A Nineteenth Century Edition and the Century After It

Almost every modern encounter with the Ars Goetia runs through one printed book. The edition prepared from Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers's translation and issued by Aleister Crowley in 1904 fixed the English wording, the spelling of the spirit names and the drawing of the seals for everyone who came after. Crowley's preliminary invocation and his framing of the spirits as portions of the human brain were his own addition rather than anything in the manuscripts, and they travelled with the text, so a reader who takes that edition as the book is reading a layered object. The consequences reach well past ceremonial practice.

The seventy two seals became a visual vocabulary of their own, reproduced in fiction, in album art, in tabletop games and in film, usually with the ranks and offices detached from them. The ranks are worth noticing on their own account: kings, dukes, presidents, marquises and earls, an infernal court modelled on an earthly one, with each spirit assigned duties that read like the services a patron might want, from finding treasure to teaching languages. The atlas describes what the book contains and how it has been used. It does not set out its procedures as instruction, and it treats the modern demonological imagery that descends from the seals as reception rather than as evidence of the text's origins.