body · 1 claim
The Throat
Fourth of the decans, countered by Raphael — the last of the four whose remedy is an archangel rather than a magical name.
The fourth decan afflicts the throat, and the Testament gives Raphael as the counter. Raphael is the busiest angel in this corpus: he binds Azazel in 1 Enoch, drives off Asmodeus in Tobit with the smoke of a fish's heart and liver, and appears here at the head of the decan list. His name means 'God heals', and every job the texts give him fits it.
After this entry the Testament's counters change character entirely, which is the clearest internal evidence that its first four decans and its remaining thirty-two come from different stock.
Oldest first
Who was blamed, and by which text?
Each card is one text making one attribution, in its own framing. Reading down the column is a transmission history rather than a set of independent witnesses — and where a claim carries a grading, that grading is about how well it is grounded in the passage it cites, nothing more.
The fourth decan, who assails the throat with pain and obstruction.
What stops it
The name of the archangel Raphael.
Countermeasures
What the texts say stops it
c. 100–400 CE
The name of the archangel Raphael.
Which texts make these claims?
Oldest first. The distance between the earliest and the latest is the thing worth looking at: a claim made in an incantation four thousand years ago and one made in a paperback in 1973 are different kinds of evidence about the same symptom.
The Testament of Solomon
Anonymous; tr. F. C. Conybeare · c. 100–400 CE · Greek
The fourth decan, who assails the throat with pain and obstruction.
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