A copy with a named chain of custody
Wellcome Collection records MS.3203 under Henry Dawson Lea and describes Five treatises upon Magic. Its fourth treatise is titled Two Books of Solomon the King called Goetia and Theurgia Goetia and advertises names, offices, circles, and seals of 336 spirits. The catalogue also reports a statement that Lea transcribed the material from manuscripts lent by Frederick Hockley in 1843. That chain matters: the object is evidence of nineteenth-century copying and collecting, even when its text descends from earlier material. The manuscript’s date is not the first date for any spirit name inside it.
Five treatises form a collector’s curriculum
The contents move through several kinds of magical knowledge rather than repeating one ritual system. A Wheel of Wisdom supplies a diagram and key; a reported experiment turns conjuration into a narrative case; the Urim and Thummim, lamps, rings, cup, and homunculi place knowledge in instruments; the Goetia and Theurgia-Goetia catalogue spirits; and Lenain’s Sacred and Divine Cabal supplies a later synthetic framework. Read in that sequence, the volume moves from a device, to an example, to a cabinet of ritual objects, to a large taxonomy, and finally to a cabalistic interpretation. The order makes the manuscript a nineteenth-century curriculum in inherited magic. Its unity comes from collecting practices, not from a single date or author.
The claim of 336 spirits is an organizing device
The title’s promise of 336 spirits turns heterogeneous entries into a countable system. “Names, Offices, Circles and Seals” also announces four parallel indexes: a verbal identifier, a functional description, a place in a diagrammed hierarchy, and a graphic mark. The total should therefore be read as part of the compiler’s architecture, not as a simple headcount that can be compared to the Ars Goetia’s familiar seventy-two. The Theurgia-Goetia multiplies named chiefs, directions, and subordinate retinues in a different way from the Goetia. Combining the books under one advertised number makes abundance visible, but it also flattens the different rules by which each book constructs its population.
Worked example: how one office becomes a reusable record
A figure such as Astaroth shows how the catalogue format turns narrative material into a repeatable record. The entry combines ducal rank, a described appearance, powers connected with hidden knowledge and the liberal sciences, a retinue, and a seal. Each element answers a different operational question: who is addressed, how the presence is recognized, what may be requested, what forces accompany the figure, and which mark identifies the entry. Copying those fields as a block preserves the catalogue’s logic even when wording changes. Separating the seal from the office, or the name from its position in the sequence, removes the cross-checks that help distinguish transmission from later rearrangement.
Tracing-paper figures separate image from page
The pasted slips of tracing paper described in the catalogue make the diagrams physically mobile before they are fixed into the volume. A copied seal or wheel can be transferred at a different scale from the prose, corrected independently, or positioned after the text has already been written. That construction helps explain why image and paragraph may not share the same transmission history. The color added to some figures creates another editorial layer: it can distinguish zones or names, but it may also reflect the nineteenth-century copy rather than the older exemplar. The page should therefore be read as an assembled artifact whose visual and verbal components were made in different operations.
What a later copy can reveal
A nineteenth-century copy may preserve an older reading or introduce a new order, label, diagram, or error. Peterson finds that this manuscript’s spirit sequence differs from common print and shares mistakes with a Welsh witness. Position and spelling therefore trace one branch of transmission rather than confirm a familiar list.
A nineteenth-century stage in the text’s history
MS.3203 shows the Goetia and Theurgia-Goetia in a nineteenth-century setting rather than at the point where either work first appeared. The catalogue associates the copy with Henry Dawson Lea and with manuscripts lent by Frederick Hockley in 1843. Its title advertises 336 spirits across the two books, while the sequence Peterson describes differs from more familiar printed arrangements. Those details make the manuscript useful for understanding how a collector copied and organized inherited material. A spirit name in this volume may be older than the physical pages, while its spelling or place in the sequence may reflect this later line of copying.