Ars Goetia Explained: The 72 Spirits, Their Offices and Seals

Quick answer: The Ars Goetia is the first and best-known book of the Lemegeton, or Lesser Key of Solomon, a grimoire compiled in English in the mid-seventeenth century. It catalogs 72 spirits said to have been bound by King Solomon, giving each a name, a rank such as king or duke, a description of its appearance, an office or set of powers, the number of legions it commands, and a seal or sigil. Most of its material was adapted from Johann Weyer's 1577 list of demons.

Related guides: the five books of the Lesser Key, full list of the 72 demons, Goetia ranks and hierarchy, Bael and Paimon, the Goetia kings, what a sigil means, manuscript and printed Goetia editions.

What is the Ars Goetia? Meaning and origin of the name

The Ars Goetia, often shortened to the Goetia, is the first book of the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, the Lesser Key of Solomon. The Lemegeton is a compilation of five separate texts gathered into one grimoire in England around the 1640s to 1660s, surviving in manuscripts such as those now in the British Library. The Goetia is the section devoted to 72 spirits, each described as a demon that Solomon once commanded and confined.

The word goetia comes from the Greek goēteia, meaning sorcery or the art of the goēs, a term for a wailing conjurer. In the ancient world it already carried a negative sense, contrasted with the more respectable theourgia, or theurgy, which claimed to work with gods rather than lower spirits. The Lemegeton keeps that contrast in its own structure: the Ars Goetia deals with demons, while the second book, the Ars Theurgia-Goetia, deals with spirits that are partly good and partly evil.

So the goetia meaning most readers encounter today, a book listing 72 demons with seals, is a seventeenth-century narrowing of an older and broader word. When people say someone is working the Goetia, they mean this specific catalog and the ritual framework around it, not Greek sorcery in general. Knowing that history helps when you meet the word in older sources where it simply means low magic.

Where the 72 Goetia demons came from

The catalog did not spring from a single author. Its most important direct source is the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, the False Monarchy of Demons, which the Dutch physician Johann Weyer published in 1577 as an appendix to his book De praestigiis daemonum. Weyer, a skeptic about witch trials, printed the list to expose what he considered the absurdity of conjuring manuals. His version has 69 spirits, no seals, and a slightly different order.

Reginald Scot translated Weyer’s list into English in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), also as an exercise in debunking. The English compiler of the Lemegeton drew on this stream, added three spirits (Vassago, Seere, Dantalion, and Andromalius appear in the Goetia but not in Weyer, while Weyer’s Pruflas was dropped), rearranged the order, and supplied each spirit with a sigil. That is how a skeptic’s exposé became a working grimoire.

Behind Weyer lies a lost or unidentified Latin source he called the Liber officiorum spirituum, the Book of the Offices of Spirits. Fragments of similar office-lists survive in earlier manuscripts, some from the fifteenth century, which show that the idea of a catalog of spirits with ranks and duties circulated in Europe well before the Goetia fixed it at 72. The frame story that Solomon sealed the spirits in a brass vessel and cast it into a lake in Babylon, from which curious Babylonians released them, comes from the Lemegeton itself and echoes much older Solomonic legends such as the Testament of Solomon.

How each entry in the Goetia is structured

Every one of the 72 entries follows the same template, which makes the book feel like a reference manual rather than a narrative. Understanding the template is the fastest way to read any entry.

Name and number

The spirits are numbered 1 to 72, beginning with Bael and ending with Andromalius. Spellings vary between manuscripts, so Asmoday may appear as Asmodeus, and Amy as Avnas. Editors usually note variants.

Rank

Each spirit holds one of seven ranks: king, duke, prince, marquis, count or earl, president, or knight. A few hold two, such as Gaap (president and prince) or Amdusias (duke, sometimes also described as a king). The ranks imply an infernal court modeled on European feudal society; our guide to the Goetia hierarchy explains them in depth.

Appearance

The text describes the form the spirit is said to take: Bael with the heads of a cat, a toad, and a man; Stolas as a crowned owl; Buer in the shape of a star with five legs; Phenex as a phoenix with a child’s voice. These forms often shift, and many entries say the spirit can be asked to take a human shape.

Office

The office is the spirit’s function. Offices are strikingly practical: teaching languages, logic, astronomy, or herbs; revealing hidden treasure; answering questions about the past and future; reconciling friends and enemies; granting dignities; or causing storms and discord. The same office recurs across many spirits.

Legions and seal

Each spirit commands a stated number of legions, from a handful to ninety or more. Finally, each has a seal, the design the operator was instructed to engrave or draw. We treat the seals separately below.

Goetia sigils: what the seals are and what they were for

The seals, usually called sigils in modern usage, are the feature that most distinguishes the Ars Goetia from Weyer’s list. Each is an abstract line drawing, often with small circles, crosses, and curling terminals, enclosed in a circle in some manuscripts. The text instructs that the seal be made in metal according to the spirit’s rank, gold for kings, copper for dukes, tin for princes, silver for marquises, iron for counts, mercury for presidents, and lead for knights, though manuscripts differ on the details and the planetary logic is a later rationalization.

In the book’s own framework the seal functioned as a badge of authority. The operator wore or displayed it, together with a secret seal of Solomon, so that the spirit would recognize the compact Solomon had imposed. In other words, the sigil was understood as a signature or coat of arms belonging to the spirit, not as a magical weapon in itself. For how the word sigil came to mean many different things, see our explainer on what a sigil is.

Historians have not found a convincing single origin for the designs. Some resemble the characters and spirit-signatures found in late medieval and Renaissance magical manuscripts; others look like free improvisation by the Lemegeton’s compiler or copyist. Because the sigils were copied by hand for two centuries before printing, small differences exist between editions, and modern books often redraw them cleanly. This site describes the seals as historical artifacts and does not provide instructions for using them.

The ritual framework around the Ars Goetia demons

The catalog is wrapped in a procedure. The Lemegeton describes a magic circle inscribed with divine names, a triangle placed outside it in which the spirit is to appear, a brass vessel recalling the one Solomon used, a hexagram and pentagram of Solomon, a ring, and a series of conjurations, constraints, and a license to depart. The operator is told to address the spirit with authority derived from God and Solomon, never as a supplicant.

This apparatus belongs to a long tradition of Solomonic ritual magic, in which the central claim is that Solomon received power over spirits from God and that the magician inherits that authority through the correct names and seals. The Greater Key of Solomon, the Clavicula Salomonis, which is a separate and in some parts older text, shares the circle and the emphasis on divine names but does not contain the 72-spirit catalog.

Reading the ritual sections as a historian rather than a practitioner reveals a lot. The elaborate precautions reflect genuine fear; the insistence on divine authority reflects the Christian framework of the compilers; and the practical offices of the spirits reflect the real wants of early modern readers: money, knowledge, status, and love. We describe this material to explain the text, and the site does not offer ritual instructions.

Common misunderstandings about the Goetia

Because the Ars Goetia is now famous through games, anime, and social media, a few errors circulate widely.

• It is an ancient text from Solomon’s time. It is a seventeenth-century English compilation. The attribution to Solomon is traditional, as it is for many grimoires.
• The 72 are the demons of the Bible. A handful of names (Belial, Asmoday, Astaroth, Beelzebub in the related material) have biblical or Near Eastern roots, but most were unknown before late medieval office-lists.
• Each demon has one fixed appearance. The text often gives shifting or multiple forms, and says many spirits can be asked to appear in a more pleasant shape.
• The sigils have a single authentic version. They vary by manuscript and edition; Peterson’s edition prints variants.
• Goetia and Lemegeton are the same thing. The Goetia is one of the five books. The others are the Ars Theurgia-Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel, and Ars Notoria.

The number 72 itself has a long symbolic life, from the 72 names of God in Kabbalah to the 72 translators of the Septuagint, which may be why the compiler settled on it rather than Weyer’s 69.

Why people search for the Ars Goetia today

The Goetia reached a mass audience in 1904, when Aleister Crowley published The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King, based on a translation by S. L. MacGregor Mathers. Crowley added an introduction arguing that the spirits were portions of the human brain, which made the book acceptable to a psychological age. Through the twentieth century it was reprinted constantly and became the default Goetia for occultists, artists, and horror writers.

Since the 1990s the 72 spirits have been borrowed by video games such as the Shin Megami Tensei series, by anime and manga, by tabletop role-playing games, and by metal bands, each adapting the names and sigils for characters and visuals. Many readers first meet Paimon, Stolas, or Buer through a cartoon owl or a game boss and then search to learn the source. Others come from the study of demonology, Renaissance history, or comparative religion.

For serious reading, two editions matter most. The Mathers-Crowley Goetia is historically important but edited freely. Joseph H. Peterson’s 2001 edition of the Lemegeton collates the British Library manuscripts and prints the sigil variants. Our article on manuscript and printed Goetia editions compares them, and the five books of the Lesser Key shows where the Goetia sits in the larger work.

Disclaimer

This article describes a historical grimoire and the beliefs recorded in it for educational purposes. The powers attributed to the spirits are presented as claims made by the text, not as facts, and this site does not provide ritual or summoning instructions.