Europe's inner demons

At this point we are confronted by the great jungle of the pseudo-Solomonic writings. It was natural that many spurious works should be foisted on to the great king of Israel, who is glorified in the Talmud and the Koran as well as in the Bible, and whose name evokes images of superhuman wisdom and fortune even to the present day. The earliest surviving example is the Testament of Solomon, which seems to have originated in Palestine in the first century after Christ.⁽⁸⁾ This is a medico-magical work and is not at all concerned with conjuring up demons; and the same could be said of most of the pseudo-Solomonic books which were written — some in Hebrew, some in Greek, some in Arabic — during the next thousand years. But from the twelfth or thirteenth century onwards pseudo-Solomonic works of quite a different kind were circulating in western Europe — true manuals on the art of conjuration, written by magicians for magicians. In the first half of the thirteenth century Guillaume d’Auvergne, bishop of Paris, in his treatise on laws warned readers against books bearing the name of Solomon and containing idolatrous images and detestable invocations.

⁽⁹⁾ Around 1267 the English philosopher Roger Bacon — at that time resident in Paris — complained that magicians were producing more and more pseudo-Solomonic works, written in grandiloquent language and containing formulae for conjuring up demons and specitications of the sacrifices to be offered them.⁽¹⁰⁾ The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources mentioned above are variants or copies of those late medieval pseudo-Solomonic works. The most relevant to our purpose is the Lemegeton

, otherwise known as the Lesser Key of Solomon, which tells us all we need to know.

Roger Bacon names, as one of the pseudo-Solomonic works circulating in the 1260s, a Book of the offices of the spirits, and the German abbot Trithemius still refers, in 1508, to a work called

Concerning the office of the spirits. This work, or these works, must have had much the same character and purpose as the first part of Lemegeton, entitled Goetia

.⁽¹¹⁾ A variant of Goetia was published by the Dutch medical doctor Johannes Weyer in 1577, under the title Pseudomonarchia daetnonum, and was later translated into English by Reginald Scot and incorporated into the fifteenth book of his Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). There we find descriptive lists of some scores of principal demons; detailing not only the forms in which each individual demon appears but also what offices he discharges and what powers he possesses. A few samples from Reginald Scot will convey something of the atmosphere: