The Red King [Updated]
How I learned the identity of a Jinn
The following article is focused on occult matters more than ritual, so if its not your bag, please skip it. I will be returning my usual specific subject matter shortly!
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Last week a new book arrived through in my hands… The Art of the Grimoire by Owen Davies… a substantial volume telling the story of the history of occult grimoires with lavish colour pics. Within an image that lead me to a delightful revelation…
The Seal
As mentioned in a recent article, I have a great soft spot for the grimoire traditions. Though, over the years, my own ritual work has moved away from their classical forms, I have remained nevertheless a big fan of the artistic styles present in the grimoires.
Maybe some 15 years ago or such I cam into possession of a number of antique printing blocks for magical talismans, most notably and recognisable to me were those from the notorious Black Pullet, but one was different…
The block, as you can see is adorned with various cryptic sigils, and characters including Hebrew letters, surrounding the central image of a chap holding a sword.
I recognised the seal very clearly. Part of a set of planetary seals that I had a nagging recollection I knew it from Anna Riva’s booklet, Secrets of Magical Seals - a book I picked up as a youngster (because it was very affordable).
Alas… checking back in the book revealed nothing. I did however add an image of this seal to my ‘cabinet of curios’ page on my website, and thought nothing more.
Then back in 2023 someone, after finding my page, emailed me and said they had been looking into it. They suggested that the figure on the seal was the spirit Camael. I could neither agree nor disagree because I just could not remember which of my books feature the full set.
Camael… but not my Seal
So, who is Camael? Well, variously an angel with a flaming sword or a demon with a flaming sword. According to the trusted Godwin’s Cabalistic Encyclopaedia, Kamael is an Archangel associated with Geburah (severity) and Mars.
This ‘archangel’ looks to have been interchangeable with Michael and might have been the entity who, with his flaming sword, helped eject the archetypal Adam and Eve from Eden.
Given the Hebraic nature of the name Camael I looked at the Hebrew letters on the block that I could translate, and indeed, to the left of the man’s shoulder (as we look at the image of the block) we can see four Hebrew characters. Now, Hebrew is read right-to-left, but as this block is itself a mirror image (because of the way block printing works) the Hebrew letters are given in the correct order: Reading from left to right are the letters Kaph, Meme, Aleph, Lamed. KMAL, Kamael. My source was right. Further confirming this, the squiggly sigil directly below the letters is indeed the sigil of the Camael, here retrieved from wikipedia:
Annoyingly, to the best of my knowledge, this sigil hails from the Grimoire of Armadel. The version of which I have, does not actually feature this sigil on the page for Camael, but gives a near perfect version on the facing page for none-other-than Samael, with whom Camael is associated, but whose identity is more often better known as the agent of evil. Digging further (thanks, Reddit) suggests that these two names are variants of the same name, with corrupted translations between different languages over the centuries, with comments saying that people favour using Camael rather than Samael for its less satanic connotations.
So, my email source was right, to a degree. (And thanks to that individual for contacting me!) However, the guy on the sigil, for whatever details can be seen, is not wielding a flaming sword so his specific identity seems incongruous… perhaps I am missing something?
The Face of the Seal
Then in a follow up email my correspondent sent me an image from a book that showed the exact seal, not readable (and the not mirrored like the actual block):
The bottom right seal depicts a man upon a lion holding a sword aloft with a severed head in his other hand. The text around the edge reads, “His Caliph, His Numeration, His Vizir (?), The Genii of the Time”. Now, just to clarify, we should note that the accompanying seal in the image carries not dissimilar text, “The Genii of the Hour, His Ambassador, His Numeration, His Minister.” Unfortunately without more context little more can be gleaned than there is an implied hierarchy involved with these figures, these Genii. But we do not know who the identity of the ‘his’ is. Though the presence of the words ‘Genii’ and ‘Caliph’, and of course the turban-esque attire, do lead one to think of middle-central Asia.
The Chest Sigil
Well, this part is actually easy. The little panel the man is wearing on his chest carries on it the sigil of Mars as derived from the ‘magic square’ of Mars. A ‘magic square’ is a grid of numbers, the arrangement of which enables all the different lines to add up to the same total. A bit like an occult sudoku. In the case of the Martian magical square, it is a grid of 5x5 (containing the numbers 1-25). Five is the number of ‘Geburah’, as it is the fifth sepher or ‘sphere’ from the qabalistic Tree of Life.
The sigil - the composition of lines that appear on the chest panel - is then made by linking specific numbers on the magical square. An image of all of this can be found on p499 of the standard edition of The Golden Dawn by Israel Regardie.
With this we are definitely getting to the indisputable position that this magical seal relates to a martian spirit - which is not the same as a actual ‘martian’. But we still don’t quite have the identity of the individual. And then…
The Art of the Grimoire
This afternoon I treated myself to some downtime and decided to have a proper read of my new book. On page seventy five I found this delightful if frightful image, and something about it tickled my mind…
The text accompanying the illustration reads:
“Image from a copy of Abu Ma’shar al-Balkhi’s Kitab al-mawalid (The Book of Nativities), Egypt (14th Century Manuscript). The Image depicts Tarish, a king of domestic Jinn. He is not listed in some other well known books of jinn, but he bears a close resemblance to the more widely known ‘Red King’ Al-Malik al-Ahmar, who was also depicted riding a lion and is associated with the planet Mars…”
So, naturally I looked for illustrations of this mysterious ‘Red King’. Red is certainly the colour of Mars. This is what I found:
The Islamic text, the Kitab al-Bulhan, or The Book of Wonders, hailing from 14-15thC Baghdad, deals with zodiacal and planetary magic, and though I can’t read Arabic, I was able to find this image of the Red King of the jinn, and jinn associated with the planet Mars…
An entity upon a lion wielding a sword and holding a severed head…
Further digging revealed this charming version of the same picture, this time from the 1582 Ottoman Book of Felicity, and depicting once again the Red King Al-Ahmar:
The Goal of the Wise
Annoyingly I don’t have a translation of the Book of Wonders, so I am unable to dig further into the lore of this entity from that source. I do, however, own a delightful translation of another book of Arabic occultism that deals with planetary magic: the Ghayat Al-Hakim, also called Picatrix or ‘The Goal of the Wise’. Chapter Ten deals with the creation of planetary talismans carved on precious stones. Under the entry for Mars we read:
On a magnet carve the picture of a man riding on a lion and raising a sword in his right hand and the head of a man in his left hand…
Here we have another description of a talisman being made that features a figure very similar to that of the talisman of my printers block, and indeed, the likeness of one of the kings of the Jinn, the Red King Al-Ahmar…
So, it is clear that the printing block I own contains a complex symbol that draws on numerous different traditions, and funnel through the stylings of the grimoires to combine qabalistic symbolism with that of the Islamic planetary jinn magic, to create a device that serves the operant in matters pertaining to martian influence.
That said… It is still escaping me the actual source of this and the other talismans on that same set - likely seven of them, each for the seven jinn of the planets… If you happen to know, let us all know in the comments below!
UPDATE:
The devil is in the detail… and the more you look the more details you find, and in this way do the devils multiply and multiply. Naturally, after posting the first version of this article i realised how many typos there were and missing images, so I gave it an overhaul… and in the process have uncovered further related material.. I’ll try and keep it concise:
The Celestial Intelligencer
1: Although I own several copies, I have never been a fan of Francis Barrett’s 1801 book The Magus or Celestial Intelligencer because I was aware that it was largely regarded as entirely plagiarised from other grimoires and occult luminaries like Agrippa. So often-as-not I pass right over it… Nevertheless I picked up a copy and leafed it open. A crack in the spine led the book to open on this exact page:
2: So i skimmed further through the book and found this entry for Camael:
It should be noted that in the text that accompanies this table, the different spirits of the days of the week are detailed, but the ‘Angel of Tuesday’ is named Samael not Camael, seemingly confirming this muddling of the two names as possible variants of the same entity.
What is interesting in the subsequent section Familiar Forms of the Spirits of Mars, we read: “Their particular shapes are, a king armed, riding on a wolf; a man armed.” It might not be a lion, there might not be a severed head, but there is certainly a sympathetic correlation.
Before moving on, notice that the symbol Raphael, to the right of Camael appears on the other Seal from the advert (see above ‘Face of the Seal’). Using that information, and the other illustrations and planetary squares, you can probably work out what the planetary influence of that other seal is.
3: Continuing I then found this system of encoding numbers, proto-sigilisation if you will, that look strikingly like the cryptic glyphs on my printing block image.
And the page before reveals the method of the sigil’s construction:
As of my writing this very sentence I have not deciphered their meaning - nor tried. I am about to this, so by the time you get to the next sentence, we will have just discovered the meaning of those symbols at the same time.
Okay… so i’ve done the calculations: The big near the top = 1823, the one near the severed head = 126 and the stack of three from top down = 85, 281, 390.
Given that both the seal and The Magus both use Hebrew it made sense to consult, once again, the ever reliable Godwin’s Qabalistic Encyclopaedia. And nothing of any significance seems to emerge from those numbers or combinations thereof. So there’s a dead end…
4: But before finally giving up, i might as well complete the job and discern the actual Hebrew words around the edge of the Seal.
Starting to the left o the three stacked number sigils (remembering that Hebrew is read right>left) are the letters aleph lamed heh yod mem. This is safe territory and begins to tell us something more of this seal… for these letters ALHIM spell the word ‘Elohim’, a ‘divine name’ common within ceremonial magic as a means of constraining or otherwise providing authority.
Moving up to the top of the seal the letters aleph lamed yod vav … aaaannndd. I don’t know. Because i can’t read the final letter, and the vav preceding it might actually be a nun I am at loss beyond it beginning with ‘El’.
Onto the third and last of the Hebrew words around the edge of the circle: yod heh shin vav heh. This is another easy one for ceremonialists, it is the divine name YHVH with the fire of ‘shin’ making YHSVH or in modern parlance, Jesus.
So I don’t immediately recognise the letters of the uppermost word, we can be sure that it is another ‘divine name’, in a manner that both sanctifies the talisman and constrains the entity within that circle (who must submit to the power of those names).
Lastly, the little word on the blade of the sword seems to be mem-kaph-kaph-yod, which has the meaning ‘grip’, which I guess has some kind of significance for holding a sword, with martian strength?
The Seal Revealed
So here is the full breakdown of the seal as best I can determine:
Thanks for taking the time to wade through the mire of old symbolism!
Articles here on the ritualist range from this type of thing to anecdotes of a ritual and magical career, technical analysis of ritual elements and primarily, tips on how to improve general ritual technique for increased efficacy.