The God-Slot Problem: How Can Non-Christians Power the Solomonic System?

[baobaoking]

Building on a point I raised in my previous post, I’ve realized this may be the biggest practical challenge that non-Christian practitioners simply cannot avoid.
The entire Solomonic system operates along a chain of divine authority. From the consecration of tools to the invocation and the dismissal, every step is carried out in the name of a specific entity, and at the very top of this chain—as the original texts make abundantly clear—stands the Triune God. If you’re a Christian, there’s no problem at all; the engine is already in place. If you’re not, then what you’re facing isn’t a matter of faith, but an engineering problem: the power source for the entire machine is in someone else’s hands.
I’ve seen four ready-made solutions, each with its own real cost.
The first is to recite it verbatim. Recite the formula of the Trinity exactly as it is, even if you don’t believe in it. Some argue that the divine name itself is a technical element, unrelated to what the practitioner believes. I respect this stance, but for those of us who come from a devotional background, it feels like signing someone else’s check. Moreover, my principle is that the practitioner’s own state of mind is part of the ritual; reciting creeds I do not hold—that is a rift I cannot bridge.
The second approach is to replace the deity. You swap out the authority slot with your own primary deity. The cost is that you contaminate two lineages simultaneously: your primary deity’s ritual system is forcibly grafted onto the grimoire’s mechanical structure, while the grimoire system is forced to accommodate a deity for whom it was not designed. I strictly enforce the separation of lineages, so this path is a dead end for me.
The third approach is self-proclamation. This is the path where you declare yourself to already be a deity and issue commands from that divine status. The cost lies in the fact that the entire safety framework of this system is built on the premise that you are not at the top. If you place yourself at the top, then between you and whatever manifests, there is nothing but yourself. A previous post on this forum explained this point very thoroughly: the essence of the original method is that you assume yourself to be a god, and beyond the god, the only one truly responsible for your safety is yourself.
The fourth approach is the intermediary. It involves having your Holy Guardian Angel hold authority on your behalf—the Abramelin path. This is the proper path, but it requires you to first complete a process measured in months and years. Strictly speaking, it postpones the problem rather than resolving it, because the question remains: whose authority stands behind your angel?
I personally follow the fifth approach, though stating this may be controversial.
My entire theological stance boils down to a single principle: the highest position is occupied by a being, and that being is unknowable. I am certain that the Most High exists; this is not a strategic assumption, but my genuine belief. However, I refuse to claim to know who He is. He is not the Trinity, nor is He any name I can call upon. When I work, the endpoint of the chain of authority is the Most High—whomever He may be.
This approach has two qualities that I value highly. First, it introduces no doctrine. I don’t need to convert to anything, nor do I need to pretend anything; the reverence is genuine, and only the name remains open-ended. Second, it automatically satisfies the separation of traditions. Because that top slot carries no name, it doesn’t clash with any tradition I hold; my devotional work maintains its own flow, and the Solomonic framework is powered without being burdened by a god with whom to compete. There is also an added benefit: honesty. Every invocation I recite is true at the moment I utter it. In a system where I require every syllable to be traceable to the original text, this is the only configuration in which my theology and my recitation do not conflict with one another.
Incidentally, this is not some modern contrivance. There truly stood an altar in Athens inscribed with “To the Unknown God,” which Paul witnessed with his own eyes in Acts 17, and Pausanias also recorded altars dedicated to the unknown gods. The ancients had long since built temples to the unnamed Supreme Being. Negative theology is an entire tradition—from Pseudo-Dionysius to the medieval work The Cloud of Unknowing—in which God can only be approached through what He is not. A large portion of the invocations of the Highest God in the PGM are, by their very nature, tradition-agnostic. Even at the very core of the grimoire tradition sits a famously unspoken name. At the heart of this tradition lies a name we do not utter.
So I’d like to ask you all: What do you put in your “God slot”? If you work with the Solomonic system and you’re not a Christian—or not just a Christian—what do you use to power this machine, and what price has it exacted from you?

 

[RiverieSoul_Azathoth]

One application of this system is modern tech and it costs freedom

Post automatically merged: Jul 23, 2026

Because of its derivative nature to the solomonic system

 

[ArchonLynx]

Christian

So you do understand Jesus himself was a jew & Christianity was not created by him it was created later after his death by his followers the term Christian was created by non believers to categorize his followers.

Solomonic magic is ancients hebrew Judaism & as far as what some of us put in the god slot depends on the person.

If you practice chaos magic you just adopt the base deity/entity for what ever ritual/system you are trying to complete.

It's honestly all up to the person doing the ritual if you get results it works if you get no results you obviously gotta go back & change a few things & try again

 

[akenu]

Solomonic magick is not that old. Eg Goetia first appeared in the 17th century, I believe.

Some writers tended to ascribe their work to famous historical or fictional people; you can bet your behind that Solomon had nothing to do with either Lemegeton or Clavicula Salomonis

 

[Firetree]

and Solomon himself was made up !

And also for anyone that thinks you gotta be Jewish or Christian to 'appreciate' Solomon .... ummmmm .... magick and demon summoning ....... in the Bible .... what ?

For those that have figured out our (non-Christian ) 'insurmountable problem ' , did you know strict biblical law explicitly prohibited sorcery, witchcraft, and consulting mediums (such as in Deuteronomy 18:10-14).

The tradition of "Solomonic magic" is a later invention that reinterpreted and weaponised specific biblical verses through the lens of surrounding pagan, Hellenistic, and Near Eastern folklore and then later Islamic mysticism, Greek magical practices, and medieval/Renaissance European occultism.

 

[Mannimarco]

I’ve realized this may be the biggest practical challenge that non-Christian practitioners simply cannot avoid.

Its called Chaos magick. You're welcome

I am several universes away from ever being a christian or anything similar. I use the pentacles just fine. The "chain of divine authority" is just lies, like the rest of christianity. The pentacles function through planetary energy, not religious.

 

[Berdnius606]

Solomonic magick is not that old. Eg Goetia first appeared in the 17th century, I believe.

Some writers tended to ascribe their work to famous historical or fictional people; you can bet your behind that Solomon had nothing to do with either Lemegeton or Clavicula Salomonis

The Goetia was compiled from fragments of older material dating back at least to the 13th century.

 

[akenu]

The Goetia was compiled from fragments of older material dating back at least to the 13th century.

Is 13th century considered ancient? Or Solomon's times? Neither.

You should check out Simon's Necronomicon. It's attributed to the Mad Arab and contains some information that goes way before BC.

 

[baobaoking]

So you do understand Jesus himself was a jew & Christianity was not created by him it was created later after his death by his followers the term Christian was created by non believers to categorize his followers.

Solomonic magic is ancients hebrew Judaism & as far as what some of us put in the god slot depends on the person.

If you practice chaos magic you just adopt the base deity/entity for what ever ritual/system you are trying to complete.

It's honestly all up to the person doing the ritual if you get results it works if you get no results you obviously gotta go back & change a few things & try again

I do understand what you’re saying. Jesus himself was a Jew; Christianity was established by his followers after his death, and even the term “Christian” was originally coined by bystanders. Before entering the Solomonic system, I spent quite a long time studying the history of Christianity. I harbor no hostility toward Christianity. On the contrary, I refuse to recite creeds I do not hold to, partly out of respect for it. A genuine belief system should not be treated by me as a mere tool.

Regarding Chaos Magic, I’d like to add an observation drawn from the land beneath my feet. In China, Chaos Magic is by far the most effective money-making model in this circle—there’s simply no other. Its falsifiability has been surgically removed. If you don’t get results, it’s because your energy isn’t strong enough, your visualization isn’t precise enough, or you haven’t practiced diligently enough. If you do get results, it proves the teacher was right. Regardless of the outcome, the tuition has already been paid. I don’t think this is the fault of Chaos Magic itself. The flexibility of the paradigm is precisely what makes it the perfect commercial vehicle; the more versatile the tool, the easier it is to sell. But this explains why I harbor a scar-tissue-like wariness toward the stance that “effectiveness equals truth.” I’ve seen what happens when it’s weaponized on a mass scale.

Setting that scar aside, to be fair, your position—that achieving results proves effectiveness, and a lack of results means going back to revise and try again—is the answer in this thread that has come closest to my own engineering intuition so far. The only remaining point of disagreement between us is that I require every statement I utter to be true at the very moment it’s spoken, whereas the results-oriented approach doesn’t require this constraint. I’ll give this point serious consideration. Thank you for directly addressing my question—this is exactly what I was hoping to get out of this thread.

Post automatically merged: Jul 24, 2026

Solomonic magick is not that old. Eg Goetia first appeared in the 17th century, I believe.

Some writers tended to ascribe their work to famous historical or fictional people; you can bet your behind that Solomon had nothing to do with either Lemegeton or Clavicula Salomonis

I completely agree with this point about the pseudonym, and I’ve actually been thinking about the same issue on my own—only I dug a layer deeper and traced it back to the list itself: the seventy-two figures from Goetia.

I’ve combed through every book I could get my hands on and searched for every language version I could find—though I was powerless to do so for languages that are too obscure. The result is that fewer than ten of the seventy-two can be traced back to authentic ancient origins. Behind Bael stands Baal; behind Astaroth stands Astarte; Asmodeus can be traced all the way back to the Book of Tobit and even earlier Persian sources; Belial is a term found in the Hebrew Bible itself; and whether Amon is the Egyptian deity in question is still a subject of academic debate. Aside from this small handful, for the remaining fifty-plus, I could find no evidence of their existence prior to the list in the grimoire itself. That list is their birth certificate.

That is why I have always believed that applying the label “Christian demons” to them is extremely unscientific. The Old Gods demonized by the Bible do indeed exist—the ones mentioned above are examples—and we’ve all witnessed the mechanism by which pagan deities are branded as demons. But the vast majority on the list do not fall into this category at all. They are not Old Gods who have been demoted to demons. They have no “past.”

So I’d like to hear your thoughts. First, what do you personally believe these Seventy-Two are? Are they spirits, fragments of the Old Gods, or purely literary inventions? Do you think they have a real origin, or are they fabricated? Second, there is a school of teachers today—I’m currently studying under one of them—that treats angels and the Seventy-Two as one and the same, viewing them both as spirits, and therefore establishes a relationship with both through offerings. For me personally, this path is a minefield. Offerings are a technique of devotional transmission; integrating them into a system structured around commands and constraints, according to my principles, amounts to the mutual contamination of the two lineages. What is your take on this path of offerings?

 

[Digiquo]

I do understand what you’re saying. Jesus himself was a Jew; Christianity was established by his followers after his death, and even the term “Christian” was originally coined by bystanders. Before entering the Solomonic system, I spent quite a long time studying the history of Christianity. I harbor no hostility toward Christianity. On the contrary, I refuse to recite creeds I do not hold to, partly out of respect for it. A genuine belief system should not be treated by me as a mere tool.

Regarding Chaos Magic, I’d like to add an observation drawn from the land beneath my feet. In China, Chaos Magic is by far the most effective money-making model in this circle—there’s simply no other. Its falsifiability has been surgically removed. If you don’t get results, it’s because your energy isn’t strong enough, your visualization isn’t precise enough, or you haven’t practiced diligently enough. If you do get results, it proves the teacher was right. Regardless of the outcome, the tuition has already been paid. I don’t think this is the fault of Chaos Magic itself. The flexibility of the paradigm is precisely what makes it the perfect commercial vehicle; the more versatile the tool, the easier it is to sell. But this explains why I harbor a scar-tissue-like wariness toward the stance that “effectiveness equals truth.” I’ve seen what happens when it’s weaponized on a mass scale.

Setting that scar aside, to be fair, your position—that achieving results proves effectiveness, and a lack of results means going back to revise and try again—is the answer in this thread that has come closest to my own engineering intuition so far. The only remaining point of disagreement between us is that I require every statement I utter to be true at the very moment it’s spoken, whereas the results-oriented approach doesn’t require this constraint. I’ll give this point serious consideration. Thank you for directly addressing my question—this is exactly what I was hoping to get out of this thread.

Post automatically merged: Jul 24, 2026

I completely agree with this point about the pseudonym, and I’ve actually been thinking about the same issue on my own—only I dug a layer deeper and traced it back to the list itself: the seventy-two figures from Goetia.

I’ve combed through every book I could get my hands on and searched for every language version I could find—though I was powerless to do so for languages that are too obscure. The result is that fewer than ten of the seventy-two can be traced back to authentic ancient origins. Behind Bael stands Baal; behind Astaroth stands Astarte; Asmodeus can be traced all the way back to the Book of Tobit and even earlier Persian sources; Belial is a term found in the Hebrew Bible itself; and whether Amon is the Egyptian deity in question is still a subject of academic debate. Aside from this small handful, for the remaining fifty-plus, I could find no evidence of their existence prior to the list in the grimoire itself. That list is their birth certificate.

That is why I have always believed that applying the label “Christian demons” to them is extremely unscientific. The Old Gods demonized by the Bible do indeed exist—the ones mentioned above are examples—and we’ve all witnessed the mechanism by which pagan deities are branded as demons. But the vast majority on the list do not fall into this category at all. They are not Old Gods who have been demoted to demons. They have no “past.”

So I’d like to hear your thoughts. First, what do you personally believe these Seventy-Two are? Are they spirits, fragments of the Old Gods, or purely literary inventions? Do you think they have a real origin, or are they fabricated? Second, there is a school of teachers today—I’m currently studying under one of them—that treats angels and the Seventy-Two as one and the same, viewing them both as spirits, and therefore establishes a relationship with both through offerings. For me personally, this path is a minefield. Offerings are a technique of devotional transmission; integrating them into a system structured around commands and constraints, according to my principles, amounts to the mutual contamination of the two lineages. What is your take on this path of offerings?

Addressing your point about where the remaining members of the seventy two might have originated in antiquity, I'll share an interesting tidbit I read today in a book that by and large had nothing to do with the occult, except for one chapter. The book is called 'In Praise of Floods', and is primarily about the vastly overlooked ecological disturbance of modern humans on riverine systems, and how flooding is natural part of the river's cycle. The author uses the Ayeyarwady, or Irrwaddy, River in Myanmar/Burma to illustrate most of his points.
One particular chapter however goes into a lengthy overview of the various spirits, or "nats", that are exceptionally well known to the locals in various parts of the river system, and totally unknown to anybody even a few miles inland, and which even the author would have never known about except he had native peers in country interviewing locals about it and who were comfortable sharing that information. Having read that today and linking it with this particular question of yours, it seems entirely plausible to me many of the names that have been passed down to us may at one point have existed entirely by oral tradition, as most of these "nats"/spirits do, and it was only at infrequent intervals did anyone more seriously involved in the occult bother to write them down with more or less their accepted roles and statuses. I find the idea that the majority were entirely fabricated out of a single person's imagination very difficult to believe, and he more than likely drew upon popular beliefs of the time.
Similar has been said about Agrippa's works; most of the information he compiled into his "Three Books" were drawn from contemporary works that were widely available (for the time) in his own lifetime, and not from ancient or lost sources.

 

[baobaoking]

Addressing your point about where the remaining members of the seventy two might have originated in antiquity, I'll share an interesting tidbit I read today in a book that by and large had nothing to do with the occult, except for one chapter. The book is called 'In Praise of Floods', and is primarily about the vastly overlooked ecological disturbance of modern humans on riverine systems, and how flooding is natural part of the river's cycle. The author uses the Ayeyarwady, or Irrwaddy, River in Myanmar/Burma to illustrate most of his points.
One particular chapter however goes into a lengthy overview of the various spirits, or "nats", that are exceptionally well known to the locals in various parts of the river system, and totally unknown to anybody even a few miles inland, and which even the author would have never known about except he had native peers in country interviewing locals about it and who were comfortable sharing that information. Having read that today and linking it with this particular question of yours, it seems entirely plausible to me many of the names that have been passed down to us may at one point have existed entirely by oral tradition, as most of these "nats"/spirits do, and it was only at infrequent intervals did anyone more seriously involved in the occult bother to write them down with more or less their accepted roles and statuses. I find the idea that the majority were entirely fabricated out of a single person's imagination very difficult to believe, and he more than likely drew upon popular beliefs of the time.
Similar has been said about Agrippa's works; most of the information he compiled into his "Three Books" were drawn from contemporary works that were widely available (for the time) in his own lifetime, and not from ancient or lost sources.

This anecdote you shared is extremely valuable to me, because it’s more than just an analogy. I looked into it further and discovered that the nat system is, in fact, a well-documented empirical example of your hypothesis—and one that goes even further than the hypothesis itself. King Anawrahta of the Pagan Kingdom, in the 11th century, initially attempted to ban nat worship but failed. He then changed his strategy, compiling the countless local spirits from folk oral traditions into an official list of the 37 Great Nats. Thirty-seven is an administrative number, not an ontological one; the actual number of nats has never been limited to this figure. Most on the list were real people who died violent deaths, and seven of them were contemporaries of the king himself. The most ingenious part is that he pulled off a move that would make us here in this thread smile knowingly: he placed an orthodox Buddhist deity at the very top of the list to serve as the ultimate authority over the entire folk spirit system. Placing an orthodox authority at the very top of a list of spirits—this was a divine reordering project carried out nine hundred years ago. By the way, the author of the book you’re reading, Scott, devoted his entire life to studying how the state compiles unreadable folk phenomena into readable lists; he himself would likely appreciate this case study.

This ties directly into something I’ve been thinking about recently. Seventy-two—I’m increasingly convinced it’s a number of a different nature, a compiled number rather than a census figure. This tradition itself treats seventy-two as a building block: 72 names of God, seventy-two ethnic groups; Rudd’s manuscript even goes so far as to pair these seventy-two figures one-to-one with seventy-two angels. First, establish a framework of sacred numbers, then fill it in with names to make it complete—this is a perfectly logical operation at the textual level. The actual number might be seven, or ten, or seven hundred twenty, or seventy-two thousand, or perhaps there is no number at all. Rather than treating seventy-two as an accurate roster, it is better understood as a conceptual entity, a container. Once understood this way, many aspects that had previously seemed awkward suddenly made sense to me.

If the list was fabricated, what is the truly consistent element in each entry? I’ve noticed that the entries for each figure in the spellbook read like job descriptions: teaching languages, seeking treasures, making people fall in love, and revealing the truth. These functions correspond almost exclusively to human desires on the secular plane. So my current working hypothesis is that the names are more like email addresses—or rather, work orders specifying a function and a method of summoning. A summons is issued based on a specific function, and the relevant spirit comes to carry it out. As for whether the same spirit responds each time, the texts offer no guarantee; perhaps it is never the same spirit at all.

There is a Japanese manga that depicts this model more accurately than most esoteric texts: Kentaro Miura’s Berserk. During the Battle of Enoch Village, the young witch Schierke first summoned the four cardinal kings in the church to establish a barrier. When that proved insufficient, she went to an abandoned shrine of the old water god in the village to invoke a spirit. After the villagers converted to a new religious sect, offerings to that shrine had long since ceased. The flood she summoned did indeed wash away all the trolls, but it also nearly destroyed the entire village, and she herself nearly lost her sense of self in the torrent. The explanation given in the work is precisely this: spirits that have gone too long without offerings manifest with greater ferocity when summoned. This is a work of fiction, but this mechanism—where the state of worship determines the nature of the manifestation—shares the same economic logic as the nat system’s logic of sustenance and the very concepts we are discussing. A certain manga artist had already anticipated all of this.

This model also incidentally explains a phenomenon I’ve observed in my own circle. In my experience, people often perform 72-character summoning rituals by rote, following a tutorial they found online without reading any relevant literature. According to the email model, this is equivalent to publicly posting a job listing without any means of verifying the applicants who respond. The most common outcome I’ve seen is that they end up being persistently followed by a spirit they can’t shake off; one person even moved halfway across China to escape it. If a name guarantees only a function rather than an identity, this outcome is entirely understandable.

Have you come across any other official lists of spirits? I’m starting to suspect that such lists might be far more common across various civilizations than we realize.

 

[Digiquo]

This anecdote you shared is extremely valuable to me, because it’s more than just an analogy. I looked into it further and discovered that the nat system is, in fact, a well-documented empirical example of your hypothesis—and one that goes even further than the hypothesis itself. King Anawrahta of the Pagan Kingdom, in the 11th century, initially attempted to ban nat worship but failed. He then changed his strategy, compiling the countless local spirits from folk oral traditions into an official list of the 37 Great Nats. Thirty-seven is an administrative number, not an ontological one; the actual number of nats has never been limited to this figure. Most on the list were real people who died violent deaths, and seven of them were contemporaries of the king himself. The most ingenious part is that he pulled off a move that would make us here in this thread smile knowingly: he placed an orthodox Buddhist deity at the very top of the list to serve as the ultimate authority over the entire folk spirit system. Placing an orthodox authority at the very top of a list of spirits—this was a divine reordering project carried out nine hundred years ago. By the way, the author of the book you’re reading, Scott, devoted his entire life to studying how the state compiles unreadable folk phenomena into readable lists; he himself would likely appreciate this case study.

This ties directly into something I’ve been thinking about recently. Seventy-two—I’m increasingly convinced it’s a number of a different nature, a compiled number rather than a census figure. This tradition itself treats seventy-two as a building block: 72 names of God, seventy-two ethnic groups; Rudd’s manuscript even goes so far as to pair these seventy-two figures one-to-one with seventy-two angels. First, establish a framework of sacred numbers, then fill it in with names to make it complete—this is a perfectly logical operation at the textual level. The actual number might be seven, or ten, or seven hundred twenty, or seventy-two thousand, or perhaps there is no number at all. Rather than treating seventy-two as an accurate roster, it is better understood as a conceptual entity, a container. Once understood this way, many aspects that had previously seemed awkward suddenly made sense to me.

If the list was fabricated, what is the truly consistent element in each entry? I’ve noticed that the entries for each figure in the spellbook read like job descriptions: teaching languages, seeking treasures, making people fall in love, and revealing the truth. These functions correspond almost exclusively to human desires on the secular plane. So my current working hypothesis is that the names are more like email addresses—or rather, work orders specifying a function and a method of summoning. A summons is issued based on a specific function, and the relevant spirit comes to carry it out. As for whether the same spirit responds each time, the texts offer no guarantee; perhaps it is never the same spirit at all.

There is a Japanese manga that depicts this model more accurately than most esoteric texts: Kentaro Miura’s Berserk. During the Battle of Enoch Village, the young witch Schierke first summoned the four cardinal kings in the church to establish a barrier. When that proved insufficient, she went to an abandoned shrine of the old water god in the village to invoke a spirit. After the villagers converted to a new religious sect, offerings to that shrine had long since ceased. The flood she summoned did indeed wash away all the trolls, but it also nearly destroyed the entire village, and she herself nearly lost her sense of self in the torrent. The explanation given in the work is precisely this: spirits that have gone too long without offerings manifest with greater ferocity when summoned. This is a work of fiction, but this mechanism—where the state of worship determines the nature of the manifestation—shares the same economic logic as the nat system’s logic of sustenance and the very concepts we are discussing. A certain manga artist had already anticipated all of this.

This model also incidentally explains a phenomenon I’ve observed in my own circle. In my experience, people often perform 72-character summoning rituals by rote, following a tutorial they found online without reading any relevant literature. According to the email model, this is equivalent to publicly posting a job listing without any means of verifying the applicants who respond. The most common outcome I’ve seen is that they end up being persistently followed by a spirit they can’t shake off; one person even moved halfway across China to escape it. If a name guarantees only a function rather than an identity, this outcome is entirely understandable.

Have you come across any other official lists of spirits? I’m starting to suspect that such lists might be far more common across various civilizations than we realize.

I am pleased my anecdote inspired such an insightful response. I had not thought the nat system would yield anything particularly valuable or of interest to me. Frankly it was a very dry chapter I found myself nodding off at times whilst reading lol. But the implications, that much as the nat system has its officially recognized list, in addition to the countless local spirits, that major occult systems like the Solomonic system could be equally as arbitrary (numerically anyways), raises a lot of questions about the underlying nature of the practice.

I like your hypothesis about them being more like posting a job listing that anyone can respond to, the "names" corresponding to a group of entities willing and capable of performing the specific job, but without much filtering of personality beyond that. However, I have never performed spirit work and so cannot attest whether this is true in practice.

I am also a huge fan of Berserk lol. Berserk's occultic world structure is strangely consistent, which leads me to believe Kentaro Miura likely knew at least a fair bit about various spirit practices.

I will have to delve into some more research about the nat system and see if there are any other parallels with the Solomonic system. Who knows, maybe the nat system came first and some chap travelled to Burma for a bit and adapted it to the West when he returned.

 

[Berdnius606]

In Latin manuscripts actually from the medieval period Haagenti is labeled as "Dagan" or "Dagon" instead.

Post automatically merged: Jul 24, 2026

This ties directly into something I’ve been thinking about recently. Seventy-two—I’m increasingly convinced it’s a number of a different nature, a compiled number rather than a census figure. This tradition itself treats seventy-two as a building block: 72 names of God, seventy-two ethnic groups; Rudd’s manuscript even goes so far as to pair these seventy-two figures one-to-one with seventy-two angels. First, establish a framework of sacred numbers, then fill it in with names to make it complete—this is a perfectly logical operation at the textual level. The actual number might be seven, or ten, or seven hundred twenty, or seventy-two thousand, or perhaps there is no number at all. Rather than treating seventy-two as an accurate roster, it is better understood as a conceptual entity, a container. Once understood this way, many aspects that had previously seemed awkward suddenly made sense to me.

The angels were traditionally paired with the 72 names of God. It is my belief that the Goetia was created to pair the angels with 72 demons they were thought to have authority over. Medieval books often have the same spirits contained within, but they are organized under greater spirits of the East (Oriennes), South (Amaymon), West (Paymon), and North (Egyn) in that order. With the exception of Vassago, the Goetia lacks any Northern Spirits. The names of the four kings of the directions given are also incorrect being randomly selected from the subordinate spirits. Originally, there must have been well over 100 spirits. I have found more complete lists in manuscripts for the East, South, and Western spirits, and just those amounted to more than 90.

 

[armageddonz1]

I am luciferian. I asked lucifer through divination if I can refer to him through those names. He said yes.

Most of the sacred names in solomonic texts don't refer to the abrahmic god particularly but rather the creator. Abrahmic religions deem Yahweh as their creator. You can deem someone else whom you trust. They will take the godform for you. For example, you can even dedicate those words of power to hekate and it will work. So for example when you are chanting the word adonai, meaning "my lord", you are calling hekate as your lord.

For some of those conjurations that specifically mention biblical stories, you can avoid them as they are largely fluff. The sacred names of God hold the real power.

 

[MorganBlack]

My entire theological stance boils down to a single principle: the highest position is occupied by a being, and that being is unknowable. I am certain that the Most High exists; this is not a strategic assumption, but my genuine belief. However, I refuse to claim to know who He is

I tend to agree with you. Ialso tend to think of Trinity as a modulation of the Mystery (the Numinous, God. the One, the Tao, the whatever ) into more human-space by human needs, wishes, and prayers.

This is a concept that precedes him but Frater Acher he has done a great job here visualizing this:

"Think of a giant water damn wall. Behind this wall resides a massive amount of power in potential. Over millennials of evolution smart humans managed to build valves into this massive wall, which now allow us to open and close these individually. Thus humans learned to leverage the water pressure behind the wall through specific power access points which in return have become controllable and can be harnessed to accomplish all kinds of man-made plans. Depending on which valve is opened and for how long we get a certain kind of pressure and quality of water. And with that we can work in whatever kind it pleases us."

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I was not raised particularly religious, by engage with the Catholic magical systems just fine. I feel it's important to consider that it's not required for your intellect to 100% taken over by all this. It will work even if you don't totally mind-fuck yourself into accepting as these "impossible and dumb" things. Ultimately they are mysteries, not dry "facts." This approach keeps our kerplunky accountant's brain - the left hemisphere - from meddling too much, if we consider these sacred ideas and off limits to its grubby survival-focused little rodent fingers.

Monotheism and the recognition of a supreme overarching divine principle also long predate Abrahamic tribal frameworks. Solomonic grimoire magic is fundamentally an extension of Catholic sacramental technology.

And Catholicism is actually Hellenic, not Abrahamic, and was built upon a Paleolithic-to-Neolithic trajectory across Eurasia that points toward a deep-seated recognition of a High God - often an distant overarching sky father or cosmic order (what Wilhelm Schmidt called Urmonotheismus), surrounded by a court of lesser spirits, ancestors, and localized numina. (a word originating from ancient Roman religion, a numen was not a fully fleshed-out human-like god with an elaborate mythology and backstory. These sit on the Catholic God's Divine Council, accompanied by divinitized humans, principalities, powers, archangels, etc. Now all this metaphor (and mythic poetry) but I also feel it's the closest description of what going on, in my personal opinion.

Paul using the stories of "YHVH" as a proxy stand-in for the Ancient Nameless God. He never made a reference to a human Jesus, whjo was always a vision of a cosmic god. This is historically and philosophically precise. When his Hellenized mind encountered the localized storm/warrior deity of the ancient Levant, he an others immediately translated that figure upward into the Platonic Theon - the Prime Mover, the Good, the Monad. Paul’s God in the Areopagus speech is explicitly agnostos theo - the Unknown God. Paul was culturally a Hellene.

The best book at this time for more on this is Book – PDF - 'From Paul to Mark - PaleoChristianity' by Laura Knight-Jadczyk (2021)

Also be sure to check out the late, great historian Russell Gmirkin.

Oh. The DNA of the Grimorium Verum (my man grim) has been traced back to 14th-century Italy, placing it at the center of late medieval scholasticism, clerics, scribes, and minor church orders were knee-deep in ritual innovation and medical astrology.

Grimoire magic is built on a universal cosmic hierarchy, and the top end is vastly more universal than a narrow tribal formulation, and anyone operating within that mythic framework can plug into it. It is quite alive, I have found, and you might find yourself learning far more about the fine points of Catholic and Neoplatonic history than you would ever expect otherwise. If that does not interest you, try the PGM as a ritual framework.

 

[AbammonTheGreat]

Is 13th century considered ancient? Or Solomon's times? Neither.

You should check out Simon's Necronomicon. It's attributed to the Mad Arab and contains some information that goes way before BC.

Muslim exegesis on the Solomonic binding of djinn is 8th century. Testament of Solomon is 1st century and Josephus also reports witnessing an exorcism where a demon is bound and commanded with a ring with a pentacle on it in the first century. Which means the tradition was already established by the 1st century. Story of Solomon goes to the Babylonian Exile which is Iron Age and we have Bronze Age mesopotamian exorcism rituals in which demons are bound under the authority of corresponding Sumerian entities utilizing holy water and magic circles.

So what is ancient and where do we draw the line in the sand on what constitutes Solomonic? People say "13th century" because thats where we can date the Hygromenteia which gives fully developed magic circle binding rituals. But the testament of solomon utilizes astrological timing with the ring of solomon and angelic heirarchies which places the tradition itself at the 1st century. If it is specifically ritual and magic centered around the story of Solomon we can extend it to the Iron Age as there is a developed exorcism tradition in tandem with this mythos, but if Solomonic magic is specifically the utilization of binding demons in heirarchies while commanding them and we throw the tied in mythology out just the ritual technology that goes all the way back to the bronze age.

I mean this stuff goes all the way back to the beginning.

 

[FireBorn]

Muslim exegesis on the Solomonic binding of djinn is 8th century. Testament of Solomon is 1st century and Josephus also reports witnessing an exorcism where a demon is bound and commanded with a ring with a pentacle on it in the first century. Which means the tradition was already established by the 1st century. Story of Solomon goes to the Babylonian Exile which is Iron Age and we have Bronze Age mesopotamian exorcism rituals in which demons are bound under the authority of corresponding Sumerian entities utilizing holy water and magic circles.

So what is ancient and where do we draw the line in the sand on what constitutes Solomonic? People say "13th century" because thats where we can date the Hygromenteia which gives fully developed magic circle binding rituals. But the testament of solomon utilizes astrological timing with the ring of solomon and angelic heirarchies which places the tradition itself at the 1st century. If it is specifically ritual and magic centered around the story of Solomon we can extend it to the Iron Age as there is a developed exorcism tradition in tandem with this mythos, but if Solomonic magic is specifically the utilization of binding demons in heirarchies while commanding them and we throw the tied in mythology out just the ritual technology that goes all the way back to the bronze age.

I mean this stuff goes all the way back to the beginning.

This feels like flattening history to fit a narrative. A lot of development is missing, a few similarities are being made to do way too much work.

The traditions concerning Solomon may go back to the exilic or earlier biblical period, but that does not establish what you are implying. The later Jewish category of demons, and certainly an organized hierarchy of demons bound under Solomonic authority, wasn't even present in that form yet. Earlier traditions contain harmful, troublesome, or ritually dangerous spirits, but that is not automatically the same category as later demonology.

The Persian period wasnt a small development either. Zoroastrian influence may have contributed to the sharpening of Jewish spiritual dualism, angelology, demonology, and eschatology.

Ancient exorcistic tech is certainly relevant background, but similarity doesnt by itself demonstrate an unbroken Solomonic tradition reaching back to the Bronze Age.

This isn’t splitting hairs. It is being honest with the history instead of backfilling it to fit a narrative. I’m not accusing you of deliberately doing that, man. I’m saying the argument itself skips a lot of development. Nothing in the occult is as clean as we would all like it to be.

 

[AbammonTheGreat]

This feels like flattening history to fit a narrative. A lot of development is missing, a few similarities are being made to do way too much work.

The traditions concerning Solomon may go back to the exilic or earlier biblical period, but that does not establish what you are implying. The later Jewish category of demons, and certainly an organized hierarchy of demons bound under Solomonic authority, wasn't even present in that form yet. Earlier traditions contain harmful, troublesome, or ritually dangerous spirits, but that is not automatically the same category as later demonology.

The Persian period wasnt a small development either. Zoroastrian influence may have contributed to the sharpening of Jewish spiritual dualism, angelology, demonology, and eschatology.

Ancient exorcistic tech is certainly relevant background, but similarity doesnt by itself demonstrate an unbroken Solomonic tradition reaching back to the Bronze Age.

This isn’t splitting hairs. It is being honest with the history instead of backfilling it to fit a narrative. I’m not accusing you of deliberately doing that, man. I’m saying the argument itself skips a lot of development. Nothing in the occult is as clean as we would all like it to be.

I was more asking how do we categorize Solomonic magic? Because the development of the tradition extends all the way back. At what point does binding and commanding demons stop being Solomonic? Is it implicit to the mythology? If thats the case then we can take it to the Iron Age. Or is it the ritual technology itself? And if it is that the procedures themselves are present in Bronze Age mesopotamia. Or is it the names of the demons? Jewish demonology is thought to be a transmission of Persian names they accumulated in Babylon. There's a ton of reframing that has to be done about the "accepted occult narrative" of it being from the Hygromanteia because the procedures of the Hygromanteia themselves can be traced much earlier. I mean where do we draw the line?

 

[solxyz]

I’ve realized this may be the biggest practical challenge that non-Christian practitioners simply cannot avoid.
The entire Solomonic system operates along a chain of divine authority.

Great topic. And one that I have wrestled with myself.

If you’re not, then what you’re facing isn’t a matter of faith, but an engineering problem: the power source for the entire machine is in someone else’s hands.

No. God is not a "power source" for a machine, and what we are facing is not an "engineering" problem. God is the supreme authority atop a not fully harmonious hierarchy. It is important that we remain clear that we are dealing with conscious beings with their own integrity, such as it is - not with parts in a machine. The machine metaphor is deleterious is general and a bad fit for the goetic work.

I’ve seen four ready-made solutions, each with its own real cost.
The first is to recite it verbatim. Recite the formula of the Trinity exactly as it is, even if you don’t believe in it. Some argue that the divine name itself is a technical element, unrelated to what the practitioner believes. I respect this stance, but for those of us who come from a devotional background, it feels like signing someone else’s check. Moreover, my principle is that the practitioner’s own state of mind is part of the ritual; reciting creeds I do not hold—that is a rift I cannot bridge.

I agree both that the divine names have some independent power and also that the practitioner's state of mind is an important part of the ritual. On the whole, I agree that this is a rather poor option, since state of mind is usually going to be more important than the inherent power in an name spoken without conviction.

The second approach is to replace the deity. You swap out the authority slot with your own primary deity. The cost is that you contaminate two lineages simultaneously: your primary deity’s ritual system is forcibly grafted onto the grimoire’s mechanical structure, while the grimoire system is forced to accommodate a deity for whom it was not designed. I strictly enforce the separation of lineages, so this path is a dead end for me.

I'm less concerned with this "contamination" issue. Systems borrow, flex, and change. This is basically my preferred solution. The only thing I would say is that this grafting has to be done intelligently, attentively, creatively, and respectfully. That is to say, it is not simply a matter of swapping out some deity names and plowing ahead. Instead, you have to explore how the two lineages may fit together. How does one's chosen deity feel about the goetic crew? What stance does this deity take toward them? Which of the deity's aspects seem most relevant to this work, or to the various stages of the work? What ritual words and actions best express the tenor of one's deity's authority. How do the demons respond to your chosen god? What ritual actions might help bring these currents into greater alignment? Etc. In short, one has to do ritual and creative work to actually accomplish the grafting.

The third approach is self-proclamation. This is the path where you declare yourself to already be a deity and issue commands from that divine status. The cost lies in the fact that the entire safety framework of this system is built on the premise that you are not at the top. If you place yourself at the top, then between you and whatever manifests, there is nothing but yourself. A previous post on this forum explained this point very thoroughly: the essence of the original method is that you assume yourself to be a god, and beyond the god, the only one truly responsible for your safety is yourself.

This solution also still faces all the problems previously discussed, since one has to be self-proclaiming as some deity or another. Assuming that you are not self-proclaiming as the Christian God, there is still the question of how well the goetic system is grafted to the particular deity mode you are manifesting as. I'm less concerned about the safety issue. If you can effectively assume a godform, that is probably just as effective - if not more effective - than calling on an external deity.

The fourth approach is the intermediary. It involves having your Holy Guardian Angel hold authority on your behalf—the Abramelin path. This is the proper path, but it requires you to first complete a process measured in months and years. Strictly speaking, it postpones the problem rather than resolving it, because the question remains: whose authority stands behind your angel?

Sure.

I personally follow the fifth approach, though stating this may be controversial.
My entire theological stance boils down to a single principle: the highest position is occupied by a being, and that being is unknowable. I am certain that the Most High exists; this is not a strategic assumption, but my genuine belief. However, I refuse to claim to know who He is. He is not the Trinity, nor is He any name I can call upon. When I work, the endpoint of the chain of authority is the Most High—whomever He may be.
This approach has two qualities that I value highly. First, it introduces no doctrine. I don’t need to convert to anything, nor do I need to pretend anything; the reverence is genuine, and only the name remains open-ended. Second, it automatically satisfies the separation of traditions. Because that top slot carries no name, it doesn’t clash with any tradition I hold; my devotional work maintains its own flow, and the Solomonic framework is powered without being burdened by a god with whom to compete. There is also an added benefit: honesty. Every invocation I recite is true at the moment I utter it. In a system where I require every syllable to be traceable to the original text, this is the only configuration in which my theology and my recitation do not conflict with one another.
Incidentally, this is not some modern contrivance. There truly stood an altar in Athens inscribed with “To the Unknown God,” which Paul witnessed with his own eyes in Acts 17, and Pausanias also recorded altars dedicated to the unknown gods. The ancients had long since built temples to the unnamed Supreme Being. Negative theology is an entire tradition—from Pseudo-Dionysius to the medieval work The Cloud of Unknowing—in which God can only be approached through what He is not. A large portion of the invocations of the Highest God in the PGM are, by their very nature, tradition-agnostic. Even at the very core of the grimoire tradition sits a famously unspoken name. At the heart of this tradition lies a name we do not utter.
So I’d like to ask you all: What do you put in your “God slot”? If you work with the Solomonic system and you’re not a Christian—or not just a Christian—what do you use to power this machine, and what price has it exacted from you?

I'm sympathetic to this approach. However, I would raise a few caveats. First, it's not clear how this is actually different than a Christian approach. You mentioned Pseudo-Dionysius, but even a less fully apophatic and completely mainstream theologian such as St. Thomas is clear that the supreme source of all, inherently beyond conceptual grapsing, is simply what the word God and thus all the Christian names of God refers to. Indeed, this is part of the allure and mythos of the tetragrammaton: it is a name that is also an unknown name. The second issue is that even if you believe that your God is beyond all names, you still need God-names to work a ritual. So what names are you using? Any name you choose carries its own energy and lineage and will throw ripples into the ritual. It seems, thus, that you might as well just use the Christian God-names with the understanding that they refer up to your God-beyond-naming.

Utimately, however, your fifth approach doesn't work for me because I don't think that the source of all being is itself a being at all. I cannot call on it to do anything.

I might suggest another approach (one that I have not really explored myself, but hopefully will get to some day) which kind of like solution #2, or maybe a version of #5. David Crowhurst, in his book Stellas Daemonum, puts forward the idea and provides pretty strong argumentation that the Goetic trinity of LBA or LBS is meant to function as the supreme authorizing source for the whole hierarchy. If so, one could use the names of LBA/LBS as the supreme authority (again, understood to refer up to the beyond-naming, if you so choose) without having to worry about "contaminating" with another current.

 

[FireBorn]

I was more asking how do we categorize Solomonic magic? Because the development of the tradition extends all the way back. At what point does binding and commanding demons stop being Solomonic? Is it implicit to the mythology? If thats the case then we can take it to the Iron Age. Or is it the ritual technology itself? And if it is that the procedures themselves are present in Bronze Age mesopotamia. Or is it the names of the demons? Jewish demonology is thought to be a transmission of Persian names they accumulated in Babylon. There's a ton of reframing that has to be done about the "accepted occult narrative" of it being from the Hygromanteia because the procedures of the Hygromanteia themselves can be traced much earlier. I mean where do we draw the line?

That is a great question. I don’t think there is a direct answer that would satisfy everyone. History is messy, and humans are messy.

Personally, I would place what we now recognize as specifically Solomonic much later, because the form, mythology, and ritual structure we associate with it had not fully developed yet. The older practices are clearly part of its ancestry, but I’m not sure that ancestry alone makes them Solomonic. Just my personal opinion.

That raises another question, though: does lineage equal efficacy? I say no. Something being older does not automatically make it more legitimate, powerful, or effective.

Maybe the bottom line is that if a practice works for the practitioner, what can anyone else really say about it? For me personally, lived experience trumps grimoires and books all day. Sometimes our experiences confirm the written canon, and sometimes they directly contradict it.

The history still matters, because we should be honest about where things came from. But history and efficacy are two different questions. Again, messy.