Blaise de Vigenère and the Arsenal 2495 Manuscript
I would appreciate your opinions and thoughts about Blaise de Vigenère.
I am not sure if it is correct about the following what I wrote about him, so if you have some more information, I would truly appreciate.
Blaise de Vigenère (1523-1596), the French diplomat, alchemist and magician, translator of Caesar and Livy, and best known for inventing the method of encryption known as the “Autokey Cipher”, became a kabalist in his later years, when he also wrote a manuscript with the table of 72 angels of Shemhamphorash, with their names, seals, powers, related psalms, and the days on which they preside.
We do not know if the Shemhamphorash seals were invented by Blaise de Vigenère or by someone else, but what we can be certain about is that he was among the first ones to use the seals in order to evoke Shemhamphorash angels. Blaise de Vigenère’s script came in the middle of 17th Century into the possession of Antoine-René d’Argenson, marquis de Paulmy. It was later given the archive number “Arsenal 2495 Manuscript”.
Antoine-René d’Argenson had his office and residence in Paris at the Arsenal building, which he transformed into a major encyclopaedic collection of books, manuscripts and prints available to scholars. One of the books in his library was “The Arsenal 2495 Manuscript” from which he studied and obviously experimented with its magic, but at the end he wrote: "This magic is so dark and terrible that it cannot be more than that.”
It is unclear what made Marquis de Paulmy draw such a conclusion, but this was also the first time that Shemhamphorash angels were mentioned in a dark context by someone who might have been a practitionair. Especially the sigils which were used by Vigenère got a bad name, especially when the 20th century magian Ambelain dismissed them for being dangerous causing many kinds of problems.