Ars Paulina: the art attributed to Saint Paul and the angels of the hours

In the Second Letter to the Corinthians the apostle Paul tells of a man «caught up to the third heaven», who heard unspeakable words. On this passage, read as the memory of the apostle's own experience, the medieval imagination built the idea that Paul had received a secret science of the angels. Hence the name of the Ars Paulina, the third part of the Lemegeton, which presents itself as a Pauline revelation of the names and functions of the heavenly hosts.

An old title, a new text

An art attributed to Paul was already circulating in the late Middle Ages, related according to scholars to the tradition of the Ars Notoria and, like it, condemned by theologians. The version preserved in the Lemegeton, however, does not coincide with the medieval one: the seventeenth-century text appears to be the result of a recent reworking, which reuses a prestigious title for material that is largely of Renaissance origin.

The phenomenon is typical of magical literature. A famous name, once associated with a certain tradition, could be applied to new texts, which inherited its prestige. Attribution to an apostle also gave the book an aura of orthodoxy, useful in a genre constantly suspected of dealings with demons and therefore exposed to the censure of theologians.

The angels of the hours

The first book is devoted to the angels who govern the twenty-four hours of the day and night. Each hour has a chief angel, accompanied by an enormous number of dukes and servants, and by a seal. The underlying idea, common to medieval astrology and magic, is that time is not neutral: each fraction of the day has a quality of its own, linked to the planets and to the intelligences that move them.

This angelology of time has close parallels in the Steganographia of Trithemius, whose second book deals precisely with the spirits of the hours, and in other Renaissance texts. Here too the English compiler seems to have drawn on printed works, turning them into a coherent system of names and seals placed under the authority of the apostle.

The angels of the zodiac

The second book shifts attention from the passing of the hours to the structure of the heavens. It describes the angels of the twelve signs of the zodiac and those assigned to each of the three hundred and sixty degrees of the ecliptic. The link with natal astrology is explicit: according to the text, every person would have a guardian angel determined by the degree of the sky rising on the horizon at the moment of birth.

This conception unites two inheritances: the Christian doctrine of the guardian angel and the ancient astrological tradition of decans and degrees, passed from the Hellenistic world to Arab astronomers and then to the Latin West. The result is a typically Renaissance hybrid, in which the theology of angels is superimposed on a sky measured with astronomical precision.

The Ars Paulina is often overlooked because it lacks the sinister notoriety of the Goetia. Yet it is a significant document of seventeenth-century culture: it shows how the figure of an apostle could vouch for angelic knowledge, and how the calendar and the zodiac were perceived as a network of ordered and nameable spiritual presences.