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The Lemegeton

The 17th-century compilation that fixed the 72 spirits, its five books, and the chain of sources running from Weyer to Crowley.

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What It Is

The Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis is an anonymous compilation of ritual magic written in English and assembled in the mid-seventeenth century out of considerably older materials. The manuscript title means roughly "the little key of Solomon"; the formula "Lesser Key of Solomon" appears in no known manuscript and is, in all likelihood, a coinage of A. E. Waite in The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts (1898), intended to distinguish it from the greater Clavicula Salomonis. The origin of the word "Lemegeton" still has no accepted philological explanation: it is an open question, not a settled consensus.

The attribution to King Solomon is legendary tradition, not historical fact. The scholarly consensus is unequivocal: no component of the corpus is ancient or Hebrew in its present form; it is an early modern anthology recycling Latin and vernacular sources from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries.

The Five Books

1. Ars Goetia. A catalogue of 72 spirits — the best known part of the corpus — each with a name, a noble rank (king, duke, prince, prelate, marquis, president, earl, knight), a number of legions under its command, attributed offices or powers, and a graphic sigil of its own. The tally of legions varies between manuscripts; the usual sum is around 2,300. It is the only book in the corpus that supplies individual sigils for each entity, and that graphic innovation is precisely what sets it apart from its printed source.

2. Ars Theurgia-Goetia. It presents 31 principal spirits of an "aerial" and ambivalent nature (neither wholly good nor wholly evil): four emperors associated with the cardinal points (Carnesiel in the east, Amenadiel in the west, Demoriel in the north, Caspiel in the south), sixteen dukes distributed across intermediate directional positions, and eleven "wandering princes" without fixed seat. Each chief commands dozens or hundreds of servitors; Peterson counts 513 spirit names in all. Its source is Book I of the Steganographia of Johannes Trithemius (composed c. 1499, printed in 1606); the seals and the ordering differ from the original through scribal corruption.

3. Ars Paulina. Divided into two parts: the first deals with 24 angels assigned to the 24 hours of the day; the second with 360 spirits corresponding to the degrees of the zodiac (monomoiriae), grouped under the twelve signs. The attribution to the apostle Paul — supposedly received during his ascent to the third heaven — is tradition; Trithemius, who mentions a text of the same name, ascribed it instead to the angel Raziel. It is the book with the most useful internal dating: it mentions firearms and the date 1641, which places its composition in the second half of the seventeenth century. It depends on Books II/III of the Steganographia, on the pseudo-Abanese Heptameron, on the Magical Calendar, and on the translation of Paracelsus published by Robert Turner in 1656.

4. Ars Almadel. The shortest. It describes the making of an inscribed wax tablet (the almadel), used as a support for angelic visions obtained by scrying. It arranges 20 principal angels into four "altitudes" or chorae, associated with the seasons and the quadrants of the heavens. It is the component with the longest documented lineage: Trithemius and Weyer cite it as an already existing work, Weyer attributes an Arabic origin to it, Latin copies survive from the fifteenth century, and Hebrew versions were identified in the twentieth.

5. Ars Notoria. The odd one out: it is not magic of evocation but an art for acquiring knowledge. It consists of prayers, orationes of unintelligible words (verba ignota), and figures (notae) which, contemplated according to a calendar, promise to confer memory, eloquence, and understanding of the liberal arts. The text incorporated into the Lemegeton is a seventeenth-century composite fusing the glossed fourteenth-century Ars notoria with the Ars brevis of the middle of the same century, and it depends directly on Robert Turner's English translation (1657). Several editions omit it; Waite ignored it entirely, and it is likewise missing from the popular diffusion descending from Mathers and Crowley.

Manuscript History

Scholarly consensus: the compilation cannot be earlier than the 1570s — given its dependence on material printed in 1577 and 1584 — and its latest parts point to after 1641. The manuscript witnesses are all later still, and most are held in the British Library (the Sloane and Harley collections):

• Sloane MS 3825 (seventeenth century). Judged by Joseph H. Peterson the most faithful witness when collated against the identifiable sources; it is the basis of his critical edition.
• Sloane MS 2731. Dated 1687, though the manuscript itself claims a date of 1572; compiled from several versions and with modernized spelling.
• Sloane MS 3648 (c. 1665 or later). A high rate of error relative to the other witnesses.
• Harley MS 6483 (1712–13). A copy associated with the name of "Dr. Rudd"; see below.
• NWU MS 65 (1713, Northwestern University). Occasionally preserves correct readings against all the others.
• Sloane MS 3824, Harley MS 6482, and Wellcome MS 3203 supply complementary material from the same circle of angelic magic.

Thomas Rudd and Harley MS 6483. Rudd (c. 1583–1656), an English mathematician and antiquary, appears as the authority behind a distinct recension entitled Liber Malorum Spirituum seu Goetia, transmitted in Harley MS 6483 — a manuscript copied around 1712–13, it is believed by the scribe Peter Smart. Its characteristic feature is the angel-demon pairing: each of the 72 goetic spirits is assigned to one of the 72 angels of the Shemhamphorash (the 72 divine names derived from Exodus 14:19–21), so that the angel serves as a counterpart binding and controlling the demon. Hence the "double-sided" seals that characterize the Ruddian tradition. Rudd also gives precedence to the brass vessel over the triangle as the principal device, and absorbs material from the Heptameron.

Here it is worth flagging an open scholarly dispute: Stephen Skinner and David Rankine, in The Goetia of Dr Rudd (Golden Hoard, 2007), maintain that Harley 6483 copies a lost original by Rudd himself and that its angelic system is primary rather than derivative; Peterson and others treat it as a later elaboration upon the Lemegeton tradition, whose "Dr. Rudd" may be in part an attribution of prestige. The matter is not settled.

Peterson's edition (2001). Joseph H. Peterson published The Lesser Key of Solomon: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (Weiser Books, 2001), the first edition to collate all five books systematically against the principal manuscript witnesses, restore the Ars Notoria, and document the sources. It is the standard scholarly reference edition. Peterson notes, among other things, that the Mathers and Crowley text "includes many fanciful alternative spellings" with no manuscript support.

Genealogy of the Catalogue of Demons

This is the best documented line in the entire corpus and constitutes scholarly consensus:

1. A lost medieval source. Weyer states that he worked from a manuscript entitled Liber officiorum spirituum, seu Liber dictus Empto. Salomonis, de principibus & regibus daemoniorum, "evidently much older than 1577." Behind it can be traced the fifteenth-century French Livre des Esperitz, whose 47 spirits include some 30 practically identical to entities in the Ars Goetia, and an English manuscript known as the Office of Spirits (1583).
2. Johann Weyer, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1577). It appeared as an appendix to the fifth edition of his De praestigiis daemonum (a work whose first edition dates from 1563). It lists 69 spirits, even though the text itself speaks of 72. Weyer, a physician and a pupil of Agrippa, published the catalogue with a skeptical and anti-inquisitorial purpose: to expose the "curiosities, deceptions, vanities, impostures and delusions" of the conjurers. He declared that he had deliberately omitted passages "to render the work unusable." Crucially, Weyer includes no sigils.
3. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). He reproduced Weyer's catalogue in English — the translation is often attributed to Abraham Fleming — with numerous errors, apparently from a careless or partly illegible manuscript copy rather than from the printed book. Scot too was writing against the witch hunts.
4. Ars Goetia. It reaches 72 by adding four spirits absent from Weyer — Vassago, Seere, Dantalion, and Andromalius — and by omitting Pruflas, whom Weyer does include. Since Pruflas is likewise missing from Scot, and since the Ars Goetia reproduces errors characteristic of Scot, the consensus is that the Goetia depends on Scot's English translation rather than directly on Weyer's Latin. The Goetia also reorders the sequence, reassigns several noble ranks and — its most visible contribution — endows each spirit with a graphic sigil that did not exist in the earlier printed tradition. To this are added borrowings from Agrippa (De occulta philosophia), the Heptameron, and the Magical Calendar.

The number 72 is no accident: it replicates the count of the names of the Shemhamphorash and of the zodiacal decans, which made possible the symmetrical pairing that Rudd's recension formalizes.

The Mathers–Crowley Edition (1904)

In 1904 there appeared The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King, printed under the imprint "Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth" and associated with Boleskine House. Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, co-founder of the Golden Dawn, had carried out the transcription and editing of the text from British Library manuscripts (chiefly from the Sloane group, with material from Harley 6483). Aleister Crowley paid for publication, acted as editor, and added apparatus of his own.

The controversy has two axes. The first concerns authorship: in the first edition Mathers is not named as translator, and Crowley published the work of his former master in the middle of his break with him, after the Golden Dawn schism of 1900. The second concerns content: Crowley prefixed a "Preliminary Invocation" — the so-called Bornless Ritual — which does not belong to the Solomonic tradition: it comes from PGM V.96–172, the "Stele of Jeu the hieroglyphist" of the Greek Magical Papyri, published by Charles Wycliffe Goodwin in 1852 and popularized by Wallis Budge in Egyptian Magic (1899). Crowley further added a preface with an explicitly psychologizing reading: "the spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain," and the invocations procedures for stimulating specific mental faculties — "a purely materialistic and rational statement," in his words.

Its spread is explained by three factors: it was the first printed and widely accessible version; it incorporated the engraved sigils that became standard iconography; and it entered the public domain through age (published in 1904, well before 1929), which allowed indefinite reprinting — including the plagiarized version by L. W. de Laurence (1916), who reissued it under his own name. Practically all later popular culture about "the 72 demons" descends from this text, not from the manuscripts. It is also, according to Peterson, the philologically least reliable version.

The Ritual Structure Described in the Text

Described as a historian of magic would describe it: the apparatus the text prescribes, with no operative value.

The setting is organized around a magic circle some nine feet in diameter, with a band of divine, sephirotic, and planetary names inscribed around its perimeter, from Eheieh down to the lunar sphere. Outside it, at a distance of two feet and with sides of three feet, is drawn the triangle of Solomon, oriented toward the quadrant assigned to the spirit; it bears the name Michael at its center and the names Anaphaxeton (or Anephezeton), Tetragrammaton, and Primeumaton along its sides. The spatial logic is transparent: the operator remains inside the circle, the entity manifests outside it, confined within the figure.

The operator wears a pentacle or pentagram of Solomon in gold or silver upon the breast, together with the spirit's seal; a hexagram of Solomon on calfskin parchment, covered with linen and pinned to the white vestment, whose declared function is to compel appearance in human form; and the ring of Solomon, of silver, bearing the names Anaphaxeton, Michael, and Tetragrammaton, held before the face as protection against the "fetid vapors" of the spirits.

The sigils are executed in metals distributed by rank: gold for kings, silver for marquises, copper for dukes, tin for princes and prelates, lead for knights, mercury for presidents, and copper with silver for earls. The conjurations — two principal ones, plus a "constraint" and a curse for the recalcitrant — invoke divine authority by means of strings of names (Agla, On, Tetragrammaton) and formulas of pseudo-Abanese lineage (Beralanensis, Baldachiensis, Paumachia et Apologia Sedes), demanding that the spirit appear "peaceably, visibly and affably."

The brass vessel belongs to the narrative frame rather than to the instrumentarium: according to the prefatory account, Solomon shut up the 72 kings with their legions in a sealed vessel of bronze and cast it into a deep lake in Babylon; the Babylonians opened it believing it held treasure, and the spirits escaped, save for Belial, who lodged himself in an image in order to give oracles. This is legendary etiology — an echo of the genie-in-the-bottle motif and of the tradition of the Testamentum Salomonis, a Greek text of the first to fifth centuries AD which is the distant antecedent of the topos but not a direct textual source of the Lemegeton.

Relation to the Greater *Clavicula Salomonis*

They are two distinct texts. The confusion is common and worth undoing precisely:

The Clavicula Salomonis (Key of Solomon, the "greater Key") is an independent grimoire, considerably older, with a manuscript tradition in Greek, Latin, Italian, and French. It is already mentioned in the Lucidator dubitabilium astronomiae of Pietro d'Abano (1303–10); the oldest surviving fragment comes from Trent (c. 1380–1410), an Italian version (BnF Ital. 1524) is dated 1446, and the oldest complete Latin manuscript (Coxe 25) is from the end of the fifteenth century. It is organized into two books: the first, ritual theory, planetary hours, conjurations, and the celebrated series of planetary pentacles; the second, the practical part — purifications, vestments, instruments, the tracing of the circle, materials. Mathers published his English edition in 1889, based chiefly on French manuscripts in the British Museum (Lansdowne 1202 and 1203, Harley 3981, Sloane 3091, King's 288), descendants of the Italian translation of Abraham Colorno (fl. 1578–1598).

The substantive difference: the greater Clavicula contains no catalogue of demons and no sigils of individual entities. It is a manual of generic magical operations — talismans, pentacles, the consecration of instruments — directed at a variety of ends and with an avowedly pious frame. The Lemegeton, by contrast, is structured as a taxonomy of named spirits: its unit of content is the entity with its name, rank, office, and seal. As Peterson and Mathers himself sum it up, the Lemegeton is "full of seals of various spirits" and is fundamentally different, despite sharing the Solomonic attribution. They share a genre, a period of diffusion, and a legendary patron; they share neither text, nor sources, nor structure.

Consensus versus Tradition

Scholarly consensus: an English compilation of the seventeenth century; the dependence of the Goetia on Weyer by way of Scot; the five parts have independent and earlier origins; the sigils are an innovation of the goetic recension; the Ars Notoria is a work of another kind incorporated late; Peterson's edition (2001) is the reference text; Mathers–Crowley (1904) is the most widely diffused and the least faithful.

Tradition or legendary attribution: Solomonic authorship; the Pauline revelation of the Ars Paulina; the Arabic origin of the Almadel (Weyer's assertion, unverified); the tale of the brass vessel in Babylon; and Sloane 2731's claim to a date of 1572.

Points in dispute: the etymology of "Lemegeton"; the real weight of Thomas Rudd against that of the copyist of Harley 6483; and whether the Ruddian angelic system is primary or derivative.

WarningHistorical and artistic content. We do not recommend performing any ritual, invocation or practice involving these entities. This is outreach about texts from the 15th to the 20th century, not an operative guide.