Ars Goetia: Where the 72 Demons Actually Came From

What the Lemegeton is — and what it is not

The full title is Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, "Lesser Key of Solomon." The name is both a claim and a misdirection. It leans on the older Clavicula Salomonis, the Key of Solomon proper, a very differently built grimoire of planetary magic — but the two share neither text nor origin. What we call the Lemegeton survives in English manuscripts written no earlier than about 1640, now in the British Library, the best known catalogued as Sloane 2731 and Sloane 3648. The word Lemegeton itself has no secure etymology. It appears with these manuscripts and nowhere before them.

The book has five parts that originally had nothing to do with one another and were bound under one roof by a compiler:

• Ars Goetia — the 72 spirits, with seals and legions.
• Ars Theurgia-Goetia — 31 aerial spirits and their compass directions.
• Ars Paulina — angels of the hours and of the degrees of the zodiac.
• Ars Almadel — a wax tablet for the "altitudes" of heaven.
• Ars Notoria — a medieval prayer book for learning quickly, a good four centuries older than the rest.

When someone today says "the Goetia," they almost always mean the first part only — and often only the list. If you want the outlier of the five, the Ars Notoria promised knowledge rather than spirits, and sits oddly inside a demon book.

Where the 72 spirits actually came from

Here is the point of the whole book. The list of 72 is not secret lore out of Solomon's temple. It is an expansion of a printed text anyone could buy: the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum of the physician Johann Weyer, published in 1577 as an appendix to his major work De praestigiis daemonum.

Weyer had studied with Agrippa and was an early opponent of the witch trials. He printed the spirit list to show how ridiculous the conjuring literature was. He left the conjuration formulas out on purpose — so that no one could misuse them — and he named his source: a Liber officiorum spirituum, a "book of the offices of spirits," now lost.

Weyer counts 69 spirits. The Englishman Reginald Scot translated the list in 1584 in his Discoverie of Witchcraft — also a book against witch belief — and so made it known in England. The compiler of the Lemegeton took it over, added three names (Vassago, Seere and Dantalion), put them in a new order, gave every spirit a seal, and restored the conjurations Weyer had withheld. An appendix meant to make demons look foolish became the handbook that teaches their evocation.

The number 72 is not arbitrary either. It matches the 72 names of God in Kabbalah, the Shem ha-Mephorash, and the 72 angels derived from them. The spirits are built as their mirror image.

How the list grew — four stations

Date	Text	What changed
before 1577	Liber officiorum spirituum	Lost source, known only from Weyer's mention
1577	Weyer, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum	69 spirits, no seals, no conjurations — omitted deliberately
1584	Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft	English translation, also meant as criticism
c. 1640	Lemegeton, Ars Goetia	72 spirits with seals, ranks, legions and conjurations
1904	Mathers / Crowley, The Goetia	The edition the twentieth century actually read

The brass vessel: the Solomon legend

The book's framing story is older than the book. Josephus already reports in the first century that God gave Solomon the art of binding demons, and that a Jew named Eleazar demonstrated the art before Vespasian. The Testament of Solomon, a Greek text from somewhere between the first and third centuries, then tells at length how Solomon uses a signet ring to compel demons to work on the Temple, interrogating each one for its name, its office and the angel who counters it. That is the blueprint for every later spirit list: name, appearance, office, remedy.

The Lemegeton tells the legend in its own version. Solomon shut the 72 spirits and their legions into a brass vessel, sealed it, and threw it into a deep lake near Babylon. The Babylonians took it for treasure, hauled it up and opened it — and the spirits went back to their old places. Only Belial, the story says, went into an image and gave oracles. The tale explains why the spirits are loose and why Solomon's tools are needed to bind them. It is legend, not history — but a legend that has been retold for nearly two thousand years.

Ranks, legions, seals: how the Ars Goetia is built

The Ars Goetia is strictly formatted. Every entry names the spirit, its rank, the shape in which it appears, its office — what it teaches or brings about — the number of legions it commands, and its seal, a line-drawn mark the conjurer is told to wear on metal. The ranks are arranged on the model of a royal court, and each rank carries an assigned metal and time of day. Some spirits hold two ranks, which is why the totals add up to more than 72.

That courtly structure is the tell. This is not a survival of Near Eastern demonology; it is early modern Europe imagining the spirit world as a monarchy with a chain of command, because that is what its compilers knew. The same instinct produced the wider esoteric picture of demons as an ordered hierarchy rather than a chaos.

One detail matters for anyone reading the book as history: the names of the Ars Theurgia-Goetia, the second part, were taken from the Steganographia of Johannes Trithemius — which is not a spirit book at all but an enciphered textbook of cryptography. The "spirit names" there are, in large part, a cipher key. The compiler read a code manual as demonology.

Circle, triangle, ring — the ceremony as text

The ceremonial apparatus of the Ars Goetia is famous and heavily illustrated: a magic circle for the operator, a triangle set outside it where the spirit is to appear, a hexagram and pentagram worn as protection, a ring, and a brass vessel echoing the legend. Much of it is drawn with more confidence than any manuscript supports — the illustrations that most people picture come from the 1904 printing, not from Sloane 2731.

We are describing this, not instructing it. This article gives no conjuration, no seal drawings to copy and no operating procedure, and that is a deliberate editorial line rather than squeamishness. The historical value of the Goetia is in how it was assembled; the ritual text is the part most likely to be taken as a promise, and it is the part with nothing behind it. If you want the honest comparison of what a grimoire is versus what a personal practice book is, that belongs in grimoire versus book of shadows.

What an American reader tends to get wrong about this

Three things, and all three are worth correcting.

First: "the Goetia is ancient." In American occult publishing the Lemegeton is routinely presented as a survival from Solomon's court, sometimes as "the oldest grimoire." It is neither. The manuscripts are English and seventeenth-century. The attribution to Solomon is a genre convention of grimoire literature, the same move that put Moses's name on the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses — a book that, by a considerable irony, had far more real-world influence in the United States than the Goetia did, through Pennsylvania Dutch powwow practice and later through Black American hoodoo publishing.

Second: the pentagram in the illustrations is not a Wiccan pentacle. The Goetia's figures are protective seals in a Solomonic frame, drawn a century before modern Pagan usage existed and meaning something different. The distinction is worth having straight before you wear either, and we set it out in pentacle versus pentagram.

Third: the text you are reading online is almost certainly the 1904 edition. Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers translated and edited it; Aleister Crowley financed the printing, put his name on it and added a preface arguing that the spirits are parts of the human brain. That preface is why so much modern American practice treats the 72 as psychological forces rather than as entities — a reading that comes from 1904, not from the manuscripts. Because the 1904 book is in the public domain in the United States, it is the version that free text archives host, which is exactly why it became the default. The scholarly edition to use instead is Joseph H. Peterson's The Lesser Key of Solomon (2001), which collates the manuscripts and shows where the printed version departs from them.

From Mathers and Crowley to the video game

The Goetia's afterlife is bigger than its practice. Because the list is public domain, vivid and pre-formatted — name, rank, appearance, power — it reads like a ready-made bestiary, and that is how twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular culture has used it. Demon names from the Ars Goetia turn up across video games, tabletop roleplaying bestiaries, comics, heavy metal and American supernatural television, usually with the rank and the legion count carried straight over and the history dropped.

This is worth naming for a simple reason: for most readers under forty, the first encounter with these names was not a grimoire. It was a game. That is not a failure of seriousness, but it does mean the names arrive pre-loaded with attributes an early modern compiler invented and a scriptwriter extended.

What we don't promise

We make no claim that the 72 spirits exist, that their seals do anything, or that any ceremony in the Lemegeton produces an effect in the world. There is no evidence for any of it, and this article is not a workbook. We also do not treat the Goetia as harmless quaint fun: people do get frightened by this material, and a smaller number get preoccupied with it in ways that are not good for them. If reading about demons is making you anxious, sleepless or convinced that something is attached to you, that is a signal to step back and talk to someone you trust — and if the distress is persistent, a clinician. That is not a dismissal of your experience; it is the same advice we would give about any material that is keeping you up at night.

Practically: how to work with this

1. Read the Peterson edition, not the free one. If you want to know what the manuscripts say, the 2001 collation is the only widely available text that shows the variants.
2. Read Weyer first, then the Goetia. The order matters. Once you have seen the 1577 list without seals or conjurations, the 1640 version reads as what it is: an editor adding the machinery back in.
3. Separate the three layers when you take notes — the ancient legend (Testament of Solomon), the early modern list (Weyer/Scot/Lemegeton), and the modern psychological reading (Crowley 1904 onward). Most confusion online comes from collapsing them.
4. Treat the pop-culture versions as a separate subject. They are interesting, but they are not evidence about the text.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Lesser Key of Solomon the same as the Key of Solomon?
No. Different text, different origin, different structure. The Lesser Key borrowed the name.

Did King Solomon write the Ars Goetia?
No. There is no manuscript before the seventeenth century, and the attribution is a standard convention of the genre.

Why exactly 72 spirits?
The number mirrors the 72 names of God in Kabbalah and the 72 angels derived from them. Weyer's earlier list has 69; three names were added to reach the symmetrical number.

Was Johann Weyer a magician?
The opposite. He was a physician and an early critic of the witch trials who printed the list to discredit conjuring, and who withheld the formulas on purpose.

Is it dangerous to read?
Reading a historical text is not dangerous. Becoming preoccupied with demonology while you are already anxious can be, in the ordinary way that any fixation can be. Judge it by how you feel afterwards.

Where can I see the actual manuscripts?
The principal witnesses are in the British Library's Sloane collection, and the catalogue entries are public.

Sources & further reading

• Joseph H. Peterson (ed.), The Lesser Key of Solomon: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, 2001 — manuscript collation and introduction.
• Johann Weyer, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, 1577, appendix to De praestigiis daemonum.
• Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584.
• Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, 2009.
• Testament of Solomon, Greek, 1st–3rd century CE; Josephus, Antiquities 8.2.5.
• Jim Reeds, "Solved: The Ciphers in Book III of Trithemius's Steganographia," Cryptologia, 1998.
• British Library, Sloane MSS 2731, 3648, 3825 — catalogue records.