Esoteric Text

Pseudomonarchia Daemonum

Witchcraft, Demonology, and Folklore Texts

Johann Weyer's catalog of sixty nine demons, each given a name, a rank in an infernal hierarchy, a description of the form it takes and the powers it grants a conjurer. Weyer compiled it from earlier conjuration manuscripts as evidence within his own De Praestigiis Daemonum, a work arguing that accused witches were self-deluded rather than genuinely allied with the demons popular belief blamed them for commanding, so the catalog exists inside a text written to undercut the practice it describes.

Facts

Origins

Era of Composition

1577 1

Language

Latin 1

Origin of the Name

Its Latin title, meaning the false kingdom of demons, signals Johann Weyer's own skeptical framing before a reader even reaches the catalogue itself, presenting the infernal hierarchy it lists as a delusion to be exposed rather than a real chain of command to be used. 1

Attributed Author / Compiler

Johann Weyer, compiled from earlier manuscript grimoires. 1

Structure

Sixty nine demons in descending infernal rank, each with a name, form, legions and powers. 1

Scholarship

Critical Edition

Modern English language readers most often encounter the catalogue through Joseph H. Peterson's annotated editions, which collate Weyer's Latin text against the later descriptions in the Ars Goetia it fed into. 1

First Published

Printed at Basel by the Officina Oporiniana in 1577, added as an appendix to the fifth edition of Weyer's own De Praestigiis Daemonum, whose first edition had appeared without it in 1563. 1

Sources

Textual Note

Printed as an appendix to the 1577 edition of Weyer's own De Praestigiis Daemonum; the direct historical source for close to seventy of the Ars Goetia's seventy two spirits. 1

Text

Literary Form

Grimoire / manual of magical operations 1

Transmission

Manuscript Tradition

Weyer's own stated manuscript source, a text he called the Liber officiorum spirituum, has not survived independently, so the printed 1577 appendix is the earliest form in which its demon catalogue is known today. 1

Scholarship and Forensics

Scholarly Note

Weyer compiled the catalogue from an earlier manuscript source he called the Liber officiorum spirituum. Historians of the grimoire tradition read the work as an attempt to catalogue and thereby master a body of demonological lore already circulating, not as an invitation to summon what it describes. 2

Learn More

Evidence Inside an Argument Against Believing It

Johann Weyer was a physician, not a magician, and De Praestigiis Daemonum, the larger work Pseudomonarchia Daemonum appeared alongside, was written to argue against the witch trials sweeping sixteenth century Europe. Weyer's position was that the women and men accused of demonic pacts were, in most cases, suffering from delusion or melancholy rather than genuinely commanding infernal power, and that the courts executing them on confession evidence were killing the mentally ill rather than punishing real sorcery. The demon catalog sits inside that argument as evidence of a different kind: proof, Weyer intended, that the elaborate hierarchy conjurers claimed to command was itself a documented fiction, copied from older manuscripts, rather than a genuine spiritual reality.

The catalog itself lists sixty nine demons in descending rank, from Bael, said to rule in the east, down through dukes, marquises, presidents and knights, each entry giving a name, a description of the shape the demon supposedly takes when it appears, its number of attending legions, and the specific powers, from teaching languages to revealing hidden treasure to raising storms, a conjurer could supposedly command from it. Weyer drew this material from earlier manuscript grimoires rather than inventing it, presenting it less as his own magical knowledge than as the kind of nonsense he believed a rational reader should recognize as nonsense.

That framing did not survive the text's later reception. Readers interested in the catalog for its own sake extracted it from Weyer's skeptical argument entirely, and it went on to a life of its own inside the ceremonial magic tradition he had written against.

The List Behind the Goetia

The seventy two demons of the Ars Goetia, the first book of the seventeenth century Lemegeton or Lesser Key of Solomon, are not an independent invention. Close to seventy of Weyer's sixty nine entries reappear in the Goetia recognizably, often with the same name, a similar rank and comparable powers, which is the strongest evidence that whoever compiled the Lemegeton's first book worked directly from Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, or from a common manuscript ancestor very close to it, rather than drawing on some wholly separate tradition. The Goetia's compiler added a small number of spirits Weyer's list lacks, adjusted some ranks and names, and, most significantly, stripped away Weyer's skeptical framing entirely, presenting the catalog straightforwardly as a working conjurer's reference rather than as an exhibit in an argument against believing any of it.

That difference in framing is the real distance between the two texts. Weyer catalogued the demons to discredit the courts that took confessions of demon-pacts as evidence of real crimes; the Goetia's compiler catalogued substantially the same demons as practical magical knowledge, seals, hierarchies and conjuration instructions included, for a reader who wanted to use them. This atlas records the Goetia's seventy two spirits as textually descended from this catalog, while keeping the two texts as separate records: Weyer's work is not the Goetia, and treating it as merely an early draft of the Goetia would erase the argument he actually wrote it to make.

The catalog also appeared bound with, and is sometimes catalogued alongside, Weyer's earlier De Praestigiis Daemonum, of which it was first printed as an appendix in the 1577 edition.

Connections

Associated With

Christianity

Demonology

Authored By

Johann Weyer

Compiled from earlier manuscript grimoires as evidence within his skeptical De Praestigiis Daemonum.