Phalegh

The Arbatel de Magia Veterum ("Arbatel of the Magic of the Ancients") was printed anonymously in Basel in 1575. It is a comparatively restrained, almost Protestant-flavored grimoire — short on demon-summoning theatrics, long on aphorisms about wisdom, virtue, and the proper use of knowledge. Its ninth and final section, the De Septem Secundeis, introduces seven planetary intelligences it calls the Olympic Spirits, each said to govern the created world on God's behalf during a fixed span of time.

The text divides the heavens into 196 provinces. Each of the seven spirits rules a share of them for a 490-year period, in a rotating sequence tied to the classical planets: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. Phalegh holds the Mars office. He is assigned 35 provinces — a mid-sized share, more than the solar, venereal, mercurial, and lunar spirits, but less than Saturn's Aratron or Jupiter's Bethor.

The Arbatel's own description of him is famously brief. In Robert Turner's 1655 English translation — the version through which most later occult writers, including Francis Barrett and A. E. Waite, encountered the text — the entry reads in full:

That is essentially the entirety of the primary source. Everything more elaborate — detailed appearances, personality sketches, invocation scripts — comes from four centuries of later commentary, ceremonial-magic practitioners, and 20th- and 21st-century occult writers filling in a very sparse original sketch. The image often circulated today of a warrior in a short red tunic with an iron sword is one such later gloss layered onto the bare Mars attribution, not a description found in the Arbatel itself.

Where the Arbatel is terse, later ceremonial magicians read Phalegh through the standard meanings long attached to Mars in Western astrology and alchemy: assertive force, the capacity to act under pressure, physical vigor, and the nerve required to see a difficult or dangerous undertaking through. Practitioners in this tradition have invoked him — or worked with his sigil and correspondences — for aims such as:

• Building courage and resolve before a demanding or confrontational task
• Strengthening willpower, discipline, and physical stamina
• Seeking advancement, recognition, or "honor," in the Arbatel's own phrase, particularly in competitive or hierarchical contexts
• Cutting through hesitation, stagnation, or fear that is blocking forward motion

This is consistent with the single line the Arbatel gives him — that he "raiseth up men... to great honor in warlike affairs" — generalized by later readers from literal warfare to any high-stakes contest of will, from career struggles to personal challenges requiring nerve.

The Arbatel itself gives no physical description of Phalegh at all — only his name, his planetary office, and his 35 provinces. The now-familiar image of a "strong warrior with fiery eyes, wearing a red short tunic and carrying a long iron sword" is a later interpretive addition, assembled from standard Mars iconography (the warrior archetype, the color red, the metal iron, weapons of war) rather than drawn from the original 1575 text.

What the Arbatel does include is a printed character, or sigil — a small geometric glyph unique to each Olympic Spirit, meant to be inscribed on a lamen or talisman used in ceremonial work. These sigils follow the same visual grammar across all seven spirits: straight ruled lines, right angles, and small circular or triangular terminals, in keeping with the geometric "seal" style common to Renaissance ceremonial magic more broadly (the same visual family as the seals in the Ars Goetia or the Key of Solomon).

The rendering shown on this page is an original illustration in that same visual style — straight lines, sharp terminals, a small triangular apex — and is offered as a stylistic reference rather than a reproduction of any specific historical or modern artist's rendering of Phalegh's character.