Book Review: Lesser Key of Solomon
An anonymous 17th-century compilation of demon-summoning instructions remains one of the most influential books in Western occult history.
Reviewed: The Lesser Key of Solomon (Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis), c. 1641–1657. Peterson edition, Weiser Books, 2001.
The Lesser Key of Solomon is a book about how to summon seventy-two demons and make them do things for you. It has no confirmed author. Its most famous title was probably coined by a critic in 1898.1 Its most popular edition was published by a man who called himself the Great Beast 666. It has been continuously in print for over a century.
Let me explain why this is more interesting than it sounds.
What the book actually is
The Lemegeton — its proper name, which nobody uses — is not a single text. It is five texts bolted together sometime in the mid-seventeenth century, each pulling from sources that range from a few decades to over a thousand years older.2 The five books are the Ars Goetia, the Ars Theurgia-Goetia, the Ars Paulina, the Ars Almadel, and the Ars Notoria. They cover, respectively: evil spirits, spirits that are partly good and partly evil, angelic spirits governing the hours and zodiac signs, more angelic spirits contacted via a wax tablet, and a system of prayers for divine knowledge.
Nobody cares about books two through five.
This is structurally important. The Lemegeton is nominally a complete magical curriculum — a spectrum from demonic evocation through angelic communion to divine illumination. It was designed, or at least assembled, to present a coherent system. What survived the editorial process of four centuries is the demon catalog. The prayers for divine knowledge are available in most editions as an afterthought. The Ars Almadel, a genuinely interesting text about contacting angels via a wax altar, gets approximately the same cultural attention as the appendix of a phone book.
The incentive structure here is worth noticing.
The source chain
The backstory attributed to the Ars Goetia goes like this: King Solomon received a magical ring from the archangel Michael, used it to summon seventy-two demons, forced them to build the Temple in Jerusalem, then sealed them in a brass vessel and threw it into a lake. Babylonian treasure-hunters later fished it out and broke the seal, expecting gold. They got seventy-two demons instead.3
This is, obviously, not what happened.
What happened is a textual transmission chain that scholars have been picking apart for decades, and it runs roughly as follows. The oldest ancestor is the Testament of Solomon, a pseudepigraphical Greek text dating to somewhere between the first and fifth centuries CE — most scholars place the original compilation around the third century — which narrates Solomon's encounters with demons in first-person and catalogs their names, appearances, and weaknesses.4 It blends Jewish demonology, Greek magical traditions, Egyptian astrological lore, and early Christian theology into a document that reads like a police procedural written by someone who believes the suspects are literally from hell.
The Testament is a narrative. It tells a story. Sometime over the next thousand years, the story became a manual.
The next identifiable link is the Livre des Esperitz, a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century French grimoire — the oldest surviving treatise on demonic magic in the French language — which lists forty-six spirits with their titles, appearances, functions, and legions.5 It provides no conjurations, no prayers, no ritual instructions. It is a catalog. A reference document. A who's-who of the infernal hierarchy, attributed (naturally) to King Solomon, containing elements traceable to at least the thirteenth century.
Thirty of its forty-seven spirits are nearly identical to spirits that later appear in the Ars Goetia.6
In 1577, the physician Johann Weyer published the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum as an appendix to his treatise De Praestigiis Daemonum. Weyer was not a sorcerer. He was a skeptic. His book argued that witchcraft was not real and that accused witches were mentally ill — a remarkably progressive position for the sixteenth century that got him placed, by Sigmund Freud three centuries later, among the ten most significant books ever written.7 His appendix was a satirical inventory of Hell's bureaucracy, drawn from an older manuscript he called the Liber Officiorum Spirituum, which has never been found.8
Weyer deliberately omitted key passages from his source to render the text unusable as a practical manual.9 He listed sixty-nine demons. He included no sigils. He published the whole thing as evidence that demonology was an elaborate fiction.
The Ars Goetia took Weyer's satirical debunking, added three new demons, restored the sigils, inserted full ritual instructions, and turned it back into an operational manual. It could not have been compiled before 1570, because it reproduces an error — the accidental omission of the demon Pruflas — that first appeared in a specific edition of Weyer's text, or possibly in Reginald Scot's 1584 English translation of it.10
A man writes a book to prove demons aren't real. Someone else uses the book to summon demons. This is the kind of thing that makes systems analysis interesting.
There is one more editorial layer worth mentioning. In a slightly later manuscript copy, the scholar Thomas Rudd — who died around 1656 — paired each of the seventy-two Goetic demons with its corresponding angel from the Shem HaMephorash, the seventy-two-fold name of God derived from Kabbalistic tradition.10a The angelic names were intended to protect the conjurer and control the demons. This was not a theological innovation. It was a safety feature. The original manual for commanding evil spirits had been retrofitted with a divine failsafe, the way a later engineer might add a kill switch to a machine that was already in production.
The demon catalog
The seventy-two spirits of the Ars Goetia are organized like a feudal court. There are kings, dukes, princes, marquises, earls, presidents, and one knight. Each rank corresponds to an astrological body: kings to the Sun, marquises to the Moon, presidents to Mercury, dukes to Venus, earls to Mars, princes to Jupiter, the knight to Saturn.11 Each demon commands a specific number of legions — ranging from twenty to eighty — and possesses specific abilities.
The abilities are where the text becomes genuinely interesting as a cultural document.
A remarkable number of these demons teach things. Furcas teaches philosophy, astrology, logic, and palmistry. Marbas reveals hidden truths. Stolas teaches astronomy and the properties of herbs. Dantalion teaches all arts and sciences and can read minds.12 The infernal hierarchy, it turns out, runs a fairly comprehensive university. If you mapped the demons' combined curriculum, you'd have a reasonable approximation of a late-medieval liberal arts education plus some extracurriculars in battlefield tactics and romantic manipulation.
Other demons find lost objects, cause or cure disease, destroy enemies, build fortifications, provide familiars, inspire love or hatred, grant invisibility, or transport the magician across great distances. The first demon listed, Bael — a king ruling in the East, appearing sometimes as a cat, sometimes as a toad, sometimes as a man, sometimes as all three at once — teaches the art of invisibility and speaks in a hoarse voice.13
Each entry follows the same format: name, rank, appearance, abilities, number of legions, and a sigil — a unique graphic seal that must be drawn on a metal lamen and worn by the conjurer. The entries average perhaps fifty words each. The longest are a short paragraph. The entire demon catalog, stripped of its ritual apparatus, would fit in a restaurant menu.
This brevity is part of the design. The Ars Goetia is not a narrative. It is a database.
The ritual apparatus
The actual summoning procedure is elaborate in a way that reveals the text's assumptions about how power works. The magician stands inside a protective circle inscribed with divine names. The demon appears — or is supposed to appear — inside a triangle placed outside the circle. The circle protects the operator. The triangle constrains the spirit. The names of God compel obedience.
The hierarchy of authority runs: God, then Solomon (via the ring and the sealed brass vessel), then the magician (invoking Solomon's precedent), then the demon. The magician does not worship the demon. The magician does not negotiate with the demon. The magician commands the demon by invoking a chain of divine authority that descends through layers of delegation, like a mid-level manager citing the CEO's name in an email to a contractor.
This is a system designed around the problem of asymmetric power.
The magician is, by definition, less powerful than the entity being summoned. The ritual apparatus exists entirely to compensate for this disadvantage. The protective circle, the divine names, the careful timing aligned to astrological configurations, the precise construction of tools from ritually appropriate materials — all of this is bureaucratic infrastructure. The magician doesn't summon the demon through personal power. The magician summons the demon through compliance with a procedural framework.
If you've ever watched someone invoke a company's written policy to get a customer service representative to do something the representative clearly doesn't want to do, you have seen the Ars Goetia in action.
The five books nobody reads
The remaining four books of the Lemegeton are worth noting precisely because they're ignored. The Ars Theurgia-Goetia, the second book, catalogs thirty-one aerial spirits tied to compass directions, mostly derived from Johannes Trithemius's Steganographia — a sixteenth-century text that was itself partly a work of cryptography disguised as a book of angel magic, or possibly the reverse.14 These spirits are described as "partly good and partly evil," which is a more interesting theological position than the Ars Goetia's straightforward evil-spirits-under-divine-constraint model. It gets less attention.
The Ars Paulina, attributed to the Apostle Paul for no discernible reason, provides a system for contacting angels associated with the hours of the day and the zodiac. The Ars Almadel describes a method of contacting angels using a wax tablet, candles, and colored silk. The Ars Notoria is a collection of prayers and meditative techniques for acquiring divine knowledge.15
Notice the gradient. The five books progress from commanding evil spirits, through negotiating with ambiguous spirits, to petitioning angelic spirits, to prayer. It is a spectrum from coercion to supplication. From magic to something that, if you squinted, could pass for devotion.
The book that survived culturally is the one about coercion. The book about prayer is the footnote. This tells you something about the market, though I'm not sure it tells you anything you didn't already know.
The Crowley problem
In 1904, Aleister Crowley published the Ars Goetia under the title The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King, edited from a translation by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, co-founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Crowley added Enochian invocations unrelated to the original text, a prefatory essay, and thirty-five annotations.16
The prefatory essay is the interesting part. In it, Crowley reframes the entire Goetic enterprise as psychological rather than supernatural. The demons, he wrote, are portions of the human brain. Their sigils are methods of stimulating specific mental functions through the eye. The divine names used to control them are vibrational tools for establishing command over the brain's operations.17
Mathers, for his part, had done the actual translation work from British Museum manuscripts back in 1888. Crowley credited it to "a dead hand." They were not on speaking terms.
This is a remarkable move. The man known as the wickedest man in the world published the most famous demon-summoning manual in the English language with an introduction arguing that demons are a metaphor for psychology. Whether this reflected genuine conviction or was a legal prophylactic against obscenity charges is, depending on your assessment of Crowley, an open question.
What is not an open question is the effect. Crowley's psychological framing became the dominant interpretive lens for an enormous segment of twentieth- and twenty-first-century occultism. Modern practitioners routinely describe Goetic work as "shadow work," the demons as Jungian archetypes, the ritual as a structured framework for confronting repressed aspects of the self.18 The seventeenth-century text that took a skeptic's debunking and turned it back into a demon manual was, three centuries later, turned into a therapy manual.
The demons keep getting reinterpreted. Their names stay the same.
The Peterson edition
Joseph H. Peterson's 2001 edition, published by Weiser Books, is the standard scholarly text and the one worth reading if you're going to read this at all. Peterson compiled his version from original manuscripts in the British Museum, cross-referencing multiple recensions, tracking variant readings, and providing critical analyses of all major variations.19 Nearly every page is twenty percent footnotes. He compares the Lemegeton's sources against Trithemius's Steganographia, Paracelsus's Archidoxes of Magic, and previously undiscovered Hebrew manuscripts of the original Key of Solomon.
The Peterson edition is not for beginners, and it does not pretend to be. It is an exercise in textual archaeology: tracing how a fifteenth-century French demon catalog became a sixteenth-century skeptic's satirical appendix became a seventeenth-century operational manual became an early-twentieth-century occultist's psychological framework became whatever it is that people on Reddit are doing with demon sigils in 2026.
The seals are redrawn from the original manuscripts. The variant sigils are presented side by side. The transmission errors are cataloged. It is the most honest edition of a text that has spent four centuries being dishonest about its own origins.
What the book is actually about
Here is what interests me.
The Lesser Key of Solomon is, on its surface, a manual for summoning and commanding supernatural entities. But what it actually documents, across every version and every editorial intervention from the third century to the twenty-first, is a persistent human intuition about how bureaucratic power works.
The demons are organized in a hierarchy that mirrors feudal governance. They are bound by contracts — the brass vessel, the divine names, the magician's invocations — that function as legal instruments. They are compelled not by superior force but by procedural authority. The magician's power derives entirely from his position within a chain of delegation that originates with God and passes through Solomon. Remove the theological framing, and what you have is an organizational chart with enforcement mechanisms.
The text has been rewritten, re-edited, satirized, re-operationalized, psychologized, and academically dissected across six centuries. Every editor — the anonymous seventeenth-century compiler, Weyer the skeptic, Crowley the showman, Peterson the scholar — has imposed a different interpretive framework on the same underlying material. The demons remain. The sigils remain. The hierarchy remains. The frameworks change. The structure persists through every reinterpretation because the structure is the thing the text is actually about.
There is a reason this book, and not the Ars Notoria's prayers for divine wisdom, has been continuously in print since 1904. People do not want to petition. People want to command. They want a system that converts procedural compliance into power over entities more powerful than themselves. They want to stand in the circle and cite the policy.
The Lemegeton's anonymous compiler understood this, even if he never articulated it. He assembled five books. He gave the demons the best book. He put the prayers last. The text itself is a record of editorial triage governed by the same incentive structure it describes: power flows to whoever controls the framework, and the framework that gets maintained is the one people actually use.
Every bureaucracy on earth runs on this principle. The Lesser Key of Solomon just had the honesty to draw the org chart with demons.
Notes
1 The name "Lesser Key of Solomon" does not appear in any surviving manuscript of the Lemegeton. A. E. Waite appears to have coined the distinction between a "Greater Key" and "Lesser Key" in his 1898 Book of Black Magic and of Pacts. See "The Lesser Key of Solomon," Wikipedia, link. ↩
2 The Lemegeton was compiled in the mid-seventeenth century from materials several centuries older, divided into five books: the Ars Goetia, Ars Theurgia-Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel, and Ars Notoria. "The Lesser Key of Solomon," Wikipedia, link. ↩
3 The legend of Solomon binding demons in a brass vessel derives from the Testament of Solomon and later Solomonic tradition. See "Goetic demon," Occult Encyclopedia, link. ↩
4 Scholarly consensus places the original compilation of the Testament of Solomon around the early third century CE, though it incorporates material from the first century. It is a pseudepigraphical Greek text blending Jewish, Christian, Egyptian, and Hellenistic elements. C. C. McCown, The Testament of Solomon (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1922); see also "Testament of Solomon," Early Jewish Writings, link. ↩
5 The Livre des Esperitz is a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century French grimoire, the oldest surviving treatise on demonic magic in French, listing forty-six spirits with descriptions traceable to at least the thirteenth century. "Livre des Esperitz," Wikipedia, link; Jean-Patrice Boudet, "Les who's who démonologiques de la Renaissance et leurs ancêtres médiévaux," Médiévales 44 (Spring 2003). ↩
6 Thirty of the Livre des Esperitz's forty-seven spirits are nearly identical to spirits in the Ars Goetia. "The Lesser Key of Solomon," Wikipedia, link. ↩
7 Freud's assessment of De Praestigiis Daemonum is noted in Joseph Peterson's introduction to Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, Twilit Grotto Esoteric Archives, link. ↩
8 Weyer cited his source as the Liber Officiorum Spirituum, seu Liber dictus Empto. Salomonis, de principibus et regibus daemoniorum. This manuscript has never been located. "Pseudomonarchia Daemonum," Wikipedia, link. ↩
9 Weyer stated in his foreword that he deliberately omitted passages "in order to render the whole work unusable." See Grimoire Magic, "Livre des Esperitz," link. ↩
10 The omission of Pruflas from the Ars Goetia reproduces an error also found in an edition of the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum cited in Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), indicating the Ars Goetia could not have been compiled before 1570. "The Lesser Key of Solomon," Wikipedia, link. ↩
10a Thomas Rudd (c. 1583–1656) labeled his copy Liber Malorum Spirituum seu Goetia and paired the demons with the seventy-two angels of the Shem HaMephorash, drawn from a manuscript by Blaise de Vigenère. "The Lesser Key of Solomon," Wikipedia, link. ↩
11 The astrological correspondence of demon ranks is detailed in "List of demons in the Ars Goetia," Wikipedia, link. ↩
12 Demon abilities cataloged in the Ars Goetia. Dantalion, the seventy-first spirit, is a Great Duke who "teaches all Arts and Sciences" and "knoweth the Thoughts of all Men and Women." "List of demons in the Ars Goetia," Wikipedia, link. ↩
13 Bael's description from the Peterson edition: "The first principall spirit is a king ruling in ye East, called Bael." Joseph H. Peterson, ed., The Lesser Key of Solomon (York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 2001). ↩
14 The Ars Theurgia-Goetia derives mostly from Trithemius's Steganographia, with altered seals and spirit ordering due to manuscript transmission corruption. "The Lesser Key of Solomon," Wikipedia, link. ↩
15 The five books of the Lemegeton and their respective contents are described in Joseph H. Peterson, ed., The Lesser Key of Solomon (York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 2001). ↩
16 Crowley's 1904 edition added Enochian invocations and essays reframing the rituals as psychological exploration. "The Lesser Key of Solomon," Wikipedia, link. ↩
17 Crowley's psychological framing: "The spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain… Their seals therefore represent methods of stimulating or regulating those particular spots (through the eye)." Quoted in "The Goetia: Lesser Key of Solomon the King," Delirium's Realm, link. ↩
18 Modern practitioners frequently interpret Goetic spirits as psychological archetypes or tools for inner exploration. See "The Goetia: History, Spirits, and Modern Practice," Solitary Morrigan, link. ↩
19 Peterson compiled his edition from original manuscripts in the British Museum, providing critical analyses of all major variations and cross-referencing Trithemius's Steganographia, Paracelsus, and newly discovered Hebrew manuscripts. Joseph H. Peterson, ed., The Lesser Key of Solomon (York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 2001). See also reviews at Amazon. ↩
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