The Goetia: The 72 Demons of the Lesser Key of Solomon

What Is the Goetia?

The Goetia (from the Greek goeteia, meaning sorcery or witchcraft) is the first of five books that make up the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, the Lesser Key of Solomon. The Lemegeton is a seventeenth-century compilation of earlier magical texts, and the Goetia is its most famous and widely practised section. It catalogues 72 demons or spirits, each with a name, rank, seal, physical description, set of powers, and specific conjuration for summoning.

The word "Goetia" itself carries a history. In ancient Greece, goeteia referred to the practices of the goetes (singular: goes), itinerant sorcerers who performed necromantic rites, invocations of the dead, and chthonic rituals. Plato distinguished the goetes from the more respectable theurgists, and the distinction between "low" goetic magic and "high" theurgic magic persisted through the Neoplatonic tradition into the Renaissance. The Goetia of the Lemegeton, despite its association with the "low" end of this spectrum, operates within a framework that combines both goetic and theurgic elements: the spirits are compelled by divine authority, using the names of God and the archangels.

The text is attributed to King Solomon, the biblical king renowned for his wisdom and, in later tradition, for his mastery over spirits. The attribution is pseudepigraphic: Solomon did not write the Goetia, any more than Hermes Trismegistus wrote the Corpus Hermeticum. But the Solomonic attribution places the text within a specific magical lineage and provides the mythological justification for the operator's authority over the 72 spirits.

The Solomonic Myth: The Brass Vessel and the 72 Spirits

The Goetia's introductory narrative tells the story of King Solomon's dominion over the spirit world. According to the text, Solomon bound the 72 spirits in a brass vessel using divine names engraved on its surface. He sealed the vessel and threw it into a deep lake near Babylon. Later, Babylonians discovered the vessel and, hoping it contained treasure, broke the seal. The 72 spirits emerged, returned to their former places, and resumed their activities in the world. Only Belial, the most powerful, remained in the vessel, choosing to present himself as a deity to the Babylonians.

This narrative is not found in the canonical Bible. It belongs to the broader tradition of Solomonic legend that developed in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic literature over many centuries. The Testament of Solomon, a Greek text from between the first and fifth centuries CE, describes Solomon's use of a magical ring given to him by the archangel Michael to bind demons and compel them to build the Temple. The Arabic One Thousand and One Nights contains similar stories of Solomon (Suleiman) imprisoning jinn in bottles sealed with his seal.

Historical Sources: Weyer, the Liber Officiorum, and the Lemegeton

Johann Weyer (1515 to 1588), a Dutch physician and student of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, published the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (False Monarchy of Demons) as an appendix to his De Praestigiis Daemonum in 1563. Weyer listed 69 demons with their ranks, powers, appearance, and summoning conditions. His purpose was not to encourage demon summoning but to demonstrate that the supposed powers of witches were actually the deceptions of demons, an argument against the witch trials of his era.

The Goetia's list of 72 spirits is clearly derived from Weyer's catalogue. The descriptions are often nearly identical, with three additional spirits added to bring the total to 72 (matching the Kabbalistic number). The most significant difference is that the Goetia includes seals for each spirit, which Weyer did not provide.

Behind both texts lies the Liber Officiorum Spirituum (Book of the Offices of Spirits), a fifteenth-century Latin text that appears to be the earliest version of the demon catalogue. Manuscript copies of this text survive in several European libraries and represent the raw material from which both Weyer and the Goetia compiler worked.

The Lemegeton itself was compiled in the seventeenth century, probably in England, from these and other sources. The five books of the Lemegeton (Goetia, Theurgia Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel, and Ars Notoria) represent a comprehensive system of spirit magic, ranging from the demonic spirits of the Goetia through the mixed spirits of the Theurgia Goetia to the angelic beings of the Ars Paulina and Ars Almadel.

The 72 Spirits: Ranks, Powers, and Organization

The 72 spirits of the Goetia are organized by rank into a hierarchical structure modeled on a medieval feudal court. The ranks, in descending order of power, are: kings, dukes, princes (or prelates), marquises, earls (or counts), presidents, and knights. Some spirits hold multiple ranks (a spirit may be both a king and an earl).

Each spirit commands a specific number of "legions" (a legion typically being understood as 6,666 lesser spirits). The most powerful king, Paimon, commands 200 legions, while lesser spirits may command as few as 10. This hierarchical structure mirrors the angelology of the period: just as the angels were organized into nine orders (seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels, angels), the demons have their own pseudo-feudal hierarchy.

The powers attributed to the spirits are remarkably practical. They include teaching arts and sciences, finding lost objects, providing knowledge of past and future events, causing or curing diseases, inspiring love, granting invisibility, building or destroying structures, transporting people across distances, and teaching languages. The Goetia reads less like a text of spiritual elevation and more like a catalogue of supernatural services available for hire.

Seals and Sigils: The Visual Language of the Goetia

Each of the 72 spirits has a unique seal or sigil: a geometric design that serves as the spirit's visual signature and the primary tool for making contact. The seals are composed of lines, curves, crosses, and abstract shapes that do not correspond to any known alphabet or symbolic system. Their origin is unclear; they may derive from the magical squares and sigil wheels of earlier Kabbalistic and Arabic magical traditions, or they may have been generated through spirit communication (the magician draws what the spirit "dictates").

In practice, the operator draws the spirit's seal on parchment or metal (traditionally on the day and hour governed by the spirit's planetary correspondence) and uses it during the conjuration. The seal may be placed within the triangle of art to attract the spirit, worn as a lamen around the operator's neck to establish authority, or used as a focus for meditation and trance work.

The Golden Dawn tradition developed the practice of "flashing" sigils: tracing the seal in the air while visualizing it in complementary colours (red sigil on green background, for example) to produce an intensified visual impression on the inner eye. This technique, which draws on the Golden Dawn's broader theory of colour correspondences, became a standard method for working with Goetic seals in the ceremonial magic tradition.

The Ritual Apparatus: Circle, Triangle, and Divine Names

The Goetia prescribes a specific ritual setup for evocation. The operator stands within a magic circle inscribed with divine names (Adonai, Tetragrammaton, El, Shaddai) and angelic names. The circle is the operator's primary protection: no spirit can cross its boundary as long as it is properly constructed and the operator does not break it by stepping outside.

The triangle of art is placed at a specific distance from the circle (usually to the east). It is a triangle inscribed with the names Michael (archangel), Tetragrammaton (the four-letter name of God), and Anaphaxeton (a divine name of obscure origin). The spirit is commanded to appear within the triangle, not within the circle. A disc bearing the spirit's seal is placed at the triangle's centre.

The conjurations themselves are lengthy invocations that call upon God by multiple names, invoke the authority of the archangels, and command the spirit by the power of the divine names to appear "in fair and human form, without deformity or tortuosity." If the spirit refuses to appear, a series of increasingly forceful "constraints" and "curses" are read, threatening the spirit with divine punishment until it complies.

The Mathers-Crowley Edition of 1904

S.L. MacGregor Mathers (1854 to 1918), co-founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, translated the Goetia from manuscript sources in the British Museum. Aleister Crowley (1875 to 1947), who had been a member of the Golden Dawn before his acrimonious departure, edited Mathers's translation and published it in 1904 as The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King.

Crowley's edition included his own "Preliminary Invocation" (actually the Bornless Ritual, a Graeco-Egyptian invocation from the Greek Magical Papyri) and an essay arguing that the Goetic spirits should be understood as portions of the human brain. "The spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain," Crowley wrote. "Their seals therefore represent (the method of stimulating or regulating) those particular spots (through the eye)."

This psychological interpretation was influential. It opened the door to understanding Goetic magic as a form of internal work (evoking and mastering aspects of the practitioner's own psyche) rather than purely as the summoning of external entities. The Mathers-Crowley edition became the standard English text for most of the twentieth century and shaped how generations of magicians approached the Goetia.

Joseph Peterson's critical edition (2001) later provided a more scholarly text, comparing multiple manuscript versions and correcting errors in the Mathers-Crowley translation. Peterson's edition is now the preferred text for serious practitioners and scholars.

The Golden Dawn Interpretation: Decans and the Tree of Life

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn developed a system for mapping the 72 Goetic spirits onto the zodiac. Each sign of the zodiac contains three decans (10-degree arcs), producing 36 decans in total. Each decan has a day spirit and a night spirit, yielding 72 spirits that correspond to the 72 Goetic demons.

This system connected the Goetia to the broader Kabbalistic structure of the Golden Dawn's magic. Each decan is associated with a specific sephirah on the Tree of Life, a specific tarot card (the 36 numbered minor arcana from 2 through 10 correspond to the 36 decans), and a specific set of angelic and demonic forces. The Goetic spirits, in this interpretation, are the Qliphothic (unbalanced) forces associated with each decan: the shadow side of the zodiacal energies.

This placement allowed Golden Dawn magicians to work with the Goetic spirits within a coherent cosmological framework. A spirit was not merely a name in a catalogue but a specific force operating at a specific point in the celestial and Kabbalistic structure of reality. Working with a Goetic spirit meant engaging with a particular imbalance in the cosmic order and, by extension, in the magician's own psychology.

Modern Approaches: Chaos Magic and the New Goetia

Chaos magic, which emerged in the late 1970s through the work of Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin, brought a radically pragmatic approach to the Goetia. Chaos magicians stripped away the elaborate Christian framework, the lengthy conjurations, and the threats of divine punishment, working instead with the seals directly through simplified evocation, trance-based contact, and results-based experimentation.

Gordon White, in The Chaos Protocols (2016), advocated a respectful rather than adversarial relationship with the Goetic spirits. Instead of commanding and threatening, the chaos magic approach treats the spirits as autonomous beings to be negotiated with, offered to, and cultivated as allies. This represents a significant departure from the original text's posture of divine authority and forced compliance.

Jake Stratton-Kent's Geosophia: The Argo of Magic (2010) and The True Grimoire (2009) recontextualized Goetic magic within the tradition of Greek goeteia, arguing that the spirits of the Goetia descend from the chthonic spirits and heroes of ancient Greek religion. Stratton-Kent's work reconnected the Goetia to its pre-Christian roots and proposed that the adversarial Christian framework was a later overlay on a much older tradition of spirit negotiation and necromancy.

The result of these modern developments is a range of approaches to the Goetia: from strict traditionalists who follow the original text's methods exactly, through Golden Dawn-influenced ceremonial magicians who work within the Kabbalistic-decan system, to chaos magicians who experiment freely with simplified or modified methods. The diversity of approach reflects the Goetia's enduring vitality as a magical text.

Psychological vs. Spiritual Interpretation

Crowley's suggestion that the Goetic spirits are "portions of the human brain" opened a long-running debate within Western magic. Are the 72 spirits autonomous external entities, as the original text clearly states? Or are they personifications of psychological forces within the magician's own psyche, as Crowley suggested and as many modern practitioners believe?

The psychological model treats Goetic evocation as a form of active imagination (in the Jungian sense): the magician projects unconscious contents onto the ritual framework, encounters them as seemingly autonomous beings, and integrates them through the process of evocation and dialogue. In this model, "Paimon" is not an independent spirit but a symbol for a specific complex of abilities and tendencies within the magician's own mind.

The spiritual model treats the spirits as genuinely external beings with their own existence, intelligence, and agenda. In this model, the ritual protections (circle, triangle, divine names) are not psychological exercises but practical safety measures against real beings whose nature makes them dangerous to unprotected humans.

Most experienced practitioners hold a position somewhere between these poles. The spirits function as though they are autonomous and external; the results of working with them are consistent with either interpretation; and the practical difference between the two models is smaller than the theoretical debate suggests. The circle protects, the seals work, and the spirits deliver results, whether one understands them as psychological projections or independent entities.