In his new book, Modern Demonolatry: Goetia Without Tears, sorcerer, attorney and practicing magician for over fifty years, W. Adam Mandelbaum, tosses the chaff and keeps the unsullied wheat of Goetic evocation, so that the modern practitioner can effectively evoke Chthonic forces without wasting words, energy and time.

He brings the same critical analysis to the Goetia, as he did to the remote viewing program of the CIA in his groundbreaking book Psychic Battlefield (St. Martins Press 2000).

For Mandelbaum, and for the modern magus, it is the results of ritual that count, not blind adherence to the old rules and the babbling of barbarous names.

For over half a millennium the accepted texts for the evocation of demons have been unduly burdened with overly complicated, heavily Christianized rituals, and a super abundance of mandatory materia magica.

The Goetia has been a prime example of the above.

Its procedural recipes and unduly lengthy recitations have long been in need of a critical re-examination and revision.  Its constraints are in need of restraint; its banishings in need of being banished.

Fortunately, in the last fifty years or so, thinking demonolators have sought to simplify the procedures, shorten the list of “stuff” required, and reduce the recitation of Yahweh and Jesus in the conjurations of old gods that existed long before they did.

But even the modern writers haven’t gone far enough.

Now with the release of Modern Demonolatry: Goetia Without Tears, the dust has been blown off the ancient instructions, the current proponents for propping up the old traditions are challenged, and new techniques are revealed so that practitioners can welcome demonic communication without the need to worship, and without the need to threaten.

Most provocative of all, for the first time in any volume of demonolatry, Mandelbaum proposes a revolutionary theory of the demonic world, and submits it is actually their desire to help the magician realize his—when intelligently and respectfully called.