The Sanctum Regnum Seal

Look closely at the ring of writing around this seal. It is a line of scripture: Psalm 91:13, in Latin, “you will tread on the asp and the basilisk, and trample the lion and the dragon,” one of the Bible’s promises of God’s protection against evil. Louis Le Breton engraved this disc for the Dictionnaire Infernal to illustrate the entry on how to make a pact with the devil.

The Sanctum Regnum

Collin de Plancy’s entry on the pacte, the pact, describes the many ways people believed you could sell your soul, and then reproduces what he calls a curious piece out of the grimoires: the Sanctum Regnum of the great Clavicule, “the true manner of making pacts, with the names, powers, and talents of all the great superior spirits, and the way to make them appear by the force of the great summons of the chapter of pacts.”

This is the machinery of the Grand Grimoire, the French manual also known as Le Dragon Rouge, whose famous ritual calls up Lucifuge Rofocale, the prime minister of Hell, and forces him under threat of the Blasting Rod to sign over a buried treasure. The text is blunt that none of it works for anyone who lacks the tools, “the blasting rod and the cabalistic circle.” The seal on this page is that circle, the ground the operator draws and stands inside while he compels the spirit to appear.

The verse that tramples

The Latin is the strange part. Super aspidem et basiliscum ambulabis, et conculcabis leonem et draconem is Psalm 91:13, a verse of pure protection. In its own setting it promises the person who trusts God safe passage over the most dangerous creatures alive, the snake underfoot, the lion in the path. The medieval church read the four beasts, asp, basilisk, lion, and dragon, as the faces of the devil himself, the enemy who rages like a lion and lies in wait like a serpent, and Augustine wrote the reading into his commentary on the psalms.

So the seal carries a paradox on its rim. The verse that promises the faithful they will crush the devil underfoot is printed around a circle built to summon a devil and strike a deal with him. The pact-maker wants two incompatible things: to command the spirit and to be safe from it. He stands on the psalm as on a floor, treading the dragon, while he calls the dragon up to bargain.

The beast and the characters

The center of the disc holds a scaled, clawed creature with many legs, drawn somewhere between a scorpion and a dragon. Around it sit the cabalistic characters the grimoire required: a crescent, a triangle, an orb topped with a cross, planetary and alchemical signs, and the jagged strokes that stand for the lightning of the blasting rod. A crossed monogram sits at the top of the ring. We will not walk through a confident meaning for each mark, because a rough nineteenth-century woodcut of magical characters is exactly where an invented reading would slip in unnoticed.

What can be said plainly is the arrangement. A beast of the kind the psalm names sits dead center, and the verse about trampling it runs around the edge, so the whole figure stages the moment of the psalm: the operator, inside his circle, standing over the creature of evil while he does business with its king.

In the compendium

The Sanctum Regnum seal sits in the Signs wing as the working circle of the darkest kind of Solomonic magic, the pact for treasure and power. It is a cousin to the Pantacle and the Seal of Solomon, the other inscribed discs the grimoires built their claims on, and it shares their trick of wrapping forbidden work in holy words. The seal in the Dictionnaire Infernal says what the whole pact tradition could never quite admit out loud: that the magician who set out to command the devil needed, more than anything, a line of scripture to stand on while he did it.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Jacques Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire Infernal, 6th ed. (1863), the entry ‘Pacte’ and the seal engraved by Louis Le Breton
• The Grand Grimoire (Le Dragon Rouge), the ‘Sanctum Regnum’ or pacta conventa dæmoniorum, 18th–19th century, the pact ritual and Lucifuge Rofocale
• Psalm 91:13 (Vulgate Psalm 90:13), ‘Super aspidem et basiliscum ambulabis, et conculcabis leonem et draconem’
• Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, on Psalm 90 (91), the four beasts read as the devil