Pictures, seals and claims

Most people meet the Goetia through pictures: a three-headed king on spider legs, a lion’s head in a wheel of goat legs. They also meet confident claims that it is an ancient Hebrew book. In this lesson you check both. You compare the pictures with the texts, you draw a seal carefully as an art-history study, and you trace one claim back to its source.

Where the pictures come from

Historical The 1904 Goetia has seals but no portraits. The well-known drawings were made by Louis Le Breton for the 1863 edition of Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal, a French dictionary of demons first published in 1818 without them. Le Breton drew from de Plancy’s descriptions, not from the Lemegeton manuscripts.

Later tradition Many modern books, decks and websites reuse Le Breton’s drawings as if they were the Goetia’s own images. They are nineteenth-century illustrations, often beautiful, and worth studying as art.

Louis Le Breton and the Dictionnaire infernal

Historical Many pictures of the Goetia spirits you see online come from one nineteenth-century French book. Jacques Collin de Plancy first published his Dictionnaire infernal, a dictionary of demons, superstitions and the occult, in 1818. For the 1863 edition, the artist Louis Le Breton made a series of engravings of demons, and these images, now out of copyright, have been reused endlessly. They are imaginative works of art from Paris in the 1860s, not ancient portraits.

Historical Comparing a picture with the text shows this clearly. Le Breton drew Buer as a lion’s head surrounded by goat legs arranged like a wheel. The 1904 Goetia instead says that Buer “appeareth in Sagittary”, the shape of the archer, “when the Sun is there”.

The drawing and the text do not agree, and neither is older than the early modern period. Asmoday is another good example: the 1904 text gives him three heads, of a bull, a man and a ram, a serpent’s tail, feet webbed like a goose’s and a dragon to ride. Le Breton follows this description fairly closely, so here picture and text match.

Seals as drawings

Historical The seventeenth-century manuscripts give each spirit a seal and say it should be made in a metal matching the spirit’s rank. The surviving copies differ in small ways, which is why seals vary from book to book. In this lesson a seal is a drawing to study: lines, circles and letter-like shapes, copied with care like any historical design. Do not make metal seals. Some metals the texts name, such as mercury and lead, are toxic, and paper and pencil are all this study needs.

Seals that differ between manuscripts

Historical The seals also vary. The main manuscripts of the Lemegeton in the British Library, such as Sloane MS 3825 and Sloane MS 2731, were copied by hand in the seventeenth century, and the seals in them differ in small and sometimes large ways. Lines are added or missed, circles become squares, letters change. The printed 1904 edition chose one set, and later books often redrew those. So when someone says that a seal must be drawn “exactly right”, the honest answer is that there was never one exact version.

The “ancient Hebrew book” claim

Historical The 1904 edition’s prefatory note mentions Hebrew manuscripts among its sources. None are known. The surviving Goetia manuscripts are seventeenth-century, in English, and the closest earlier list is Weyer’s of 1577. The book is attributed to King Solomon by legend, not by authorship.

Your study practice, step by step

What you need: a notebook, a pencil, a ruler and a compass, about an hour, and free images of the 1863 Le Breton drawings and a scan of the 1904 Goetia.

1. Choose Bael, Buer or Asmodeus and read the 1904 description.
2. Look at the Le Breton drawing and list what it adds, changes or leaves out.
3. Choose that spirit’s seal from the 1904 scan and copy it in pencil, using the ruler and compass.
4. Label the parts that are geometric and the parts that look like letters.
5. Find one website that calls the Goetia “ancient” or “Hebrew” and note what source, if any, it gives.
6. Compare that claim with the dates you know: Weyer 1577, the manuscripts in the 1600s, print in 1904.
7. Write a three-sentence correction in your own words.

Journal prompts: Did the picture or the text shape your idea of the spirit more? How did it feel to copy a seal as a drawing rather than a symbol of power? Why do you think “ancient” claims are so attractive?

How to check an “ancient” claim, in prose

When you meet a claim that the Goetia is an ancient Hebrew, Egyptian or Babylonian book, check four things. First, ask what the earliest surviving copy is; for the Goetia, the manuscripts are seventeenth century and its spirit list depends on Weyer’s printed list of 1577.

Second, look for the language of the oldest copies; they are in English and Latin, not Hebrew. Third, notice who makes the claim, and whether they sell something. Fourth, notice that the 1904 title page itself says the book was translated “by a dead hand”, a joke about Mathers, not a claim about ancient Hebrew scribes.

Modern Beginners often ask whether a seal is dangerous to draw. In this course you copy seals as historical drawings, the way an art historian might copy a medieval emblem, and that is study. Another common question is why “ancient” sounds so convincing. Age seems to promise authority and authenticity, which is exactly why writers in every century, from the Testament of Solomon onward, have claimed it. A myth to drop is that the Le Breton drawings show what spirits “really” look like; they show what one artist imagined in 1863.

Buer: one blank space, three pictures

Historical Buer shows better than any other spirit how pictures grow from texts. In Weyer’s Latin of 1577, the line describing his shape has a gap: “conspicitur in signo”, “he is seen in the sign”, followed by an asterisk where a word is missing. The Victorian editor of Scot, Brinsley Nicholson, noticed this in his 1886 edition and explained that Weyer’s source was probably illegible at that point, so the copyist marked the gap.

Scot, translating in 1584, did not understand the asterisk and wrote simply that Buer “is seene in this signe”, with no sign at all. The seventeenth-century Goetia filled the gap: Buer “appeareth in Sagittary, and that is his shape when the Sun is there.” Then in 1863 Le Breton drew him as a lion’s head ringed with goat legs, from de Plancy’s dictionary. One missing word in a manuscript became a gap, then an archer, then a wheel of legs.

This is why I ask you to check pictures against texts. Each version is real evidence of what someone wrote or drew, but none of them is a portrait of anything. They are links in a chain of human copying and imagining.

Looking at a picture in three passes

Art historians often look at an image in stages, and the method works well for demon pictures too.

First pass: describe. Write only what you see, without interpreting: a lion’s head, five legs, hooves, a dark background. This slows you down and stops your first reaction from taking over.

Second pass: interpret. Ask what the artist wanted you to feel. Is the figure comic, grotesque, elegant or frightening? Le Breton’s engravings are often strangely playful, closer to a natural history plate than to a horror image.

Third pass: place it. Note the date, the artist, the book and the audience. A dictionary sold to curious Parisian readers in the 1860s had very different aims from a seventeenth-century manuscript copied for private use.

Lamens, rings and seals as history

Historical In the 1904 text several seals are described as things to wear. Agares’s entry ends: “this is his Seal or Character which thou shalt wear as a Lamen before thee”, a lamen being a plate hung on the chest. The book also describes a magic ring and a pentagram of Solomon, all modelled on the legend of Solomon’s ring in the Testament of Solomon. For your study, these descriptions are evidence of how the compiler imagined protection and authority. You do not need to make any object to understand them, and this course does not ask you to.

A question beginners ask: “Are the seals in modern books copied correctly?” Many are redrawn from the 1904 plates, which already chose one version among differing manuscripts. Correct, here, can only mean faithful to a named source. So when you copy a seal for study, write under it which edition and plate you used, the way a careful student labels a sketch of a museum object.

A worked example

A learner chooses Bael. The 1904 text gives three heads, a toad, a man and a cat, and says nothing about legs. Le Breton gives him spider legs. She writes: “The spider body is the artist’s invention, from 1863.” She copies Bael’s seal, counts its circles and marks the letter-like hooks. The website she checks calls the Goetia “a 3,000-year-old Hebrew grimoire” with no source, and her correction reads: “The Goetia survives in seventeenth-century English manuscripts. No Hebrew original is known. The Solomon link is legend.”

Try this

Pick Bael, Buer or Asmodeus. Compare the 1863 Le Breton drawing with the 1904 description and list what the picture adds, changes or leaves out. Then write one sentence on why the picture is not “the real” image of the spirit.

Recap

The famous demon pictures are Le Breton’s illustrations for the 1863 Dictionnaire infernal, not part of the Goetia. Seals can be studied as historical drawings with pencil and compass. No Hebrew Goetia is known; the text is seventeenth-century, with roots in Weyer’s 1577 list.

What next

Press “Mark as done” and continue with Reading ritual language and your study year. My Goetia myths page answers more common claims.

Further reading: Jacques Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire infernal (1863 edition), digitised by the Bibliothèque nationale de France on its Gallica site.

Sources

• Jacques Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire infernal, 6th edition with drawings by Louis Le Breton (Paris: Plon, 1863).
• S. L. MacGregor Mathers (trans.) and Aleister Crowley (ed.), The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King (Boleskine, 1904).
• British Library, Sloane MS 3825, the Lemegeton, mid-seventeenth century, edited online by Joseph H. Peterson.

Go deeper: the Goetia pages on this site

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