Vine

The single most consequential thing ever done with the Goetia was to pair it, one for one, with the angels of the Shem ha-Mephorash. The arrangement is associated with Thomas Rudd, whose manuscripts set out the scheme, and it is the reason the two lists are today almost impossible to discuss separately.

The logic is straightforward. Both lists number seventy-two. The Shem list had long been distributed around the zodiac, five degrees to a name, seventy-two names to the full circle of three hundred and sixty. Placing the spirits on the same grid gives every degree of the ecliptic an angel and a demon, and the relation between them is stated as constraint: the angel of a given degree holds the spirit of that degree in check, and is invoked to bind it.

Two observations follow, and both cut against how the pairing is usually presented.

The first is that the pairing is not a discovery of a hidden correspondence. It is a construction, made possible only because the demon list had already been brought up to seventy-two. Had the Lemegeton kept Weyer's sixty-nine, no such scheme could exist.

The second is that the arrangement is not in the Lemegeton itself. The Goetia's manuscripts give the seventy-two spirits without angels. Rudd's material is a separate body of work, transmitted in its own manuscripts, and modern editions that print the angel alongside the spirit are combining two seventeenth-century sources rather than reproducing one.

The pairing is genuinely interesting and genuinely old. It is also an editorial act, and it should be labelled as one.

Among Vine's offices is the discovery of witches. It is a small line, and it sits in the middle of the bloodiest period of European witch prosecution, which makes it one of the more uncomfortable sentences in the book.

The chronology is not incidental. Weyer compiled the ancestor of this catalogue in the 1570s, at the height of the persecutions, and he compiled it in order to argue against them. Reginald Scot, whose English translation of Weyer is the demonstrated source of the Goetia's text, wrote The Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584 for the same purpose: to show that the accused were deluded, ill or defrauded, and that the confessions were worthless. James VI of Scotland is reported to have ordered Scot's book burned.

So the Goetia's catalogue descends, by a traceable line, from two consecutive attempts to stop people being executed for witchcraft. And in the course of that descent it acquired an entry advertising a spirit who will identify witches.

Nothing about that is a paradox in the period's own terms. Learned ritual magic and popular witchcraft were understood as different things by the people who practised the first, and cunning folk who claimed to detect witches were a fixture of English village life and appear constantly in the court records. The compiler was not being ironic.

But it is a clean illustration of what happened to Weyer's work. A sceptic's exhibit, printed to be disbelieved, was excerpted into a working catalogue and put to exactly the use its author had written against. Whatever else the Lemegeton is, on this point it is a monument to a book being read backwards.