The Goetia and the Infernal Tradition

The Goetia is the first and most famous book of the Lemegeton Claviculi Salomonis, the Lesser Key of Solomon. It catalogues seventy-two demons, each with a name, a title, a rank, a number of legions, a seal, and a specific kind of power. For nearly five centuries it has been the most copied, the most translated, the most performed, and the most argued-over of all European magical texts. The Goetia is also the historical seed of the modern category of “demonology” in the popular imagination: most contemporary ideas about conjuring spirits descend from it, even where the people holding those ideas have never opened the book. What follows tries to read the Goetia as the layered text it is, and to separate its claims from the modern mythology that has grown up around it.

What the Goetia actually is

The Goetia is not a single document but a compilation. Its earliest list of seventy-two demons derives from Johann Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1563), an appendix to his De Praestigiis Daemonum in which Weyer — court physician to the Duke of Cleves and a fierce critic of witch-hunting — catalogued the infernal court in order to expose the dangers of magical practice. Weyer drew his list in turn from a now-lost German manuscript. The list was then combined with seals, conjurations, and ritual instructions probably compiled in the seventeenth century into the present Goetia, which appears as the first book of the Lemegeton (a fuller account of which is in the article on the Lesser Key of Solomon; see also Peterson 2001, xi–xx).

The seventy-two demons are organised as a parody of the heavenly court. Each demon is assigned a rank within a sevenfold hierarchy — King, Duke, Prince, Marquis, Count (or Earl), Knight, or President — and a precise number of legions of infernal soldiery under his command. The first demon in the standard edition, Bael, is described as a King ruling in the East; Agares, the second, is a Duke riding a crocodile; Vassago (the third) is a Prince with good and gentle nature, discovering things hidden and recovering things lost; Samigina (or Gamigin), a President who appears as a horse or ass; Asmodeus (the thirty-second), a King strong and powerful with three heads; Bael and Astaroth are the most often cited in modern practice. The seals are drawn as circles with Hebrew-letter names and geometric sigils, often crossed by lines that connect specific letters. The conjurations are long, formulaic, and liturgically intense, calling upon the powers of the four corners, the seven planets, the twelve signs, and the seventy-two divine names of the Shem HaMephorash.

The famous operation associated with the Goetia is straightforward in outline. The magician, properly consecrated and observing a strict regime of abstinence and prayer, draws a circle on the floor, places a triangle outside it, marks the seal of the desired demon on parchment, and then calls the demon by name. The demon, constrained by the divine names invoked, is compelled to appear in the triangle, to give true answers to questions, and to perform whatever service is asked. The text is explicit that the demon cannot harm a magician who works from within a properly constructed circle.

The structure of a Goetic evocation

A Goetic evocation has a fixed structure, repeated with variations across the seventy-two entries. The magician first performs a series of consecrations and prayers — usually at least a week of formal preparation, often with fasting, sexual abstinence, and the recital of the Psalms. The day of the operation is chosen by astrological criteria, and the operator bathes, robes, and enters the prepared space. The conjuration runs through three or four orations, each calling on a different order of divine names. The first oration calls on the name of the demon’s planetary ruler. The second invokes the holy angels and the four archangels. The third calls on the Shem HaMephorash — the seventy-two-fold name of God — by the specific three-letter name assigned to the demon. The fourth, present in the stronger conjurations, calls on the highest divine name, Tetragrammaton, and demands obedience.

Throughout, the operator vibrates the divine names — that is, pronounces them with a slow, drawn-out, breathy emphasis, sometimes with the body held in a particular posture. The seals of the spirits are smudged with smoke from a corresponding incense, and the name of the demon is written in the triangle outside the circle. The conjuration ends with a direct command: the demon is to appear in the triangle in a visible, comely form, without harm to the operator, and to fulfil the request. The art of constructing the circle, drawing the seals, and vibrating the names is treated separately in the article on sigils, circles, and practical magic.

If the operation succeeds, the demon appears — in the text, typically as a man with a particular face, or as a creature with a specific head, often accompanied by lesser spirits. The magician addresses the demon politely but firmly, reiterates the binding, and asks the question. The demon answers, gives the seal for use in a talisman, and, when dismissed, departs. Failure is rare in the texts, but when described it involves a demon who refuses to appear, who appears as a hideous shape, or who attacks the operator. None of this is empirically testable in any agreed sense, but as a description of a discipline of attention it has a serious internal logic that several twentieth-century practitioners — including Crowley, who left detailed records of his own work — have set out at length (Crowley 1929; Sutin 2000, 174–184).

The demon as a constrained spirit

The most striking feature of the Goetia is its theology of constraint. The demon is not a fallen angel in the later Christian sense, nor a pagan god degraded into a devil. It is a spirit who, by virtue of the divine names and the seal, can be compelled to obey a properly consecrated operator. The constraint is mechanical: the demon’s nature is to obey a name it cannot resist. This is the theological point that popular accounts of the Goetia most often miss. The demon is not summoned and worshipped; it is summoned and used.

This is why the Goetia repeatedly insists on the operator’s piety. A magician who is not properly purified, who works in a state of sin, or who uses the divine names disrespectfully cannot compel anything, and may himself be harmed. The text is studiously Christian, citing the biblical story of Solomon, the four rivers of Eden, the angels of the Apocalypse, and the throne of the Almighty. The demon is constrained by the very powers the magician worships. The structure is the same as that of the exorcism rites of the Christian church, and several modern scholars (Davies 2003; Maxwell-Stuart 2005) have read the Goetia as essentially a clerical discipline adapted for the laity.

The interpretive dispute about what “the demon” actually is is still genuinely open. The older Christian reading holds that the Goetia is real demonic magic and is forbidden; the older occultist reading holds that the demon is a real but morally neutral spirit who can be hired for services, and the work is dangerous; the more recent psychological reading holds that the demon is a part of the operator’s own unconscious, and the Goetia is a procedure for making it visible and giving it a temporary job. Each of these readings has distinguished defenders. Hanegraaff has argued that the academic study of Western esotericism should be able to hold all three without forcing the issue (Hanegraaff 2013, 25–34). Most serious modern practitioners work somewhere between the second and third.

The Shem HaMephorash and divine names

The Shem HaMephorash — the “explicit name” of God — is a seventy-two-fold name derived from three verses in Exodus (14:19–21), each of which in the Masoretic text is read in three columns of 22, 22, and 28 letters. The columns are then read vertically to produce seventy-two triplets of Hebrew letters, each of which is the name of a single angel. These seventy-two angels are paired, in the Goetia and elsewhere, with the seventy-two demons: each demon is bound by a corresponding angel. To call the demon is to call the angel, and the angel’s name is the key that opens the demon. The 72-fold structure also connects the Goetia to a wider cosmological system: the 72 angels are sometimes associated with the 72 quinaries of the zodiac (five-degree divisions), the 72 elders of the Book of Revelation, and the 72 names in the Sefer ha-Razim and other ancient Jewish magical texts. The Jewish and Christian Kabbalistic background is treated at length by Idel and Scholem, and is essential for understanding why the Goetia’s demon is paired with an angel rather than opposed to one (Idel 1988; Scholem 1974).

The conjurations also use a dense layer of Greek, Hebrew, and pseudo-Hebrew names. Agla, an acronym for Atah Gibor Le-olam Adonai (“Thou art mighty forever, Lord”), is repeated as a binding word. Tetragrammaton — the four-letter name YHVH — is vibrated at climactic moments. The accumulated effect is a sound-world that places the operator within a sacred geography, in which the cosmic order is named and so made present. The tradition of working with divine names as living powers is also at the heart of the article on sacred symbolism and geometry.

The nineteenth-century recovery: de Laurence, Mathers, and Crowley

For most of the eighteenth century, the Goetia circulated in manuscript among small groups of English and Scottish occultists. The first printed English edition was privately issued in Chicago in 1898 by L. W. de Laurence & Co., a publisher of occult and self-help materials whose reprints of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses and the Goetia sold in tens of thousands but were notorious for their poor editing and later legal troubles. S. L. MacGregor Mathers translated and lightly edited the Goetia; his revised text was published in 1904 as the first issue of The Equinox (Vol. I, No. 1, March 1904), and a fuller standalone edition appeared in 1909, with multiple reissues thereafter. Mathers added an introduction drawing on the Golden Dawn’s Kabbalistic and astrological framework and appended the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum as a critical apparatus. Mathers’s Goetia is still the standard English edition and has been reprinted, with revisions, by Joseph Peterson (Peterson 2001) and by Stephen Skinner (Skinner 2011).

Aleister Crowley, Mathers’s collaborator and then rival, contributed the Liber 777 table of correspondences and a short preface in which he argued that the Goetia was genuine tradition requiring only an experienced operator. The Golden Dawn, of which Mathers was a founding chief, had already developed a Kabbalistic astrology and a theory of elemental weapons that the Goetia could be plugged into. The 1904 Equinox edition is the point at which the modern Goetic revival begins, and most later English-language editions descend from it.

The twentieth-century reception

Crowley’s career turned the Goetia into a focus of controversy. In Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), Crowley gave an account of his own Goetic evocations, including the famous “Amalantrah” working in Bou Saâda, Algeria, in 1909, in which he claimed to have conjured Choronzon, the “Demon of the Abyss.” The text, in part genuine visionary material and in part Crowleyan theatre, became the foundation of the modern “infernal” reading of the Goetia — the idea that the conjurations touch a real and dangerous non-human intelligence. Sutin’s biography treats the working in detail and is more sober about what is reported and what is performative (Sutin 2000, 96–105).

The next generation, including Gerald Gardner, Kenneth Grant, and the various Thelemic and Typhonian lineages, extended Crowley’s reading. The Goetia came to be treated as a manual for contacting chthonic or “left-hand” currents that orthodox ceremonial magic preferred to avoid. The 1970s and 1980s saw a wave of new editions and translations, including Joseph H. Peterson’s The Lesser Key of Solomon (Weiser, 2001, but circulating in samizdat from the 1970s) and Stephen Skinner’s working edition (Skinner 2011). The Dictionnaire Infernal of Jacques Collin de Plancy, first published in 1818 and reissued in a definitive sixth edition in 1863 with the famous illustrations by Louis Breton, was reissued in facsimile in the same period and exercised a strong influence on popular demonology, especially through its engravings. The article on the occult in popular culture traces the public side of this reception.

The Church of Satan, founded in 1966 by Anton LaVey, drew the Goetia into a popular theistic Satanism in which the seventy-two demons became, in effect, a pantheon. LaVey’s Satanic Rituals (1972) — a separate book from the Satanic Bible of 1969 — adapts several Goetic invocations and lists the seventy-two demons as a working pantheon. The popular reception fused the Goetia with a Christian theistic Satanism that the medieval texts themselves do not support. The resulting “demonolatry” — the worship of named demons as gods — is a late twentieth-century development, not a continuation of the historical tradition, and a serious student of the text should keep the two clearly separate (Petersen, ed., 2009).

Theistic Satanism, Luciferianism, and the Goetia

It is important to distinguish the historical Goetia from modern theistic Satanism. The Goetia is a Christian-influenced Solomonic text in which the demons are constrained by divine names; the operator does not worship the demons. Theistic Satanism, in its various forms, treats Satan (and sometimes the Goetic demons) as a real being to be honoured and even adored. Luciferianism, a related but distinct tradition, treats Lucifer as the bringer of enlightenment. These modern movements draw on the Goetia for a list of names and a sense of authority, but their theology is different. The Goetia’s demon is a spirit to be used; the theistic Satanist’s demon is a being to be served. The twentieth-century history of these currents is laid out in the article on figures who shaped modern occultism, and a longer scholarly account is in Per Faxneld’s Satanic Feminism (2017).

Goetia and spirit communication

The Goetia is also a document within the larger Western tradition of spirit communication and mediumship. Its operation is, in effect, a structured form of spirit contact: a spirit is conjured, it appears, it answers questions, and the session ends. The same pattern shows up in nineteenth-century séance rooms, in twentieth-century channelled material, and in modern mediumship, though the technical apparatus differs. The Goetia is the most elaborate written system for forcing such a contact, and the most explicit about the conditions for doing so safely — a point the historian of spiritualism Alex Owen has made in a different context (Owen 1990, 17–36).

The Goetia in modern practice

In the early twenty-first century, the Goetia is still actively worked. Practitioners of traditional ceremonial magic perform the conjurations more or less as written, with full ritual apparatus, often within a Golden Dawn or Thelemic framework. Others approach the Goetia psychologically, treating the demon as an “inner” figure to be visualised and dialogued with. A small minority — usually outside the formal orders — claim genuine conjurations with consistent results, and the evidence for and against such claims is undecidable by any agreed method. The academic study of the Goetia, beginning with Weyer and extending through the work of Frank Klaassen, Owen Davies, and Joseph Peterson, has established the textual history with reasonable certainty, even if questions of influence and transmission are still actively debated.

Whatever the operator’s framework, the Goetia remains what it has been for four centuries: a manual of procedure for making contact with named non-physical intelligences. The seals, the names, the conjurations, the triangle, and the circle are the surviving parts of a system that was once widely known, and that continues to attract serious students on both sides of the academic and the practical divide.

Sources and further reading

The indispensable modern edition of the text is Joseph H. Peterson, ed. and trans., The Lesser Key of Solomon: Lemegeton Claviculi Salomonis (York Beach: Weiser, 2001), with a thorough introduction to the textual history. Stephen Skinner, The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King (Ibis Press, 2011), is the best single-volume working edition, with explanatory notes. On the textual history of the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, see the older work of Henry Carrington Bolton and, more recently, Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Oxford University Press, 2003), which situates the Goetia in the wider history of printed and manuscript magic. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, The Occult in Medieval Europe 500–1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), and his Witchcraft in Europe and America (2005), are concise and responsible. On Weyer and the sceptical tradition, see Brian P. Levack, The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West (Yale University Press, 2013). On the Dictionnaire Infernal, see the recent scholarly edition by Terry Murphy (2017). For the Satanic Bible and Satanic Rituals distinction and the Church of Satan more broadly, see Per Faxneld, Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Brill, 2017), and the older study by Robert Johnson, The Triumph of the Devil (1973). For Crowley’s Amalantrah and the chthonic reading, see Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), and the recent scholarly biography by John Coulter (2017). For the Jewish and Christian Kabbalistic background, see Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (Dorset Press, 1974), and Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (Yale University Press, 1988). For the academic study of the demonological tradition as a whole, the standard reference is Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), and Kocku von Stuckrad, Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge (London: Equinox, 2010). Donald Tyson’s edition of the Three Books of Occult Philosophy by Cornelius Agrippa (St. Paul: Llewellyn, 1993) is the most accessible translation.