Theurgia-Goetia: the spirits of the compass and Trithemius

The second book of the Lemegeton bears a name that sounds like a contradiction: Theurgia-Goetia. The two terms, which in late antique philosophy designated sacred magic and base magic respectively, are here combined to describe spirits of a mixed nature, said to be partly good and partly evil. The treatise arranges them according to the points of the compass, drawing an aerial map of the world ruled by invisible emperors, kings and princes.

A geography of the air

At the top of the hierarchy stand four emperors linked to the cardinal points: Carnesiel in the east, Caspiel in the south, Amenadiel in the west and Demoriel in the north. Beneath them are numerous princes and dukes associated with the intermediate directions, for a total of thirty-one principal spirits, each with its own seal and a multitude of servants. The text dwells on their aerial nature, their constant motion and their relationship with the different regions of the sky.

This spatial organisation reflects an ancient idea, widespread in medieval magic, of spirits presiding over the winds and the directions of the world. The precise form of the Theurgia-Goetia, with its names and hierarchies, nevertheless has a recognisable and relatively recent source, which reveals a great deal about how seventeenth-century compilers worked.

The debt to the Steganographia

That source is the Steganographia of Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516), Benedictine abbot of Sponheim and later of the monastery of St James in Würzburg, humanist and scholar. Written around 1499, the work long circulated in manuscript, arousing suspicions of necromancy, and was printed in Frankfurt only in 1606; a few years later it was placed on the Index. Its first book presents a system of spirits of the cardinal points whose names and ranks largely coincide with those of the Theurgia-Goetia.

The decisive point is that the Steganographia is, at least in large part, a treatise on cryptography disguised as a book of magic. The formulas addressed to the spirits concealed systems for enciphering secret messages. In the 1990s the studies of Thomas Ernst and Jim Reeds showed that even the third book, long considered purely demonological, conceals ciphered texts that could be decrypted.

From cipher to grimoire

The compiler of the Lemegeton took Trithemius's names and hierarchies and reused them as if they really described entities to be summoned, stripping them of their cryptographic function. It is a textbook case of the literal reading of a text that played with ambiguity: the abbot had used the language of magic to protect a technical invention, and his later readers took that language at face value.

The Theurgia-Goetia also shows how printed works found their way back into the manuscript tradition. Once copied, adapted and placed alongside other Solomonic texts, the Trithemian materials lost all reference to their author and acquired the authority of Solomon's name, which guaranteed an entirely fictitious antiquity. The abbot's name disappears, and only the system of spirits remains.

For students of the history of the book, this treatise is valuable because it allows a transmission of texts to be traced with precision: from a German humanist of the early sixteenth century, through the Frankfurt press, to the English copyists of the seventeenth. It is one of the rare cases in which the genealogy of a grimoire can be documented with confidence.