The seventy-two spirits

Every entry below is the text of the Lesser Key of Solomon as this library publishes it. Nothing here was written for this page: the names, the ranks, the legion counts and the descriptions were read out of the book, and each one cites the page it came from.

72spirits, all accounted for
2,645legions, summed
71agree across two editions
7ranks named

The ranks fall out as 23 dukes, 14 marquises, 12 presidents, 10 kings, 7 earls, 5 princes, 1 knight.

How this page was made

The library holds two printings of this book, set from the same text by different hands. Both were read, and the seventy-two entries of each were compared against the other. Seventy-one agree exactly. The forty-fourth did not, and the disagreement is recorded on his page rather than resolved in silence.

Extracting them was not as simple as it sounds, and the failures are worth naming. The first attempt anchored on the first bracketed number in the book and produced six spirits whose descriptions read Sight., Sound. and Smell. — it had locked onto Crowley's preliminary list of the senses instead of the spirits. The second lost Agares' thirty-one legions, because his count falls across a page break and the routine that strips footnotes threw away the block it landed in. The third promoted Andromalius from Earl to King, having searched for ranks in the order of a list rather than the order of the text. None of those announced themselves; each was found by checking the result against what the page actually says.

What this is not

This is a catalogue of what a seventeenth-century manuscript claims, published because the manuscript is public domain and because reading what a text actually says is more use than reading what somebody says about it. The library takes no position on whether any of it is true, and offers no instructions for doing anything with it.

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