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The List Behind the Goetia

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The List Behind the Goetia

The seventy two demons of the Ars Goetia, the first book of the seventeenth century Lemegeton or Lesser Key of Solomon, are not an independent invention. Close to seventy of Weyer's sixty nine entries reappear in the Goetia recognizably, often with the same name, a similar rank and comparable powers, which is the strongest evidence that whoever compiled the Lemegeton's first book worked directly from Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, or from a common manuscript ancestor very close to it, rather than drawing on some wholly separate tradition. The Goetia's compiler added a small number of spirits Weyer's list lacks, adjusted some ranks and names, and, most significantly, stripped away Weyer's skeptical framing entirely, presenting the catalog straightforwardly as a working conjurer's reference rather than as an exhibit in an argument against believing any of it.

That difference in framing is the real distance between the two texts. Weyer catalogued the demons to discredit the courts that took confessions of demon-pacts as evidence of real crimes; the Goetia's compiler catalogued substantially the same demons as practical magical knowledge, seals, hierarchies and conjuration instructions included, for a reader who wanted to use them. This atlas records the Goetia's seventy two spirits as textually descended from this catalog, while keeping the two texts as separate records: Weyer's work is not the Goetia, and treating it as merely an early draft of the Goetia would erase the argument he actually wrote it to make.

The catalog also appeared bound with, and is sometimes catalogued alongside, Weyer's earlier De Praestigiis Daemonum, of which it was first printed as an appendix in the 1577 edition.

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