In this guide

A pale vellum manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale de France gives a conjurer the names of about forty-six spirits. A seventeenth-century English book gives him seventy-two. The English book is the Ars Goetia. The French one is the Livre des Esperitz, and it came first.

Two Books, Two Centuries, One List of Spirits

Two Books, Two Centuries, One List of Spirits

The Livre des Esperitz is a working grimoire, written in French around 1450, that promises control over named spirits. The Ars Goetia, the first book of the Lemegeton, was assembled in England in the mid-seventeenth century, and its demons have become the most famous roster in Western ceremonial magic. Their genealogies connect at dozens of names, and the older text explains where the newer one began.

That is the short answer. The long one is a story of copying, translation, and an age that lost its horror of demons and started to organize them.

From a French Parchment to an English Compilation

From a French Parchment to an English Compilation

The trail is documented. The Livre des Esperitz survives in at least two manuscript copies, the best known at Paris under the shelf mark BnF français 25345. The French historian Jean-Patrice Boudet published the first modern study of it, and Stephen Skinner and David Rankine made its role in the Goetia’s ancestry widely known in The Goetia of Dr Rudd (2007).

In the chain of transmission, the Livre stands first. Johann Weyer, a physician who wrote against witchcraft, compiled his Pseudomonarchia Daemonum in Latin in 1577, and much of its demon list comes from the French text. Reginald Scot translated Weyer into English in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). A little over half a century later, anonymous compilers built the Lemegeton and placed the Goetia at its head, keeping many of the same names, adding ranks and seals, and completing the roster to a full seventy-two.

The human consequence of this genealogy is simple: the French text was written in the vernacular. Anyone literate could read it without a Latin education, which made spirit lists less a monastic property and more a household skill. By the time the English printing press carried the list onward, it had already crossed three languages and two centuries. The whole lineage belongs to the family of grimoires, a tradition defined by the promise of a book that works.

The manuscript itself is spare. It names each spirit, gives its office, and notes when to call it, but it does not pause to argue theology. That spareness is why historians date it early: the genre accumulated, it did not prove.

The Mathematics of Hell: Why the Goetia Has 72

The symmetry appeared only at the last stage. The Livre groups its spirits under named kings and gives each one an office, with no celestial mathematics behind the count. The Goetia’s compilers, by contrast, matched the roster to the seventy-two names of God in the Hebrew tradition called the Shem HaMephorash. Each demon was paired with an angelic name, as though every darkness had been assigned a curb.

That pairing is a statement about order. In the Goetia, a hierarchy of kings, dukes and presidents sits facing the divine names that govern it, and the circle is built to hold the operator in a named, bounded place. The Livre makes no such claim. Its list is looser, more like a farmer’s calendar of nocturnal appointments than a theology. The older book is messier, and more honest about the mess.

Consider the offices the two books assign. The Livre’s spirits teach languages, find hidden treasure, heal the sick, and reveal secrets, the standard promises of the folk magician. The Goetia keeps those promises and adds pageantry: each spirit has a rank, a number of legions under command, and a sign to wear on its seal. The rank makes the system evokable, because a hierarchy gives the operator a thread of authority to pull. Dantalion, for example, appears in both texts. In the Livre he is simply a spirit who teaches arts and reads minds. In the Goetia he is a Duke who commands thirty-six legions.

Ritual without Seals: How the Two Books Actually Worked

That same pragmatism shows in the ritual. The Livre gives names, titles, and days to call, but it omits seals. Its instructions tell the operator to draw a circle “as in the Clavicle,” meaning the Key of Solomon, a separate and much longer book. The Goetia is self-contained. It provides the circle, the brass vessel with its cover, the ring, the triangular vessel, and a unique seal engraved for every spirit on its list.

We keep both on the same shelf in our own library. The physical difference is abrupt. The Livre is a few folio pages, a list you could memorize on a long winter evening. The Goetia is a manual thick enough to require its own geography of circles, names, and hours. A magician in 1450 needed two books to do what the Lemegeton compilers later packed into one.

The compilers also standardized the language. The Livre’s instructions tumble out in short French sentences. The Goetia swings into Latin prayers and Hebrew divine names, which makes it longer on the page and heavier in performance. What was once a reference list became a liturgy.

Between the Livre and the Goetia sits a Latin list that almost no one reads for pleasure. Johann Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, an appendix to his anti-witchcraft treatise De Praestigiis Daemonum (1563), catalogs sixty-nine spirits, not seventy-two. It was written to expose the absurdity of demonology, and it became, against its author’s intent, a sorcerer’s source. Scot’s translation gave the list its English readership, and the Lemegeton’s compilers then reordered it, added the Shem HaMephorash pairings, and cut the moralizing framing.

Weyer’s own intention complicates the genealogy. He was a Protestant physician who believed demonic possession real but witch-hunters wrong, and his list was meant to show that the whole demonology was a pagan infection inside the church. The Lemegeton’s compilers did not care about the argument. They stripped the moral, kept the names, and laid out the list as a usable instrument. It is one of history’s ironies that a text written to discredit sorcery became the backbone of ceremonial magic.

How many spirits actually survived from the Livre into the Goetia? Sources disagree on the exact number, but most scholars count just over thirty, a little less than half of the Goetia’s roster. The rest came from other contemporary lists, such as the Heptameron and various Solomonic manuscripts. The Goetia, in other words, is a composite.

There is another quiet difference in naming. “Esperitz” is simply French for “spirits,” while “Goetia” derives from the Greek “goeteia,” meaning sorcery or wailing. The older word is neutral. The later one announces a darker craft, and the tone of the book matches the title. For the full composite picture, see our guide to the Lesser Key of Solomon.

What People Get Wrong About the Goetia’s Origins

The long chain explains a persistent misdating, and we hear it often in the reading room.

  • The Goetia is not medieval. It was compiled after 1640, well after the Reformation, though it is stuffed with older material.
  • The Livre des Esperitz is not a translation of the Goetia. It is two centuries older, and it is one of the Goetia’s raw ingredients.
  • Not every Goetic demon comes from the Livre. Roughly half do, and the other half arrived from sister manuscripts.
  • Neither book was written by Solomon. Both are pseudepigraphic, borrowing Jewish angelology and Christian exorcism formulae, and the attribution was part of the method rather than an error.

We state this without condescension. A book signed “Solomon” carried more weight in 1450 than a book signed by an unknown clerk, and the fiction did real work.

FAQ

Is the Livre des Esperitz older than the Ars Goetia? Yes, by about two centuries. The Livre was written around 1450, and the Goetia was compiled in the mid-seventeenth century.

Which spirits appear in both books? Vassago, Seere, Dantalion, Orobas, and roughly two dozen others, although the Goetia gives them ranks, legions, and seals that the Livre never mentions.

Who wrote the Livre des Esperitz? The text is anonymous. The manuscript style points to a fifteenth-century French cleric or a clerk with access to clerical magic, but no name survives.

If you have the Livre, do you still need the Goetia? The Livre gives names and offices; the Goetia gives the full ritual engine, including the seals, the circle, and the angelic pairings. Most practitioners choose the Goetia for those extras.

The Root Under the List

The Livre des Esperitz is not a footnote. It is the ground floor of the most famous demon list in Western occultism, and it reached that position by changing shape at each crossing. Trace the line backward from the Goetia’s engraved seals, through Weyer’s sixty-nine, and you land on a spare French manuscript that trusted a list to do the work. Begin with the Goetic seals in our glossary, then read the two books side by side, and the tradition will speak for itself.