“The Offices of Spirits” is a useful name for a family of related catalogues. It is a poor substitute for a manuscript shelfmark. Names, sequence, ranks, and neighboring material change from one surviving witness to the next.
What an “office” meant in a spirit catalogue
An office is the task, power, or sphere attributed to a named spirit by a particular text. An entry might combine a rank, an appearance, a direction, a number of legions, and an answer it was said to provide. Those fields resemble administrative description, but they are claims within a historical manuscript, not evidence that the named entity existed or performed the task. Comparing offices helps identify related texts because a changed spelling can still accompany a recognizable description. It can also expose an unsafe identification: two similar names may stand beside different functions and different neighbors. A figure’s wording and position in its witness can differ from the later standardized name.
Weyer’s named source and his printed selection
Johann Weyer named a Liber officiorum spirituum as the source behind the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, added to the 1577 fifth edition of De praestigiis daemonum. The source he used has not been identified as one complete surviving manuscript. His note to the reader says he removed material to make imitation harder. The resulting printed appendix has sixty-nine numbered entries, even though its Belial story mentions seventy-two kings. Its omissions are part of the evidence: the printed catalogue cannot be used as a transparent photograph of the book Weyer had. He also put the list inside an argument about delusion and magical pretension, a setting unlike that of a later ceremonial compilation.
Earlier and neighboring witnesses
Trinity College Cambridge MS O.8.29 is a composite volume. Its sixth part, an early-sixteenth-century French booklet, contains the Livre des Esperitz followed by a book of conjurations. The college catalogue gives the opening words and places these works in that physical part; it does not label the whole mixed volume an Ars Goetia. Folger Shakespeare Library V.b.26, written around 1577–1583, contains an English “Officium de spirittibus” section beginning at manuscript page 73. A shorter list of ten spirits with four kings appears in British Library Sloane MS 3853 according to Peterson’s comparison. These are related points of comparison, not copies shown to descend in a simple straight line.
Why the seventeenth-century Goetia is another stage
The Goetia portion of the Lemegeton presents seventy-two numbered spirits with individual seals in a larger ritual framework. Peterson’s witness comparison finds close dependence on the Weyer and Scot line for many descriptions, yet the order is extensively rearranged. The Goetia also includes Vassago and three final figures absent from Weyer’s list; it does not include Weyer’s Pruflas. Those facts support textual reuse and revision, rather than an unchanged catalogue transmitted from antiquity. The familiar 1904 Mathers–Crowley book is later still: it printed one part of this compilation, not the lost book Weyer reported seeing.
Bael across the surviving records
Bael appears as the first entry in Weyer’s 1577 appendix and in later Goetia arrangements, including Sloane MS 3825. A familiar name does not make the surrounding descriptions identical. Folger V.b.26 contains an “Officium de spirittibus” within a much larger anthology, so its manuscript context also differs from either printed list. Catalogue records establish the surviving objects; comparisons of their wording and sequence show a textual family with revisions rather than one unchanged book.
References
The catalogues identify the surviving objects, while modern transcriptions expose wording and editorial expansions that do not appear in every witness.