The Ars Goetia: The Brass Vessel and the Seventy-Two

DESCRIPTION

The Ars Goetia is the first book of the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis — the Lesser Key of Solomon — an anonymous English grimoire compiled in the mid-1600s from material a century and more older. It is, at bottom, a personnel file: seventy-two spirits, each with a name, a rank in an infernal peerage (kings, dukes, princes, marquises, earls, presidents, knights), a seal, a count of legions commanded, and a job description. Bael, first king, grants invisibility. Buer teaches philosophy and cures sickness. Andromalius, seventy-second and last, catches thieves.

The frame story explains the filing system. Solomon, the text says, bound the spirits and their legions into a vessel of brass, sealed it, and sank it in a deep lake at Babylon. The Babylonians, "expecting to find great store of Treasure therein," broke it open. Everything got out.

That is why this file exists, and why it is File 1 of 72. The Ars Goetia is the most durable demon census in Western print, and a census is read one entry at a time. The Watch will take the spirits in catalogue order. Bael is next.

THE RECORD

The chain of custody is documented and unheroic.

• 1st–5th century CE: the Greek Testament of Solomon establishes the legend — Solomon compels demons, by means of a ring, to build the Temple.
• 1577: the physician Johann Weyer appends Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, a catalogue of sixty-nine spirits, to De praestigiis daemonum — a book arguing that accused witches were ill, not guilty. Weyer deliberately withheld the operative instructions.
• 1584: Reginald Scot translates Weyer's list into English inside The Discoverie of Witchcraft, another skeptical work.
• Mid-17th century: an anonymous English compiler assembles the Lemegeton (the date 1641 occurs in the text). Pruflas is dropped; Vassago, Seere, Dantalion, and Andromalius are added; the count lands on seventy-two — the same figure as the angel-names of the Shem HaMephorash. Manuscripts survive in the British Library: Sloane MSS 2731, 3825, and 3648, and Harley MS 6483.
• 1904: Aleister Crowley publishes S. L. MacGregor Mathers's translation as The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King, after the two had fallen out. Crowley's prefatory essay declares the spirits "portions of the human brain."
• 2001: Joseph H. Peterson's critical edition, made from the Sloane manuscripts, becomes the scholarly standard.

THE HONEST READ

There is no brass vessel. The seventy-two are a literary artifact with a traceable pedigree, descended — by way of two skeptics — from a catalogue titled the False Monarchy of Demons, published to discredit the very hierarchy it described. What unsettles is not the legion but the ledger: names, ranks, and offices, recorded as if for audit, surviving four centuries of copying intact. The Watch expects nothing to answer to these names; it files the next seventy-one because the census, not the spirits, is the thing that escaped.

— The Archivist