I’m trying to decipher part of this funky old Italian grimoire – the Fasciculus rerum Geomanticarum – to compare the descriptions of the demons in it to later books. I haven’t found a transcription that I could feed into google translate, and my lack of familiarity with Latin is bound to make any transcription I do close to useless.
I’ve tried some, it’s bad. I can gather the names of the demons, their titles and numbers of legions they command, but anything else is real tough. So I need either a transcription or translation to work from, or I need somebody with boss Latin skills to just rattle off the answers. Google did help me confirm the demon names via the footnotes in a modern French book about demonology, but I haven’t found anything else.
Anybody wanna show off their Latin or googling skillz in my comments here? I need the info from pages 611 to 628 of the PDF.
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My Latin is way too rusty, I’m afraid.
I just wanted to comment to say that I can see this post, unedited, being the first page of a really terrific lighthearted modern epistolary fantasy novel that ends up with the apocalypse in the last few chapters.
I’d love to help, and Latin isn’t really a problem for me, but the manuscript is not the easiest to read. I checked to see if someone had done an edited version of the text that would be easier to make out, but unfortunately it remains in MS form only. It’s been close on a decade since I last did any palaeography work, and I’m far less familiar with late 15th Century book hands than earlier stuff. I can make out maybe 75% of the words after a bit of squinting, but seventeen pages would take many hours of poring over to work out given the quality of the image and the crabbed nature of the writing.
Google Translate doesn’t work very well with Latin, as Sean Hannity found out.
Thanks for the feedback and amusements, y’all. Translate is sorta adequate if you use it right, which clearly Hannity didn’t. For this purpose, I don’t think the actual and specific phrasing is going to help me summon demons, so knowing very generally what is being said should be adequate. These kind of books are pretty samey too, so lots of repeated words and ideas. “MACGUFFIO also known as MACGUFFYN or MACGYVIR is a Great Duke who appears in the form of a knight riding a leopard with two snakes in one hand and a cold bowl of poison in the other. He makes the exorcist wise in earth sciences and humanities, soweth discord between his enemies, and can maketh your ass invisible. He confers dignities and confirms them. He commands 29 legions from the orders of potestates and 6 of thrones.” That’s the kind of stuff I NEED TO KNOW. For science.
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So the big question is: what were the authors of those books on?
I can’t criticize your obsession, though. When I was in grad school reading Le Morte D’Arthur and the French Prose Arthur, I started keeping box scores of who beat whom in all the tournaments.