The 1904 Goetia: Mathers, Crowley and the Golden Dawn

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 Goetia that most people know is a printed book of 1904, The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King. Behind it lie a handful of seventeenth-century English manuscripts, a famous quarrel between two magicians, and a magical order that loved tables of correspondences. This page explains what the 1904 edition contains, which parts are old and which are new, and how to read it well.

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Two men and a manuscript

Later tradition Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854 to 1918) was a leading figure of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and an editor of magical manuscripts. He had already published The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) and The Key of Solomon the King (1889). In the 1890s he prepared an English text of the Goetia from the Sloane manuscripts in the British Museum, comparing them as he went.

Aleister Crowley (1875 to 1947) joined the Golden Dawn in 1898 and studied with Mathers. In 1900 the Order split, and Crowley sided at first with Mathers, who was living in Paris. Over the next years the two fell out completely. Biographers tell differently how Crowley came to hold Mathers’ manuscript.

In 1904 Crowley published it at his own expense from his house, Boleskine, on Loch Ness in Scotland, under the imprint of a “Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth.” The title page says the book was “translated into the English tongue by a dead hand.” Mathers was very much alive. The unsigned Prefatory Note, dated Boleskine 1903, explains the joke: the translator “succumbed unhappily to the assaults of the Four Great Princes,” so the work had to be finished “by another hand.” Crowley’s own note calls his editing “practically a sinecure.”

What the 1904 book contains

Later tradition The book mixes the seventeenth-century text with Crowley’s additions. In order, it has:

• an unsigned Prefatory Note and notes by Crowley, signed “Ed.”;
• a Greek invocation before the title page asking for “the terrible Mathers” to be cast down;
• Crowley’s essay “The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic,” which argues that the spirits are “portions of the human brain”;
• a “Preliminary Invocation,” the Bornless One, from a Greek magical papyrus that C. W. Goodwin published in English in 1852;
• the “Preliminary Definition of Magic,” from the manuscripts;
• the catalog of 72 spirits, with seals redrawn for print;
• the Observations on times and metals, the ranks list, and the circle, triangle, hexagram, pentagram, ring, vessel and secret seal;
• the conjurations, the constraint, the invocation of the king, the curse called the Spirits’ Chain, the welcome and the license to depart;
• the conjurations rendered into Enochian, the “Angelic” language of John Dee, with Crowley’s transliteration;
• a closing “Explanation of Certain Names” and other notes.

Crowley’s notes

Later tradition Mathers’ text is in early modern English, lightly regularized. Crowley’s notes are sometimes useful and sometimes jokes. Under Marchosias he added, “For me he appeared always like an ox, and very dazed.” Under Vual, who “speaketh the Egyptian Tongue, but not perfectly,” he wrote, “He can nowadays converse in sound though colloquial Coptic.” These notes are Crowley’s, not part of the old text, and they are a good reminder to check who is speaking on any page of the book.

A quick guide to the footnotes: notes signed “Trans.” are Mathers’. Notes signed “Ed.”, often in square brackets, are Crowley’s. Unsigned notes are probably Mathers’. Notes beginning “Or” give manuscript variants.

Crowley’s essay and the psychological reading

Later tradition Crowley’s essay may be the most influential thing he added. He argued that “the spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain,” and that the ritual works by stimulating particular regions of the brain through sense impressions: the robe, the incense, the circle, the words. On this view, calling a spirit who teaches languages is a way of awakening the part of yourself that learns languages. Crowley partly meant this and partly meant to tease skeptics, and his later writing treats spirits in more complex ways.

Modern The idea took root. Lon Milo DuQuette, writing with Christopher S. Hyatt in 1992, developed a practical psychological approach that keeps the full ritual structure while treating the spirits as aspects of the psyche. Others draw on Carl Jung and read demons as shadow material. These readings make the Goetia approachable for people who do not believe in literal demons, but they carry their own risk: treating a spirit as “part of me” can make strong experiences feel more personal and more unsettling. If you go this way, the guidance on Goetia safety and mental health still applies.

The Golden Dawn layer

Later tradition The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in London in 1888 by William Wynn Westcott, William Robert Woodman and Mathers. It taught a system of ceremonial magic combining Kabbalah, astrology, tarot, Enochian magic, Egyptian imagery and Rosicrucian symbolism, with grades, initiations and rich tables of correspondences.

The Goetia sat at the edge of this system. Members studied it and some evoked its spirits, but it was not central to the grade work. What the Golden Dawn did was fit the Goetia into its tables. It linked the 72 spirits to the 36 decans of the zodiac, a day spirit and a night spirit for each decan, and adopted the pairing of each spirit with one of the 72 angels of the Shem ha-Mephorash, first found in the early eighteenth-century Rudd manuscripts. Crowley later printed related tables in 777 (1909). If a modern book tells you a spirit’s planet, decan or tarot card, it is drawing on this layer. The seventeenth-century Goetia does not contain it.

The Golden Dawn also shaped how the Goetia is practiced. Its members wore robes, used the banishing ritual of the pentagram and approached spirits as part of spiritual self-development. When modern writers describe “Goetic work” as a path of self-knowledge, they are drawing on the Golden Dawn and Crowley, not on the seventeenth century.

Boleskine and the legend

Modern Crowley bought Boleskine in 1899 for the Abramelin operation, a different and much longer ritual. He began preparing it there and abandoned it in 1900, and he later wrote of strange events in the house. Stories about Boleskine, many of them exaggerated, became part of the Goetia’s modern legend. They belong to Crowley’s biography, not to the history of the text.

The de Laurence reprint

Later tradition In 1916, the Chicago publisher L. W. de Laurence reprinted Mathers’ text under his own name as The Lesser Key of Solomon, Goetia: The Book of Evil Spirits, without proper credit. It circulated widely in the twentieth century, including in the Caribbean and West Africa, where de Laurence’s books became famous. It silently changes a few numbers and notes. Belial’s legions, for example, are 80 in the 1904 edition and 50 in de Laurence. If two websites disagree about a number, this reprint is often why.

Modern editions

Modern A few editions are worth knowing.

• Joseph H. Peterson, The Lesser Key of Solomon (2001). The whole Lemegeton edited from the manuscripts, with variants and Weyer’s catalog. The standard for close reading.
• Stephen Skinner and David Rankine, The Goetia of Dr Rudd (2007). The Rudd manuscripts, with the angelic counterparts.
• Hymenaeus Beta (ed.), The Goetia (1995 and later). A modern edition of the 1904 book with illustrations and notes.
• Lon Milo DuQuette and Christopher S. Hyatt, Aleister Crowley’s Illustrated Goetia (1992). A practitioner’s guide written from a Crowleyan psychological view.

The 1904 text is in the public domain and free online. Modern editions under copyright should be bought or borrowed, not copied.

The myth of a Hebrew original

Later tradition The Goetia’s preface says its books “were first found in the Chaldee and Hebrew Tongues at Jerusalem by a Jewish Rabbi,” then put into Greek and Latin, “as it is said.” The 1904 Prefatory Note even claims Hebrew manuscripts among its sources. None is known. The oldest versions are English, and their language, theology and reliance on Weyer and Scot all point to early modern Europe. A seal “from the original Hebrew Goetia” does not exist.

Reading the 1904 edition today

If you pick up the 1904 book, these habits help:

• Read Crowley’s essay and the Preliminary Invocation as a modern editor’s introduction, not as the seventeenth-century Goetia.
• Check the footnote signatures before trusting a note.
• Compare a few entries with Scot’s English on Weyer and Scot. You will see how often the Goetia follows Scot.
• Look at the seals in more than one edition if you can. The 1904 seals are one set of drawings, not the only form.

For the longer story, read the history of the Goetia. To see how the 1904 text sorts its spirits, go to ranks and offices, or return to the Goetia hub.