Ars Goetia

Translated and Introduced by Paul Summers Young
 
The Lemegeton - The Little Key of Solomon - is the name of a family of seventeenth and eighteenth-century manuscripts inspired by Johannes Weyer's Pseudomonarchia on the one hand, and Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft on the other, drawing upon Agrippa and Peter of Abano along the way. Some of these texts were compiled into the book we now know so well by Mathers and Crowley, the basis for magical thought and practice around the world.
 
Our series will draw upon various Early Modern sources and related texts, not to establish a definitive text - there is just no such thing - but to explore it as a canon of magical literature made by a subculture relating to the religious radicalism and controversy of the time, and the 'Hermetic Enlightenment'.
 
This volume assembles multiple early sources of the Ars Goetia, restoring a sense of textual plurality often lost in later standardised editions. By placing variant manuscripts, excerpts, and related materials side by side, it reveals how the hierarchy of spirits, their seals, and their functions developed over time.
Particular attention is given to the pre-nineteenth-century transmission of the text—before its codification during the occult revival—allowing readers to encounter the Goetia not as a fixed manual, but as a dynamic body of practice shaped by scribes, practitioners, and compilers.
The second edition refines the transcription, expands the critical apparatus, and deepens the contextual framing, making it both a scholarly resource and a working text.