The Lesser Key of Solomon: Ars Goetia
The Book of Evil Spirits
translated and introduced by Paul Summers Young
(Volume I of the Lesser Keys series)
This first volume of the Lesser Keys series pulls together several versions of the Ars Goetia, with a variety of extracts from source texts that ground the canon in their time and place, and explore the different ways people have interacted with the concepts and symbols, prior to the Occult Revival of the nineteenth century and the text's codification in its first modern published edition.
About the Series
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 subsequent The Lesser Key of Solomon by S. L. MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley, one of the touchstone texts for magical thought and practice in the Western occult tradition.
This series draws 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'.
Subsequent volumes will explore the Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel and Ars Notoria (vols. III-V not yet released).
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Hardcover Edition
359 pages. Printed and bound in Italy. Hardcover bound in Red Buckram. 160 gram black Endpapers. Printed on 115 gsm wood-free, age-resistant Arena Ivory Rough paper. Sewn book block, black ribbon bookmark and black Headbands. Gilding on front cover and spine.
