Tabula Semiphoras (Summa Sacrae Magice / Skinner) — altar “table/board” or worn as a lamen?

[Hakon]

Hi everyone,

I’m working through the Tabula Semiphoras in Stephen Skinner’s Summa Sacrae Magice material and I’ve hit a practical + textual question about how it’s actually meant to be used.

Most of the surrounding discussion calls it a tabula (table/board/tablet) and gives very “artifact-like” instructions (how it should be drawn, proportions, cautions about how the exemplar looked, inks/colors, etc.). That reads to me like a fixed diagram/board intended to be present in the operation (on the altar, within the working space, for reference/recitation).

But by the end of the instructions (or at least the way I’m reading them), it almost feels like it could be treated like a lamen—something the operator wears over the heart—especially since in closely related Solomonic/ritual contexts we often see explicit use of a breast-plate/lamina/lamen.

So my questions are:

1. Is the Tabula Semiphoras actually intended as a “board/tablet” placed in the working space, or is for using it as a lamen worn on the chest?

I’m totally open to “it’s simply tabula and nothing more”—I just want to check whether my “tabula → lamen” reading has any real textual/traditional basis, or whether I’m blending layers from adjacent material (tabula as diagram vs. lamen as a separate tool from elsewhere in the corpus).

Thanks!

"And while you are in the circle, carry it [the lamen] hanging from your neck in silk of seven colors, or in front of your chest in a square fold [of material]. And before they come it must be ‘mute’ (i.e., folded), because if it were standing open they could not appear nor would they dare. It must be shown to them [the spirits] before they come, so that they are compelled to obey. It is not necessary to fold the spirit paper tied to it.”