both an altar and an instrument for conjuring celestial intelligences. One reads of Solomon’s rings and pentacles, not in passing allusion but as living tools, inscribed and consecrated, their powers carefully enumerated.

What sets the Summa Sacra Magice apart from other grimoires, even other large and ambitious ones, is the sheer breadth of its vision. Many magical texts of the Middle Ages are narrow in focus—a conjuration manual here, a book of talismans there. Ganellus’s work attempts to be encyclopedic. It does not merely list rituals; it offers a theory of why they should work, grounding each practice in a lattice of correspondences between heaven and earth. Angels and demons are not simply summoned; they are placed within a vast hierarchy that stretches from the seven planets to the remotest celestial spheres. Talismanic magic is not presented as superstition but as the practical outworking of divine mathematics. In this, Ganellus reflects a distinctly scholastic mindset. Just as Thomas Aquinas sought to reconcile Aristotle with Christian doctrine, Ganellus seeks to reconcile the ceremonial art with Christian cosmology, so that no conjuration is divorced from theology, and no incantation lacks a rationale.

This ambition made the Summa an object of both fascination and unease for later generations. Its influence can be traced in the veins of other grimoires, though rarely acknowledged outright. The Sworn Book of Honorius, the Key of Solomon, the Almandal rituals, even later currents of angelic magic all bear traces of Ganellus’s structure and ideas. Notable magicians and scholars—Johannes Trithemius, John Dee—are known to have owned and studied copies, and it is no exaggeration to say that parts of Dee’s angelic experiments and his conception of the Enochian schema stand in the shadow of Ganellus’s Latin. Yet the Summa remained elusive, never printed, transmitted in a handful of manuscripts, often under slightly altered titles or in composite volumes that obscured its identity. For centuries, it was an underground current in the already shadowy world of ritual magic.

The manuscript’s survival story is itself a study in the precariousness of esoteric texts. Today, the principal witness is a single manuscript: Kassel Universitätsbibliothek, 4° Ms. astron. 3, a thick codex whose pages hold Ganellus’s sprawling system in all its ornate Latin. There is also a German translation preserved in Berlin, testimony to the work’s gradual seepage into northern Europe. But for the most part, the Summa remained a text for the initiated few—those who could find it, decipher it, and risk the weight of its implications. Even scholars of magic often knew of it only by name or by scattered citations in catalogues. Only now, in the twenty-first century, is it being fully translated, edited, and brought into the light.

The very title, Summa Sacra Magice, invites reflection. By calling it a summa, Ganellus signaled that he meant his work to be comprehensive, perhaps even definitive, and by calling it sacra he aligned magic with sanctity. For Ganellus, magic was not the devil’s counterfeit of religion; it was the hidden core of religion, the operative dimension of sacred truths. To conjure an angel or to fashion a talisman was not to rebel against heaven but to collaborate with it, to work with the grain of divine creation. This framing made the text survivable within a Christian world that often looked on magic with suspicion, but it also opened a seam of tension: the rituals are bold, the spirits not all benign, and the line between invocation and command is sometimes crossed with startling confidence. The Summa insists that the magician can be at once devout and audacious, a servant and a master, and this duality infuses every page.

Because the Summa Sacra Magice was so long inaccessible, it acquired an aura of legend among students of grimoires. Those who knew of it spoke of it in half-whispered tones, as an ancestor text lurking behind the more familiar Solomonic literature. Recently however, that veil finally began to lift when Stephen Skinner and Daniel Clark, two of the leading editors of historical magical texts, published the first volume of their translation through Golden Hoard Press, covering Books I and II. For the first time, readers can see Ganellus’s Latin side by side with a careful English rendering, complete with redrawn diagrams, notes, and historical framing. It is a monumental project, and future volumes will carry the translation through the remaining books, but even this first installment has made clear the scope and significance of Ganellus’s vision.

Reading the Summa today is a disorienting experience, one that collapses familiar boundaries between medieval and modern categories. It is undeniably a grimoire, full of conjurations, pentacles, and instructions for working with spirits. But it is also a work of speculative theology, a philosophical treatise, and a practical manual. It moves from prayers that could be mistaken for monastic devotions to instructions for constructing ritual implements that would not look out of place in a later magical order. There is grandeur in its system, but there is also a granular precision, a sense that every name, every sigil, every material choice matters. Beeswax or tin, Hebrew or Latin, Sunday or Tuesday—each detail is woven into a web of meaning. This combination of cosmic scope and obsessive specificity is what makes the Summa both daunting and irresistible.

Ganellus himself remains a spectral presence. Almost nothing survives of his biography, and what little can be inferred must be gleaned from the text. He was learned—steeped in scholastic method, conversant with the languages of scripture and ritual. He was also daring, willing to lay out in systematic form practices that others hinted at or hid. He was writing in a time and place where inquisitorial suspicion was a constant risk, and yet he composed a work that openly teaches the conjuration of spirits. Was he a cleric? A lay scholar? An itinerant magus? The Summa does not say. But in every line one senses a mind both rigorous and restless, eager to draw together scattered traditions into a single, unified art.

The text also reveals a world in which “magic” was not yet the antithesis of “religion.” In Ganellus’s Latin, the boundaries are porous. Sacred names are invoked not to defy the Church but to fulfill what the Church only dimly comprehends. Angels are summoned not in rebellion but as partners in divine work. Even the darker materials—the references to demons, the threats of coercion—are framed as part of a larger cosmological order in which every spirit, however wayward, has its place. This is not the tidy moral world of later theology, nor the sanitized ceremonialism of later orders. It is messier, stranger, and, in its own way, more alive.

The reemergence of the Summa Sacra Magice has implications beyond the study of one text. It forces a reconsideration of how medieval magic developed, how it was transmitted, and how it underlies the more familiar currents of Renaissance esotericism. It reminds us that the so-called “Solomonic” tradition was not a single book or a single lineage but a confluence of sources, some canonical, some obscure. And it shows us that even in the fourteenth century, there were those who thought of magic not as a scatter of charms and spells but as a discipline worthy of a summa—a great work, meant to stand alongside the weightiest syntheses of its age.

For modern readers, the Summa can be approached in several ways. One can treat it as a historical document, a window into the ceremonial practices of a particular time and place. One can read it as a sourcebook, mining it for rituals and correspondences. One can engage with it philosophically, as a meditation on the nature of sacred power. However it is read, it is not a text to be rushed. Its Latin is dense, its structure intricate, and its worldview foreign enough to unsettle. But for those willing to spend time within its pages, it offers something rare: a glimpse of a magical tradition in its own words, unfiltered, ambitious, and unapologetically grand.

A facsimile of the original Latin manuscript can be viewed in Summa sacrae magicae by Berengarius Ganellus, 1346 (4° Ms. astron. 3), a treasure of any serious occult library, and for those who prefer an English doorway into this vast text, the first volume of the new translation by Stephen Skinner and Daniel Clark can be purchased here. This is only the beginning of the Summa’s return to the world, but already it feels like a restoration, a great book stepping back into the conversation after centuries of near silence.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Primary Sources

Ganellus, Berengarius. Summa Sacrae Magicae. Latin manuscript, Kassel Universitätsbibliothek, 4° Ms. astron. 3. Listed as Persée Project item no. 13, classified under the subject heading Grimoire Magic and cataloged as a manuscript in the library’s astronomy/astrology series.

Ganellus, Berengarius. Summa Sacrae Magicae. German translation, late 16th century. Berlin Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, MS Germ. Fol. 903. Vernacular rendering of Ganellus’s full text, preserving all five books and 85 chapters.

Ganellus, Berengarius. Summa Sacrae Magicae. Facsimile of Kassel Universitätsbibliothek, 4° Ms. astron. 3. Kassel: Universitätsbibliothek Kassel, 1346. Digital facsimile (319 pp.). Accessed August 3, 2025. https://booksofmagick.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Berengarius-Ganellus-Summa-sacrae-magicae__sml-.pdf.

Skinner, Stephen, and Daniel Clark. Summa Sacra Magice: Books I & II. Singapore: Golden Hoard Press, 2025. Accessed August 3, 2025. https://www.mortlakeandcompany.com/product/summa-sacre-magice-stephen-skinner-daniel-clark-deluxe-golden-hoard-2024-/690.

Peterson, Joseph. “Summa Sacra Magice (partial transcription and translation of the introduction).” Esoteric Archives. Accessed August 3, 2025. https://www.esotericarchives.com/ganell/ssm.htm.

Secondary Sources

Schäfer, Peter. Synopse zur Hekhalot-Literatur. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1981.

Fanger, Claire. Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.

Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Davies, Owen. Grimoires: A History of Magic Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Addendum: Descriptions of the two primary codexes of the work...

Kassel manuscript, Universitätsbibliothek Kassel 4° Ms. astron. 3, the principal Latin witness for Summa Sacrae Magicae by Berengarius Ganellus:

Provenance and Manuscript Features

The Kassel codex, shelfmark 4° Ms. astron. 3, is a Latin manuscript composed around 1346, likely near Perpignan in the Crown of Aragon, although it is unknown precisely where Ganellus composed the manuscript. It is the earliest and most authoritative copy we possess, containing over 200,000 Latin words across five books and eighty‑five chapters, structured in a manner that clearly reflects Ganellus’s original compilation. The manuscript is part of Kassel’s astronomy and astrology collection (hence its shelfmark), a historical context that aligns with its blending of celestial and ritual content.

The manuscript’s pages hold richly detailed magical diagrams, sigils, pentacles, ritual circles, and inscriptions, drawn in the same hand that transcribed the text—making it a unified work rather than a copy of disparate sources. These visuals are integral to the treatise, not later additions.

Completeness and Condition

As the most complete Latin witness, Kassel 4° Ms. astron. 3 preserves nearly the entirety of Ganellus’s compendium. While minor lacunae or smudged sections may exist—as is common in manuscripts of this size—it remains unparalleled in scope. Subsequent translations and vernacular copies, such as the Berlin German version, appear to rely structurally on precisely this Kassel archetype.

Authority and Textual Integrity

For textual critics and esoteric scholars, this Kassel manuscript constitutes the benchmark witness. It is the only surviving copy in the Latin in which Ganellus wrote his system. Later versions and translations, including Berlin MS Germ. Fol. 903, appear to be closely derived from it. Where Berlin translators worked in German vernacular, almost inevitably some Latin names, theological nuance, and structural coherence became altered or abridged.

Paleographic, Codicological, and Folio Insights

The manuscript is executed in a consistent Gothic textualis script, with chapter headings, rubrication, and careful layout. The combination of script and ornamentation situates it firmly in mid‑14th century Catalan or Occitan scribal tradition. The diagrams—pentacles, sigils, seals—are drawn in a mature ritual style that presumes familiarity with mid‑century European magical graphical conventions.

Its juxtaposition with other manuscripts suggests it lived among astrological codices in Kassel’s collection—not outlier magical books—supporting the idea that in Ganellus’s milieu, magic, astrology, and natural philosophy were intellectually integrated.

Scholarly and Ritual Significance

This Latin codex is pivotal not only as the textual foundation of the Summa, but as a direct conduit to Ganellus's vision—revealing his full structure, symbolic system, and theological framing. It includes key rituals such as the Shemhamphorash invocations, Almandal formations, Solomon’s rings, and the vestment inscriptions based on the Shi’ur Qomah tradition, all in the original medieval Latin phrasing.

For modern editions like the Skinner & Clark translation, the Latin on each page serves as the reference base—from which diagrams were redrawn, names transliterated, and ritual apparatus described. It is both the source text and the visual source.

Limitations and Research Uses

Despite its authority, it is nearly illegible to non‑specialists: abbreviations, medieval Latin grammar, and ritual jargon require expert paleographic skill. High resolution digitization helps, but interpreting Ganellus’s logic—why specific bodies of angels, rituals, or talismans are arranged as they are—still demands scholarly background in medieval magic and Christian-Hebraic syncretic traditions.

Yet it remains unmatched for philological analysis, allowing comparison of nomenclature, theological phrases, and magical grammar that later translations obscure. It is the textual archetype scholars must consult for serious study.

Summary in Rare Book Terms

Kassel 4° Ms. astron. 3 is the primary and authoritative Latin manuscript of the Summa Sacrae Magicae, written circa 1346 in the Crown of Aragon. It preserves Ganellus’s full text, diagrams, and ritual system in a cohesive format. It serves as the ultimate reference point for textual critics, historians of magic, and ritual scholars. All later versions—including the German translation and modern editions—derive from or are based on this singular Latin codex. Its value is paramount—not only for content but as a nexus of magic, art, theology, and medieval scribal culture.

The Berlin manuscript, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz MS Germ. Fol. 903, a complete German translation of Ganellus’s Summa Sacrae Magice:

Historical Provenance

This manuscript dates to around the late sixteenth century (circa 1580), likely produced in German lands as part of the flourishing interest in “learned magic.” It survives in Berlin Staatsbibliothek, bound in quarto format under shelfmark Germ. Fol. 903. It is a faithful translation of the Latin Summa originally penned in 1346 in Catalonia. While the Kassel Latin manuscript remained obscure, this German version attests to the text’s transmission and readership in Central Europe during the late Renaissance.

Completeness & Content

The Berlin manuscript encompasses the entire Summa in translation, covering all five books and eighty‑five chapters, preserved on folios 517v through 549v (though pagination varies by binding). Whereas many translations or abridgments survive in fragmentary form, this codex is unusually complete, making it the only full vernacular version known.

Authority and Relationship to the Kassel Manuscript

Textually and structurally, MS Germ. Fol. 903 appears to faithfully follow the Kassel Latin source (Ms. 4° astron. 3). It integrates Solomonic rituals, Shemhamphorash tables, Almandal procedures, and passages derived from the Liber Iuratus Honorii, just as in the Latin original. Although medieval scribal transmission risks homogenization, this sixteenth‑century translation aligns closely with the Latin manuscript’s content and organization, suggesting it was copied from a now‑lost exemplar directly descended from the 1346 archetype.

Scholarly Perspective and Paleographic Value

From the vantage of rare book studies, MS Germ. Fol. 903 is invaluable for several reasons:

• It demonstrates the early reception and translation of a Latin magical compendium into German, illuminating how occult knowledge migrated from Iberia into German‑speaking regions.
• The codex preserves illustrations and technical diagrams (circles, pentacles, seals) that replicate those in Kassel, which otherwise remain available only via digital facsimile or secondary transcription.
• As a vernacular codex produced in the era when John Dee and Trithemius curated collections of such works, it illuminates the intellectual climate in which Renaissance magicians encountered Ganellus’ system.
• Textually, it provides material for comparing translation practices: shifts in magical names, ritual formulas, or theological insertions may surface upon comparison with the Latin. It also helps assess the integrity of textual transmission.

Use Value for Researchers

A scholar examining MS Germ. Fol. 903 can trace how the Summa's magical and cosmological vocabulary was rendered into German, revealing interpretive choices made by sixteenth‑century translators. One can also analyze how ritual diagrams were reproduced, adapted, or reinterpreted. Crucially, it sheds light on the spread of Ganellus’s influence outside Iberia, into later traditions like the Solomonic and Shemhamphorash magic familiar in Northern Europe.

Limitations and Contextual Nuance

While MS Germ. Fol. 903 is comprehensive, it remains a translation. Nuances of medieval Latin, Hebrew transliterations of magical names, and textual variants in the original may become obscured or altered in translation. It should therefore be used alongside the Kassel Latin manuscript (and any critical editions) when precise philological analysis is required. It is nevertheless the only complete version accessible in a pre-modern vernacular, making it essential for understanding how the Summa circulated among non-Latin readers.

In summary, Berlin MS Germ. Fol. 903 is a rare and authoritative witness to the entire Summa Sacrae Magice, uniquely capturing its transmission to German-speaking occult culture. For historians of magic, it reveals both continuity and adaptation—giving us a vivid picture of late Renaissance engagement with Ganellus’s grand magico-theological compendium.

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