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Something I keep running into and I'm curious how the people here who actually practice see it.
The more I dig into the sources, the more it looks like a lot of what gets treated as "traditional Goetia" is fairly recent. The 72-spirit list itself is old, it goes back through Weyer's Pseudomonarchia (1577) and earlier, but a lot of what people take as canon, the enns, the fixed metal-per-rank thing, even a good chunk of the ceremonial framing, really comes from the 1904 Mathers/Crowley edition or from modern practitioners.
I'm not saying the modern stuff is "wrong" or that it's "just history", living practice clearly has its own value and I know plenty of you work with these spirits for real. I'm genuinely curious about your take: when you run a rite that's faithful to the old text, do you feel it carries something different than a modern reconstruction, or is intent doing most of the heavy lifting? And are there spots where you think the modern additions actually improved on the source?
For full disclosure, I've been building a reference that cross-checks each of the 72 against its actual sources and marks clearly what's in the old texts vs what's a later addition (grimorium.lat/en/). It's my own project, sharing it partly because it might be useful and honestly because I'd value corrections from people who practice. Not selling anything.
It's a very complex history to unpack and can be very confusing. And there is probably still more yet to be uncovered.
OK, lets try. The modern "goetia" was born with a very late The Lesser Key of Solomon, and it was anonymously compiled in England around the mid-17th century, probably somewhere around the 1650s.
But historians like Dr. Gal Sofer and occult scholars like Dr. Stephen Skinner trace the origin and evolution of Solomonic magic and 'Goetia' - here maybe better thought of as 'diabolist sorcery' - or "filthy, medivel demon magic' (ha!) through a pretty consistent and continuous lineage over many centuries. The earliest proto-text, the Testament of Solomon, was compiled in Greek around the 2nd to 3rd centuries AD.
There are a couple of lines of speculation here I can't go into too much here, but Dr. Sofer emphasizes the Solomonic tradition weaves together several threads Jewish (Aramaic/Hebrew), Arabic, and Byzantine-Greek magic. The Greek Hygromanteia is cited by Stephen Skinner as a predecessor to the Key of Solomon, and early Jewish manuscripts. From them was established the ritual framework of commanding entities via divine names, along with others traditions like the Greco-Egyptian PGM .
My fave gim is the Grimorium Verum, which is a much later diabolist grimoire from 18th-century French and Italian tradition. But the late Jake Stratton-Kent changed how scholars and practitioners view the Grimorium Verum arguing the various GV texts are vital, living artifacts of Continental European folk sorcery and chthonic goetia.
Verum uses very accessible everyday materials like parchment, simple knives, local herbs rather than elite "high magic" tools like swords. It's a very practical, stripped-down working handbook used by rural, low-level practitioners, cunning folk, rural sorcerers, and regional exorcist-healers across France, Italy, and the broader Mediterranean world.
We can pretty confidently say at this time that the Grimorium Verum is a late-stage artifact of a continuous tradition of diabolist sorcery', rather than a single manuscript composed in the 1300s, or part of the later 1650s Lesser Key, which has a completely different hierarchy - but also probably or might share/preserve spirits that are part of a similar or the same tradition.
Very important here is Berengar Ganell’s 1346 Suma Sacra Magicae, which is the text that codified the sublunary hierarchy used in Verum as governed by the Three chiefs Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Astaroth (here swapped with Satan). Long story there as Prince of the Powers of Air , meaning the sublunar world
In my view, and in alignment with the Italian Catholic worldview of the traditon as it comes to us, the Three Chiefs basically work as God's rightful subordinates, ruling over the Chthonic Sublunar world. We can think of them, in my opinion, as archangelic-level powers, but essentially acting as Angels of Purgatory / Hell / Tartarus. This structure I have found makes the system more safe and workable, but that is personal gnosis that should be tested by other's experimentation.
For more on the worldview of our traditon , see this episode Glitch Bottle that I somehow keep recommending :
This is exactly the kind of reply I was hoping for, thank you. The Sofer/Skinner continuity line and the JSK reframing of the Verum are the part my own work mostly brackets out, so it's a genuinely useful corrective.
I think the core of what you're pointing at is that "the Goetia" is really at least two overlapping-but-distinct lineages that people collapse into one. There's the literary Ars Goetia line, Weyer's Pseudomonarchia (1577) into the anonymous Lesser Key (~1650s) into Mathers/Crowley (1904), which is the one my project maps. And then there's the Continental folk/diabolist current you're describing, the Verum and the cunning-folk handbooks, with a completely different framework (the Three Chiefs) that Stratton-Kent argued was a living tradition rather than a literary artifact. Overlapping cast of spirits in places, very different scaffolding.
What's struck me digging into individual spirits is how far back the entities go even when the "72 + feudal ranks" packaging is late. For a few of them I've been able to follow the documentary chain right back to Ganell's Summa Sacrae Magicae (1346) — through the Livre des Esperitz (15th c.) and the Folger V.b.26 ms. (c. 1580), and then into Weyer — which lines up exactly with your point that the sublunary hierarchy predates the Lesser Key most people treat as "the source." So the list is late; a lot of the spirits aren't.
Genuine question, since you actually work the Verum/Three-Chiefs frame: do you read the Lesser Key's kings-and-dukes structure as a later literary reorganization laid over that older sublunary/chthonic hierarchy, or as a genuinely separate tradition that only shares personnel? That's the seam I keep getting stuck on.
(And I'll take the Glitch Bottle rec, JSK is what sent me down this whole rabbit hole in the first place.)
Kvzlx, sounds like you know what's up and got it going on! Rock on!
I had to look these up to check the dates but I think we can say a break into two streams happened between Ganell’s 1346 Suma Sacra Magicae and the 15th-century Livre des Esperitz where the Three Chiefs got removed, which pretty much broke the hierarchical structure of the tradition.
The sidelining of the Three Chiefs stared in Liber Officiorum Spirituum (around 1400 at the earliest) - but by 1450's Le Livre des Esperitz, an early French branch, they removed the Three Chiefs as overseers, while keeping Lucifer in the header notes.
Le Livre des Esperitz directly feeds into Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1577), which Reginald Scot translated in Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which in turn became the primary source for the Ars Goetia section of the Lemegeton (The Lesser Key) in the mid-17th century.
The Verum line kept the Three Chiefs because, as we suspect, it stayed in the underground Italian/Mediterranean folk-clerical currents with direct pact mechanics overseen by Lucifer, Belzebuth, and Astaroth through Scirlin.
RE: the Lesser Key’s feudal structure of Kings, Dukes, Marquises, and Count, etc. I think it's a literary/editorial reorganization laid over an older, sublunary/directional chthonic structure, but perhaps it was trying to describe something real going on. It could be how they felt, but also I tend to ignore it and stick with the GV.
Maybe I am missing something, but it if works for folks, I have no dog in that race. Ther's is not the Grim Trad game server I prefer to log into and play on , so I try to keep my opinions to that which I have more experience with, and even then I try to tred lightly when it comes to other people's personal practices.
In my personal gnosis, the 'cousin 'pact-based grimoires (the GV, Grand Grimoire ,and the Black Dragon) are extremely chthonic. When the daimons appear they appear as very Lovecraftian in my room. (I keep meaning to finish a write up on this.) An excellent magician and author, John King - a Lesser Key guy - mentioned on his blog the time attended a ritual with another GV guy, and very confimingly for me, he called the manifestation "Lovecraftian."
Not that they are literally Lovecraftian cosmic horrors beyond human comprehension - but parts of Underworld "vibe' very much that way, and less of all that Hot Topic whimsy-goth taking Instagram photos in a cemetery with crystals vibe.
MorganBlack — this is gold, and yeah, that answers the exact seam I was stuck on. "Literary/editorial reorganization laid over an older sublunary/directional structure, but maybe pointing at something real" is pretty much where I've landed too, except you've actually worked it and I've only read my way there.
One small refinement to the transmission chain, for whatever it's worth, because it actually tightens your point rather than fighting it. The thing Weyer himself names as his source isn't the Livre des Esperitz directly — it's the Liber Officiorum Spirituum. And the current scholarly read (Boudet's work on the demonological "who's who") is that the LOS and the Livre des Esperitz look less like A-feeds-into-B and more like two branches of the same medieval stock: they share around 35 spirits (names usually mangled), but ~31 are only in Weyer and ~15 only in the Livre. So it's less a clean pipe and more a braided river.
Which loops back to that Folger V.b.26 I mentioned — turns out it's itself a Liber Officiorum Spirituum witness (ca. 1577–83, mostly English), so it sits right on the seam you're describing. The one wrinkle I'd flag on dates: the surviving LOS copies are 16th-c even if the underlying material is older, so "1400 → 1450 → 1577" is probably better drawn as an older common source with the datable witnesses clustering late. Doesn't change your two-streams picture at all — if anything the Three-Chiefs-drop happening on the LOS/Esperitz branch while the header keeps Lucifer is a really clean way to see the flattening in progress.
On the "Ganell codified the Three Chiefs, then they got removed" — I'm with you on the structure being visibly there and then gone, I just personally file the causal version (Ganell as the specific codifier the Verum inherited from) under "strong hypothesis, not nailed-down document," mostly because the direct textual bridge is the part I can't lay my hands on. Happy to be wrong if someone's got the folios.
And the Lovecraftian thing — genuinely, please finish that write-up. That's exactly the kind of report I don't try to bracket out, precisely because you're flagging it as personal gnosis rather than smuggling it in as history. The whole reason I keep the documented / reconstructed / gnosis layers separate in my project is so a report like yours keeps its weight instead of getting flattened into fake pedigree. "Chthonic underworld vibe, not Hot Topic cemetery crystals" is doing a lot of honest work in one sentence. The John King corroboration is interesting too — two independent GV workers landing on the same texture is the sort of thing that's worth more than a hundred confident blog posts.
Anyway — thank you, this genuinely moved my understanding forward. Logging off your server before I overstay my welcome as the Lesser Key tourist.
Freemasonry as we now know it grew from lodges of actual stonemasons, called "operative" masonry. What we now recognize as Freemasonry is "speculative" masonry, rendering the tools and teachings of medieval engineers as philosophy and ritual. The very first speculative masonry initiation on record happened within two months of the writing of the Lemegeton, in roughly the same place. I believe it is very likely that these two things are related, or at least that the people involved in this early masonry are the exact sort who would be interested in the Lemegeton. It is certain that someone took a practical interest, because artifacts of the Lemegeton (the Holy Fathers figure of Solomon, the Pauline Art table, some other items) have turned up in historical auctions.
The seals of the Lemegeton are unique caricatures. They are exactly the sort of thing you could expect from an author whose buddies included sailing merchants, book collectors, alchemical tinkerers and the like. There is no reason to think of it as the work of monks or priests, but it is easy to see as the sort of thing an enterprising person would produce for others in their class. The conjurations are mostly copied, and the 72 part division is ancient (although not universal), but the seals were almost certainly made just for the Lemegeton.
Like most other sources of its time, Lemegeton uses alchemical/astrological symbols to indicate the materials of the seals. In just about every book from then and back several centuries, these are meant to be the metals themselves. They are used that way almost universally until the advent of regular chemistry letter-symbols. The sun means gold. The moon means silver. Not solar or lunar, but gold and silver.
Until a few years ago, it was hard to find people who were even aware that these things have nothing whatosever to do with the Goetia.
Goetia clearly says that the prayers in the 5th book are used to form the circle. The "explanations" are nothing of the sort. There is no "Bornless" anything, no Enochian. It was all added in by AC after his falling-out with Mathers.
when you run a rite that's faithful to the old text, do you feel it carries something different than a modern reconstruction, or is intent doing most of the heavy lifting? And are there spots where you think the modern additions actually improved on the source?
A long time ago somebody realized that playing (American) football is dangerous, and they invented "flag football" where you grab a flag from someone's pocket instead of tackling them to the ground. Less people got hurt, and it opened the sport to younger people. Great! But before they fixed the major issues, they first knew how to play real football. With occult anything, the people making up the new and improved versions of everything don't really understand how the original version was supposed to operate.
They will snip out whatever they don't like, and keep the parts they don't understand. If the seals didn't "look cool," those would probably have to go as well. I have not seen any kind of modernization that indicates the author understood the originals.
Freemasonry as we now know it grew from lodges of actual stonemasons, called "operative" masonry. What we now recognize as Freemasonry is "speculative" masonry, rendering the tools and teachings of medieval engineers as philosophy and ritual. The very first speculative masonry initiation on record happened within two months of the writing of the Lemegeton, in roughly the same place. I believe it is very likely that these two things are related, or at least that the people involved in this early masonry are the exact sort who would be interested in the Lemegeton. It is certain that someone took a practical interest, because artifacts of the Lemegeton (the Holy Fathers figure of Solomon, the Pauline Art table, some other items) have turned up in historical auctions.
The seals of the Lemegeton are unique caricatures. They are exactly the sort of thing you could expect from an author whose buddies included sailing merchants, book collectors, alchemical tinkerers and the like. There is no reason to think of it as the work of monks or priests, but it is easy to see as the sort of thing an enterprising person would produce for others in their class. The conjurations are mostly copied, and the 72 part division is ancient (although not universal), but the seals were almost certainly made just for the Lemegeton.
I regard the "enns" as modern, based on entirely fictional writings about some fam-trad BS.
Like most other sources of its time, Lemegeton uses alchemical/astrological symbols to indicate the materials of the seals. In just about every book from then and back several centuries, these are meant to be the metals themselves. They are used that way almost universally until the advent of regular chemistry letter-symbols. The sun means gold. The moon means silver. Not solar or lunar, but gold and silver.
Until a few years ago, it was hard to find people who were even aware that these things have nothing whatosever to do with the Goetia.
Goetia clearly says that the prayers in the 5th book are used to form the circle. The "explanations" are nothing of the sort. There is no "Bornless" anything, no Enochian. It was all added in by AC after his falling-out with Mathers.
A long time ago somebody realized that playing (American) football is dangerous, and they invented "flag football" where you grab a flag from someone's pocket instead of tackling them to the ground. Less people got hurt, and it opened the sport to younger people. Great! But before they fixed the major issues, they first knew how to play real football. With occult anything, the people making up the new and improved versions of everything don't really understand how the original version was supposed to operate.
They will snip out whatever they don't like, and keep the parts they don't understand. If the seals didn't "look cool," those would probably have to go as well. I have not seen any kind of modernization that indicates the author understood the originals.
Faria — great breakdown, and you're pushing on exactly the joints I care about. A few reactions.
Total agreement on the enns (modern, downstream of a fam-trad fiction) and on the seals being essentially a Lemegeton-native product. Weyer's Pseudomonarchia carries the names, ranks and offices but no sigils at all, so whoever assembled the Lesser Key is where those caricatures enter the record. Your read of them as the work of an enterprising collector-class hand rather than a cloister rings true.
The metals point is one I wish more people internalized: the planetary glyphs are the metals, full stop — ☉ is gold, ☽ is silver, ♂ is iron — not "solar current" or "lunar energy." That's how every source reads them until modern chemistry notation muddied the water. Good to name it out loud.
And you're dead right about the Bornless business. The "Preliminary Invocation" isn't Solomonic at all — it's lifted from the Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri (first Englished by Goodwin in 1852), and Crowley bolted it onto the 1904 Goetia; the original text just says the fifth-book prayers form the circle, exactly as you note. The "Initiated Interpretation" preface is his too. It's one of the cleanest examples of a modern addition wearing the source's clothes.
The one place I'd tap the brakes is the Masonic timing. I went and checked, because the coincidence is tempting: the Lemegeton's usual "circa 1641" is itself a soft estimate, and the two candidates for the first recorded speculative initiation are Moray (Newcastle, May 1641) and Ashmole (Warrington, 16 Oct 1646). So "within two months, same place" is really two fuzzy dates grazing each other, and the locations don't line up. What I think absolutely holds is the milieu — Ashmole himself is the poster child: alchemist, astrologer, antiquarian, and a serious collector of magical manuscripts. That's precisely the collector-tinkerer class you're describing, and it's a much sturdier bridge than the calendar coincidence. The auctioned artifacts (the Solomon figure, the Pauline table) fit that same world — I'd genuinely love a pointer to those if you have one, since that's the kind of physical evidence I can actually cite.
On the flag-football thing — I think you've named the failure mode exactly: snip what you dislike, keep what you don't understand, and the seals only survive because they look cool. Where I'd put it a hair differently: my own project isn't trying to build a better football, it's trying to be the rulebook that says "here's real football, here's flag football, and here's who changed which rule and when." Label the layers instead of blending them, so anyone who wants the original can still find it under the modern varnish. Sounds like we'd agree the varnish is the problem — I just don't trust myself to improve the game, only to annotate it.
Lemegeton's usual "circa 1641" is itself a soft estimate, and the two candidates for the first recorded speculative initiation are Moray (Newcastle, May 1641)
I give the 1641 date to Lemegeton on account of this passage from the end of the Pauline Art prelude:
"shewed in this sigill which is fitted for the 10th Day of March in the years 1641 being on a wednesday"
I entered this into an astrology program and found that the Pauline Art seals work out for that day and time along the Prime Meridian, so likely England, also the fact that it's in English.
The auctioned artifacts (the Solomon figure, the Pauline table) fit that same world — I'd genuinely love a pointer to those if you have one, since that's the kind of physical evidence I can actually cite.
This discussion was on the now-defunct Studio Arcanis forum posts by Ged... but it did come with checkable references. I looked at that time, but no longer have them. They exist, somewhere. If you are using a bot to do the searches, keywords like "colored hexagram parchment over wood" were probably not terribly common things to appear for sale.
I give the 1641 date to Lemegeton on account of this passage from the end of the Pauline Art prelude:
"shewed in this sigill which is fitted for the 10th Day of March in the years 1641 being on a wednesday"
I entered this into an astrology program and found that the Pauline Art seals work out for that day and time along the Prime Meridian, so likely England, also the fact that it's in English.
This discussion was on the now-defunct Studio Arcanis forum posts by Ged... but it did come with checkable references. I looked at that time, but no longer have them. They exist, somewhere. If you are using a bot to do the searches, keywords like "colored hexagram parchment over wood" were probably not terribly common things to appear for sale.
That Pauline Art passage is exactly the kind of thing I was missing thank you. "Shewed in this sigill which is fitted for the 10th Day of March in the years 1641 being on a wednesday" is an internal date, which is the strongest kind: the text fixing itself in time, the same way the Grimorium Verum accidentally dates itself by casually parceling out "America" to Astaroth. And the fact that you ran the Pauline seals and they resolve for that day on the Prime Meridian is a genuinely nice confirmation it pins the working to England on top of the English text. That's a far harder anchor than the vague "mid-17th-century" everyone repeats, and it's citable. Consider it stolen (with credit).
It also does something useful to the Masonic question: it turns my "1641 is soft" into "1641 is actually pretty firm for at least the Pauline Art layer." Which, fair that tightens the coincidence with Moray (May 1641) rather than loosening it. I still wouldn't hang a lineage on "two months apart," but the shared milieu argument only gets stronger if the Lemegeton material really is sitting right there in 1641 England among the exact collector-astrologer crowd you're describing.
On the artifacts Studio Arcanis, posts by Ged, references that were checkable at the time. That's a real lead even if the forum's dead; I'll go spelunking in the Wayback Machine for it, and "colored hexagram parchment over wood" is a great needle to search on precisely because it's such an odd phrase.
And yeah busted, more or less. I do lean on search tools for the grunt work; the human part is deciding what's worth citing and, mostly, what to throw out. Which is exactly why a lead like yours is worth more than a search: a machine will never surface "colored hexagram parchment over wood" on its own, but a person who actually saw the thing remembers the phrase. If Ged's posts turn up anywhere, that's a genuine physical-evidence citation I'd add in a heartbeat. Appreciate you pointing at it.
It also does something useful to the Masonic question: it turns my "1641 is soft" into "1641 is actually pretty firm for at least the Pauline Art layer." Which, fair that tightens the coincidence with Moray (May 1641) rather than loosening it.
....
And yeah busted, more or less. I do lean on search tools for the grunt work
Your post resembled some of the Claude outputs a friend produced in relation to other grimoire topics. It is a useful research assistant.
I have not looked, but it might be fun to compare samples of Moray's handwriting to the couple of Lemegeton manuscripts. Those Ps and Bs, his habit of fancy capitals and underlining. That sort of thing.
Slightly off topic... I suspect that things like Goetia were on the table when the core rites of Freemasonry were being developed. Modern ritual features stories of Solomon's temple construction, his wisdom and justice... it's possible that the whole Lemegeton was someone's attempt to squeeze some existing occult materials into a proto masonic rite.
Something I've been researching is the whole removal of the 3 chiefs and then their reintegration in the later grimoires, such as Verum. Livre des Esperitz, likely 15th century, contains them (Lucifer, Beelzebub, Satan) as the first 3 spirits, before the 4 cardinal kings, then the rest which mostly carry over into the later lists. Liber Officiorum Spirituum, also likely 15th century as it was listed in Johann Trithemius's catalog of magic books, Antipalus Maleficiorum (1508), contains them as well. The 3 chiefs first seem to first disappear with Weyer's Pseudomonarchia in 1563, and in the book itself he says that he removes parts of the system to render it useless/unworkable. That book lists 69 spirits, but it references Solomon sealing 72 spirits in the brass vessel(Belial's entry). I think it might be reasonable to speculate that the 3 chiefs may have been removed from the tradition by Weyer with Pseudomonarchia, which in turn was used as the source for Scott's Discoverie of Witchcraft, which was finally used by someone in England before 1641 to produce the Lemegeton. The link with freemasonry seems very likely, we just don't have anything concrete.
You might be interested in Colin D Campbell's Of The Arte Goetia, which prints the spirit lists of Pseudomonarchia, Discoverie of Witchcraft, and Goetia MS 3825 side-by-side, and discusses their differences along with speculation on their evolution. He also speculates that Weyer removed the 3 chiefs intentionally. Jake Stratton-Kent's Pandaemonium is an excellent resource as well for your project, as he goes over these things as well and lists a side-by-side comparisson of these spirit catalogs from various sources.
It's clear the compilers of Lemegeton drew from various sources, some easier to pin down than others. The evolution of spirit catalogs into Goetia seems mostly straightforward, but some other elements of the work are not. Who, exactly, first said that I needed to wear a lion's skin, for example? Lemegeton Book 2, Theurgia Goetia, is very clearly inspired by Trithermius's Stenographia; in fact it's essentially the exact same things with the elements of cryptography removed and solomonic ritual added in it's place. I haven't worked with it, but have known others who said they had powerful results from it. For all we know this was just put together to give the appearance of something powerful and magical. That certainly doesn't render it any less effective in practice, as anyone who has worked with the Simon Necronomicon or a similarly fabricated grimoire could tell you. Maybe this is how all of these things originated, there really is no way to say for sure.
It's hard to pin down the true origin of any of these things, and I'm sure we're missing lots of intermediary developments. I've recently been studying the Jewish incantation bowls from the Sasanian Empire, roughly 250AD Babylon. These contain Aramaic spells to protect against and bind demons, almost all of which are drawn around a pictograph of a demon, often times the demon is drawn bound up, to symbolically bind them. Many of these drawings bear a striking resemblence to the demon seals from the Goetia. To the point where when you compare them side by side it feels almost obvious they emerged from the same tradition. But where is the direct link? If one exists it's highly unlikely to find the hands of someone who can tie it to this tradition, at least not for a very long time. Research on the incantation bowls themselves is extremely hard to come by, I've only found one useful source of information, and it's entirely written in Hebrew, was produced not even 10 years ago, and shows that it's still an area of active research.
Trying to build a reference like you are is a noble effort (your website looks nice and clean btw, and I really like the color themes), just try not to stress over "completing" it. I feel like there are centuries of discovery ahead, for all the history that still remains buried. Things never translated out of latin or french or german, manuscripts never noticed by modern researches, things tucked away in private collections that nobody even knows about yet, things physically buried in the earth somewhere that wait to be discovered. You just have to always be skeptical of new information as well. Connolly, for example, without a doubt invented the demon enns and the whole backstory of their use. Clearly there are people that use them and find them effective, but honestly in practice some people could literally do whatever they want to do and produce results. It depends on the magician. I find it difficult to consider them a continuation of the same tradition, but perhaps they are. I'm not a fan of a lot of the new gen-alpha slang, but our language evolves because it's alive, and the fact that our magic traditions are continuing to evolve means they too are alive, which is a good thing.
Also, I vaguely remember seeing that post on Studio Arcanis, but it will be difficult to find now if it still exists. Almost the entire site was locked behind a login wall, so most of what is saved on the Waybackmachine is only the very first post of a thread, and even then many of the threads were not saved. You can try looking at it's predecessor site, EvocationMagic(dot com), as the threads there were not behind a login wall, but they were similarly not all saved, and I think the post in question was much more recent. I was only able to make a very limited backup of the site before it went dark for good, and I don't believe I have a copy of that particular thread myself.
Post automatically merged:
It may have been the thread titled "Historic Magical Record" Feb 15, 2015 in the Grimoire Tradition subforum, which unfortunately was not saved by the waybackmachine.
Your post resembled some of the Claude outputs a friend produced in relation to other grimoire topics. It is a useful research assistant.
I have not looked, but it might be fun to compare samples of Moray's handwriting to the couple of Lemegeton manuscripts. Those Ps and Bs, his habit of fancy capitals and underlining. That sort of thing.
Slightly off topic... I suspect that things like Goetia were on the table when the core rites of Freemasonry were being developed. Modern ritual features stories of Solomon's temple construction, his wisdom and justice... it's possible that the whole Lemegeton was someone's attempt to squeeze some existing occult materials into a proto masonic rite.
Yes, I use an AI for the reading-around and the first-pass searching. I decide what's worth keeping, and most of the work is discarding the rest. I'd rather say that plainly than be cagey about it.
The handwriting comparison is a good idea, mainly because it's actually testable. It probably won't lead anywhere, but lining up Moray's hand against the Sloane copies and checking the capitals is a real test rather than a guess.
The proto-Masonic point I keep coming back to. I can't prove it, but I can't dismiss it either. The 1641 date, the English text, and the Solomon-and-the-temple material that later turns up in the craft are all in the same time and place. That isn't evidence, but it is suggestive.
Something I've been researching is the whole removal of the 3 chiefs and then their reintegration in the later grimoires, such as Verum. Livre des Esperitz, likely 15th century, contains them (Lucifer, Beelzebub, Satan) as the first 3 spirits, before the 4 cardinal kings, then the rest which mostly carry over into the later lists. Liber Officiorum Spirituum, also likely 15th century as it was listed in Johann Trithemius's catalog of magic books, Antipalus Maleficiorum (1508), contains them as well. The 3 chiefs first seem to first disappear with Weyer's Pseudomonarchia in 1563, and in the book itself he says that he removes parts of the system to render it useless/unworkable. That book lists 69 spirits, but it references Solomon sealing 72 spirits in the brass vessel(Belial's entry). I think it might be reasonable to speculate that the 3 chiefs may have been removed from the tradition by Weyer with Pseudomonarchia, which in turn was used as the source for Scott's Discoverie of Witchcraft, which was finally used by someone in England before 1641 to produce the Lemegeton. The link with freemasonry seems very likely, we just don't have anything concrete.
You might be interested in Colin D Campbell's Of The Arte Goetia, which prints the spirit lists of Pseudomonarchia, Discoverie of Witchcraft, and Goetia MS 3825 side-by-side, and discusses their differences along with speculation on their evolution. He also speculates that Weyer removed the 3 chiefs intentionally. Jake Stratton-Kent's Pandaemonium is an excellent resource as well for your project, as he goes over these things as well and lists a side-by-side comparisson of these spirit catalogs from various sources.
It's clear the compilers of Lemegeton drew from various sources, some easier to pin down than others. The evolution of spirit catalogs into Goetia seems mostly straightforward, but some other elements of the work are not. Who, exactly, first said that I needed to wear a lion's skin, for example? Lemegeton Book 2, Theurgia Goetia, is very clearly inspired by Trithermius's Stenographia; in fact it's essentially the exact same things with the elements of cryptography removed and solomonic ritual added in it's place. I haven't worked with it, but have known others who said they had powerful results from it. For all we know this was just put together to give the appearance of something powerful and magical. That certainly doesn't render it any less effective in practice, as anyone who has worked with the Simon Necronomicon or a similarly fabricated grimoire could tell you. Maybe this is how all of these things originated, there really is no way to say for sure.
It's hard to pin down the true origin of any of these things, and I'm sure we're missing lots of intermediary developments. I've recently been studying the Jewish incantation bowls from the Sasanian Empire, roughly 250AD Babylon. These contain Aramaic spells to protect against and bind demons, almost all of which are drawn around a pictograph of a demon, often times the demon is drawn bound up, to symbolically bind them. Many of these drawings bear a striking resemblence to the demon seals from the Goetia. To the point where when you compare them side by side it feels almost obvious they emerged from the same tradition. But where is the direct link? If one exists it's highly unlikely to find the hands of someone who can tie it to this tradition, at least not for a very long time. Research on the incantation bowls themselves is extremely hard to come by, I've only found one useful source of information, and it's entirely written in Hebrew, was produced not even 10 years ago, and shows that it's still an area of active research.
Trying to build a reference like you are is a noble effort (your website looks nice and clean btw, and I really like the color themes), just try not to stress over "completing" it. I feel like there are centuries of discovery ahead, for all the history that still remains buried. Things never translated out of latin or french or german, manuscripts never noticed by modern researches, things tucked away in private collections that nobody even knows about yet, things physically buried in the earth somewhere that wait to be discovered. You just have to always be skeptical of new information as well. Connolly, for example, without a doubt invented the demon enns and the whole backstory of their use. Clearly there are people that use them and find them effective, but honestly in practice some people could literally do whatever they want to do and produce results. It depends on the magician. I find it difficult to consider them a continuation of the same tradition, but perhaps they are. I'm not a fan of a lot of the new gen-alpha slang, but our language evolves because it's alive, and the fact that our magic traditions are continuing to evolve means they too are alive, which is a good thing.
Also, I vaguely remember seeing that post on Studio Arcanis, but it will be difficult to find now if it still exists. Almost the entire site was locked behind a login wall, so most of what is saved on the Waybackmachine is only the very first post of a thread, and even then many of the threads were not saved. You can try looking at it's predecessor site, EvocationMagic(dot com), as the threads there were not behind a login wall, but they were similarly not all saved, and I think the post in question was much more recent. I was only able to make a very limited backup of the site before it went dark for good, and I don't believe I have a copy of that particular thread myself.
Post automatically merged:
It may have been the thread titled "Historic Magical Record" Feb 15, 2015 in the Grimoire Tradition subforum, which unfortunately was not saved by the waybackmachine.
Small thing on the date, only because the timeline matters: the Pseudomonarchia list first shows up in the 1577 edition of De praestigiis daemonum, not 1563. 1563 is the first edition of the book, before Weyer attached the spirit list. Doesn't change your argument.
And the argument is the part I like. Weyer wasn't preserving a system, he was a skeptic trying to discredit one, and he says himself he left things out to make it unworkable. So the three chiefs don't get lost on the way to the Lemegeton, someone who thought it was all nonsense cut them on purpose, and that gutted list is what Scot copies. The "69 spirits but the text still says 72 in the vessel" bit gives it away. The frame remembers what the list dropped.
Ordering Campbell's Of the Arte Goetia and JSK's Pandaemonium off the back of this. Side-by-side catalogs are exactly what I want to cite instead of paraphrase.
On the bowls I'll be careful, and I think you'd want me to be. The awkward part is the seals themselves are late, 16th century at the earliest, and they aren't in the Testament of Solomon or the bowls. So the resemblance is real but it can't be descent, the seals didn't exist yet. I'll keep it as a parallel, not a lineage. Same shelf as the enns, and I liked your point about the language staying alive.
On Studio Arcanis, thanks for the steer. It's mostly behind the login so Wayback only kept the opening posts, and I couldn't turn up "Historic Magical Record" anywhere. I'll try EvocationMagic. If your backup ever has it, I'd love a look.
And thanks for the kind words on the site. Taking the advice, I'll quit chasing "done."
Freemasonry as we now know it grew from lodges of actual stonemasons, called "operative" masonry. What we now recognize as Freemasonry is "speculative" masonry, rendering the tools and teachings of medieval engineers as philosophy and ritual
Love it! This had not even occurred to me, but broadly fits with what we know so far.
First, cards on the table, I am NOT attempting to construct a straw-man argument that the GV is somehow "more authentic." Older does not automatically mean better, imho.
We do have two "lines"of early to early modern grimoire transmission, the framework associated with the GV (often referenced in scholarship exploring argues that the Southern European transmission of Ibero-Italian and Mediterranean magic) and then and Northern European grimoire streams . They are two stages of a geographical and editorial migration that altered the framework European magic. The Mediterranean stream was concentrated in Italy, Spain, Greece, ad Southern France - and retained conservative link to Byzantine, late-antique, and folk-clerical praxis.
I do not wish to not make a JSK authenticity argument - which erases the Greek and Greek Orthodox culture as inauthentic and substitutes pre-Homeric Greek paganism a pure ideal. For more on how modern "esoterica" is often little more than a white-washing and the appropriation of Greek culture and magic see scholar of Greek magic and folklore, Dr. Sasha Chaitow's Substack
But I think, bradly we can say the Southern Stream of our tradition is the older survival of Mediterranean folk-clerical chthonic goetia.
And the Northern Stream represents an Early Modern intellectual, astrological, and ceremonial containment system built over the Southern framework to make it manageable for Northern European Renaissance sensibilities. All good, more below.
The Grimorium Verum and Peterson's proto-Verum manuscript tradition long hypothesized liens but then seen in The Secrets of Solomon - draw from an older, southern European tradition characters as rough, hand-drawnm straight and wavy lines, loops, circles, forks, and cross-hatching. This style descends directly from Byzantine-Greek goetia, late-antique magic amulets, and medieval Italian folk-magic scriptoria.
If accurate 'Northern Stream' might be said to follow in the footsteps of Agrippa who gave us a system where anyone could construct a spirit’s sigil from scratch, provided they knew the spirit’s name.
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Pardon my segue into raw, barefaced speculation in an attempt to be ecumenical.
Speaking personally again to soften this from going too far into authenticity arguments - I have no issue with that approach. I am perfectly willing to suggest our very divine human creativity and creative reason (had to sneak the Logos in here somewhere) gives us the ability to create new and very "authentic" traditions, if they are "linked up" - whatever that means.
Although modern Pagans get upset with me when I say this, I suspect it works rather like the time the fierce native Bon spirits of Tibet met the newly arrived Buddhists. The spirits have to agree to use the new protocols, accepting barley flour dough and butter as blood substitutes for their offerings, if only because they are given no other options. Christian exorcists did the same with older pagan spirits, forcing them to split into local demons and then local saints.
An example here is the Slavic pagan horned god Veles. His positive attributes as the patron of livestock, wealth, and earthly abundance were shaped (perhaps forcibly perhaps willingly, who knows? ) into Saint Vlas ( aka Saint Blaise) - who at times is merged with Saint Nicholas as a protector of herds and travelers, keeping the positive domain of Veles. Meanwhile, his negative, chthonic, and serpentine aspects were split off, demonized, and converted into the literal Devil or localized chort of demons.
So I see no reason why the magicians Northern Stream of our tradition could have very make new seals, vessels, and protocols that are just as effective, if a little different in tenor, than the earlier Southern Stream. Or that is how I think of it at this time.
I don’t claim to be any expert in goetia whatsoever, however I would like to say this. About 10 years ago I swore off these old grimoires and their, to me, ridiculous ingredients listings (“gather unto thee a branch of hyssop that hath nott borne fruit at sunrise when Jupiter is favorably aspected to Venus and grind with a root of (illegible) by the light of a full moon after St. Crispins day, all while reciting the 54, 7th and 23rd psalms, which you must say after backing around your home 20 times while praying the rosary and….”). What is this some kind of prank? They literally seemed like a waste of money and space on my shelf.
then you have books like Lucifer and the hidden demons with path workings which I don’t recommend (zero results) and GoM which is super interesting but I haven’t done much with.
Then awhile ago I found out that there was a translation of the Summa Sacra Magice and something told me to get it. I had heard some of Skinners interviews where he was hyping it up, you know you would expect an author to shill something they did, but I still took a chance. I dropped 70 USD on the first of 3 volumes, the third is due to be released this fall. Oh. My. Gods. Absolutely phenomenal. Really incredible book. I can see why Skinner says it is so foundational to the later books. It’s really good, the most interesting part Ive found is the use of “The winds” to bring the spirit to you, so you summon the wind from the direction that spirit comes from before you summon the spirit. I can’t wait to get volume 2 (70$) and 3 (90$), I haven’t spent that much on any single book but it seems like it’s definitely a good investment.
The biggest thing to me about the GV , maybe @MorganBlack has something to add about it, is that it presents spirits that aren’t in the Lemegemeton. I wonder how many other spirits are out there looking at us dumb ass humans wondering why they don’t get picked for dodgeball while everyone is running Belial and Vasso into the ground like a starving DoorDash driver who is behind on his rent payment.
GV definitely doesn’t get enough attention and like Morgan said, it’s simple and direct. I can just imagine some medieval adept trying to save their florins to buy a sword or mitre. Then again I wonder how much of the stuff that’s written is just there to discourage people from doing it or a sort of joke (“what do you mean I have to have a solid gold lament! I haven’t ate anything in 2 days except stale bread and 1/2 a turnip, I can’t afford this!” and then your teacher is like “nah dude, that’s for the dabblers to keep them away from this, just draw it on a piece of parchment from Brother Ezekiel or a piece of wood from the carpenter, you’ll be fine “)
The biggest thing to me about the GV , maybe @MorganBlack has something to add about it, is that it presents spirits that aren’t in the Lemegemeton. I wonder how many other spirits are out there looking at us dumb ass humans wondering why they don’t get picked for dodgeball while everyone is running Belial and Vasso into the ground like a starving DoorDash driver who is behind on his rent payment.
Just my personal opinion..... I think the Goetia spirits are just the same deities that people worship elsewhere. Baal, Horus, Freya, etc. Whoever compiled the list began with the idea that there would be 72 entries. They had the equivalent of a community college library and went through everything there to sift out gods and spirits that connect on two specific themes: those noted for magical powers, transformations, other special effects, and those whose myths connect to Bible characters and Christian themes.
It is common for people to assume grimoires were written by isolated monks who never heard of anything outside of Europe, but that just isn't even remotely the case. In the mid C17th there were all sorts of foreign imports throughout Europe. The Dutch were trading in Japan and Indonesia. The Atlantic SLave Trade began a couple of years after Lemegeton was written. Indian rajahs were sending out mass mailers for Krishna. All those spices came from somewhere. The Goetia author looked around and saw all these gods and devils of the foreign lands, and said "Hey, we've got some of this too!" and compiled a list. The Goetia itself says that after their release from the vessel, they returned to their places of honor and worship.
There are 8 groupings of the spirits, sorted into four quarters. In the south you have Africa and Arabia. The western spirits are Celtic, Roman, or Greek. The northern ones are Nordic and Slavic. There are spirits of far and near east. Nine spirits in each of 8 categories, with a center point in Jerusalem. All of those root deities appear in sources that a literate person 400 years ago would be able to easily access, and my belief is that they were deliberately obscured so as to identify them with demons more than mythic gods, heroes, and monsters.
Most of the seals of the spirits are just the English letters of their names rearranged like a sigil. Most of the seals also include their number, like for example Sallos is #19, and the seal is made of nine circles and ten lines. Andras is #63, and there's nine dots, three Venus symbols, and 4 lines, or 9 x (3+4) = 63. Agares #2 seal has a number 2 in it. #41 is "41" in Roman numerals. Etc etc. Every time there's a number component to the seal, it matches the spirit's number in the list. So it becomes fairly clear that the author invented the seals to represent the name, number, and usually some character point about each spirit.
I THINK there is an added bit here. Please, everyone, forgive my Catholic/ Mystical / Neoplatonic framework here. I swear I'm not recuiting, but this is how I think of it.
OK, I do take some issue with the academic hand-waving that says, "Culture A had a storm god, and then Culture B conquered them, so Culture B's archangel is just Culture A's storm god with a new hat." Human spiritual history is not simple copy-pasting.
Let's look at history of Archangel Michael as a good example of this. Jake Stratton-Kent suggested St. Michal "is" the Canaanite/West Semitic god of plague, war, and burning heat Resheph (also spelled Reshep or Reshef).
In the Phoenician-Greek inscriptions of Cyprus, Resheph was explicitly identified with Apollo (specifically Apollo Amyklos or Apollo Resheph). Apollo, like Resheph, was the archer god who shot arrows of pestilence, but was also a healer (Apotropaios - the turner away of evil).
JSK's broader thesis was that angels and demons in post-classical magic aren't medieval inventions out of whole cloth, they "are" (and he was more nuanced than modern pagans think here) the ancient gods and local spirits of the Near East and Mediterranean , re-categorized and reshuffled into the Judeo-Christian hierarchy.
Which is not wrong, per se. But I think this is only one layer. St. Michael is all these things, but also something bigger, imho.
From a Catholic/Mystical framework (and rooted in St. Augustine's view of the Ideas in the Mind of God), the universe isn't a random collection of material events. It is structured by eternal, primordial Truths. This comes to us from Plato , and the idea of Achetrypes, but that takes even more unpacking, and who has time for that?
So before there was ever a Canaanite writing on a clay tablet, or even a more ancient Paleolithic hunter painting a cave wall 60,000 years ago, the Principle of the Divine Protector already existed. I take some issue with Plato because I feel it is an element of human consciousness working along (co-creating, they say, but need a better word) to articulate and formalize this Principle for our human needs, but that is splitting the Archetypal hair.
So when humans in 40,000 BCE propitiated the spirit of the celestial hunter to guard their tribe through the night, they reached, met, or created the same eternal blueprint that a Judeo-Christian mystic reaches for when invoking St. Michael. Only the outward symbols and local expression changes based on whether you carry a flint spear or a steel sword, and paranormally patterned by the local culture around you.
Pardons to any more secular folks and pagans for this religious-sounding part again, but in Catholic theology, God doesn't just reveal Himself all at once in 33 AD. In Catholic thought there is a pre-Christian divine pedagogy. God allowed early humanity to perceive the spiritual world through the tools they had.
So when humans encountered a fierce, purging, defensive fire of God’s warrior spirit in the Bronze Age, they called him Resheph and tried to appease him with sacrifices because that was their level of understanding. As human consciousness matured, that same eternal energy / pattern, or imho Way of Being - that specific Archangelic / Archetypal presence in the Mind of God - revealed in its new form (and in the Catholic mind, also truer form) - not as a petty regional god / spirit / daimon demanding blood, but as St. Michael, the Supreme Commander of Heaven.
So to the Catholic mind, everything in Creation is just Catholic. Yes, I know this not very politically correct, as they say these days, but it is inclusive. Resheph, Apollo, and the early hunter-shaman spirits weren't the origin of St. Michael. They were early, partial human attempts to perceive, name, and interact with an eternal reality that was already there. The qualties of Resheph and Apollo are included in St. Michael.
This is how I think human creativity (again... Logos) turns / tunes, manifestsa Divine Idea / cosmic pattern / frequency that predates us all, and all of them, into a spirit we can interact with. (And it get more complex - they are also persons at another level, and not just Platonic forms ). I just let people have their own local manifestations - even if I am often like, 'WTF you talking about, Willis' - and still try to keep my mitts off of their stuff.
I think that compass idea is a very compelling theory worth exploring.
Your last point, Faria, points towards what I wanted to say about SSM when it was brought up. I think my favorite point in the book is the descriptions of characters being composed from the letters of a name in various languages being rearranged into one symbol. This makes it the oldest reference to sigil creation in the western tradition that I'm aware of, and it's essentially the same thing I did intuitively when I first started out, before actually reading about chaos magick and just hearing about it.
Also I think your points, Morgan, about the lineage splitting along a Southern/Verum line and a Northern/Lemegeton line, with the Southern line retaining more of it's original form compared to the Northern line, seems to fit with everything we know very well. But we're now so far removed from the formation of both of these systems, I feel they are both "authentic" in their own right. If we trace this all the way back, perhaps the most authentic work of all would be etching the stick figure of a bison on a rock with the faith that whatever spirits I believed in would bring one around for me and my family to eat. But there are thousands of steps along the path from there to today, and I don't think any of the stops along the way can invalidate any of the others. A caveman drawing a bison, a Renaissance magician drawing astrological symbols, a modern chaote rearranging some letters, I think there's very little difference in what's going on behind the scenes.
I also think that most of these spirits from the classical grimoires are demonized pagan dieties from other cultures, at least on the surface. But I very much agree with a lot of what you just wrote, Morgan. I think this whole thing has been an attempt by humans to percieve and name forces which already exist, and as we continue to develop so too will our understanding of these things. 100,000 years from now I think we will still be practicing these arts, but I woulnd't be surprised if that practice and understanding were completely unrecoognizable to us today.
My views largely mirror some ideas in hinduism, mainly the idea that Brahman is the ultimate and eternal reality, and that everything else is an expression or manifestation of Brahman, all the gods, spirits, and every other creature including ourselves, everything is an aspect of that one ultimate reality. I think many magical worldviews parallel this concept in one way or another, and it makes understanding these things a bit easier.
(“gather unto thee a branch of hyssop that hath nott borne fruit at sunrise when Jupiter is favorably aspected to Venus and grind with a root of (illegible) by the light of a full moon after St. Crispins day, all while reciting the 54, 7th and 23rd psalms, which you must say after backing around your home 20 times while praying the rosary and….”). What is this some kind of prank?
Sometimes they seem like blinds meant to distract you from other points, but sometimes these instructions feel exactly like a prank. I'm reminded of the Hand of Glory from the Verum, where you have to first tear out the hairs from a horse in heat before a long ritual where you end up with a magic money granting snake in a box with the face of a man that you must feed wheat husks daily, but you must not omit anything because it's specifically "not intended as a joke!"
I've never heard anyone's account of attempting this, but I'm sure it would be an interesting story regardless of the outcome.
So to the Catholic mind, everything in Creation is just Catholic. Yes, I know this not very politically correct, as they say these days, but it is inclusive. Resheph, Apollo, and the early hunter-shaman spirits weren't the origin of St. Michael. They were early, partial human attempts to perceive, name, and interact with an eternal reality that was already there. The qualties of Resheph and Apollo are included in St. Michael.
When I was about 11 yeas old, I was introduced to demonology by a Catholic priest. I would ask him things like, "How do people pray to some other god and get their prayers answered?" His answer was that the idols are fictional beings, a collection of human superstitions, and that the Devil could make them appear to have power, thereby tempting people toward idol worship. That is a condensation of many conversations, but I've never been able to escape the essential theme.
I look for example at Bael, the first spirit. There were lots of Baal deities, and they bled over into other "king of all the gods and ruler of the godly house" kind of deities. Even Sartre has Zeus and Beelzebub occupying the same seat. Baal deities are all about worldly glory: be strong, be handsome, be cool, be successful. It's easy to see that as godly, to look at the biggest human winners and assume divinity is all about that too. So you set up a cult that promotes worship of that type of godliness. Kings show off how cool they are for winning battles and claiming territory. Time passes, and someday you're wondering why the people from over the mountains are killing everyone on your side even though you've been making sacrifices to the Great Badass in the Sky on schedule. That version of godliness just doesn't work, it's an illusion that seems to work but fails when it counts. And yet we can't escape thinking of handsome winners as the good guys, it's a natural thing, a temptation resulting from material conditions that remain undefined no matter how closely you investigate. It's not so much that Baal is a demon, the same thing exists even in the absence of Baal in the historical record, it's a universal condition to which the Goetia author applied Baal as a representative. Whereas Baal the deity is in every way about standing out and making yourself more awesome, the binding of Baal is about invisibility or shutting off that same power.
May I ask which Catholicism, Faria? Mexican Catholicism is a bit more - I hate to say relaxed, it is not relaxed, but in Iberian folk traditions El Diablo, the Devil, often is less a horriffic cosmic monster - and is usually seen more like a rogue spirit, a trickster, or a bit of a cartoon adversary you can outsmart with a quick prayer, or a bargain. In the Book of St. Cyprian he will grant your wish then tell you to go give money to the poor .
Catechism-level Augustinian polemics as taught in seminary to keep parishioners out of the weeds. I do not argue with the Church, but most priests are not well educated here. Not their job.
Getting to the 14th Century Italian Catholicism was very useful for me, at least for my GV practice. That said, I want to temper a little some of the rose -colored glasses some more pagany types have on. The priests are not 100% wrong. The GV spirits are weird as fuck. Seriously. If they are pagan gods, then the pagan gods were some weird-ass critters.
In my view, and in alignment with the Italian Catholic worldview of the traditon as it comes to us, the Three Chiefs basically work as God's rightful subordinates, ruling over the Chthonic Sublunar world. We can think of them, in my opinion, as archangelic-level powers, but essentially acting as Angels of Purgatory / Hell / Tartarus. This structure I have found makes the system more safe and workable, but that is personal gnosis that should be tested by other's experimentation.
This (what I am about to write) is a bit of a tangent here, but this (quoted text) is a good example of the double-talk I mentioned in an earlier thread - in which Catholicism (and indeed all forms of Christianity) can sometimes gesture toward a more-or-less non-dual understanding of God, but then always falls back into treating God as a distinct being which is still somehow outside and above it all, and thus the reason that I cannot comfortably dwell in the Catholic mythocosmology. Ipsum Esse is not the kind of thing which has "rightful subordinates." Nor can this be regarded simply as a poetic way of speaking. Ipsum Esse is not superior or inferior to anything, nor does it authorize or deputize anything in particular. Much as the sun shines on all beings equally, Ipsum Esse simply is, providing without bias for the existence of whatever come to exist. The only distinction one can draw in the relationship between beings and absolute ground is the degree of clarity that those beings have toward their ground.
I'm not raising this issue just to be argumentative. I am groping for a way to engage with the three chiefs and the rest of the hierarchy, but I do also want to challenge you to be clear about this for yourself.
