The history of the Goetia, from Solomon to 1904

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

The Ars Goetia is often presented as an ancient book of King Solomon. The real story is longer and, to me, more interesting. It runs from Greek words for grief and sorcery, through Jewish, Christian and Islamic legends of Solomon, through medieval clerics with forbidden books and two Renaissance skeptics who fought the witch trials, to a quarrel between two English magicians in 1904. This page follows that chain, link by link, and marks which layer each part belongs to.

If you are struggling right now, call your local emergency number (112 in Europe, 911 in the US and Canada) or see Getting help.

Before the Goetia: a word with a history

Historical Goetia is a Greek word. A goēs was a kind of sorcerer in the ancient Greek world, and the word is linked to goos, the wailing lament sung over the dead. The scholar Sarah Iles Johnston has argued that the goēs was first a specialist in lament and in dealing with the restless dead. By the time of Plato, the word had turned sour and meant a cheat or a quack.

Late antique philosophers then set goeteia, low sorcery, against theurgia, “god-work,” a sacred ritual that lifted the soul. Renaissance scholars inherited the pair, and the seventeenth-century title Ars Goetia, “the goetic art,” uses the word in exactly that later sense: a manual for working with evil spirits.

The Solomon legend

Historical The Goetia borrows its authority from King Solomon. In the Hebrew Bible, Solomon is a king famous for wisdom, who “spake of trees” and of beasts, birds and fishes (1 Kings 4:33). Later writers read more into that wisdom. The Wisdom of Solomon, a Greek book probably from the first century BCE, says God taught him “the violence of winds,” a phrase whose Greek can also mean spirits.

By the first century CE, the historian Josephus could say that Solomon composed exorcisms still in use, and he described a Jewish exorcist named Eleazar drawing out a demon with a ring and a root in front of the future emperor Vespasian. The Babylonian Talmud tells how Solomon captured Ashmedai, king of demons, with a chain and an engraved ring.

The most important ancient source for the Goetia’s picture of Solomon is the Testament of Solomon, a Greek text dated anywhere from the first to the fifth century CE. In it, the archangel Michael brings Solomon a ring engraved with a seal. With it he binds one demon after another, makes each give its name, its powers and the angel that defeats it, and sets them to work building the Temple. None of its demons is identical to a Goetic spirit, but the form is there: a king, a ring, a list and a binding.

Solomon is also a prophet in Islam, called Sulayman, and the Quran says that by God’s permission jinn worked for him. The jinn are not demons in the Christian sense, and that tradition is not part of the Goetia, but it shows how widely the image of Solomon commanding spirits traveled. I tell the whole legend on King Solomon and the ring.

Medieval grimoires and clerical necromancy

Historical Between the Solomon legends and the Goetia lie about a thousand years of Christian magic. A grimoire is a handbook of ritual magic, and the historian Owen Davies stresses three things about grimoires: they were copied and changed by every copyist, they borrowed famous names for authority, and they were practical, aimed at lost goods, treasure, love, lawsuits and sickness.

By the Middle Ages, many magical books carried Solomon’s name. Church writers condemned them. William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris in the thirteenth century, called the rings and seals of Solomon idolatry, and the repeated condemnations show that the books circulated.

The historian Richard Kieckhefer showed who used many of these books: a “clerical underworld” of priests, monks, students and men in minor orders who could read Latin and perform rites. A fifteenth-century manuscript in Munich, which he edited as Forbidden Rites (1997), contains dozens of experiments for summoning demons by the names of God, using circles drawn on the ground, prayers and commands. Practitioners seem to have seen themselves as Christians using God’s power to command evil spirits, much as an exorcist did.

The best-known Solomonic grimoire, the Key of Solomon, survives in versions from the fifteenth century on. It is mainly a manual of preparation: purity, fasting, tools, planetary hours and talismans called pentacles. The Goetia’s title, the Lesser Key, places it beside this older book.

Lists of spirits with ranks and offices also existed before the Goetia. A fifteenth-century French manuscript in Trinity College, Cambridge, the Livre des Esperitz, lists 47 spirits, with many names that later appear in the Goetia in different forms.

Weyer, 1577, and Scot, 1584

Historical The Goetia’s list reached print through two men who wanted to weaken belief in witchcraft. The Dutch physician Johann Weyer argued in De praestigiis daemonum (1563) that many women accused of witchcraft were ill or deluded and should be treated by doctors, not burned. To the 1577 edition he added the Pseudomonarchia daemonum, “the false monarchy of demons,” a catalog of 69 demons copied from a magician’s book. He printed it to expose its folly, and he left parts out so that no one could use it.

The English gentleman Reginald Scot went further. His Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) argued that most witchcraft claims were fraud, delusion or the product of cruel interrogation. In Book 15 he translated Weyer’s catalog into English, again to show what conjurers claimed. The Goetia’s wording often follows Scot’s English closely. Of Agares, Scot says “he commeth up mildlie in the likenes of a faire old man, riding upon a crocodile, and carrieng a hawke on his fist.” The Goetia’s version is almost the same.

Of the Goetia’s 72 spirits, 68 appear in Weyer, though often in a different order and with different spellings. It is one of history’s ironies that two skeptics preserved the catalog that magicians later copied. I explain both books on Weyer and Scot.

The Sloane manuscripts: the Goetia takes shape

Historical In the seventeenth century, English copyists combined the pieces into one manual: the catalog of 72 spirits with their seals, followed by the circle, triangle and other tools, and a set of conjurations. This is the Ars Goetia, the first of the five books of the collection called the Lemegeton, or Lesser Key of Solomon. You can read about all five on the Lemegeton.

The text survives in manuscripts collected by Sir Hans Sloane, whose library became a founding part of the British Museum and is now in the British Library. Sloane MS 3825 is often treated as the main text. Sloane MS 2731 is dated by a note to 1687. Sloane MS 3648 is related, and Sloane MS 3824 holds an early form of related material, including three of the four spirits missing from Weyer. Harley MS 6483, linked to a “Dr. Rudd” and dated 1712 to 1713, pairs each spirit with one of 72 angels.

The manuscripts do not agree on every name, number or seal. The safe statement is that the Goetia took shape in England in the seventeenth century, from several sources, and survives in more than one version.

It helps to picture that England. The century brought civil war, the execution of a king and a restoration. It also brought the last major witch hunts in English history and the rise of the Royal Society, founded in 1660. Belief in spirits was common among educated people, and so was suspicion of anyone who tried to command them. The Goetia’s concerns, treasure, favor, lost goods, love and learning, are the concerns of that world.

What the seventeenth-century Goetia contains

Historical It helps to know what is actually in the book before following its later life. The Ars Goetia opens with a short preface about Solomon and the spirits he bound in a vessel of brass. Then comes the catalog: 72 entries, each a few lines long, giving the spirit’s name, rank, appearance, offices and number of legions, with its seal drawn beside it. After the catalog come the “Observations,” with metals and hours for each rank, then drawings of the magic circle, the triangle, the hexagram and pentagram of Solomon, the brass vessel and the ring. The book ends with a series of conjurations, each stronger than the last, and a license to depart.

What it does not contain is just as telling. There are no colors, no incenses for each spirit, no offerings except brief mentions for three spirits, no tarot cards and no personalities beyond a word or two. Most of what modern books attach to the spirits arrived later.

A Christian book

Historical The Goetia’s frame is Christian through and through. Its spirits are fallen angels, several of whom are said to have belonged to angelic orders such as Virtues, Thrones or Potentates before the fall. Its conjurations call on the names of God, many taken from Hebrew, and on Christian ideas of divine authority. The magician commands in God’s name and stands protected inside a circle of holy names. Whatever you think of that frame, reading the Goetia without it misreads the text.

This also explains the tone of the old entries. A spirit that teaches astronomy and a spirit that causes storms sit side by side, because in the text’s world every one of them is a dangerous, subordinate being, useful only under God’s command. Modern views that treat the spirits as friends, teachers or parts of the self are later developments, and I label them that way.

Mathers and Crowley, 1904

Later tradition The Goetia stayed in manuscript until 1904. In the 1890s, S. L. MacGregor Mathers, a leader of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, prepared an English text from the Sloane manuscripts. Aleister Crowley, his former student, had fallen out with him bitterly. In 1904 Crowley published the text from his house at Boleskine in Scotland as The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King, “translated into the English tongue by a dead hand.” The dead hand was a jibe at Mathers, who was very much alive.

Crowley added an essay arguing that the spirits are “portions of the human brain,” notes of his own, a “Preliminary Invocation” from a Greek magical papyrus that has nothing to do with the Sloane manuscripts, and an Enochian version of the conjurations. In 1916 the Chicago publisher L. W. de Laurence reprinted the text under his own name and silently changed some numbers.

The Golden Dawn and Crowley also tied the spirits to the 36 decans of the zodiac, planets and tarot cards, printed in Crowley’s 777 (1909). Those links are later tradition. The seventeenth-century Goetia does not contain them. The full story is on the 1904 Goetia.

After 1904

Modern The 1904 edition became the Goetia most people read. Joseph Peterson’s 2001 edition of the Lemegeton compares the manuscripts closely, and Stephen Skinner and David Rankine edited the Rudd material in 2007. Practitioners today approach the spirits in very different ways: some keep the old Christian frame of command, some read the spirits as parts of the mind, some build devotional relationships, and many simply study the text as history. The Goetia also appears in films, games and fiction, often far from the text.

A second edition of the 1904 text, edited by Hymenaeus Beta, appeared in 1995 with illustrations and notes, and Lon Milo DuQuette and Christopher Hyatt published an illustrated Goetia in 1992. Each of these books adds its own layer. When two modern books disagree about a spirit, it is usually worth asking which older text each one is following, and whether either is following one at all. That single question clears up most of the confusion beginners run into.

Myths about the Goetia’s age

Later tradition The Goetia’s own preface says the books were “first found in the Chaldee and Hebrew Tongues at Jerusalem by a Jewish Rabbi,” and then put into Greek and Latin, “as it is said.” That phrase is a hedge, and the story is a common grimoire device. No Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek original is known. The oldest versions are English.

So when you read online that the Goetia was “written by Solomon around 950 BCE” or “kept secret for three thousand years,” you can set that aside. The Goetia is old enough to be interesting: around three and a half centuries in its present form, with roots in older catalogs and much older legends. It does not need to be older than that.

A timeline of the Goetia

How to read the history well

A few habits help with any Goetia book or website, including this one.

• Ask which source. The 1904 text, Weyer, Scot, a Sloane manuscript or a modern book? If no source is named, treat the claim as modern.
• Read the entry. Each spirit gets a few lines. Notice what is missing, such as colors, offerings or personality.
• Expect variation. Names, ranks, numbers and seals change between versions. That is normal in a copied tradition.
• Respect the faiths involved. Solomon is sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims. The legends are worth reading as legends.

When you are ready to meet the spirits themselves, start with the 72 spirits and ranks and offices. For everything else, return to the Goetia hub, and if you want a gentle, free place to begin with the wider craft, my Mini-Grimoire is there for you.