History and Later Influence

The Arbatel de magia veterum was first printed in Latin at Basel in 1575, anonymously, and stands apart from most Renaissance grimoires for its emphasis on piety and natural philosophy over demonology. Robert Turner translated it into English in 1655 and printed it alongside his own edition of the pseudo Agrippa Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, and Turner's translation became the version most later readers encountered, including Aratron and the other six Olympic spirits under those names and planetary offices.

The text influenced a line of later ceremonial magicians who read Turner's Agrippa collection as a single body of source material, and Aratron in particular is often singled out among the seven for the range of his stated offices, from alchemy to invisibility to extending fertility and life. Twentieth century ceremonial orders that drew on multiple grimoire traditions, including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's wider curriculum, treated the Arbatel as one source among several distinct systems, alongside John Dee's later Heptarchia Mystica and the Ars Goetia's seventy two spirits, each with its own separate origin, structure and cast of names that this atlas keeps distinct rather than merging.