Lumen de Lumine

About This Edition

Lumen de Lumine is Thomas Vaughan’s A New Magical Light, published in London for H. Blunden in 1651 under the name Eugenius Philalethes. Its title is Latin, but its principal language is English. This Diotimos edition offers a complete modern English reading of that first edition, with new translations of its Latin, Greek and Hebrew passages. It is a modernisation and translation of quotations, rather than a translation of the whole book from a Latin original.

The historical text includes the title and its epigraphs, the dedication to Oxford, the Latin poem on Sir Thomas Bodley, the address to the reader, the entire discourse, its emblem and inscriptions, and all twelve Magical Aphorisms with their closing doxology. The FINIS on printed page 97 is followed by the aphorisms on pages 99–101; those final pages are included. No substantive historical passage has been deliberately omitted or replaced with an editorial summary.

The original English, including its foreign quotations, appears beside the modern reading in the PDF, Word document, Markdown and parallel-text EPUB. The separate English-only EPUB presents the full modern reading, all notes and study features, and the historical emblem. Its inscriptions are transcribed and translated in the accompanying reading text and figure guide. Source spellings remain visible in the parallel formats; every format shares the same reading text.

The governing witness is Wellcome Collection EPB/A/69096.4, digitisation b30340160, catalogued as the first edition: sixteen unnumbered pages and 101 numbered pages. Its library PDF adds a modern catalogue cover, so a PDF image number is not the same as a printed page number. Stable LL passage identifiers and source locators allow the reading and commentary to be checked without relying on the new edition’s pagination. The catalogue records a final blank leaf H8 as wanting; this is a missing blank, not a gap in the printed reading text.

The physical copy’s binding, endpapers, library stamps and later handwritten copy notes are recorded as copy evidence rather than inserted into Vaughan’s discourse. The catalogue notes that the copy is bound with The Divine Pymander; that separately published work is outside this edition. Blank printed surfaces, repeated running headings, catchwords and signature marks are accounted for in production but are not duplicated as prose. The dedication’s 1650 date and the title and reader-address dates of 1651 are retained as printed.

The historical source is public domain and the digitisation carries a Public Domain Mark. Source credit: Wellcome Collection. The present modernisation, new translations and Diotimos commentary are separately identified contributions. This is a new reading edition with source-based notes; it does not claim to be a critical collation of every surviving copy.