Who Are the 72 Demons of the Ars Goetia?

The demons of the Ars Goetia have been copied by hand, printed in occult journals, engraved on protective amulets, and invoked in candlelit rituals for close to five hundred years — yet almost nobody who encounters the list stops to ask where it actually came from.

The story turns out to be stranger and more historically interesting than the legend of King Solomon that gets stapled onto it. Behind the 72 names, seals, and titles of nobility is a real paper trail: a 16th-century Dutch physician trying to end the witch trials, a lost Latin manuscript, a scrambled English translation, and a 19th-century occult society that turned a demon catalog into a psychological system.

Who Are the 72 Demons of the Ars Goetia?

The 72 demons of the Ars Goetia are a catalog of spirits described in the first of five books of the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, popularly known in English as the Lesser Key of Solomon. According to the text, each of these 72 spirits was once bound and commanded by King Solomon, who confined them inside a brass vessel sealed with magical symbols after subduing them with a divinely empowered ring.

Each of the 72 spirits is given a fixed set of attributes in the text:

• A name (with numerous spelling variants across manuscripts — Bael/Baal, Paimon/Paymon, Beleth/Byleth, and so on)
• A rank within an infernal nobility — King, Duke, Prince, Marquis, Earl/Count, President, or Knight
• A number of legions under their command, ranging from as few as 6 to as many as 100
• A physical description of the form the spirit is said to take when it appears
• A seal or sigil, a unique geometric symbol used to summon and command it
• A specific office or set of powers — teaching sciences, revealing hidden treasure, inciting or destroying love, granting invisibility, raising storms, or answering questions about the past and future

The word “Goetia” itself comes from the Greek goeteia (γοητεία), meaning “sorcery,” “jugglery,” or “howling” — related to goēs, a term for a sorcerer or wailing conjurer, possibly connected to the ritual lament used in low, folk forms of magic as opposed to the more elevated “theurgy.” The Ars Goetia is, because of that, literally “the art of sorcery,” and it stands in deliberate contrast to the Lemegeton’s other, more angelic books.

Crucially, the Ars Goetia is not an ancient text. The oldest complete manuscripts of it date only to the second half of the 17th century, and the list of 72 names did not exist in anything like its current form before the 1560s. The Solomon legend is ancient. The specific list of 72 named, ranked, sigil-bearing demons is not.

The Complete List of All 72 Demons of the Ars Goetia

Below is the full roster in the traditional order established by the manuscripts and preserved in the Mathers/Crowley 1904 edition — numbered 1 through 72, with each spirit’s rank, legion count, and primary office. Several spirits carry two titles at once (noted in parentheses), a manuscript inconsistency that has never been fully resolved.

1. Bael — King, 66 legions. Speaks in a hoarse voice; teaches invisibility; often shown with three heads (toad, man, cat).
2. Agares — Duke, 31 legions. Makes those who flee return; teaches languages; destroys temporal and spiritual dignities.
3. Vassago — Prince, 26 legions. A “good” spirit; reveals things past and to come and finds lost or hidden objects.
4. Samigina (Gamigin) — Marquis, 30 legions. Teaches the liberal sciences; gives account of souls who died in sin.
5. Marbas — President, 36 legions. Answers hidden truths; causes and cures disease; teaches mechanical arts.
6. Valefor — Duke, 10 legions. Tempts men toward theft; a treacherous familiar who betrays those he serves.
7. Amon — Marquis, 40 legions. Reconciles feuds between friends and foes; tells of the past and the future.
8. Barbatos — Duke, 30 legions. Understands the speech of animals; uncovers treasure hidden by enchantment.
9. Paimon — King, 200 legions. Teaches all arts and sciences; reveals secrets of earth, wind, and water; appears with musicians before him.
10. Buer — President, 50 legions. Teaches natural and moral philosophy and logic; knows the virtues of herbs; heals infirmities.
11. Gusion — Duke, 40 legions. Tells all things past, present, and future; reconciles friendships; confers honor.
12. Sitri — Prince, 60 legions. Inflames love and lust between men and women; reveals secret desires.
13. Beleth — King, 85 legions. Rides a pale horse with music sounding before him; gives the love of men and women.
14. Leraje (Leraikha) — Marquis, 30 legions. Causes battles and quarrels; makes arrow wounds fester and gangrenous.
15. Eligos (Abigor) — Duke, 60 legions. Discovers hidden things; foresees the outcome of wars; wins the favor of lords and soldiers.
16. Zepar — Duke, 26 legions. Causes women to love men, but also renders women barren.
17. Botis (President/Earl) — 60 legions. Tells things past and future; reconciles friends and foes.
18. Bathin — Duke, 30 legions. Knows the virtues of herbs and precious stones; transports men suddenly between countries.
19. Sallos (Saleos) — Duke, 30 legions. Of a pacific nature; causes mutual love between men and women.
20. Purson — King, 22 legions. Reveals hidden things and treasure; answers truly on secret and divine matters.
21. Marax (Morax) (President/Earl) — 36 legions. Teaches astronomy and liberal sciences; supplies familiars skilled in herbs and stones.
22. Ipos (Earl/Prince) — 36 legions. Knows past, present, and future; makes men witty and courageous.
23. Aim (Haborym) — Duke, 26 legions. Sets cities, castles, and great places ablaze; makes men clever; answers on private matters.
24. Naberius — Marquis, 19 legions. Restores lost honors and dignities; makes men cunning in rhetoric.
25. Glasya-Labolas (President/Earl) — 36 legions. Author and captain of manslaughter; tells past and future; can render a man invisible.
26. Buné (Bimé) — Duke, 30 legions. Changes burial places of the dead; gives eloquence, wisdom, and riches.
27. Ronové (Marquis/Earl) — 20 legions. Teaches rhetoric and languages; grants loyal servants and social favor.
28. Berith — Duke, 26 legions. Tells past, present, and future; claims to transmute all metals into gold; must be approached carefully, as he is said to lie.
29. Astaroth — Duke, 40 legions. Explains the fall of the angels; teaches the liberal sciences; discovers hidden treasure.
30. Forneus — Marquis, 29 legions. Teaches rhetoric and languages; gives a good reputation among friends and foes.
31. Foras (Forcas) — President, 29 legions. Teaches logic and ethics; grants invisibility, long life, and eloquence; finds lost objects.
32. Asmoday (Asmodeus) — King, 72 legions. Teaches geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy; grants invisibility; guards treasure.
33. Gäap (President/Prince) — 66 legions. Teaches philosophy and the liberal sciences; causes love or hatred; can deliver familiars from other magicians.
34. Furfur — Earl, 26 legions. Causes love between man and woman; raises storms, thunder, and lightning.
35. Marchosias — Marquis, 30 legions. A strong and reliable fighter in the conjurer’s cause; gives true answers.
36. Stolas — Prince, 26 legions. Teaches astronomy and the properties of herbs and precious stones.
37. Phenex (Phoenix) — Marquis, 20 legions. An excellent poet; teaches wonderful sciences; obedient to the conjurer.
38. Halphas (Malthus) — Earl, 26 legions. Builds towers, furnishes them with weapons, and sends men-at-arms to designated places.
39. Malphas — President, 40 legions. Builds houses and high towers; destroys the desires and thoughts of enemies.
40. Räum — Earl, 30 legions. Steals treasure from royal houses; destroys cities and human dignity; reconciles friends.
41. Focalor — Duke, 3 legions. Commands wind and sea; can drown men and overturn warships, but will spare all if commanded.
42. Vepar — Duke, 29 legions. Governs the waters; guides armed ships; can cause fatal, worm-infested wounds — or heal them.
43. Sabnock — Marquis, 50 legions. Builds high towers, castles, and cities; afflicts men with gangrenous, worm-filled sores.
44. Shax (Chax) — Marquis, 30 legions. Takes away sight, hearing, and understanding on command; steals money and horses.
45. Viné (Vine) (King/Earl) — 36 legions. Discovers witches and hidden things; raises storms; tells past, present, and future.
46. Bifrons — Earl, 6 legions (the smallest legion count in the entire list). Teaches sciences and the properties of gems and woods; moves corpses.
47. Vual (Uvall) — Duke, 37 legions. Procures the love of women; reconciles friends and enemies; speaks broken Egyptian.
48. Haagenti — President, 33 legions. Makes men wise; claims to transmute metals into gold and transform wine into water.
49. Crocell (Crokel) — Duke, 48 legions. Teaches geometry and the liberal sciences; can simulate the sound of rushing water.
50. Furcas — Knight (the only spirit of this rank), 20 legions. Teaches philosophy, astronomy, rhetoric, logic, palmistry, and pyromancy.
51. Balam — King, 40 legions. Gives true answers on past, present, and future; grants invisibility and wit; depicted three-headed.
52. Alloces (Allocer) — Duke, 36 legions. Teaches astronomy and the liberal arts; provides trustworthy familiars.
53. Caim (Camio) — President, 30 legions. Grants understanding of the speech of birds, cattle, and dogs; a skilled debater.
54. Murmur — Duke and Earl, 30 legions. Teaches philosophy; compels the souls of the dead to appear and answer questions.
55. Orobas — Prince, 20 legions. Gives true answers on divine matters; remains faithful and never deceives the conjurer.
56. Gremory (Gamori) — Duke, 26 legions. Tells of hidden treasure and past, present, future; procures the love of women.
57. Ose (Voso) — President, 3 legions. Makes men wise in the liberal sciences; can induce delusions of grandeur or madness.
58. Amy (Avnas) — President, 36 legions. Makes men marvelous in astrology and the liberal sciences; reveals hidden treasure.
59. Orias (Oriax) — Marquis, 30 legions. Teaches the virtues of the stars and planetary “mansions”; can transform a man’s shape.
60. Vapula — Duke, 36 legions. Teaches philosophy, mechanics, and the sciences.
61. Zagan (King/President) — 33 legions. Turns water to wine and wine to water; makes fools witty; transmutes metals into coin.
62. Valac (Volac) — President, 30 legions. Reveals hidden treasure and the location of serpents; delivers them harmless to the conjurer.
63. Andras — Marquis, 30 legions. Sows discord; considered one of the most dangerous spirits in the entire catalog.
64. Haures (Flauros) — Duke, 36 legions (20 per Pseudomonarchia Daemonum). Speaks truly of creation and divinity if bound in a magic triangle; otherwise deceives.
65. Andrealphus — Marquis, 30 legions. Teaches geometry and measurement; can transform a man into the shape of a bird.
66. Cimeies (Kimaris) — Marquis, 20 legions. Teaches grammar, logic, and rhetoric; locates lost treasure; rules the spirits of Africa.
67. Amdusias (Amduscias) — Duke, 29 legions. Announced by thunder and unseen instruments; can bend trees at will.
68. Belial — King, 80 legions. Distributes senatorships; requires offerings and gifts or will not answer truthfully.
69. Decarabia — Marquis, 30 legions. Knows the virtues of herbs and stones; can transform into birds and sing.
70. Seere (Seir) — Prince, 26 legions. Travels anywhere on Earth almost instantly; brings abundance and helps locate treasure.
71. Dantalion — Duke, 36 legions. Teaches every art and science; knows and can alter the thoughts of any man or woman.
72. Andromalius — Earl, 36 legions. Recovers stolen goods and thieves; punishes wrongdoing; discovers hidden treasure.

The Older Legend: Solomon’s Ring and the Testament of Solomon

The idea that King Solomon commanded demons is far older than the Ars Goetia itself, and it comes from a separate textual tradition that later became fused with the 72-demon catalog in popular imagination.

The earliest reference to a magic ring used to control spirits comes from the Jewish historian Josephus in the 1st century CE, who describes an exorcist named Eleazar using a ring set with a root “revealed by Solomon” to draw a demon out of a possessed man before the Roman emperor Vespasian.

The Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Gittin, folio 68) tells a related story: Solomon uses a ring engraved with the divine name to capture the demon king Ashmedai (Asmodeus) and force him to help locate the shamir, a legendary worm needed to cut stone for the Temple without iron tools — a detail tied to the biblical prohibition on iron touching an altar (Exodus 20:25).

The fullest early account is the Testament of Solomon, a Greek pseudepigraphal text whose composition is dated by researchers anywhere from the late 1st century CE to the medieval period, with most agreeing its core material reflects first-century Jewish demonological beliefs even if the surviving manuscripts are later.

In it, Solomon receives a signet ring from the archangel Michael after a demon named Ornias begins tormenting one of his temple workers nightly, stealing his wages and draining strength from his thumb. Using the ring, Solomon interrogates and binds a series of demons — including Ornias, Beelzeboul, Asmodeus, and a female spirit named Onoskelis — forcing them to labor on the construction of the Temple of Jerusalem.

This is an important distinction that gets blurred in most popular treatments: the demons named in the Testament of Solomon are almost entirely different individuals from the 72 demons of the Ars Goetia. The two traditions share a premise — Solomon subduing spirits with a ring — but not a cast list. The 72-name catalog comes from an entirely separate, much later manuscript lineage, described below.

Archaeological evidence supports how widespread the “Solomon binds a demon” motif became: hundreds of carved gemstones and amulets from the 3rd through 7th centuries CE, cataloged today in collections such as the Campbell Bonner Magical Gems Database, show a mounted rider — identified as Solomon — spearing a prostrate female demon, worn as Roman and Byzantine-era protective jewelry.

The visual symbol most associated with Solomon’s authority — the six-pointed “Star of David” hexagram, popularly called the Seal of Solomon — is itself a later addition to the legend. The specification of the seal as a hexagram appears to arise from a medieval Arab tradition rather than from any early Jewish or Christian source, and most scholars believe the symbol entered Kabbalistic practice in medieval Spain by way of Arabic literature.

Medieval Middle Eastern retellings elaborated the object further, describing a ring made of both brass and iron, with each half used to seal commands to good spirits and evil spirits respectively — a detail with an odd afterlife of its own, since the same “spirit sealed inside a container” motif is generally considered the folkloric root of the much later “genie in the lamp” tradition.

The Real Origin of the List: Johann Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum

The direct ancestor of the 72-demon list is not biblical or medieval — it is a 16th-century work written to discredit belief in demonic power.

In 1563, the Dutch physician Johann Weyer (1515–1588) published De Praestigiis Daemonum (“On the Tricks of Demons”), a systematic argument against the witch trials sweeping Europe. Weyer was a student of the occultist, soldier, and physician Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in Antwerp — Agrippa died when Weyer was only about nineteen, having had just a few years to influence him directly — and Weyer went on to serve as court physician to the Duke of Cleves.

His interest in witchcraft is said to have been sharpened after he was asked to give medical testimony in a court case involving an accused fortune-teller.

The experience led him to spend two decades conducting research before he finally published. Weyer contended that most people accused of witchcraft were suffering from delusion, melancholy, or manipulation by the Devil directly, rather than genuinely holding supernatural power themselves — a position that put him at direct odds with the Malleus Maleficarum, the notorious witch-hunting manual his work is often read as rebutting point by point.

His book has since been described by some commentators as an early landmark in the treatment of mental illness; the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud is reported to have ranked it among the ten most significant books he had ever read.

To the 1577 edition of De Praestigiis Daemonum, Weyer appended a catalog titled Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (“The False Monarchy of Demons”) — a list of 69 demons complete with names, ranks, and the specific hours, directions, and ritual conditions under which they were said to be summoned. Unlike the later Ars Goetia, Weyer’s original Latin list included no seals or sigils at all.

Weyer’s stated purpose was mockery, not instruction. By cataloging the supposed bureaucratic “false monarchy” of Hell in exhaustive, faux-official detail, he intended to make the entire belief system look absurd.

He later claimed to have copied the material from an older source, most likely a text now known (from related surviving manuscripts) as the Liber Officiorum Spirituum — the “Book of the Offices of Spirits” — a Latin work whose own manuscript relatives survive today in the Trinity College Cambridge library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Bodleian Library at Oxford, part of a broader English “Offices of Spirits” manuscript tradition.

Weyer’s list of 69 demons was translated into English in 1584 by Reginald Scot, who included it as an appendix to his own skeptical work, The Discoverie of Witchcraft — again, with the explicit intent of exposing demonology as fraud rather than promoting it.

In a small but telling manuscript accident, the demon Pruflas (also called Bufas), fourth in Weyer’s Latin order, was dropped from Scot’s English translation. That omission helps modern researchers date and cross-reference later derivative texts, since any manuscript missing Pruflas in that same position was very likely copied from Scot’s English version rather than from Weyer’s original Latin.

It is a genuine historical irony that two of the most skeptical, anti-superstition books of the 16th century — one Dutch, one English, both written explicitly to argue that demonology was fraudulent nonsense — became, unintentionally, the direct textual source for one of the most reprinted ceremonial-magic handbooks in the Western world.

From 69 to 72: How the List Became the Ars Goetia

Sometime after 1584, an anonymous English compiler took Weyer’s 69-demon list (via Scot’s translation and possibly other sources), reordered it, added three additional spirits to bring the total to 72, and — critically — added a full set of seals (sigils) for each demon, something entirely absent from Weyer’s original. The expanded, illustrated version became the text now known as the Ars Goetia.

The number 72 was almost certainly chosen deliberately to mirror the Kabbalistic tradition of the Shem HaMephorash, the 72-fold “Explicit Name” of God, derived through a rabbinic technique applied to three consecutive 72-letter verses in Exodus 14:19–21, and traditionally associated with 72 protective angels.

A later manuscript copyist, Thomas Rudd (1583?–1656), made this connection explicit: in his copy of the material, titled Liber Malorum Spirituum seu Goetia, he paired each of the 72 demon seals directly against the seal of one of the 72 Shem HaMephorash angels, whose function was to protect and control the conjurer during the ritual. Rudd’s angelic names and seals were drawn from the papers of the French scholar Blaise de Vigenère — the same source material later used by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers for his own Golden Dawn work.

The Ars Goetia was then folded together with four other independent magical texts — the Ars Theurgia Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel, and Ars Notoria (a memory-and-learning ritual system with roots going back to the 13th century) — into a single five-book compilation. This compilation is what became known as the Lemegeton.

The name “Lemegeton” itself is generally considered a garbled invention, most likely introduced by a compiler with limited Latin who was attempting to render “the Little Key of Solomon” and instead produced “Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis.” The now-common English title, “The Lesser Key of Solomon,” does not appear in any manuscript at all — it was proposed later by the occultist A.E. Waite in 1898, to distinguish the Lemegeton from a separate, unrelated grimoire called the Clavicula Salomonis (Key of Solomon).

The Manuscripts: What Actually Survives

Unlike many grimoires that circulated mostly as rumors, the Ars Goetia’s manuscript trail is unusually well-documented. It is held almost entirely in one place: the British Library’s Sloane manuscript collection, assembled by the physician and collector Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753).

• Sloane MS 2731 — an especially neat, complete English-language copy, begun in January 1686/7. It contains a full set of 72 demon seals. Still, it omits the fifth book, the Ars Notoria, substituting a few unrelated ritual fragments in its place.
• Sloane MS 3648 — a rougher, carelessly written 17th-century codex that also mixes in extracts from Agrippa and Paracelsus, and which the scribe of Sloane 2731 appears to have drawn on directly.
• Sloane MS 3825 — a more internally consistent mid-to-late-17th-century copy, containing a shorter version of the Ars Notoria supplemented from Robert Turner’s 1657 printed translation.
• Harley MS 6483 — held in the British Library’s separate Harleian collection, generally considered the latest of the major copies, dated to around 1712–13, and containing additional material not found in the Sloane texts.

Internal evidence — such as the specific set of demons included and omitted, matching the particular edition of Scot’s translation used — places the earliest plausible compilation of the Ars Goetia as we know it sometime after 1584, with the surviving complete manuscripts all dating from the final decades of the 17th century into the early 18th.

The demon seals themselves have no confirmed source earlier than these manuscripts; the leading scholarly theories are that they were newly invented by the Lemegeton’s compiler using established sigil-construction methods — most plausibly the planetary “kamea” magic squares described in Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1531–33) — or else adapted from an older, now-untraceable visual tradition. Because the seals vary somewhat between manuscripts, they appear to have mutated gradually through hand-copying rather than being fixed from a single canonical source.

The Infernal Hierarchy: Ranks, Legions, and Correspondences

The Ars Goetia organizes its 72 spirits into a strict nobility that mirrors the structure of a medieval European royal court, complete with planetary, metallic, and coloristic correspondences that later occultists (particularly the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) formalized into a complete magical system:

Mathers himself flagged a structural oddity in this correspondence table: of the seven classical planetary metals — lead (Saturn), tin (Jupiter), iron (Mars), gold (the Sun), copper (Venus), a mercury/silver mixture (Mercury), and silver (the Moon) — iron, the metal of Mars, is conspicuously absent from the seal-metal assignments given in the manuscripts, since Earls are instead assigned a copper-and-silver mixture.

Mathers suggested this was very likely a copying error or omission somewhere in the manuscript chain rather than an intentional exclusion, since it leaves one classical planet unrepresented in an otherwise complete sevenfold system.

An important quirk of the system: several spirits are recorded across different manuscripts as holding two ranks simultaneously. Vine (Viné) appears as both King and Earl; Glasya-Labolas as both President and Earl; Gäap as both Prince and President; Botis as both Earl and President. Those who work from the manuscripts directly, rather than smoothing over the inconsistencies, treat these dual titles as evidence of the text’s layered, hybrid origins rather than as errors to be corrected.

The sole Knight of the entire hierarchy of Hell is Furcas, who commands 20 legions and teaches philosophy, astronomy, rhetoric, logic, palmistry (cheiromancy), and pyromancy. Why exactly one spirit has this singular rank, unmatched by any other Knight, is never explained in the text and remains one of the Ars Goetia’s genuine unresolved oddities.

What the Demons Do: Domains and Powers

Read as a set rather than individually, the 72 offices sketch a fairly consistent map of the concerns that mattered to a 16th- and 17th-century petitioner. Frequent categories include:

Knowledge and hidden truths. A large share of the spirits are described as teachers or revealers: Marbas uncovers hidden or secret matters and can cause or cure disease; Paimon instructs in all arts and sciences and confers dignities; Astaroth explains the fall of the rebel angels and teaches the liberal sciences; Furcas teaches logic and rhetoric.

Love, discord, and relationships. Sitri inflames passion and reveals secret desires; Zepar causes women to fall in love with men, but also renders women barren; Vual restores friendship and reconciles enemies; Dantalion is said to influence and read the thoughts and affections of both men and women.

Wealth, treasure, and worldly advancement. Several spirits are described specifically as finders of hidden treasure or granters of favor with the powerful, reflecting the text’s practical, transactional character — this was, functionally, a manual for petitioning spirits for tangible outcomes, not a work of abstract theology.

Transformation and travel. A handful of demons, such as Bathin, are credited with the ability to transport a person suddenly from one country to another and with knowledge of the occult properties of herbs and precious stones.

The now-familiar visual imagery of many of these demons — Astaroth as a winged naked creature riding a dragon-tailed beast, Furfur as an antlered hart, Bael’s toad-man-cat triple head — comes not from the original 17th-century manuscript seals themselves, which are abstract geometric sigils rather than figurative pictures, but from a separate 19th-century illustrated source: the French writer Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, whose 1863 edition was illustrated by the engraver Louis Le Breton.

Because de Plancy only illustrated a portion of the 72, most complete modern illustrated editions mix genuine Le Breton engravings with later artwork created in the same style to fill the gaps — meaning the “classic” look of the Goetic demons in most popular books and websites is a 19th-century artistic interpretation layered on top of a 17th-century textual description, itself derived from a 16th-century satirical catalog.

One big example: the Ars Goetia rarely frames the spirits in explicitly Satanic or purely malevolent terms in the way later popular culture does. They are closer to functionaries with specialized “offices” — a term the text itself uses — than to embodiments of sin.

Modern practitioners in some contemporary schools of ceremonial magic and chaos magic have leaned into this reading, treating the spirits less as external, morally evil beings and more as archetypal forces to be engaged with deliberately and cautiously.

The Golden Dawn Revival: Mathers, Crowley, and the 1904 Edition

The Ars Goetia’s modern popularity owes almost everything to a single publishing event. In the 1890s, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854–1918), co-founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, transcribed and translated the Ars Goetia from the British Museum’s Sloane manuscripts.

Mathers assigned each of the 72 spirits to a specific ten-degree astrological “decan,” tying the entire system into the Golden Dawn’s broader Kabbalistic framework built around the Tree of Life — a structural addition with no basis in the 17th-century manuscripts themselves, but one that became so influential it is now often mistaken for part of the “original” text.

Crowley later extended the decanic system in his 1909 correspondence tables 777, cross-referencing each of the 72 spirits with a Hebrew letter-based gematria value, a minor tarot card, and a specific zodiacal decan of ten degrees — for example, assigning Cimeies (spirit 66) to the third decan of Capricorn and the Four of Disks (Pentacles).

None of the numerological and astrological scaffolding exists anywhere in the 17th-century Sloane manuscripts; it is entirely a Golden Dawn-era addition, though it is now so profoundly embedded in modern occult reference books that it is frequently presented as if it were original to the grimoire.

In 1904, Aleister Crowley published an edited version of Mathers’ translation under the title The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King. Crowley made two significant additions of his own: a “Preliminary Invocation” drawn from a Greco-Egyptian magical papyrus (later nicknamed the “Bornless Ritual” by later practitioners), grafting a roughly 2nd-century Egyptian exorcism text onto the front of a 17th-century English demon catalog; and an essay titled “The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic,” in which Crowley reframed the 72 demons as symbolic representations of parts of the human subconscious rather than literal external entities — a psychological reading of the material that had no precedent in any earlier version of the text and that greatly shaped how 20th-century occultism approached the Goetia.

The result of this layered transmission — a 15th/16th-century demon catalog, expanded and sigil-illustrated in 17th-century England, filtered through 19th-century Golden Dawn Kabbalah, with a 2nd-century Egyptian ritual grafted onto the front and a 20th-century psychological reinterpretation layered on top — is the version of the Ars Goetia that has circulated ever since and that underlies virtually every modern edition in print.

Evidence the Text Was Actually Used

Despite its literary and compiled nature, there is documented evidence that people genuinely attempted to use Solomonic ritual material of this kind, rather than treating it purely as reading matter.

Surviving records include trial documents from the Venetian Inquisition describing the use of Solomonic conjuring techniques by accused practitioners; the Book of Oberon — a 16th-century English practitioner’s working notebook of ritual magic, closely related to the Ars Goetia tradition and containing genuine evocation instructions rather than literary description; and the medical casebooks of the physician-astrologer Richard Napier (1559–1634), which record the application of Solomonic techniques alongside conventional medical practice for patients he believed to be afflicted by spirits.

Physical evidence of use also survives directly on some grimoire manuscripts themselves, in the form of wear patterns, candle-wax stains, and marginal annotations left by past owners — the kind of physical evidence codicologists use to distinguish a manuscript that was actually handled during ritual work from one that was copied purely as a curiosity or a collector’s item.

Taken together, this evidence indicates that at least some portion of the Ars Goetia’s early readership treated it as a working ritual manual rather than as the literary curiosity or piece of anti-superstition satire its underlying source material, Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, was originally intended to be.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius. Three Books of Occult Philosophy. 1533.
• Bane, Theresa. Encyclopedia of Demons in World Religions and Cultures. McFarland & Company, 2012. Internet Archive.
• Collin de Plancy, Jacques. Dictionnaire infernal: répertoire universel des êtres, des personnages, des livres, des faits et des choses qui tiennent aux esprits. 6th ed., Henri Plon, 1863. Internet Archive.
• Kieckhefer, Richard. Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century. Sutton Publishing, 1998.
• Solomon, King of Israel (attributed). The Key of Solomon the King (Clavicula Salomonis). Translated and edited by S. Liddell MacGregor Mathers, George Redway, 1889. Internet Archive.
• McCown, Chester Charlton, editor. The Testament of Solomon. J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1922. Internet Archive. Edited from manuscripts at Mount Athos, Bologna, Holkham Hall, Jerusalem, London, Milan, Paris, and Vienna.
• De Laurence, L. W. The Lesser Key of Solomon, Goetia. Project Gutenberg, 7 Nov. 2023. Originally published by De Laurence, Scott & Co., 1916.
• Henson, Mitch, and Jeff Wellman, editors. Lemegeton: The Complete Lesser Key of Solomon. Metatron Books, 1999. Internet Archive.
• Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Edited by Brinsley Nicholson, Elliot Stock, 1886. Internet Archive. Reprint of the 1584 edition.
• Waite, Arthur Edward. The Book of Ceremonial Magic. Cosimo, Inc., 2007.
• Gasdia, Russell. Frightful Demons and Faithful Prayer: Possession, Exorcism, and Religious Sentiments in Johann Weyer’s De Praestigiis Daemonum and Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Academia.edu.
• Kalmin, Richard. The Demons in Solomon’s Temple. (2014). ResearchGate.