The Arbatel's central teaching is that magic is a science given by God to be used for good, and that its unlawful use, seeking harm through demonic pacts, is a separate and forbidden art the book explicitly declines to teach. Framed that way, it presents a cosmology in which history itself is administered: the book divides time into ages of 490 years, each ruled in turn by one of seven Olympic Spirits, planetary governors who sit above the ordinary spirits of Western ceremonial magic rather than beside them.
The seven are Aratron of Saturn, Bethor of Jupiter, Phaleg of Mars, Och of the Sun, Hagith of Venus, Ophiel of Mercury, and Phul of the Moon, each already recorded in this atlas with the powers and subordinate spirits the Arbatel assigns to it. The text gives each one a domain of influence reaching from alchemy and longevity to political fortune, and instructions for the days and dispositions under which a practitioner might seek its favor. Unlike the Solomonic grimoires copied in manuscript at the same period, the Arbatel offers no circle of protection or coercive conjuration; its tone is petitionary, consistent with its claim to teach a benign, divinely sanctioned art.
That framing carried the book into the modern occult revival. Ceremonial magicians working from Turner's translation, and later from corrected editions, treated the Olympic Spirits as a planetary pantheon distinct from the Goetic entities of the Lemegeton, and the system remains current in planetary magic because the Arbatel presents it as complete in itself: seven spirits, seven planets, seven ages, with nothing left dangling from the books apparently never finished.