The number 72 was not chosen by accident. In Kabbalistic tradition, the Shemhamphorasch — the 72-letter name of God — derives from three consecutive verses of Exodus (14:19–21), each containing exactly 72 Hebrew letters. Each cluster of three letters, one drawn from each verse, produces one of the 72 divine names, each paired with an angel. The 72 demons of the Ars Goetia are, in this framework, their Qliphothic mirror: the shadow-counterpart of the divine name system, infernal where the angelic is celestial, but identical in number and structural logic.

That symmetry is not coincidental. It is the product of deliberate theological architecture — and it tells you something important about what the Goetia actually is. Not a random catalog of monsters. Not King Solomon’s diary. A composite text assembled across centuries from demonized Canaanite gods, medieval manuscript traditions, Kabbalistic numerology, and Renaissance demonology, stitched together by anonymous compilers who understood exactly what they were building.

This is the account the standard grimoire introductions skip: where the 72 actually came from, what the hierarchy means structurally, which demons can be traced to specific pre-Christian deities, and why a 17th-century occult text compiled in England became one of the most influential documents in Western esotericism. The scholarship on this has deepened considerably since Joseph Peterson’s critical edition of the Lemegeton in 2001. The picture that emerges is stranger, and more historically grounded, than most occult sources acknowledge.

What “Goetia” Actually Means — And Why the Greeks Would Have Laughed

The word goetia comes from the Greek goēs — an itinerant sorcerer, specifically one who performed necromantic rites, chthonic invocations, and rituals associated with the dead. Plato, in the Republic, uses the term with obvious contempt. The goētes were the traveling conjurers, the roadside magicians who hawked cures and curses at the margins of respectable society. Goeteia was low magic: fraudulent, chthonic, socially disreputable.

Against this, Plato placed theurgy — high magic, the ascent toward the divine through ritual participation with the gods. The Neoplatonists, especially Iamblichus, developed this distinction extensively. Theurgists worked upward; goetes worked downward.

The Ars Goetia — the “Art of Goetia” — inverts this hierarchy in a deeply interesting way. It claims to be low magic in name while operating through unmistakably high-magic mechanisms: the operator commands the spirits not through any personal power, but through the authority of divine names — the Tetragrammaton, the names of the archangels, the Seal of Solomon. The grimoire is formally goetic but structurally theurgic. This tension was recognized even in the 17th century. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, whose Occult Philosophy fed directly into the Lemegeton tradition, wrote that “Goetia is unfortunate, by the commerces of unclean spirits made up of the rites of wicked curiosities.” Yet Agrippa spent decades studying and systematizing precisely this material.

The Latin term inherited from this Greek root, goetia, came to refer generally to the evocation of spirits through low magical means. By the time the Lemegeton was compiled in the mid-17th century, the word had shed its class connotations but retained its association with spirit-compulsion as opposed to spirit-invitation. That distinction matters operationally: the Goetia is a text about forcing spirits to obey, not petitioning them to cooperate.

The Transmission Chain: How 72 Demons Arrived in a 17th-Century Grimoire

The Ars Goetia is not old. The Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis — the “Little Key of Solomon,” of which the Goetia is the first of five books — was compiled in England in the mid-17th century, drawn primarily from materials that were themselves only a few generations older. What makes it feel ancient is the deliberate pseudepigraphical attribution to Solomon, and the fact that the source texts it draws from do trace back, through a long chain, to genuinely ancient traditions.

Here is that chain, reconstructed from Peterson’s 2001 critical edition and subsequent scholarship:

Which Demons Were Gods: The Demonization Question

The most persistent claim in popular occult writing — that the 72 demons of the Goetia are demonized deities of older religions — is partially true and mostly overstated. The actual picture, based on scholarly analysis rather than tradition, is more specific and more interesting.

The mechanism of demonization has a documented textual trigger. Psalm 96:5 in the Greek Septuagint reads: “all the gods of the nations are daimonia” — demons. The Hebrew original uses elilim, meaning worthless idols, not demonic beings. But it was the Greek text that shaped Christian demonology for centuries. Paul reinforced it in 1 Corinthians 10:20, writing that Gentile sacrifices are offered to demons rather than to God. Once that theological framework was established, every deity of a conquered or marginalized religion became a candidate for reclassification as an infernal spirit.

Of the 72 Goetia spirits, scholarly consensus identifies approximately 8–12 that can be traced with reasonable confidence to specific pre-Christian deities. Perhaps 5–10 more have been proposed with weaker evidence. The remaining 50-plus have names of uncertain origin — possibly corrupted through centuries of manuscript copying, possibly invented by medieval grimoire authors, possibly derived from Hebrew, Greek, or Latin roots that no longer map clearly to known divine figures.

The Strongest Cases

Astaroth (spirit #29, Duke) derives from Astarte/Ashtoreth, the great Semitic goddess of love, war, and the evening star — cognate with the Babylonian Ishtar. In the Goetia she becomes a male Duke who “willingly answers all questions concerning past, present, and future.” The Hebrew Bible consistently condemns Ashtoreth worship (1 Kings 11:5; 2 Kings 23:13), making the demonization historically documented.

Bael (spirit #1, King) — rendered as the first and therefore highest-ranking spirit in the Goetia — almost certainly derives from Ba’al, the Canaanite storm and fertility deity whose worship was the primary religious competitor to Yahwism throughout the period of the Israelite monarchy. The biblical polemic against Ba’al runs from Numbers through 2 Kings. By making Ba’al/Bael the first demon in the catalog, the Goetia’s compilers encoded a theological statement in the alphabetical and numerical structure of the text.

Amon (spirit #7, Marquis) carries the name of Amun — the king of the Egyptian gods during the New Kingdom period (c. 1550–1070 BCE), the deity of the great temple complex at Karnak. In the Goetia, Amon appears in the form of a wolf with a serpent’s tail and speaks of past and future events. The archaeological record at Karnak documents one of the largest cult complexes in human history; the Goetia reduced its presiding deity to a numbered spirit in an infernal catalog.

Berith (spirit #28, Duke) is Ba’al Berith — “Lord of the Covenant” — a deity worshipped at Shechem, explicitly named in the Book of Judges (8:33 and 9:4). Excavations at Tell Balata, the site of ancient Shechem, uncovered a massive Late Bronze Age temple identified by archaeologists as Ba’al Berith’s cult site. The physical evidence for the deity’s worship and the textual documentation of his demonization form one of the cleaner archaeological threads in this entire question.

Asmoday (spirit #32, King) relates to Asmodeus, the demonic figure from the Jewish Book of Tobit and the Talmud, who may in turn derive from the Zoroastrian demon Aeshma Daeva. This represents a slightly different pathway: not a deity demonized by Christian competition, but a figure who was already demonic in one tradition absorbed into another’s taxonomy.

The Hierarchy: An Infernal Feudal Court

The Goetia organizes its 72 spirits according to a rank system modeled on medieval European nobility. This was not arbitrary decoration — it was a deliberate mapping of infernal power onto the most familiar political structure the 17th-century reader possessed. The feudal analogy carried real operational significance: rank determined the number of legions a spirit commanded, and, by the grimoire’s internal logic, the relative difficulty of compulsion.

Higher-ranking spirits commanded more legions and were considered more resistant and potentially more dangerous to invoke without adequate preparation. The rank structure also organized the catalog — the 72 entries are not alphabetical but follow an internal hierarchy with Kings interspersed throughout rather than grouped at the top.

One detail that gets consistently muddled in popular sources: several spirits hold dual ranks. Botis (#17) is both Count and President. Ipos (#22) is both Count and Prince. Gaap (#33) is both Prince and President. Different manuscript editions record different primary ranks for these spirits, which is why the total rank count across some editions reaches 77 rather than 72. Peterson’s critical edition tracks these variants carefully; the Crowley-Mathers edition flattens them.

Six Demons Worth Understanding in Depth

Rather than a numbered list of 72 brief entries — which every other article on this topic provides — the following focuses on six spirits whose historical, theological, or structural significance repays closer examination.