Seventy-two demons. Each with a name, a rank, a seal, and a resume of services offered. Kings and dukes and marquises of Hell, commanding legions of spirits numbered in the thousands. The Ars Goetia reads like a personnel directory from an infernal bureaucracy. It has been copied by hand, printed in occult journals, tattooed on skin, referenced in video games, and invoked in rituals across five centuries. Almost nobody who encounters it asks the obvious question: who actually wrote this?
The answer is uncomfortable for everyone. For believers in ancient occult wisdom, the surviving manuscripts are barely 350 years old, all in English, and the demon seals are probably younger than Shakespeare’s plays. For skeptics who dismiss it as medieval nonsense, the tradition it draws from is at least 2,000 years old and spans cultures that had no contact with each other. And for scholars who want clean answers, the critical period of transmission, the centuries where the tradition traveled from the ancient Mediterranean into medieval European grimoires, remains a gap that no one has fully bridged.
This is the story of a text that sits at the end of a very long chain. And the chain is more interesting than the text.
What Is the Ars Goetia?
The Ars Goetia (“Art of Sorcery” or “Art of Howling,” from the Greek goeteia) is the first and most famous section of a five-part grimoire called the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, the Lesser Key of Solomon. The five books are:
- Ars Goetia: 72 demons, their seals, and conjuration methods
- Ars Theurgia-Goetia: spirits of the cardinal directions
- Ars Paulina: angels of the hours and zodiac signs
- Ars Almadel: angels of the four altitudes
- Ars Notoria: prayers for acquiring knowledge
The Lemegeton presents itself as the work of King Solomon. It is not. The attribution follows a convention established over a thousand years earlier by the Testament of Solomon, the Greek text that first cast Solomon as the master of demons. But where the Testament tells a story, the Goetia offers a service catalog. Each of the 72 entries follows the same template: the demon’s name, its appearance, its feudal rank, the number of legions it commands, and what it can do for you if properly summoned.
The range is wider than the template suggests. Bael, the first spirit, shifts shape between a cat, a toad, and a man, sometimes showing all three at once, speaks in a hoarse voice, and makes the one who summons him invisible. Most of the catalog runs to horned kings and armored beasts, which is what makes Valac, the sixty-second, land so strangely: he comes as a small boy with an angel’s wings, riding a two-headed dragon, and lays hidden treasure and tamed serpents at the conjurer’s feet. Other entries hide a catch. Belial, made next after Lucifer, arrives as two beautiful angels in a chariot of fire and hands out high office, yet gives no honest answer unless he is presented with gifts first.
All seventy-two run on that template, each promising something specific and usable, and the full roster sets them out with every demon’s seal and a link to its profile. The Goetia’s closest sibling — the other grimoire that taught Europe you could hire a demon rather than exorcise one — is the Grand Grimoire, whose complete text we carry in a faithful English translation.
The question is: where did this come from?
The Manuscripts Nobody Can Find
Every complete copy of the Lemegeton that survives is written in English and dates to the 17th century or later. The primary manuscripts are held at the British Library in the Sloane Collection:
- Sloane MS 2731 (dated 1686/7): one of the fullest copies, with a complete set of demon seals (though its text omits the Ars Notoria)
- Sloane MS 3825 (late 17th century): variant readings
- Sloane MS 3648 (late 17th century): partial Lemegeton
The Lemegeton was probably assembled in mid-to-late 17th-century England by an unknown editor who gathered five independent texts under a single Solomonic umbrella. The surviving form draws on printed books of the 1650s and 1660s, so it took shape after them. The component parts are older, some considerably so. The Ars Notoria circulated independently in Latin from the 13th century. The Ars Almadel appears in Latin manuscripts from the 14th to 15th century. But the Ars Goetia’s demon catalog, the part everyone remembers, traces to a specific and identifiable source.
And that source was written by someone who thought the whole thing was absurd.
The Skeptic Who Created a Bible for Sorcerers
Johann Weyer (1515-1588) was a Dutch physician and one of the earliest opponents of the witch-hunting mania that was consuming Europe. A student of the famous occultist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Weyer had turned against the entire enterprise. He argued that accused witches were mentally ill, not possessed, and should be treated by doctors, not burned by inquisitors.
In 1563, Weyer published De Praestigiis Daemonum (“On the Tricks of Demons”), a systematic attack on demonology. To the 1577 edition he appended the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (“False Monarchy of Demons”), a catalog of 69 demons with their names, ranks, and abilities. Weyer’s point was mockery. Look at this, he was saying. Look how ridiculous these beliefs are. A false monarchy. Organized nonsense.
He had copied the list from a manuscript he found, which he claimed was an older Latin text. That source appears to be the Liber Officiorum Spirituum (“Book of the Offices of Spirits”), a now-lost Latin text that Weyer named but never dated, part of an older “Offices of Spirits” tradition that circulated in England. Related manuscripts of that tradition survive at Trinity College Cambridge, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
The supreme irony of the whole tradition: a man who wrote a demon catalog to prove demonology was nonsense provided the primary source for the most influential practical manual of demon magic in the Western world.
The Sixty-Nine and the Seventy-Two
Weyer lists 69 demons. The Ars Goetia lists 72. Four demons appear in the Goetia but not in Weyer: Vassago, Seere, Dantalion, and Andromalius. Meanwhile, Weyer includes Pruflas, who does not appear in the Goetia at all. The arithmetic: 69 minus 1, plus 4, equals 72.
Beyond the numbers, the differences are structural:
| Feature | Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1577) | Ars Goetia (c. 1640s-1680s) |
|---|---|---|
| Language | Latin | English |
| Number of demons | 69 | 72 |
| Seals/sigils | None | Full set of 72 unique seals |
| Ritual instructions | Minimal | Elaborate conjuration apparatus |
| Purpose | Anti-magic polemic | Practical magical manual |
The addition of three demons to reach 72 was almost certainly deliberate. And the reason lies in a number that had been sacred for over a thousand years.
Why Seventy-Two?
In Kabbalistic tradition, the Shem HaMephorash (the “Explicit Name of God”) is derived from three consecutive verses in Exodus 14:19-21. Each verse contains exactly 72 Hebrew letters. Written one above the other, with the middle verse reversed, they produce 72 three-letter combinations. Each combination forms a divine name. Each divine name is associated with an angel.
Seventy-two angels from the Name of God. And in the shadow Kabbalah that emerged by the medieval period, each angel had a demonic counterpart.
The Goetia’s 72 demons are the shadow of the 72-fold Name. This is not speculation. The ritual framework of the Goetia itself relies on invoking divine names and angelic authorities to compel the demons’ obedience. The compiler was operating within a Kabbalistic framework where the number 72 carried a specific, non-negotiable weight. Weyer’s 69 simply would not do.
But 72 sits at a wider convergence of sacred numerology:
- The 72 nations of the world (Genesis 10, Septuagint version)
- The 72 translators of the Septuagint (six from each of the twelve tribes)
- The 72 disciples sent out by Jesus (Luke 10:1)
- The 72 years for one degree of equinoctial precession (the full precessional cycle being approximately 25,920 years)
- Double the 36 decans from the Testament of Solomon, each governing a body part and disease
Whether the doubling from 36 to 72 was deliberate, whether the compiler consciously mirrored the Testament’s decan-demons, is unknowable. But the Kabbalistic connection is not ambiguous. Someone took Weyer’s 69 and padded it to 72 to fit the sacred architecture.
The Gods They Made Into Demons
Among the 72 names, something else is happening. A significant number are not obscure medieval inventions. They are old gods, demonized.
Astaroth (#29) is the Canaanite goddess Astarte, called Ashtoreth in the Hebrew Bible, the equivalent of Mesopotamian Ishtar. The Bible itself names her as a deity Solomon worshipped (1 Kings 11:5). In the Goetia, she has changed gender, from goddess to male demon riding a dragon. The name was deliberately corrupted: the Hebrew vowel-pointing of “Ashtoreth” echoes boshet (“shame”), a standard biblical technique for degrading foreign gods.
Bael (#1), the first demon in the catalog, carries the name Ba’al, the chief storm god of the Canaanite pantheon. The Ba’al Cycle from Ugarit (c. 1400-1200 BCE) presents him as a heroic deity who defeats the sea god and the god of death. The Bible records centuries of conflict between Yahweh worship and Ba’al worship, from Elijah’s contest on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18) to the reforms of King Josiah (2 Kings 23). In the Goetia, this king of a major ancient religion appears in shifting lowly forms with a hoarse voice.
Asmoday (#32) is Asmodeus, whose name traces to the Avestan Aeshma Daeva, a Zoroastrian demon of wrath. He traveled from Old Iranian through Aramaic (Ashmedai) to the Greek of the Book of Tobit, the Talmud, and the Testament of Solomon. In the Talmud (Gittin 68a-b), he is the king of demons whom Solomon captures to build the Temple.
Amon (#7) carries the name of Amun, the king of the Egyptian gods during the New Kingdom (c. 1550-1070 BCE), the god of the temple complex at Karnak. In the Goetia, Amun appears as a wolf with a serpent’s tail who tells of things past and to come.
Berith (#28) is Ba’al Berith (“Lord of the Covenant”), a deity worshipped at Shechem, explicitly named in Judges 8:33 and 9:4. Archaeological excavations at Tell Balata (ancient Shechem) have uncovered a massive Late Bronze Age temple identified as his cult site.
The demonization mechanism was not subtle. Psalm 96:5 in the Greek Septuagint reads: “all the gods of the nations are daimonia”, demons. The Hebrew original uses elilim (worthless things, idols), but it was the Greek text that shaped Christian demonology. Paul reinforced it in 1 Corinthians 10:20: what the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God.
Of the 72 Goetia demons, approximately 8 to 12 can be traced with reasonable scholarly confidence to pre-Christian deities. Astaroth, Bael, Asmoday, Amon, and Berith are the strongest cases. Another 5 to 10 have been proposed with weaker evidence. The remaining 50-plus have names of uncertain origin, possibly corrupted through centuries of manuscript copying, possibly invented by medieval grimoire authors, possibly derived from Hebrew, Greek, or Latin roots that no longer map clearly to known divine figures.
So the Goetia is no pure catalog of demonized gods. It reads as a composite: some demonized deities, some demons from Judeo-Christian tradition, and many figures whose origins are lost in the transmission chain.
The Feudal Court of Hell
The 72 demons are organized into a hierarchy that would feel entirely at home in a medieval European kingdom: kings and princes at the top, then dukes, marquises, earls, and presidents, down to a single knight. The complete roster, with each spirit’s rank, is in the full list below.
Each demon commands a specified number of “legions,” typically 20 to 40, with Paimon near the top commanding 200. If a legion follows the Roman convention of roughly 5,000 soldiers, the total across all 72 demons runs into the millions.
This hierarchy is one of the strongest arguments that the text is medieval European in origin, not ancient Solomonic. The feudal system did not exist in ancient Israel. “Marquis” is a Carolingian-era title for a border lord (8th to 9th century). “President” is a Roman administrative term for a provincial governor. “Knight” emerged in the 11th to 12th century.
These titles tell us something specific: the people who composed and refined this catalog, whoever they were across the centuries, understood the supernatural world as structured like the world they lived in. If God’s court had ranks (the nine orders of angels laid out by Pseudo-Dionysius in the 5th century), then Satan’s court must have ranks too. If earthly kingdoms had dukes and marquises, Hell had them as well. The demonic hierarchy is a mirror of the human political order.
As the scholar Richard Kieckhefer has documented, medieval necromantic manuals consistently organized their spirit catalogs this way. The Munich Manual of Demonic Magic (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, CLM 849, 15th century) contains spirit-summoning procedures using similar feudal ranking systems. The concept of an infernal monarchy was standard in the theological imagination. Peter Binsfeld, in 1589, formalized a system assigning each of the seven deadly sins to a specific demonic prince: Lucifer for pride, Mammon for greed, Asmodeus for lust, Leviathan for envy, Beelzebub for gluttony, Satan for wrath, Belphegor for sloth.
Hell, here, ran like a bureaucracy.
The Full List: All Seventy-Two Demons
Here is the complete roster, in the order Mathers set down, from Bael who opens the book to Andromalius who closes it. The rank under each name is the feudal title the Goetia assigns the spirit. The linked names have their own full Crazy Alchemist entries, and the portraits show the demons as the 1863 Dictionnaire Infernal drew them.
![Sabnock, Engraving from Collin de Plancy's #emph[Dictionnaire Infernal], 1863](/images/goetia/sabnock.svg?v=20260707)
![Belial, Engraving from Jacobus de Teramo's #emph[Buch Belial] (1473), the figure redrawn from the group](/images/goetia/belial-v2.svg?v=20260707)
Where Louis Le Breton engraved the demon for Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal (1863), the card shows his plate (public domain). The Dictionnaire illustrated only some of the seventy-two; the rest are house engravings drawn in the same style after the Goetia's own description of each spirit, except Belial, from Jacobus de Teramo's Buch Belial (1473). The seals are the demons' own sigils from the Lesser Key of Solomon (public domain). Rank, legions, and office follow Mathers' translation of the Goetia.
Ranks follow Mathers’ translation of the Goetia, where some spirits hold two titles at once. The numbering is the standard one fixed by that edition, which is why a demon’s “place” in the list, Paimon at nine, Asmodeus at thirty-two, is itself part of how practitioners have always referred to them.
The Seals That Are Younger Than Shakespeare
This is perhaps the most surprising fact about the Ars Goetia, and one that almost nobody discusses: the 72 demon seals, the distinctive geometric sigils that have become the visual signature of the entire tradition, do not appear in any text before the late 16th century at the earliest.
Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1577): no seals. Pure text, names and descriptions.
The Liber Officiorum Spirituum manuscripts (15th to 16th century): minimal or absent. Some versions contain crude marks for some spirits, nothing like the systematic set of 72 unique sigils.
Sloane MS 2731 (c. 1687): full set of 72 seals. Each demon has a unique geometric design.
Somewhere between 1577 and 1687, someone created, or compiled from earlier sources now lost, a complete visual system for 72 demons. The seals vary between manuscripts, sometimes significantly, suggesting they were being copied and mutating through copying errors rather than being fixed canonical images.
Where did they come from? Three theories:
Invented by the Lemegeton compiler. The simplest explanation. Whoever assembled the Lemegeton in the mid-17th century created a set of seals using established sigil-making techniques, most plausibly the planetary kameas (magic squares described in Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia, 1531-1533), from which a name can be traced into a sigil.
Derived from an older visual tradition. Some seals bear structural similarity to characters from Arabic talismanic manuscripts, particularly the tradition attributed to Ahmad al-Buni (d. c. 1225), whose Shams al-Ma’arif contains elaborate systems of letter-based sigil generation.
Generated through specific techniques and later separated from the method. The Golden Dawn demonstrated that many Goetia seals can be approximately reconstructed by tracing the letters of the demon’s name across a Rose Cross sigil wheel. This could mean the originals were generated this way and the technique was later forgotten, or it could mean the Golden Dawn retrofitted the technique to match existing seals.
What can be said with confidence: the seals are not ancient. They do not appear in the Testament of Solomon, in the Aramaic incantation bowls, or in any text before the late medieval period. They are probably no older than the 16th century. They vary between manuscripts. And the versions most people recognize today are the cleaned-up redrawings published by Mathers and Crowley in 1904.
The Thousand-Year Gap
Here is the central mystery.
The Testament of Solomon was composed between the 1st and 5th centuries CE. It contains a catalog of demons, each interrogated by Solomon, each revealing its name, nature, and the angel that defeats it. The 36 decan-demons are assigned to body parts and zodiacal positions. The framework is unmistakable: a catalog of supernatural entities, organized hierarchically, controlled through divine authority.
The earliest recognizable ancestors of the Goetia tradition, the Liber Officiorum Spirituum manuscripts, date to the 14th and 15th centuries.
Between these two points lies a gap of roughly 1,000 years. How did the Solomonic demon-catalog tradition survive through this gap? We don’t fully know. But the probable channels can be mapped:
Arabic-Islamic intermediaries. The Solomonic tradition flourished in Arabic literature. The Quran itself presents Sulayman as commander of the jinn (Surahs 21, 27, 34, 38). Post-Quranic literature, particularly the Qisas al-Anbiya (“Stories of the Prophets”) tradition compiled by al-Tha’labi (d. 1035) and al-Kisa’i, contains elaborate lists of named jinn who served Solomon, with their specific tasks and how each was subdued. Arabic magical texts like the Ghayat al-Hakim (known in Latin as the Picatrix, c. 10th century, Latin translation c. 1256) carried demon taxonomy, talismanic magic, and astrological demonology that structurally bridges the ancient and medieval traditions.
Jewish Kabbalistic channels. The Solomonic tradition was continuously maintained in Jewish magical practice. The Sefer ha-Razim (3rd to 4th century CE) catalogs angels and spirits arranged across seven heavens, each with specific powers and invocation procedures. The Babylonian Talmud’s Ashmedai narrative (Gittin 68a-b) preserved the Solomon-as-demon-master tradition through the rabbinic period. And the incantation bowls, thousands of Aramaic bowls from 4th to 7th century Mesopotamia invoking Solomon’s seal, prove that the tradition had a living material practice, not just a literary afterlife.
Byzantine Greek transmission. The Greek Magical Papyri tradition, which shared the same Alexandrian cultural world that produced the Testament, continued into the Byzantine period. These texts eventually connected to the Solomonic grimoire tradition through channels that remain poorly documented.
Latin ecclesiastical channels. Medieval Latin texts on demonology, exorcism manuals and theological treatises, preserved demon names and hierarchies even while condemning the practice of conjuring them. The Book of Enoch tradition, with its catalogs of fallen angels who taught forbidden arts, fed directly into medieval European demonology.
The Crusades and the Toledo School of Translators (12th to 13th century), where Arabic texts were translated into Latin, are the most likely transmission points for the transition from Arabic Solomonic magic to Latin grimoires. But this is an area where the evidence thins. We can see the tradition on both sides of the gap. We can identify plausible bridges. We cannot trace a continuous manuscript chain.
People Actually Did This
One of the persistent assumptions about grimoires is that they were literary curiosities, theoretical texts that nobody really used. The evidence says otherwise.
The Sloane manuscripts themselves show signs of use: wear, annotations in multiple hands, corrections, and personal notes. These were not library display copies. They were working documents.
The Book of Oberon (Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.b.26), a late 16th-century English magical notebook published in a scholarly edition in 2015, contains spirit-summoning procedures in the Solomonic tradition alongside practical recipes. It is clearly a practitioner’s working notebook.
Venetian Inquisition records from the 16th and 17th centuries document cases where priests and laypeople were investigated for magical practices including spirit summoning using circles, triangles, and ritual tools matching grimoire descriptions. The State Archive of Venice (Archivio di Stato di Venezia) holds these trial records in the Sant’Uffizio collection.
Richard Napier (1559-1634), an English clergyman and physician, used astrological magic and angel-summoning techniques from the Solomonic tradition in his medical practice. Several thousand of his consultation records survive in the Bodleian Library.
The Munich Manual of Demonic Magic (CLM 849, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 15th century), analyzed in detail by Richard Kieckhefer in Forbidden Rites (1997), is an actual practitioner’s manual for spirit summoning with detailed ritual instructions.
These are not fringe cases. Owen Davies, in Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (2009), documents extensive evidence of people actually using these texts from the medieval period through the 20th century. The grimoire tradition was not purely literary. It had practitioners, and those practitioners left records.
Mathers, Crowley, and the Egyptian Graft
For most of its history, the Ars Goetia circulated in manuscript. That changed in 1904.
Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854-1918), a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, translated the Ars Goetia from the British Museum manuscripts, working chiefly from the Sloane copies. Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), Mathers’ former student and eventual rival, obtained the translation and published it as The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King.
What Mathers did was more than translate. He added material from Golden Dawn Kabbalistic work: a system pairing each of the 72 demons with one of the 72 angels of the Shem HaMephorash. This angel-demon correspondence was presented as if it were original to the text. It was not. However, it was not entirely Mathers’ invention either. The same pairing is attributed to Dr. Thomas Rudd (c. 1583-1656), an English mathematician and occultist. It survives in a later manuscript, Harley MS 6483 (copied around 1712, now at the British Library), which already matched the Goetia demons to the 72 angels of the Shem HaMephorash, generations before Mathers. Whether Mathers knew the Rudd material or arrived at the same idea independently through Golden Dawn Kabbalah remains unclear.
Mathers also redrew the demon seals, producing cleaned-up versions that became the standard images, displacing the more variable and sometimes crude manuscript originals.
Crowley added his own contributions: a preface reinterpreting the entire Goetia in psychological terms (the demons are portions of the human brain, the conjuration is self-mastery), and a Preliminary Invocation adapted from a completely different tradition. This invocation came from PGM V.96-172 in the Greek Magical Papyri, a 2nd-century Greco-Egyptian exorcism text known as the “Stele of Jeu the Hieroglyphist” or the Bornless Ritual. It invokes a powerful spirit called the “Headless One” (Akephalos) to compel all lesser spirits to obey.
The result was a hybrid: a 17th-century English demon catalog, filtered through 19th-century Golden Dawn Kabbalah, with a 2nd-century Egyptian exorcism ritual grafted onto the front and a 20th-century psychological reinterpretation layered on top. This is the version that spread through the occult world for the next century.
Joseph H. Peterson’s 2001 critical edition, The Lesser Key of Solomon (Weiser Books), was the first to compare multiple manuscripts systematically and strip away the Mathers-Crowley additions. It remains the standard scholarly text. Jake Stratton-Kent’s Encyclopaedia Goetica series (2009-2011) attempted to go further, reconstructing the pre-Mathers tradition by working backward through Weyer to the Liber Officiorum Spirituum sources.
The Pattern Beneath the Pattern
The Ars Goetia is not an isolated text. It sits at the end of a tradition that appears, in various forms, across every literate civilization that left records.
Mesopotamia, c. 1900-500 BCE: The Udug-hul / Utukku Lemnutu incantation series catalogs malevolent entities, each with specific attributes, attack modes, and binding formulas. The ashipu (incantation priest) invokes the authority of the gods Enki and Marduk to compel demons, exactly as the Goetia practitioner invokes God’s names to compel the 72. And Mesopotamian demonology was not binary. Pazuzu, king of the wind demons, appeared on the backs of Lamashtu amulets as a protective force. Some demons fought other demons.
Egypt, 2nd century BCE to 5th century CE: The Greek Magical Papyri contain multiple spirit lists organized by name, visual appearance, planetary correspondence, and invocation procedure. PGM VII.505-528 lists the 36 decans by name with their functions, directly paralleling the Testament of Solomon’s decan-demons. Both draw on the same Egyptian astrological tradition.
India, c. 1000 BCE onward: The Atharva Veda contains hymns against specific categories of supernatural beings: rakshasas, pisachas, bhutas, pretas. The Vetala Panchavimshati presents King Vikramaditya contending with a corpse-inhabiting spirit who tests his wisdom, an inverted parallel to Solomon commanding demons. The Bhaisajyaguru Sutra lists twelve Yaksha Generals, each governing a specific function and commanding seven thousand lesser yakshas. A numbered catalog of named spirits with specific domains, organized hierarchically.
Tibet, 8th century CE onward: Padmasambhava is said to have subdued and bound local Tibetan demons, converting them into dharmapalas (protectors of the Dharma). The structural parallel to Solomon is direct: a holy figure encounters spirits, binds them through superior spiritual authority, and sets them to work for a sacred purpose.
Ethiopia, 15th century onward: Ethiopian magical scrolls (ketab or tilsam), parchment rolls sometimes meters long, combine Ge’ez prayers, talismanic designs, and named demons from the broader Solomonic tradition. Ethiopia preserved the complete text of 1 Enoch when all other traditions lost it. The Lefafa Sedek contains lists of divine names organized by body part, directly paralleling the Testament’s decan-demons who afflict specific organs.
The same structural logic appears everywhere: named entities with specific attributes, organized hierarchically, controlled through the invocation of a higher authority. The content varies enormously. Mesopotamian disease-demons are nothing like Buddhist yaksha generals in narrative terms. But the architecture is the same: naming as power, correspondence systems mapping spirits to planets or body parts or compass directions, authority through delegation from a divine source, and a pragmatic relationship with the unseen that is older and more widespread than the strict good-versus-evil binary that monotheism later imposed.
What We Don’t Know
Here is what remains genuinely open.
The transmission gap: we can see the Solomonic demon-catalog tradition in the ancient Mediterranean (Testament of Solomon, Greek Magical Papyri, incantation bowls). We can see it in medieval Europe (Liber Officiorum Spirituum, Key of Solomon, Lemegeton). We can identify plausible bridges (Arabic Solomonic texts, the Toledo translation movement, Jewish Kabbalistic channels). But we do not have a continuous manuscript chain connecting the two ends. Whether the medieval tradition represents an unbroken transmission from antiquity, a creative reconstruction based on fragments and reputation, or some combination of both is an unsettled question.
The seals: who designed them, when, and using what method? The Rose Cross theory, the Arabic talismanic theory, and the simple-invention theory all have evidence in their favor. None has conclusive proof.
The identity of the Lemegeton compiler: someone in 17th-century England gathered five independent texts, added three demons to reach the Kabbalistic number 72, created or compiled a set of seals, wrote a pseudo-Solomonic framing narrative, and produced one of the most influential magical documents in Western history. We do not know who this person was.
And the cross-cultural question: why does the numbered-catalog approach to supernatural beings appear in cultures with no documented contact? The 72 demons of the Goetia, the 36 decans of the Testament, the twelve Yaksha Generals of the Bhaisajyaguru Sutra, the demon taxonomies of the Udug-hul, the yaksha chiefs of the Atanatiya Sutta organized by cardinal direction. Is this convergent cultural evolution, humans everywhere developing similar cognitive strategies for managing their relationship with the unseen? Or does it point to something about the structure of human experience that neither materialist science nor traditional theology has fully accounted for?
The Two Views
The skeptical reading: The Ars Goetia is a 17th-century English compilation drawing on a 16th-century Latin skeptic’s catalog (Weyer), which itself drew on 15th-century manuscript traditions of uncertain origin. The demon names are a mix of corrupted pagan divine names, Hebrew and Greek constructions, and medieval inventions. The seals are probably 16th or 17th century creations. The feudal hierarchy is a transparent projection of European political structures onto the supernatural. The number 72 was borrowed from Kabbalistic numerology. The text’s real significance is sociological and literary: it tells us how late medieval and early modern Europeans organized their fears and desires, not anything about the nature of reality. The cross-cultural parallels reflect the universality of human cognitive patterns (categorization, hierarchy, naming) rather than any shared encounter with actual non-human entities.
The other reading: The tradition predates the text by millennia. The Ars Goetia is the latest crystallization of something that has been continuously practiced since the Mesopotamian incantation bowls, at minimum. The chain runs from Mesopotamia through the Testament of Solomon through Arabic Solomonic magic through the medieval Latin grimoires to the Lemegeton, and at every stage, people were not just reading about it but doing it: inscribing bowls, drawing circles, invoking names. The cross-cultural appearance of structurally identical demon-catalog systems in traditions with no documented contact (Mesopotamian, Indian, Buddhist, Tibetan, European, Ethiopian) suggests that these catalogs are not arbitrary cultural constructions but responses to something that different civilizations encountered and organized independently using whatever conceptual framework was available to them. The pragmatic, non-binary approach to demons (Pazuzu protects, the Talmud’s Ashmedai weeps at weddings, some Goetia demons are described as “good-natured,” Buddhist demons become protectors of the Dharma) is the older, more widespread position. The strict good-versus-evil binary is a later development, and it may have obscured more than it clarified.
Both readings have evidence. Neither closes the question.
The Ars Goetia remains what it has always been: a catalog of 72 names, a set of seals drawn by unknown hands, and a tradition that stretches backward into a darkness that we can partially illuminate but never fully dispel.
Sources and Further Reading
Primary Text Editions:
- Joseph H. Peterson, The Lesser Key of Solomon: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (Weiser, 2001)
- Daniel Harms, James R. Clark, Joseph H. Peterson, The Book of Oberon (Llewellyn, 2015)
- S.L. MacGregor Mathers (ed. Aleister Crowley), The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King (1904)
Scholarly Works:
- Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Oxford, 2009)
- Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century (Penn State, 1997)
- Frank Klaassen, The Transformations of Magic (Penn State, 2013)
- Sophie Page and Catherine Rider, eds., The Routledge History of Medieval Magic (Routledge, 2019)
- Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (2002)
- Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Cambridge, 2008)
- Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (1974)
- Jake Stratton-Kent, Encyclopaedia Goetica (Scarlet Imprint, 2009-2011)
- Stephen Skinner and David Rankine, The Goetia of Dr. Rudd (Golden Hoard, 2007)
