Esoteric Text

Ars Goetia

Also Known As The Goetia The usual short title, and the one under which Mathers and Crowley published it in 1904. · Goetia Bare short form. The same word also names the practice of spirit conjuration and the seventy two spirits themselves.

Grimoire Texts

The Ars Goetia is the first of the five books of the Lemegeton, the compilation known in English as the Lesser Key of Solomon. It lists seventy two spirits with their ranks, their offices and the seals a magician is instructed to engrave, together with the circle, the triangle and the conjurations used to call and to constrain them. Its catalogue follows the older list that Johann Weyer printed as the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum in 1563, with additions and with the seals Weyer does not give. It reached a wide English readership through the 1904 edition of Samuel Liddell Mathers and Aleister Crowley, and it is the part of the Lemegeton most often reprinted on its own.

Facts

Origins

Era of Composition

1640 to 1660 1

Language

English 2

Attributed Author / Compiler

Anonymous; compiled from Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum list, with additions, as part of the Lemegeton. 1

Text

Literary Form

Grimoire / manual of magical operations 3

Scholarship

First Published

No printed edition existed before the twentieth century; the compiled English manuscript tradition, mid seventeenth century in its surviving form, first reached print as S.L. MacGregor Mathers's translation, edited by Aleister Crowley and published in 1904 as The Goetia, The Lesser Key of Solomon the King. 1

Transmission

Manuscript Tradition

Survives as the first of five sections making up the seventeenth century compilation known as the Lesser Key of Solomon, itself preserved across several English manuscripts that vary in the naming and ordering of the seventy two spirits they list. 1

Scholarship and Forensics

Scholarly Note

Historians of magic trace much of its catalogue of spirits back to earlier medieval grimoire traditions, reading the text as a compilation and systemization of older material rather than as an original invention of its own period. 1

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An Anthology That Reads as One Book

The Lemegeton is not a work with an author. It is a compilation, and the Ars Goetia is only the first of the five parts bound with it, alongside the Ars Theurgia Goetia, the Ars Paulina, the Ars Almadel and the Ars Notoria. Those five differ in age, in language of origin and in temper: the Ars Notoria descends from a medieval devotional technique for acquiring learning by prayer, and sits oddly beside a book of constrained spirits. Nothing in the manuscripts names the compiler, and the surviving copies in the British Library are seventeenth century English books rather than an original. So the Ars Goetia has to be read as a compiler's selection from older stock. Its catalogue of spirits corresponds closely to the list Johann Weyer printed, and Weyer in turn said he was reproducing a manuscript he did not endorse. What the Lemegeton adds is the apparatus: the seals to be engraved, the circle and triangle, and the wording of the conjurations.

A separate recension associated with Thomas Rudd pairs each spirit with an angel of the Shemhamphorash set against it, which changes the theology of the book without changing its list. The atlas therefore records the Ars Goetia as a stage in a chain of copying rather than as a composition. Which stage added the seals, and where the compiler found them, is not settled by anything in the manuscripts themselves.

A Nineteenth Century Edition and the Century After It

Almost every modern encounter with the Ars Goetia runs through one printed book. The edition prepared from Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers's translation and issued by Aleister Crowley in 1904 fixed the English wording, the spelling of the spirit names and the drawing of the seals for everyone who came after. Crowley's preliminary invocation and his framing of the spirits as portions of the human brain were his own addition rather than anything in the manuscripts, and they travelled with the text, so a reader who takes that edition as the book is reading a layered object. The consequences reach well past ceremonial practice.

The seventy two seals became a visual vocabulary of their own, reproduced in fiction, in album art, in tabletop games and in film, usually with the ranks and offices detached from them. The ranks are worth noticing on their own account: kings, dukes, presidents, marquises and earls, an infernal court modelled on an earthly one, with each spirit assigned duties that read like the services a patron might want, from finding treasure to teaching languages. The atlas describes what the book contains and how it has been used. It does not set out its procedures as instruction, and it treats the modern demonological imagery that descends from the seals as reception rather than as evidence of the text's origins.

Connections

Associated With

Demonology

Thomas Rudd

Source The Goetia of Dr Rudd (Harley MS 6482 and related manuscripts)Thomas Rudd