The most misreported fact about this corpus concerns the man who compiled its ancestor.
Johann Weyer was a physician, a pupil of Agrippa, and one of the most important early opponents of the witch trials. His De Praestigiis Daemonum, first published in 1563, is a sustained attack on the reasoning behind the prosecutions, in substance a rebuttal of the Malleus Maleficarum, arguing that the women being tried were deluded, melancholic or ill, that their confessions described things that had not happened, and that they should be treated rather than burned. It was a dangerous book to write and it was written at the height of the killing.
The Pseudomonarchia Daemonum was appended to the fifth edition, in 1577. It is a catalogue of demons with their ranks and offices, presented as an exhibit: this is the kind of nonsense the conjurors trade in. Weyer states that he has deliberately left material out, saying that lest anyone mildly curious should rashly imitate this proof of folly, he has omitted passages in order to render the whole work unusable.
Everything that happened afterwards ran the other way. Reginald Scot translated the catalogue into English in 1584, again to discredit it. The Lemegeton's compiler took Scot's 1665 text, restored the apparatus Weyer had withheld, added four spirits to make the count seventy-two, and produced a working book. Mathers and Crowley printed it in 1904. It is now the most widely circulated demonological list in any language.
So the founding document of Goetic practice is a sceptic's exhibit, deliberately sabotaged by its author to prevent exactly the use it was eventually put to. That is not a minor irony about the tradition. It is the tradition's central textual fact.