A 15th-century German priest copied a list of demons from a manuscript he called “a pack of lies.” That list, the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, became the skeleton for the Ars Goetia, the first book of the Lesser Key of Solomon — but the two texts disagree on nearly everything that matters: which demons exist, how many, what they command, and whether you should trust the names at all.
We keep both on the same shelf at Le Grand Grimoire. The Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (False Monarchy of Demons) sits beside the Ars Goetia because you cannot understand one without the other. The first is a Renaissance scholar’s rough draft, assembled from older sources he did not name. The second is a 17th-century grimoire that took that list, reorganized it, and sealed it into the form most modern practitioners know: seventy-two demons, each with a seal, a rank, and a specific job.
The differences between them are not academic. They determine which spirits a conjuror can call, what authority those spirits claim, and how the whole hierarchy holds together.
Where Did These Two Lists Come From?
The Pseudomonarchia Daemonum was published in 1577 as an appendix to Johann Weyer’s De Praestigiis Daemonum (On the Tricks of Demons). Weyer was a Dutch physician and occultist, a student of the notorious Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. He compiled the list by copying from earlier manuscripts — likely the Liber Officiorum Spirituum (Book of the Offices of Spirits) and a now-lost German grimoire. Weyer called his own work unreliable. He included the demons not as a practical guide but as evidence that demonology was a tangled mess of corrupted names and borrowed ranks.
The Ars Goetia appeared roughly seventy years later, around 1640, in a manuscript known today as Sloane 3825, held at the British Library. Its compiler is unknown. The text claims King Solomon bound the demons and sealed them in a bronze vessel, a story that appears in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic folklore. The Ars Goetia took Weyer’s list and expanded it. Weyer listed sixty-nine demons. The Goetia has seventy-two.
Those three extra demons tell the whole story.
What the Two Demonic Hierarchies Actually Say
The Pseudomonarchia lists eight demon-kings: Bael, Paimon, Beleth, Purson, Asmodeus, Vine, Bileth, and Zagan. The Ars Goetia keeps Bael and Paimon as kings but demotes Beleth and Purson to great presidents, downgrades Asmodeus to a king but under Amaymon’s authority, and drops Vine, Bileth, and Zagan from the royal rank entirely. The Goetia introduces a new king never named by Weyer: Belial.
That shift matters. In the Pseudomonarchia, the kings rule over the other spirits directly. In the Goetia, the kings answer to four “chief emperors” — Amaymon, Corson, Zimimay, and Gaap, who correspond to the four cardinal directions. A conjuror must dismiss one emperor before calling the next. That directional system does not exist in Weyer.
The seals differ too. The Pseudomonarchia includes no illustrations. Weyer described each demon’s appearance, “Bael appears with a cat’s head, or a toad’s, or all three”, but gave no diagrams for their sigils. The Ars Goetia provides engraved seals for every one of its seventy-two spirits, arranged so the conjuror can trace them onto virgin parchment or metal. This is the single most practical difference between the two texts. A grimoire without seals is a map with no marks. The Goetia gave practitioners something to draw.
The Three Demons Only the Goetia Names
Purson, Zagan, and Belial appear in the Ars Goetia in forms absent from the Pseudomonarchia, but the names themselves are older. Belial appears in the Hebrew Bible as a term for worthlessness, not a proper name (Deuteronomy 13:13, Judges 19:22). The Dead Sea Scrolls treat Belial as a satanic figure, the commander of the forces of darkness. By the time the Goetia lists him as a king, he commands eighty legions and appears in a chariot of fire.
Purson is a different case. The Pseudomonarchia lists him as a great king who knows hidden treasures. The Goetia assigns him twenty-two legions and gives him a bear-shaped form with a serpent’s tail, riding a bear and carrying a viper. Zagan, a great president in Weyer who can turn wine into blood, stays a president in the Goetia but gains a griffin’s wings and a transformed voice.
None of these additions come from new sources. The Goetia’s compiler worked from the same tradition but reorganized it to fit the seventy-two-spirit structure, a number with deep symbolic weight in Kabbalistic angelology. Seventy-two angels bear the names of God in the Shem HaMephorash. The Goetia mirrors that structure with seventy-two fallen angels, creating a symmetry that Weyer never attempted.
The Four Emperors: What the Pseudomonarchia Leaves Out
The Pseudomonarchia names twenty-one dukes, thirty-three presidents, and a handful of undisputed kings. It has no emperor rank. The Ars Goetia introduces four: Amaymon, Corson, Zimimay, and Gaap. They govern the four cardinal points, Amaymon the east, Corson the west, Zimimay the north, Gaap the south, and every other demon in the Goetia answers to one of them.
This is not an arbitrary addition. It borrows from the ancient grimoire tradition of the Heptameron (attributed to Peter of Abano, 13th century), which assigns angelic and demonic rulers to the four directions, the four seasons, and the four watches of the day. The Goetia’s compiler adapted that system for the Solomonic framework. Weyer, writing as a skeptical physician, had no interest in building a working ritual system. He catalogued. The Goetia’s author built.
The practical consequence: a conjuror using the Pseudomonarchia can call any demon directly, provided they know the correct name and rank. A conjuror using the Ars Goetia must first observe the directional hierarchy. Call Bael without acknowledging Amaymon, and the spirit may not answer. The Goetia imposes a protocol the Pseudomonarchia lacks.
Which Grimoire Should a Practitioner Use?
The answer depends on what you want from the spirit.
The Pseudomonarchia offers what Weyer intended: a record of what earlier demonologists believed, without ritual instructions, without seals, without protective circles. It is a reference text, not a grimoire in the practical sense. If you want to study the evolution of demonic names from the Renaissance to the early modern period, you start with Weyer.
The Ars Goetia offers a complete ritual system: materials, timing, conjurations, licenses to depart, and the seals themselves. If you intend to call a spirit, and we do not recommend doing so without significant preparation, you use the Goetia, preferably from a critical edition that notes where it borrows from Weyer and where it departs.
A third option exists. Some practitioners combine both. They use the Goetia’s seals and ritual structure but consult the Pseudomonarchia for details the Goetia omits, physical descriptions, alternative names, the number of legions. Weyer’s Bael appears “with three heads, one like a cat, one like a toad, one like a man.” The Goetia says only that Bael appears “in divers shapes.” The Pseudomonarchia fills the gap.
Common Misconceptions People Bring to These Texts
Myth: The Ars Goetia is the original Solomonic text. No surviving manuscript of the Goetia predates the 17th century. The Solomon legend is a literary frame, not a historical claim. The oldest known Solomonic grimoires date to the 14th and 15th centuries, and the Goetia draws heavily on them, but the seventy-two-demon structure is a Renaissance invention.
Myth: The Pseudomonarchia is a copy of the Goetia. The reverse is true. The Goetia copied Weyer, not the other way around. Weyer’s text predates the first Goetia manuscript by at least sixty years.
Myth: Both texts describe the same demons with the same powers. They disagree on dozens of details. The demon Gaap, for example, is a king in the Pseudomonarchia who appears “with four horns like a bull.” In the Goetia, Gaap is a president who appears as a man with a face like a lion, carrying a red-hot coal. Rank, appearance, even jurisdiction change between the two.
Myth: You need both to do effective spirit work. No. You need one working grimoire. The Goetia is self-contained. The Pseudomonarchia is a supplementary source, valuable for comparative study but insufficient as a ritual manual.
FAQ
Why are there only 69 demons in the Pseudomonarchia? Weyer listed 69 because he copied from manuscripts that had not yet standardized the count. The 72-demon structure came later, possibly influenced by Kabbalistic angelology.
Can I use the Pseudomonarchia seals? The Pseudomonarchia has no seals. Weyer did not include them. Every seal associated with those demons comes from later grimoires, primarily the Ars Goetia.
Which text is more accurate historically? Neither. Both are compilations of earlier folklore, with names drawn from Babylonian, Jewish, Christian, and Arabic sources. The Pseudomonarchia is closer to its immediate sources. The Goetia is more internally consistent.
Do the two texts conflict on demon rankings? Constantly. The Goetia promotes some demons and demotes others, reassigns their legions, and adds an entire layer of imperial authority that Weyer never mentions.
The Pseudomonarchia Daemonum and the Ars Goetia are not rivals. They are two drafts of the same map, one drawn by a skeptic who thought the territory was a fiction, the other by a compiler who believed the map could be used. Weyer gave us the names. The Goetia gave us the work.
You can read them both and find the contradictions. Or you can read one, then the other, and watch the hierarchy shift under your hand.
For a deeper look at the Goetia’s structure and the seventy-two spirits themselves, see our main demonology and goetia guide. You may also want the list of Goetic seals, where each sigil is drawn as the original manuscripts intended. And if you are comparing sources, our article on comparing Solomonic grimoire traditions traces how the Goetia, the Lemegeton, and the Munich Manual of Demonic Magic relate to one another.