Grimoires
The Lemegeton’s second book arranges aerial spirits by direction, rank, mobility, and seal while borrowing from Trithemius’s Steganographia.
A different catalogue after the Goetia
Theurgia-Goetia is the second part of the collection now called the Lesser Key of Solomon or Lemegeton. Its title joins words that modern readers sometimes treat as opposites: the text presents aerial spirits described in varying moral terms rather than another list identical to the seventy-two Goetic figures. The opening of the British Library Sloane MS 3825 version organizes chief spirits and ministers, assigning names, directions, and seals. It is a catalogue with a procedural frame, but its entities, counts, and graphic signs belong to a particular textual tradition. They are not independently documented beings. Calling this work “Book Two” describes its place in a seventeenth-century compilation, not the date when all of its component names were invented. Missing ministers and changed seals can result from differences among manuscripts and editions rather than from a simple copying error.
What it borrowed from Trithemius
Joseph H. Peterson’s edition compares the names and some seals with Johannes Trithemius’s Steganographia, composed around 1500 and first printed in the early seventeenth century. Trithemius presented his spirit language within a work on concealed communication. Theurgy-Goetia’s compiler reused parts of that material in a new ceremonial setting. That shift matters more than superficial resemblance. A borrowed name can retain its spelling while its function, setting, and supporting instructions change. Peterson identifies Sloane MS 3824, folios 53r–71v, as a related earlier form headed “The Second Parte of the Art of King Solomon”; it lacks most of the later abundance of seals. Sloane MS 3825 then witnesses a fuller version. This is a concrete example of how grimoire compilations grow: the existence of a figure in one book does not show that every detail beside it belongs to the same period.
Names, seals, and the second book’s sources
The chief spirit’s name, the number of subordinates, and the drawn seals can differ between manuscripts and editions. Some modern sets supply clean, identical-looking symbols where a witness has a damaged mark or no drawing. The Steganographia parallel helps explain borrowed names, but it does not prove an identical ritual in Trithemius: Peterson distinguishes his hidden-writing examples from the later Theurgia-Goetia conjurations. The second Lemegeton book also sits beside the Goetia and Ars Paulina, where different materials were assembled under one authoritative name. Their relationship shows how a compilation developed rather than whether its claimed operations produced effects. Directional headings and minister lists help expose that assembly process. When one witness shortens a list and another expands it with seals, the difference points to successive editorial work rather than a single catalogue copied without change.
How the thirty-one rulers organize direction, time, and office
The catalogue’s thirty-one chief rulers form a hierarchy rather than an undifferentiated list of names. Four emperors anchor the cardinal directions: Carnesiel in the east, Caspiel in the south, Amenadiel in the west, and Demoriel in the north. Kings and princes then occupy subordinate directional positions, so a title tells the reader where a ruler belongs as well as its rank. The text makes another division between twenty stationary chiefs, assigned to fixed points of the compass, and eleven wandering chiefs said to move from place to place. Their ministers introduce a third layer of order. Some serve by day and others by night, while planetary hours rotate which minister is addressed within those periods. The offices attributed to the chiefs often overlap; discovering hidden things, carrying messages, or transporting objects; yet access is differentiated by direction, motion, time, seal, and the text’s moral description of the ruler. This explains the repeated lists. They are coordinates for selecting a named office-holder within the compiler’s imagined aerial administration, not thirty-one unrelated biographies. A modern alphabetical spirit directory preserves the entries but removes the directional and hourly system that makes their sequence intelligible.
Questions to explore
- Which manuscript actually supplies the seal shown in an edition?
- What changed when Trithemius’s names entered a ceremonial compilation?
- Does a spirit count include ministers as well as chiefs?