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Sacred Correspondences
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The Order Nobody Can Explain

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The Order Nobody Can Explain

Weyer's list and the Goetia's list contain almost the same spirits in almost entirely different positions, and no one has accounted for it.

Bael heads both. Agares follows in both. After that the two sequences come apart and never recover a shared logic. Weyer's sixty-ninth and final entry is Stolas, who sits at number thirty-six in the Goetia. A reader who lays the two lists side by side finds a shared population and a scrambled sequence.

The editor Joseph Peterson, who has collated the surviving manuscripts, states the problem and declines to solve it, offering only the suggestion that the leaves of some ancestor manuscript may have come loose and been reassembled out of order. No better account has been proposed, and the honest description is that this is an open question rather than a settled one.

The transmission route itself, by contrast, is known with unusual precision. Reginald Scot printed an English translation of Weyer's catalogue in The Discoverie of Witchcraft, and the Goetia's text descends specifically from the enlarged 1665 edition of Scot rather than from Weyer's Latin or from Scot's own first edition of 1584. Peterson establishes this from errors and spellings unique to that printing, which is the kind of evidence that settles a question of descent rather than merely suggesting one.

That fixes a floor under the whole book. Whatever earlier material may stand behind the Lemegeton, the version of this catalogue preserved in the surviving manuscripts cannot predate 1665. Presentations of the Goetia as a medieval or an ancient text are not supportable, at least for this part of it. The compilation is early modern, its immediate source is a printed English sceptic's book, and its ordering is a puzzle its own tradition has never addressed.

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