The Dictionary of Demons, page 5
The Goetia contains the sigils and descriptions of seventy-two individual demons—a number by now of familiar significance. These demons are referenced in numerous works, and I have compared as many of these texts as I could find in order to compile the most accurate descriptions as possible. In doing so, I have combined references from Wierus’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1564) and Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), as well as material on the Goetic demons found both in Dr. Rudd’s Treatise on Angel Magic (sixteenth century) and his version of the Goetia as translated and produced by occultists Stephen Skinner and David Rankine.
Beyond the names from the Goetia, the lion’s share of demon names came from two distinct works. The first, referred to as the Ars Theurgia in this text, is often listed as the Theurgia-Goetia in other writings. This is traditionally the second book of the Lemegeton, or Lesser Key of Solomon, a work firmly planted in the Solomonic tradition and dating back to approximately the seventeenth century. The Lemegeton is almost certainly derived from older sources, but the oldest extant manuscripts are from a translation by Robert Turner produced in London in 1655.
The second is a curiosity unto itself. Known as the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, this work is powerfully steeped in Jewish esotericism. Aimed at achieving conversation with a heavenly being known as the Holy Guardian Angel, this classic text of ceremonial magick provides the names of literally hundreds of demons that are required to swear their subservience to the operator during the Holy Guardian Angel process. Attributed to a fourteenth-century Jewish scholar known as Abraham von Worms, the Abramelin material was translated into English by occultist Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers in 1898. Mathers was working from a fifteenth-century French manuscript that, at the time, was the only version of the Abramelin material available to him. Over the years, Mathers has received some criticism for his translation, but recently, Abramelin scholar Georg Dehn discovered that it was the manuscript, and not Mathers’s translation, that was flawed. Dehn, in an exhaustive search for the real Abraham von Worms, has brought several other versions of the Abramelin material to light. These include a manuscript written in cipher and kept at the Wolfenbüttel Library in Germany, a manuscript dating to 1720 and kept at the Dresden Library, and finally a version of the Abramelin material published in 1725 by Peter Hammer in Cologne. In addition to these discoveries, Dehn claims to have traced Abraham von Worms—long thought to be a name crafted to legitimize the Abramelin story—to the very real Jewish scholar Rabbi Jacob ben Moses ha Levi Moellin, known in the fourteenth century as the MaHaRIL. Dehn’s 2006 publication, The Book of Abramelin, has proven indispensable for its comparison of the surviving manuscripts, especially where the long lists of demon names are concerned.
Other works that serve as sources of names include the classic Sworn Book of Honorius, also known as the Liber Juratus. The oldest versions of this grimoire date to the fourteenth century, and it is considered to be one of the most influential grimoires. Many of the grimoires that came after it seem to have at least been inspired by its contents, if they have not directly borrowed portions of this book. I drew names from the 1977 Driscoll translation of the Sworn Book, published by Heptangle Press, as well as from the Joseph H. Peterson translation, which at the moment can only be found online at his extremely useful site, Esoteric
Archives.com.23 Of these two, the Peterson translation is by far superior, but then, Peterson has established himself as the definitive scholar of these antique texts. His research and commentary on all of the grimoires, not just the Liber Juratus, has been invaluable to the compilation of this book.
In addition to the classic grimoires, I have included several that some scholars believe to be spurious. The Grimoire of Pope Honorius, written in nineteenth-century France, yielded a few names, even though this book was most certainly never penned by the actual Pope Honorius III. Another large section of names came from Peterson’s translation of the Grimorium Verum, a book that claims to have been written in 1517 but that most scholars date to the mid-1700s. Names taken from the Grand Grimoire, also known as Le Dragon Rouge, come from the Darcy Kuntz editions, which themselves come from translations by Arthur Edward Waite. These translations can be found in Waite’s 1913 publication, the Book of Black Magic. All of these texts are clearly derivative of the grimoiric tradition, but their original sources are unclear. This, coupled with their authors’ attempts to attain credibility by actively obscuring the origin and time period of the manuscripts, is why the tomes remain suspect. They are included because, spurious or not, their information nevertheless influenced later representations of the Solomonic material.
Although I have taken very little from it, another potentially spurious grimoire sourced tangentially within this text is the Grimoire of Armadel. Though it was translated by Mathers in the early 1900s, the earliest recorded mention of this book dates back to a bibliographical reference compiled by one Gabriel Naude in 1625. Author Aaron Leitch, in his book Secrets of the Magickal Grimoires, suggests that this book was less a legitimate grimoire and more a fabrication intended to feed an occult panic that gripped France between the years 1610 and 1640 CE. There were persistent rumors at the time of necromancy being practiced among the clergy, and the priestly tone of the Grimoire of Armadel seems constructed to feed these fears directly.
Some of the rarely sourced grimoires that have contributed names to this book include the Munich Handbook presented in Professor Richard Kieckhefer’s excellent work Forbidden Rites. Translated and presented from a similarly academic standpoint are the Liber de Angelis and the Liber Visionarum. These are both amazing examples of the grimoiric tradition that I never would have encountered were it not for their inclusion in Claire Fanger’s 1994 Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic. The whole Magic in History series, from whence Conjuring Spirits comes, was tremendously helpful to this book, for it includes not only Professor Kieckhefer’s Forbidden Rites but also Elizabeth Butler’s Ritual Magic and Fortunes of Faust. If you are interested in expanding your own research beyond the curated material in this Dictionary of Demons, I highly recommend exploring these works.
Finally, related to both the grimoiric tradition and the Faust legends of Germany, I have drawn several names from the text known as The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. Attributed to Moses and intended to demonstrate how Moses was able to out-do the magicians of the Pharaoh with his own magickal tricks, this book circulated throughout Germany in the form of a variety of pamphlets in the 1800s. Eventually, it was compiled in 1849 by an antiquarian from Stuttgart by the name of Johann Scheible. This book is a blend of the grimoiric tradition, Talmudic lore, and the essentially German tradition of the Faustbuch, a magickal system that shaped and was shaped by the legend of Faust and his demon, Mephistopheles. Also attributed to Moses, but significantly more mysterious in its origin, is the Sword of Moses, published “from an unique manuscript,” presumably in Hebrew, by one Dr. Moses Gaster in London, 1896.24 The full text of this book can also be found with commentary on Joseph H. Peterson’s EsotericArchives.com.
Interior pages of the Clavis Inferni, an eighteenth-century grimoire attributed to St. Cyprian. JHS is a Christogram derived from the first three letters of the name Jesus in Greek. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection, London.
All of the texts cited above comprise a massive body of work. I know that at least a few of my readers will now be wondering whether I left anything out in my exhaustive search for demon names (and whether I have a shred of sanity left after such a search!). In fact, there are a few traditional grimoires whose contents I chose to exclude from this book. One of these was the Heptameron. This influential work, traditionally attributed to Peter de Abano, was published at least two hundred years after his death in 1316 CE. For this reason, many scholars dispute the claim that Abano authored the text, although posthumous publications of grimoires are not entirely unheard of, especially in the case of magickal texts that might have proven dangerous to release in the author’s lifetime.
The debate about the authorship of the fourteenth-century Heptameron was not the reason I left it out. The Heptameron clearly has some details in common with books like the Sworn Book of Honorius and, in fact, is echoed throughout much of the grimoiric tradition. For example, one of the “angels” said to reign on Friday in the Heptameron is called Sarabotes. This name is suspiciously close to the Sworn Book’s demon Sarabocres. But the Heptameron very specifically identifies all of the spirits presented in the text as angels. They are not described as being fallen—in fact, many of them are assigned to positions in one of the seven heavens. In a text devoted expressly to demons, this identification with angels precludes the inclusion of these spirits as they appear in the Heptameron, even though they reappear as demons in later works.
For much the same reason that I left out the Heptameron, I did not source the sixteenth-century work known as the Arbatel of Magic (although you will find a few minor references to its magickal system). First published in Latin in Basel, Switzerland, in 1575, this grimoire is distinguished by its lack of infernal entities. It deals primarily with Olympian, or planetary, spirits, each assigned to one of the seven heavenly luminaries identified throughout Renaissance works. In this, it is a tome concerned primarily with celestial influences, and the spirits it describes are clearly separate from demons. Its concepts owe a great deal to the philosophy of Paracelsus (1493–1541). Although its contents are not relevant to our inquiry about demons, the Arbatel was nevertheless a significant work. Its influence can be seen in the Secret Grimoire of Turiel and The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. Perhaps best described as a tome of transcendental magick, it is notably the point of origin for the use of the term theosophy in the sense of occult knowledge.
Originally, I included the spirits listed in the related Secret Grimoire of Turiel. This text, unknown for many years, came to light only in the twentieth century. The material in this book is thought to date back to approximately the sixteenth century. However, it should be noted that since no extant copies exist beyond that discovered in 1927, there is a very real possibility that the grimoire was fabricated, much like the Red Dragon Grimoire.25 The contents of the book seem far less calculated to shock or to play into the dark and mysterious reputation of the grimoires, and this alone argues for the probable legitimacy of the text. I ultimately cut from this book the material from the Secret Grimoire of Turiel, but not because of the disputed legitimacy of its contents. Instead, none of the spirits discussed in the Secret Grimoire of Turiel were identified explicitly as demons. Some are angels, but most are Olympic spirits, as with the earlier Armadel.
Another otherwise influential tome of celestial magick (or astral magick, from the Latin astrum, “star”) that didn’t make the cut for included material was the Picatrix. This Arabic text is said to date to the eleventh century, although a thirteenth-century date is more likely. While the Picatrix sometimes comes up in reference to demonic grimoires, the text itself adds little to the subject of demons. Instead, it deals primarily with astrological correspondences and the spheres of the heavens. The book also contains material on talismans, herbs, and philosophy. Trithemius includes a listing on the Picatrix in his catalogue of occult works. He notes that the edition he is referring to is a Latin text translated from an Arabic version in 1256. When it comes to the significance of time and planetary correspondences in ceremonial magick, the Picatrix and related Islamic traditions are foundational, but it is not a source of demonic proper names.
Finally, among those well-known and influential Solomonic texts left unsourced within this book is the Ars Notoria, sometimes called the Notary Art of Solomon.26 A number of manuscripts bear this name, the oldest dating to the thirteenth century, although Joseph Peterson notes that the Ars Notoria is closely linked to the Liber Juratus and that the Liber Juratus may in fact be dependent upon it.27 Where the Liber Juratus contains a discussion of the spirits, including their names and offices, the Ars Notoria focuses on orations, prayers, and holy names of God. These are employed for the purpose of communion with the divine and achieving instant knowledge of all sciences.28
The Ars Notoria was well known, and not simply among a small subset of secret practitioners. Pope Benedict XIV, writing in his treatise on saints, observes, “There is a certain art, called notoria, by which, after certain prayers and other ceremonies having a show of piety, men learn all at once the liberal sciences.” 29 Benedict XIV goes on to quote from the Colloquies of Erasmus, which reportedly contains an example of the Ars Notoria. Other books are cited as well, amply demonstrating the tremendous reach of this particular piece of the Solomonic tradition. A version of this book is included in Turner’s translation of the Lemegeton, but I’ve left out both the Art Pauline and the Almadel from that work as well, since they either do not deal with spirits at all or deal expressly with angels. The same goes for the Ars Notoria.
New Sources in the Anniversary Edition
In the decade since the Dictionary of Demons was first published, writings about the Solomonic tradition have flourished. So many new grimoires have become available that it’s been hard to keep up. A number of factors have helped with this uptick in available work. Shifting attitudes in academia have led to a growing number of scholars who treat grimoires, magick, and the occult as a serious topic of inquiry in fields as widespread as literature, comparative religious studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and folklore. Changing technologies have also led to a proliferation of available texts: not only is it easier to publish and distribute a printed book, but social media has also allowed for people with specialized interests to connect in ways they really didn’t have before. Another aspect of changing technology includes the ease with which a book can be digitalized and shared. Since the Google Books project, this has grown beyond merely scanning a text to make it available online. Organizations like the Wellcome Library in London have made their entire collections virtual, including high-resolution photo tours of many handwritten texts. These are so crisp, you can zoom in to see the stitching in the binding and all the varied textures on each vellum page. Finally, the uptick in scholarship is not limited only to the often exclusive halls of academia. Independent researchers and occultists have also been tirelessly working to transcribe and share these fascinating texts, and there is a reason the same handful of names appear again and again in these published manuscripts. Folks such as Joseph H. Peterson, Dan Harms, David Rankine, and Stephen Skinner have engaged in exhaustive exploration of the manuscripts in the Sloane collection, at the Folger Library, and at Wellcome. Over the past decade, they have brought into the public eye grimoiric texts that otherwise would have remained overlooked or entirely forgotten.
Between the academics, the online libraries, and the many new published grimoires, I almost couldn’t keep up. As it was, I had to carefully limit what texts I sourced, focusing mainly on the ones that brought either a new perspective or a wealth of previously unknown names to the table. One of the heftiest new sources, the Book of Oberon, brought both.
Published by the team of Daniel Harms, Joseph H. Peterson, and James R. Clark, the Book of Oberon is drawn from a manuscript stored at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, under the title Book of Magic, with Instructions for Invoking Spirits, etc. Although the precise date of its creation is uncertain, the first date recorded in the work is 1577. In addition to having what is arguably a more complete list of the Offices of Spirits than many other works, the Book of Oberon stands out because its conjurations are not concerned merely with angels and demons; as its name implies, the grimoire contains spells for conjuring faeries as well. The text also contains a profuse number of demon names, many of which appear to be unique to this volume. Some of that uniqueness may come down to a matter of spelling and penmanship: the manuscript that became the Book of Oberon comprises several distinct works and shows evidence of multiple people’s handwriting. At least one of these individuals was not well versed in Latin, and more than a few of the names recorded throughout this massive tome are inconsistently rendered from page to page. Some names change in their spelling even within the same line. A few, which otherwise appear to be representations of the familiar seventy-two Goetic demons, have spellings that suggest the person recording the name was taking written dictation and imperfectly rendered what they heard. Even with these obvious errors, however, the Book of Oberon is a landmark work, providing an unprecedented window into the working magick and folk beliefs of Shakespeare’s England.30
Another exciting work made available through the tireless work of Joseph H. Peterson is the Secrets of Solomon: A Witch’s Handbook from the Trial Records of the Venetian Inquisition, published in 2018. Known originally as the Clavicula Salomonis de Secretis, this is a grimoire that originated in Venice in 1636. It had originally belonged to Leonardo Longo, a former Dominican monk from Naples. He is likely the author of this grimoire, and he used it in his magickal practice. That practice earned him the scrutiny of the Venetian Inquisition. He was tried for witchcraft and ultimately executed. The confiscated book remained in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia.
Pages from the eighteenth-century grimoire Clavis Inferni. The image on the left shows the Holy Spirit with seven stars and seven lights. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection, London.
The Secrets of Solomon is an exciting grimoire to see in print because it reveals a clear line of descent between the legitimate grimoiric tradition of the Renaissance and previously disputed grimoires such as the Grand Grimoire and the Grimorium Verum. The names of the demons, their powers, and their hierarchies are nearly identical in these works. Most of the differences are small spelling variations of the sort to be expected across a series of transcriptions. Although they still may have been penned in the 1800s, the Grimorium Verum and its related texts clearly derive from the material in the Secrets of Solomon.
