This first volume, Ars Goetia (translated by Paul Summers Young), pulls together 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.

This series will draw 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’.

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 book we now know so well by Mathers and Crowley, the basis for magical thought and practice around the world.

All the illustrations, seals, and tables in this edition of Ars Goetia translated by Paul Summers Young will be restored and carefully reproduced.

Subsequent volumes will explore the Ars Theurgia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel and Ars Notoria.