Arbatel de Magia Veterum first appeared in print at Basel in 1575, in Latin, with no author named on its title page. That anonymity has never been resolved. The book surfaced from the same Swiss printing culture that was producing editions of Paracelsus and the surviving works of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and its Latin has the careful, slightly defensive tone of a writer distancing his subject from the demonic conjuration manuals then circulating in manuscript. Modern critical work, chiefly Joseph H. Peterson's edition and translation, has not settled the authorship question; it has mainly corrected the text itself, since the version most English readers encountered for three centuries came through one intermediary.
That intermediary was Robert Turner, who translated the Arbatel into English in 1655 and bound it together with a work he presented as Henry Cornelius Agrippa's Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, a text modern scholarship considers pseudonymous. The pairing was influential rather than accurate: generations of readers met the Arbatel as an appendix to a book it had no real connection to, and Turner's translation itself introduced errors that persisted until Peterson's edition returned to the Latin original.
The book's structure signals ambition beyond what survives. Its aphorisms are grouped in sevens, and the whole was evidently planned as seven such books of seven sevens, an arithmetic architecture typical of Renaissance number symbolism. Only the first book, titled the Isagoge, or introduction, was completed or has come down to us. Whether the rest were written and lost, or never written at all, is unknown. What survives is nonetheless a complete and self-contained system: instructions for approaching magic as licit natural philosophy, and the doctrine of the seven Olympic Spirits that occupies the second half of this record.