Finding Spirit Names From Your Natal Chart?, A question about a method in Agrippa's Occult Philosophy Book III Options

In Book III, of Agrippa's Books of Occult Philosophy, in Chapter 26-27, there is a method to discover (supposedly) the name of a good, and a bad spirit, that has been "assigned" to you at birth.

I'm trying to do this, but I can't quite make sense of it, I'm going to be buying another translation before Christmas, and hopefully that will help clear it up, but I thought I'd try here first.

From what I can understand (which may be all wrong), the method in Chapter 26, is to take your birth chart, and starting at your Ascendant, assign in order the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet, and wherever a planet rests, that letter is part of the Spirit name. But how do you order the letters to get the name? I've figured out my seven letters, but from there, I don't know how to arrange them to find the name.

I've also read two different explanations on getting the name of the bad spirit, one is you label the letters backwards from the Ascendant, the other is you use the letters (degrees) opposite of wherever a planet rests in your chart.

Can anyone clear this up for me?

As for chapter 27, I'm just lost, so any help there would be much appreciated.

Thanks for the latter advice (sorry I didn't respond to it before).

Anyways, I got a new translation, and according to the footnotes, you just follow the order they appear in your chart, counterclockwise from the Ascendant. Reading that, and rereading the old english it actually made a lot of sense.

I've figured out the names, but not worked with them yet, but I'll put up my results when I do.

This is a fascinating subject, I have been divining names of intelligences by using the mystical associations of the individual hebrew letters for sometime, however I'm curious about this method as well, and how they compare. In chapter 26, Agrippa suggests that a useful genius may be divined based on what the magician wishes to accomplish and by composing (as far as I can tell from the text) a starchart beneficial to that purpose and then taking the spirit's name from that.

What I'm wondering though is exactly what he means we he talks about assigning letters - there are only 12 hebrew letters that are associated with the signs/houses; is that saying that only these 12 letters will be used to determine the name of said spirit, or am I missing something critical here?

peace

This post has been edited by Vagrant Dreamer: Jan 23 2008, 12:39 AM