An Anthology That Reads as One Book

The Lemegeton is not a work with an author. It is a compilation, and the Ars Goetia is only the first of the five parts bound with it, alongside the Ars Theurgia Goetia, the Ars Paulina, the Ars Almadel and the Ars Notoria. Those five differ in age, in language of origin and in temper: the Ars Notoria descends from a medieval devotional technique for acquiring learning by prayer, and sits oddly beside a book of constrained spirits. Nothing in the manuscripts names the compiler, and the surviving copies in the British Library are seventeenth century English books rather than an original. So the Ars Goetia has to be read as a compiler's selection from older stock. Its catalogue of spirits corresponds closely to the list Johann Weyer printed, and Weyer in turn said he was reproducing a manuscript he did not endorse. What the Lemegeton adds is the apparatus: the seals to be engraved, the circle and triangle, and the wording of the conjurations.

A separate recension associated with Thomas Rudd pairs each spirit with an angel of the Shemhamphorash set against it, which changes the theology of the book without changing its list. The atlas therefore records the Ars Goetia as a stage in a chain of copying rather than as a composition. Which stage added the seals, and where the compiler found them, is not settled by anything in the manuscripts themselves.