Ars Goetia: the history of the catalogue of seventy-two spirits

In antiquity the Greek word goeteia denoted a low-ranking magic, often associated with deception and the world of the dead, which Neoplatonist philosophers set against theurgy, the religious practice directed towards the gods. In seventeenth-century England the term gave its name to the first and most famous part of the Lemegeton, the Ars Goetia: a list of seventy-two spirits, each with a rank, a seal and a description of its appearance and supposed powers.

The bronze vessel and the names of the spirits

The text sets the catalogue within a legendary frame. According to the tradition reported in the Goetia, Solomon shut the spirits in a bronze vessel and cast it into a lake near Babylon; the Babylonians, thinking they would find treasure inside, broke the vessel and set them free. The story echoes motifs of the Solomonic legend already attested in the Testament of Solomon and widespread in many variants in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic worlds.

The names of the spirits reveal a composite origin. Some are ancient deities demoted to demons, such as Bael, recalling the Canaanite Baal, or Astaroth, an echo of the goddess Astarte; Asmoday derives from the Asmodeus of the Book of Tobit. Others look like distortions of Hebrew or Latin names, and others still have no recognisable etymology. Each spirit is placed in a feudal hierarchy of kings, dukes, princes, marquises, earls and knights, reflecting the political imagination of late medieval Europe.

The source: Weyer and the Pseudomonarchia

The core of the catalogue is not English. In 1577 the physician Johann Weyer, a pupil of Cornelius Agrippa known for his criticism of witch trials in De praestigiis daemonum, published as an appendix to that work the Pseudomonarchia daemonum, a list of sixty-nine demons taken from a manuscript in his possession. Weyer printed it to expose its absurdity, presenting it as an example of the fantasies of necromancers.

Paradoxically, publication secured the catalogue an enormous circulation. In 1584 Reginald Scot included an English translation in The Discoverie of Witchcraft, itself a sceptical work, and from there the list passed into English manuscripts. The seventeenth-century Goetia largely follows its order and descriptions, adds some spirits to reach the symbolic number of seventy-two, and introduces the graphic seals that were missing from the Pseudomonarchia.

Modern editions and images

At the end of the nineteenth century Mathers prepared a translation of the Goetia based on the Sloane manuscripts. The text was published in 1904 by Aleister Crowley, after the two had fallen out, under the title The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King, with notes by Crowley and a preliminary invocation taken from a Graeco-Egyptian magical papyrus. That edition, reprinted countless times, fixed the popular image of the grimoire for the whole twentieth century.

In the same decades the goetic demons entered the visual imagination through illustrated works such as the Dictionnaire infernal of Jacques Collin de Plancy, whose 1863 edition offered engraved portraits of many spirits in the catalogue. Those images, born of Romantic curiosity and popular erudition, have been reproduced in so many modern publications that many readers believe them to be part of the original grimoire.

Historians now read the Goetia as a document of European demonology: a catalogue born in late medieval manuscripts, printed in order to be mocked, translated by a sceptic and finally rearranged by English copyists. Its history shows how much the polemics against magic unwittingly helped to make its texts known.