The Seventy-Two Demons, and Where They Came From

The first and most notorious book, the Ars Goetia, catalogues seventy-two demons with their seals, ranks and offices, what each can teach or procure, and how many legions of spirits each commands. This list is not ancient: it derives directly from the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, the catalogue appended by the physician Johann Weyer to his De praestigiis daemonum (1577), which Weyer printed partly to expose and ridicule such conjuring.

The best-known English edition is The Goetia of Solomon the King (1904), translated by S. L. MacGregor Mathers and edited and published by Aleister Crowley, who added his own material; it is this version, and the seventy-two sigils, that later occultism and popular culture have chiefly drawn upon. The number seventy-two carries its own resonance, echoing the seventy-two-fold name of God of Kabbalistic tradition, which is one reason it was fixed upon.