Aim

This spirit carries more forms of its name than almost any other in the catalogue. Weyer has Aym, and also Haborym or Haborim; the Lemegeton manuscripts give Aim, Aym and Haborym in various combinations, sometimes presenting them as alternatives for one spirit and sometimes reading as though two entries had been merged.

The variety matters because Haborym has occasionally been connected to the Hebrew haverim, companions, and through that to speculative derivations of the kind this corpus attracts. The connection is a guess. Nothing in Weyer or the Lemegeton offers an etymology for any spirit in the list, and no medieval or ancient source has been produced in which a demon of this name appears with these offices.

What is documented is a pattern in the transmission. Where a Latin list gave two forms for one entry, a name and an alias, English translation and recopying could preserve both, lose one, or split the entry in two. The Goetia's catalogue shows evidence of all three outcomes at different points. Naberius and Cerberus stand as alternatives in some readings. Cimeies appears as Cimeries and Cimejes. Haures appears as Flauros, Hauras and Havres.

For a reader this has a practical consequence. The apparent stability of the seventy-two names is an artefact of the modern editions, which pick one form and print it. In the manuscripts the list is looser than that, and a name is often a small dossier of variants rather than a fixed label. Arguments that depend on precise spelling need to be checked against a source that reports the variants rather than smoothing them away.

Almost every modern encounter with the Goetia runs through a single small book published in 1904.

Its title page reads The Book of the Goetia or, The Lesser Key of Solomon the King: From Numerous Manuscripts in Hebrew, Latin, French and English, and it was issued at Foyers in Inverness by the Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth. The translation and editorial work were Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers's. The publication was Aleister Crowley's, and Crowley supervised it, supplied prefatory matter of his own, and gave it a prominence in his later output that it would not otherwise have had. The two men were by then estranged, and the circumstances of the publication have been argued over ever since.

Three things about this edition should be held in mind by anyone using it.

It is a Golden Dawn document as much as a Solomonic one. Mathers read the material through the correspondences his order used everywhere else, and the framing reflects that.

Its spellings are not always defensible. Joseph Peterson, working from the manuscripts, reports that the edition contains numerous alternate spellings of the spirit names for which he can find no manuscript support. Where a modern book gives an unusual form, the 1904 text is the first place to check.

And it fixed the canon. The seventy-two names as most people know them, in the order most people know them, are the 1904 order and the 1904 spellings, reproduced without attribution across a century of derivative books, games, novels and albums. That is a considerable achievement in transmission. It is not the same thing as an accurate text.