Each entry is built from primary sources, dating every fact and separating documented-ancient material from the modern.
The base is the Ars Goetia in the S. L. MacGregor Mathers & Aleister Crowley edition (1904), cross-checked with Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1577) —whose named source is the Liber Officiorum Spirituum, a textual sibling of the Livre des Esperitz (15th c.)— and its passage into English in Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584); and, for the oldest spirits, texts such as the Testament of Solomon or the books of Tobit and Enoch. The Lemegeton carries an internal date: its third part, the Ars Paulina, is reckoned “for the 10th of March 1641”, anchoring its compilation in mid-17th-century England.
The rank system —king, prince, duke, marquis, count— is not a late invention: it is already in the Livre des Esperitz (15th c.). And beneath those crowns lies an older, directional structure: the four kings of the cardinal points —Oriens (east), Paimon (west), Amaymon (south) and Egyn (north)—, which the Ars Goetia itself preserves. The feudal crowns are a literary reorganization laid over that older sublunary grid. And one key detail: Weyer was not a practitioner but a skeptic who stated he left parts out to make the system unworkable; so the literary branch drops the Three Chiefs and much of the apparatus —not by accident of transmission, but by a hostile editor.
Not everything now taken as “traditional” is. With date and author:
And a common point: the planetary symbols on the seals (Sun, Moon, Mars) mean the metals —gold, silver, iron—, not “energies”.
We always tell apart three things that are often confused. The documented is what a real source says, cited with its date. The reconstructed is what the state of the text forces us to infer —an expanded abbreviation, an illegible word, a damaged passage— and it is marked in brackets or with «[?]». And gnosis (or UPG, «unverified personal gnosis») is a practitioner's experience or interpretation: it can be sincere and valuable to whoever lives it, but it is not a documentary source and is not collated as one. When a debate drifts into philosophy —whether the spirit is an entity, an archetype or a phenomenon of consciousness— we are already in the realm of gnosis, not of the document; that is why we keep it apart and labelled. It is not a value judgement: it is a criterion of honesty. Every claim carries the label of what it actually is. The same discipline governs our Library of editions: faithful transcription, [reconstruction] in brackets and modern addition, never mixed.
Content is checked against the primary editions before publishing. If you spot an error or a better source, write to wowhplovecraft@gmail.com: we would rather fix it than be wrong. See the Bibliography.
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