What the Ars Goetia actually is — and what it isn’t

The name carries more weight than it deserves. “Lesser Key of Solomon” implies a definitive text descending from biblical antiquity — but that title never appears in any manuscript. A.E. Waite coined it in 1898 to distinguish the Lemegeton from the separate Clavicula Salomonis, and it stuck. The actual title circulating in 17th-century manuscripts was Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis — “The Little Key of Solomon” — which is different enough to matter.

The Ars Goetia is the first of five sections: Ars Goetia, Ars Theurgia Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel, and Ars Notoria. Of those five, only the Ars Goetia has penetrated popular culture. The other four — which cover aerial spirits, planetary intelligence, angelic hierarchies, and a memory art borrowed from the 13th century — remain largely unstudied outside specialist circles.

The word “goetia” derives from the Greek goēteía, meaning sorcery or witchcraft — specifically the low art of compelling spirits by force, as opposed to theurgy, which works through divine petition. This distinction mattered enormously to Renaissance magicians. Goetic practice was dangerous, borderline illicit, and precisely the kind of thing a magician would claim not to practice while practicing it.

The Solomon legend that anchors the whole text originates in Jewish midrash and the Babylonian Talmud, where the king’s dominion over spirits is described alongside his famous wisdom. Islamic tradition — particularly Quranic references to Solomon commanding the jinn — added its own layers. By the Renaissance, these converging traditions produced a rich body of Solomonic magic that made no clear distinction between what was Jewish, Arabic, or Christian in origin.

The practical implication for modern researchers: the Ars Goetia is a compilation assembled from at least three distinct sources — Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1577), Reginald Scot’s translation thereof in the Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), and material from Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, plus the Heptameron and the Magical Calendar. It is not ancient. Internal evidence — the absence of Pruflas, whose omission only appears in a specific edition of Scot — places the earliest possible compilation date at 1570 at the absolute minimum, and the text as we have it likely dates from 1641.

The manuscript transmission chain

The most under-appreciated fact about the Goetia is how many hands changed it before Mathers and Crowley produced the 1904 edition that most practitioners work from. Here is the actual chain:

The comparison between Weyer and the Ars Goetia is where the interesting editorial decisions surface. Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia lists 69 spirits — not 72 — and explicitly omits sigils. Four spirits appear in the Goetia that are nowhere in Weyer: Vassago (spirit 3), Seere (spirit 70), Dantalion (spirit 71), and Andromalius (spirit 72). Meanwhile, Pruflas — the fourth spirit in Weyer — vanishes from the Goetia entirely. That particular omission links the Goetia genealogically to a specific edition of Scot’s translation, which contains the same omission, placing the text’s compilation firmly after 1584.

The six ranks and what they encode

The hierarchy of the 72 spirits is not decorative. According to a footnote in Wikipedia’s scholarly summary of the list (derived from the Wikipedia article on Ars Goetia demons), each rank maps to a planetary association: kings correspond to the Sun, marquises to the Moon, presidents to Mercury, dukes to Venus, earls to Mars, princes to Jupiter, and the sole knight (Furcas, spirit 50) to Saturn. This is Hermetic astrology embedded in the demonological system — the cosmos reflected in the infernal hierarchy.

The four kings of the cardinal directions — Amaymon (East), Corson (West), Ziminiar (North), and Gaap (South) — sit above the 72 in the text’s implied hierarchy, though they are not counted among the 72. A footnote variant names them differently: Oriens, Paymon, Ariton, and Amaymon, with their “preferred rabbinic names” listed as Samael, Azazael, Azael, and Mahazael. This is Kabbalah bleeding into demonology — the four princes of the Qliphoth mapped onto the four compass directions.

Some spirits hold dual ranks — “Count/President,” “Marquis/Count” — reflecting either variant traditions in the source manuscripts or the text’s failure to fully resolve its composite origin. Botis (spirit 17) is “Count and President.” Ronové (spirit 27) is “Marquis and Earl.” These are not errors; they are seams where the sources didn’t quite merge.

Complete list: all 72 spirits

What follows is the complete sequence as given in the Ars Goetia, with ranks and primary attributed powers. Spelling follows the Peterson (2001) critical edition where it differs from Mathers/Crowley. The “legions” column reflects the number of demonic legions each spirit commands — numbers which vary across manuscripts and should be understood as symbolic indicators of relative importance rather than literal figures.

Deep profiles: the nine most-studied spirits

Nine spirits dominate the scholarly and practitioner literature — either because of their power classification, their cross-cultural appearances, or their particular resonance with modern psychological interpretations. What follows goes beyond the table descriptions.

Sigils and the logic of their structure

Sigils are the most immediately recognizable element of the Ars Goetia, and the most frequently reproduced without context. Each of the 72 spirits has a unique seal — a geometric glyph used to summon or bind that spirit. Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia had no sigils at all. They appear for the first time in the Sloane manuscripts.

The structural logic of the sigils has been analyzed by several scholars and practitioners without consensus on a single underlying system. The most defensible observation is that they are not random: similar spirits within the same rank tend to share geometric families — dukes more often use curves and arcs, kings tend toward more angular, cross-like forms. Whether this reflects a deliberate design principle or simply the aesthetic preferences of whoever drew the Sloane manuscripts has not been established.

Crowley’s 1904 edition introduced the double-circle format (name in the outer ring, spirit name in Roman letters) and redrew all sigils. The Harley MS variant, which preserves both Hebrew and Roman lettering, is considered closer to the Sloane originals. For anyone working with sigils in ritual contexts, this distinction matters: the commonly circulated Crowley-edition sigils are 1904 editorial reconstructions, not faithful reproductions of 17th-century originals.

The ritual system: circle, triangle, vessel

The Goetia’s ritual system is more specific than most popular accounts suggest. It specifies seven required implements: the Great Seal of Solomon, the Hexagram of Solomon, the Pentagram of Solomon, the Ring of Solomon, the Vessel of Brass, the Secret Seal of Solomon, and specific garments for the magician. These are not decorative — each has a described function in the working.

The essential dynamic is spatial: the magician stands inside a protective circle inscribed with divine names, while the spirit is called into a triangle outside the circle. The triangle bears three divine names at its points — Anaphaxeton, Primeumaton, and Tetragrammaton — and contains a small circle in the center where the spirit’s sigil is placed. The spirit cannot cross into the magician’s circle; the magician does not step into the triangle.

The brass vessel is used for binding spirits after they have been worked with — the text’s preface says Solomon thus confined the 72. The Secret Seal of Solomon (distinct from the Hexagram and Pentagram of Solomon) is engraved on the bottom of the brass vessel. Crowley’s edition includes a “Preliminary Invocation” and Enochian-language versions of some conjurations that do not appear in any Sloane manuscript — he added them. The Sloane originals are without these additions.

Modern practice: three camps and what they actually do

The Goetia is practiced more widely in 2026 than at any point since the 17th century — the convergence of internet distribution, chaos magic influence, and a broad cultural turn toward occult practice created conditions no publisher of the Sloane manuscripts would have predicted. But “Goetia practice” means three genuinely different things depending on who is doing it.

Camp 1: Ceremonial literalists

These practitioners attempt the full ritual system as described — protective circle, Triangle of Art, brass vessel, appropriate timing, the complete conjuration texts. This group is smaller than forum activity suggests. The full system requires considerable material preparation, space, and time. The neuralgrimoire.com research community has documented a small but consistent group of practitioners working in this tradition, citing Peterson’s 2001 edition as their primary source. Their accounts uniformly note the difference between what the Sloane manuscripts specify and what Crowley’s edition omits or alters.

Camp 2: Chaos magic interpretivists

A second group treats the 72 spirits as psychological archetypes — aspects of consciousness rather than external entities. The sigils become tools for accessing specific cognitive or emotional states; “summoning Buné” means deliberately entering a mental mode associated with eloquence and abundance. Crowley’s own essays in the 1904 edition actually opened this door — he wrote about the rituals as psychological exploration. This tradition runs through Austin Osman Spare and into modern chaos magic, where the spirits are explicitly reframed as components of the unconscious mind. Jungian shadow work and Goetic practice have been discussed together in contemporary esoteric psychology circles, though no peer-reviewed academic work has explored this overlap in detail.

Camp 3: Pop-culture eclectics

The largest group by volume uses Goetia imagery, sigils, and spirit names as aesthetic and conceptual touchstones without committing to any particular ontological claim about the spirits’ nature. This group has been significantly shaped by the appearance of Goetia material in games (particularly the Shin Megami Tensei franchise), music, and visual art. Their engagement with the text is real but differently oriented — more interested in the system’s symbolic depth than in ritual application.

The practical implication of these three camps is that “Goetia resources” online are heavily skewed toward camp 3’s aesthetics and camp 2’s interpretive framework, while the literal ritual system of camp 1 is significantly underrepresented in accessible writing. Anyone researching actual practice — rather than cultural reception — needs to account for this distribution.

One thing genuinely under-appreciated across all three camps: the Ars Notoria, the fifth book of the Lemegeton, which predates everything else in the collection by centuries (first mentioned in 1236) and consists of prayers intended to grant eidetic memory and rapid learning — operating through angelic rather than demonic mediation. Its relationship to the Goetia’s spirit system has been almost entirely unexplored in the popular literature.

Scholarly resources and primary texts

The gap between popular Goetia literature and serious scholarship is large. Most widely-circulated guides work from Mathers/Crowley without acknowledging the manuscript tradition that predates it. For anyone wanting to go deeper — whether as researcher, practitioner, or curious reader — the following resources represent genuine primary and secondary sources.