The Textual Tradition: Weyer, the Lemegeton and Mathers

The Ars Goetia is the best-known part of the Lemegeton, a compilation of five magical treatises assembled in the mid-seventeenth century (the earliest surviving manuscripts date to around 1641) out of considerably older material. Its immediate ancestor is the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, a catalogue of spirits printed by the Dutch physician Johann Weyer in 1577 as an appendix to his work against the persecution of witches; Weyer listed sixty-nine spirits, and the Goetia's total of seventy-two was reached by later additions.

Reginald Scot rendered Weyer's catalogue into English in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). The version through which nearly all modern readers meet the text is The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King, edited by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and published by Aleister Crowley in 1904; the rank and legion-count given here for Halphas follow that standard list. The tradition is described in historical and academic terms, as a body of early-modern demonological literature, and the spirits are not presented as real beings.