Weyer, Scot and the 1904 Goetia

Your goal in this lesson: to know where the list of 72 spirits actually comes from, and which parts of the famous 1904 book are old and which are new.

Two skeptics

Historical 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, to show what conjurers claimed.

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. Of Agares, Scot says “he commeth up mildlie in the likenes of a faire old man, riding upon a crocodile”. The Goetia’s wording often follows Scot’s English closely. Of its 72 spirits, 68 appear in Weyer, though in a different order and spelling. Two skeptics preserved the list that magicians later copied.

The Lemegeton

Historical The Ars Goetia is the first of five books in a collection called the Lemegeton or Lesser Key of Solomon, which survives in seventeenth-century English manuscripts now in the British Library. Most scholars date its compilation to the middle or later part of that century. The other books deal with spirits of the compass, angels of the hours, a wax tablet called the almadel and prayers for memory. The Goetia itself contains the catalog of 72 spirits with their seals, followed by instructions for the circle, the triangle and the conjurations. It is a Christian book: the magician commands spirits by the names of God.

Mathers and Crowley, 1904

Later tradition S. L. MacGregor Mathers, a leader of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, prepared an English text from the Sloane manuscripts in the 1890s. Aleister Crowley, after falling out with him, published it in 1904 from his house, Boleskine, on Loch Ness, as The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King. Crowley added a prefatory note, a Greek invocation mocking “the terrible Mathers”, his essay “The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic” arguing that the spirits are “portions of the human brain”, and a “Preliminary Invocation” taken from a Greek magical papyrus. The seals were redrawn for print. The 1904 edition is the one most readers know, and the spirit pages on this site follow its numbering.

After 1904

Modern Later editions, such as Joseph H. Peterson’s The Lesser Key of Solomon (2001), go back to the manuscripts and show their differences. Online, the 1904 text, Crowley’s notes and modern lore are often mixed without labels. Now you can separate them.

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

Try this

Today’s exercise: make a timeline with five dates: 1563, 1577, 1584, the mid-1600s and 1904. Next to each, write who or what it stands for in one line.

Quick recap

• Weyer (1577) and Scot (1584) printed the demon list to argue against witch trials.
• 68 of the Goetia’s 72 spirits appear in Weyer.
• The Goetia is the first book of the seventeenth-century Lemegeton.
• Mathers edited and Crowley published and annotated the 1904 edition.

Keep going

Press “Mark as done” and continue with How to read a spirit entry.

Need a refresher? Go back to Solomon and the grimoires or see the whole course.

Sources

• Johann Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, with the Pseudomonarchia daemonum (Basel, 1577).
• Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584), book 15.
• S. L. MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King (Boleskine, 1904).
• Joseph H. Peterson (ed.), The Lesser Key of Solomon (York Beach: Weiser, 2001).

Go deeper: the Goetia pages on this site

Mark as done