What the sources claim for it
A foundation of divine names. The working rests on it physically as well as figuratively.
What is it made of?
A construction rather than a drawing: each ring is generated from the one outside it by a stated rule, which is why the figure can be rebuilt from the instructions alone.
The outer ring
The heptagon
The heptagram
The central cross
Sigillum Dei Aemeth
- 01
The outer ring — Forty letters and numbers, from which the names of the seven archangels are read off in sequence.
- 02
The heptagon — Seven sides for seven planetary angels — the count that governs everything inside it.
- 03
The heptagram — A seven-pointed star inscribed within, carrying further names at its points.
- 04
The central cross — The middle of the figure, and the point the whole construction is oriented on.
History
Where does Sigillum Dei Aemeth come from?
Dee's angelic diaries describe the seal in construction detail: a heptagram within a heptagon, rings of letters and numbers from which angel names are read out, the whole cut in wax. Four smaller copies went under the table's feet and a larger one under the shewstone. The design is older than Dee — versions circulate in medieval manuscripts — but the version that survived is his.
It belongs with the circle rather than with the seals of spirits. It is not the mark of a being being summoned; it is the ground the working stands on, which is why it is under the furniture rather than in the operator's hand.
The larger argument
Why is it in a corpus about spirits?
Dee's sigil is what happens when the tradition stops copying equipment and starts deriving it. The Ars Goetia's seals cannot be reconstructed if the plate is lost; the Sigillum can, from a rule. That is a different claim about where a mark's authority comes from, made in the same decades as the new natural philosophy and by a man who was part of it.
Afterwards
What did it turn into?
Reconstructed continuously by ceremonial magicians since the Golden Dawn, from Sloane manuscript drawings that disagree with each other on several of the letters.
Which texts describe it?
None, and here is why
Waiting on an edition rather than lacking one. The design descends through the Liber Juratus and Sefer Raziel before Dee reworks it, and Dee's own account survives in Casaubon's 1659 printing, which is public domain and reachable. None of those is in this corpus yet, so the page describes the mark and does not yet cite the books that would carry it.
Nearby
Related marks
The Celestial Alphabets
Three alphabets Agrippa prints for writing the names of angels — Hebrew letters redrawn with rings at the joints, so that a script becomes a set of sigils.
The Enochian Alphabet
Twenty-one letters dictated square by square from lettered grids, in a script the sessions claimed was the language Adam spoke.
The Pentagram
A five-pointed star drawn in one unbroken line — an accounting mark, a Pythagorean password, a Christian emblem of the five wounds, and only recently a sign of evil.
The Tetragrammaton
Four letters that stopped being pronounced and became, in consequence, the most powerful thing you could write on a piece of equipment.
The Bronze Serpent
A healing standard that stood in the Temple for centuries until a reforming king smashed it — the Hebrew Bible's own account of a symbol going wrong.
The Sator Square
Five Latin words in a grid that reads the same in four directions, scratched on a wall at Pompeii and still being cut into churches a thousand years later.