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Dude, you want mystic to be clear and be rationalistic . When has THAT ever happened is all of human history?
Joking aside, your confusion probably comes down to a slight mismatch between classical Catholic philosophy and modern day mainstream Catholic theology. In Catholic thought,there is no contradiction between the Ground of Being and personal, hierarchical order.
Most reduce Ipsum Esse to "Energy, or The Source) so He must be like the sun or an impersonal cosmic battery. But Catholic theology argues that if Ipsum Esse is the source of all reality, it must also be the source of consciousness, love, and mind. So the Ground of Being is supremely personal.
In Christian Neoplatonism, following thinkers like Pseudo-Dionysius and Meister Eckhart, we don't view hierarchy as a legal structure or a set of 'rightful subordinates.' Hierarchy (hier-archia, meaning 'sacred order') is an alignment of clarity as a conduit for divine emanation. Ipsum Esse - the Uncreated, Infinite love overflows into creation, and that love scades through order so that finite beings can receive it without being overwhelmed.
He was a Marianist of the RCC. Relaxed was not in his vocabulary. His version of Catholicism ran on the idea that Catholics are right about everything, everyone else is either stupid or evil, and everything said about doctrine only exists as 700 pages of commentary from 40+ people about half of which is in foreign languages. He was a very influential person in the diocese, my family, and my education. He expected that I would become a priest, along with two others my same age, but much to his disdain I liked girls and the other two boys were killed in their teens. I credit JP2 personally performing a miracle before my own eyes for rescuing me from him and liberating me from Catholicism altogether.
Thank you for that, Faria! Wow, a hard-edged Marianist. Damn. I much prefer the kinder mystic Marian schools. I'm a hard enough mean asshole as it is. The manifestations from the Catholic universe (yes, being ecumenical here) help me be kind and compassionate.
Oh, I meant to include above I really don't like hard theological discussions. But when pushed I will say Catholicism is about The Good, The True, and The Beautiful as three Transcendentals - three different faces of the exact same underlying reality, Ipsum Esse.
But I honestly, I care little for the truth of Catholicism. I would prefer people see its beauty.
In Neoplatonism, Beauty is the radiance of the True and the Good. It requires no intellectual defense or philosophical argument, it simply captivates your heart. (And that's how it really got to me, who was for many years a very mean, hard sorcerer in a mean land. Magic is still a gun. ) Through the Marian manifestations of Beauty, sweetness and Love, but also liturgy, sacred art, symbolism, and mystical practice Beauty becomes the primary vehicle of Reditus, the soul's return to God. (Who, I am ecumenical enough to say, goes by many names.)
Ok, enough of that. I know all this churchy-sounding talk is no fun. Bring on the demons!
The debate is in full swing: Here at the Eastern Library, we have a comprehensive view of things that states that, in the beginning, God created the angels after the heavens, then created the jinn—who are creatures of fire. It is said that the father of the jinn, like Adam, the father of all humanity, was created from poisonous fire, and that he first begot Shakiya and Bakhiya—a man and a woman—who in turn begot Azil.
A celestial war broke out because the jinn deviated from God’s covenants, and they were banished from the physical world to a parallel realm
—where they remain present in the physical world but are also connected to the unseen realm. Then humanity was created, and Azil was in the seventh heaven, worshiping God alongside the angels. God commanded everyone to prostrate themselves before Adam as His successor in the universe, but Azil immediately refused, claiming that his origin was superior to that of humans, for he was created from fire while humans were created from clay. Then Azil fell alone to Earth, and there he possessed the knowledge, power, and secrets of magic. He then went to his family
—his sons Shakhia and Bakhia—and taught them magic; thus, he became Satan, the first and greatest enemy of humanity. Thus, magic predates humanity and their very existence, for it is inseparable from the universe itself; it is a power and a law practiced only by humans and devils.
Here, God intervened once more during the time of Solomon, for according to the Islamic narrative, Solomon was not a sorcerer; however, in one of the manuscripts, he is referred to as “Al-Dawair,” a work attributed to more than one person that depicts the names of the angels and the planets, their helpers, and their respective divisions. The important point is that Eastern tradition holds that Harut and Marut descended from heaven as angels and taught humans “high magic”—that is, the magic of the angels and the nominal elements. Thus, during the time of Solomon, humanity came to understand high magic more clearly, since it came from the angels of magic themselves. This is why Eastern society views..
According to Islamic tradition, Solomon was not a sorcerer but a prophet. He called upon God alone and did not need any other power or actions, for he was no ordinary prophet—he was a prophet who asked God to grant him the keys to the kingdom, which meant that he could command the winds to rise, come, and go according to his will. He did not need a staff or a knife; rather, he would call upon God, and God would answer him. and would immediately comply…
So where did those manuscripts come from that claim Solomon gathered all the kings of the jinn and the devils, seated them, and commanded them to reveal the magic they possessed? He ordered his scribes to record it all in full—every scroll, seal, inscription, and talisman—in collections of books. He took a solemn oath from each group, sealed with his name, that they would depart and leave humanity alone, and that the magic would be nullified simply by reciting or writing those oaths, whose power and effectiveness God Himself guarantees through His names and attributes...
After Solomon’s death, those books appeared, and Satan inspired his friends and allies, telling them that this was the secret Solomon had hidden—and through which he had possessed that power… And thus, the leading Jewish religious scholars wrote down the magic and mixed it with narratives based on whatever book fell into the hands of a group from the Twelve Tribes… Let us consider the matter: whether they were demons, jinn, or whatever you or we call them in the East and West
—they are nothing but angels in heaven or on earth, jinn, or demons. And of course, everyone realizes that there are demons or spirits that claimed divinity; at least their names are accurate, for they are engraved on temples, obelisks, surviving ruins, amulets, and so on. But if we take an impartial view, it is either a 12-part cycle—corresponding to the zodiac signs
—or a 7-part cycle, corresponding to the days of the week or the planets. And the 24-part cycle equals the day, or the 28-part cycle of the lunar mansions, or 72—which is the product of 12 × 6. Also, the quintiles are the astronomical degrees that converge at 72. This is an open-ended question
—fill in those patterns with whatever you like and tell me: is there anything beyond them?
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.
Recently I have been reading Taking Appearances Seriously by Henri Bortoft, in which he takes aim at the Platonic notion that the really real, the truth of a being or situation, is some unexperienced "eternal pattern" of this sort. To illustrate the point, he takes the example of a Hamlet. The play only finds its full being through being performed. When you see Hamlet performed, you are in fact seeing Hamlet, not some shadowy derivative of Hamlet. Indeed, the unperformed Hamlet - the ink on the page or the personal reading of the text - is the shadowy lesser being of Hamlet.
And yet clearly there are many different performances of Hamlet, varying in any number of ways. This shows us that Hamlet has what he calls multiplicity-in-unity or a "dynamic unity of self-difference" (which, he suggests, is a feature of all living things and all meaning). He then turns to texts more generally, in discussing the relationship between meaning and the words. The key point is that neither words nor some pre-existing meaning can be taken as primary. What is expressed is not fully determinate before being put into words, and yet it is not that words themselves constitute the thought, such that thoughts are "mere words."
Texts, however, are dependent on context for their meaning. Instead of being self-contained, they must always be open to being understood differently. This multiplicity of meaning is a feature of text. There is not a one true meaning that hides back in some Platonic heaven.
I could go on, but I hope the relevance to the question of spirits is clear: while there are indeed many cultural interpretations of a given spirit-pattern, (a) there is no one final or true form of that spirit and (b) the truth and fullness of that spirit is not found in some Platonic heaven, but in the numerous ways that spirit actually comes into presence. The various weapons that different cultures put in Michael's hands were not just some kind of outer clothing, but a part of Michael's way of being in the world.
I like the Bortoft / Performance Metaphor premise. Nifty! I will add here a spirit isn't a static Platonic blueprint floating in the Pluroma. We all participate in Being itself, but they exist as a 'dynamic unity' that requires participation and expression to be realized. So do we, but that is another topic.
Not to be a Verum thumper, but it tells us "that spirits who will come according to the character and temperament of the one who wishes to invoke them." I have found this to be quite true, and in the dymanic of the Sublunar world, with us as magicans , this very much in play (a pun, for later). While I have my own suspicions about the underlying metaphysics of how that exactly works, at the end of the day I'm less concerned with abstract metaphysical 'Truth' than I am with operative truth for evocation work.
OK, in practice an goetic evocation works by setting a stage, picking up the costume, setting out the furniture, using a liturgy to establish a ritual syntax, and giving the spirit a living, imaginal medium through which to present itself. The spirit (thought being) becomes embodied in the performance of the rite, relative and shaped by what Verum calls our "character" - but used to be called "soul" Without the operator and the ritual container the spirit remains as unexpressed potential and consciousness, a rebel without a body. With us it becomes an active, living force in the world, well, our human-centric reality we all create together through human creativity and creative reason. (See Bernardo Kastrup's Idealism for more, but he need modulating with the Daimonic.)
Anyway, this actually parallels traditional Catholic sacramental theology. Grace and Presence are not abstractions, but they require visible signs, specific matter (materia), and formal spoken liturgy (forma) to become active in space and time. Just as Christ isn't called to as an abstract intellectual concept but becomes truly (in formal Catholic thinking) present through the physical, liturgical act of the Mass, a spirit (or thought-being) becomes embodied in the performance of the rite.
The classical Sublunar world is the Daimonic Reality (per Patrick Harpur - which need some updating to "World Soul" or "The Imaginal"). The Daimonic is the intermediate zone where meaning comes into presence. It’s the realm of Soul - which thrives on multiplicity, emotion, image, and embodiment - rather than the pure, isolated unity of abstract Spirit. Platonic Ideas need to be grounded in this Daimonic, Imaginal reality to have any real blood in their veins, fangs, and nails on their claws.
Quite side note, I do have one caveat with abandoning classic Platonism - which ties back , per Verum and the pooled experinces of magicans comparinng our ritual notes online - the daimons mirror the magican to some degree. So we have to be careful not to swing to the opposite extreme into an an unthinking, bestial Vitalism. I have been there. Throwing out abstract forms shouldn't mean surrendering to raw, uncritical passions or the chaotic flux of the Sublunar world.
The only reason so many people attack the grimoires is becasue of the Christian language they use, but whether you look at Catholic mysticism, Buddhist Kaula traditions, or Hermeticism, every deep tradition realizes that navigating the Daimonic Sublunar realm requires discernment, and self-coherence (Logos, imho ) along with the immersion to swim safely in it. The goal isn't to erase the patterns, or avoid the Daimionic which is impossible, but to realize that the patterns and its performance are co-created - and then write better plays.
Back to Bortoft, whom I have not read. We don't need to throw away the blueprint of Hamlet. In the Daimonic level we can see the blueprint comes alive when actors step onto the stage. The blueprint of Hamlet is not dead or meaningless. It acts as an active absence, as a real, organizing coherence that uses the physical stage of Daimonic reality to present itself. An actor can perform Hamlet badly, but they cannot perform Hamlet as Macbeth. The blueprint constrains and guides the performance, even as the performance gives the blueprint life.
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.
his is the most useful post in the thread for what I'm actually building, thank you. Two things you said do real work for me: the Trithemius Antipalus Maleficiorum (1508) citation, which gives the Liber Officiorum Spirituum a hard terminus ante quem independent of any surviving copy, and the Campbell / JSK Pandaemonium side-by-side catalogs, which are exactly the "cite, don't paraphrase" material I want. Both ordered.
I can actually speak to the LOS/Esperitz seam from the manuscripts now rather than from the secondary literature, because I've been making my own transcriptions of both — the Livre des Esperitz from Trinity College Cambridge O.8.29 (ff. 179r–182v) and the Liber Officiorum Spirituum from Folger V.b.26 (pp. 73–84, the mostly-English copy). Reading them side by side, Boudet's "braided river" is very visible, and it lines up with your "sidelining started in the LOS" almost exactly:
Both open on the four cardinal kings — Oriens/East, Paymon/West, Amaymon/South, Egyn/North — as the load-bearing structure.
The three chiefs are present in both but already demoted. In the Livre they're literally spirits 1–3 (Lucifer, Bezlebut, Satan) standing before the four kings, with Lucifer also up in the header. In the Folger LOS they survive only as a header aside — "there be 3 devills that [are] in the arte of Nigromancy: viz Lucipher, Bellzebub, Satan" — and then the text just… moves on to the kings and the office-list. So you can watch the flattening happen between the two witnesses, which is a nicer piece of evidence for your point than either text alone.
The shared-but-mangled cast is right there: Beal / Baall, Agarat / Acharos, Barbas / Barbates (the Folger one keeps the four trumpets and the birdsong-and-barking-dogs office that becomes Goetic Barbatos), Forras / Partas, Oze / Ose, Asmoday, Berith, Zagan… next to a chunk that only shows up on one side. Braided river, not a clean pipe — agreed.
One wrinkle I'd flag, same caution you raised about the incantation bowls: the datable LOS witnesses are 16th-century (Folger is c. 1577–83), even though Trithemius proves the text is pre-1508 and the material older still. So I'd draw it as "older common stock, witnesses clustering late" rather than a dated 1400 → 1450 → 1577 line — which only strengthens the two-streams picture rather than fighting it.
On the transmission point specifically: you're right that Weyer names the Liber Officiorum Spirituum, not the Livre des Esperitz, as his source — the detail most summaries get backwards. (And the small date thing, since it matters for the chain: the spirit-list first appears in the 1577 De praestigiis, not the 1563 first edition.)
I've kept all of this as plain transcription + translation with the documented / reconstructed / gnosis layers marked, licensed CC-BY, precisely so a primary reading can be checked against Campbell and JSK instead of taken on my say-so. If a folio-by-folio comparison of the two witnesses would be useful to anyone here, I'm glad to share what I've got — corrections very welcome, since you and MorganBlack have worked this far harder than I've read it.
(And yes — busted on the same thing I told Faria: I use an assistant for the transcription grunt-work and the first-pass reads. The judgment about what's actually on the page, and what to throw out, is the part I don't delegate.)
Nice, kvzlx. All respect to be you guys doing hard work to track down the historical threads.
If you're researching the Four Demon Kings you might like Mat Hadfied's recent work. He's a 'Verum guy' doing excellent work uncovering some lost threads of our shared tradition.
To be clear, I had none of this wonderful, but extra information when I worked my own early 'starter Verum' in the 1990s, piecing it together from scraps like in Idries Shah's potboiler, The Secret Lore of Magic.
An Exposition upon The Sphere of the Cosmos
"Written in the early fourteenth century and referencing many works which are now lost to history, the Commentary provides us with another missing piece in the early development of this tradition. Whilst challenging in its scope, this text is significant, containing important keys such as one of the first known attributions of the four kings of the directions, Oriens, Amaymon, Paymon, and Egyn, to the cardinal signs of the zodiac, as well as the first known appearance of the mysterious spirit Floron and his mirror."
his is the most useful post in the thread for what I'm actually building, thank you. Two things you said do real work for me: the Trithemius Antipalus Maleficiorum (1508) citation, which gives the Liber Officiorum Spirituum a hard terminus ante quem independent of any surviving copy, and the Campbell / JSK Pandaemonium side-by-side catalogs, which are exactly the "cite, don't paraphrase" material I want. Both ordered.
I can actually speak to the LOS/Esperitz seam from the manuscripts now rather than from the secondary literature, because I've been making my own transcriptions of both — the Livre des Esperitz from Trinity College Cambridge O.8.29 (ff. 179r–182v) and the Liber Officiorum Spirituum from Folger V.b.26 (pp. 73–84, the mostly-English copy). Reading them side by side, Boudet's "braided river" is very visible, and it lines up with your "sidelining started in the LOS" almost exactly:
Both open on the four cardinal kings — Oriens/East, Paymon/West, Amaymon/South, Egyn/North — as the load-bearing structure.
The three chiefs are present in both but already demoted. In the Livre they're literally spirits 1–3 (Lucifer, Bezlebut, Satan) standing before the four kings, with Lucifer also up in the header. In the Folger LOS they survive only as a header aside — "there be 3 devills that [are] in the arte of Nigromancy: viz Lucipher, Bellzebub, Satan" — and then the text just… moves on to the kings and the office-list. So you can watch the flattening happen between the two witnesses, which is a nicer piece of evidence for your point than either text alone.
The shared-but-mangled cast is right there: Beal / Baall, Agarat / Acharos, Barbas / Barbates (the Folger one keeps the four trumpets and the birdsong-and-barking-dogs office that becomes Goetic Barbatos), Forras / Partas, Oze / Ose, Asmoday, Berith, Zagan… next to a chunk that only shows up on one side. Braided river, not a clean pipe — agreed.
One wrinkle I'd flag, same caution you raised about the incantation bowls: the datable LOS witnesses are 16th-century (Folger is c. 1577–83), even though Trithemius proves the text is pre-1508 and the material older still. So I'd draw it as "older common stock, witnesses clustering late" rather than a dated 1400 → 1450 → 1577 line — which only strengthens the two-streams picture rather than fighting it.
On the transmission point specifically: you're right that Weyer names the Liber Officiorum Spirituum, not the Livre des Esperitz, as his source — the detail most summaries get backwards. (And the small date thing, since it matters for the chain: the spirit-list first appears in the 1577 De praestigiis, not the 1563 first edition.)
I've kept all of this as plain transcription + translation with the documented / reconstructed / gnosis layers marked, licensed CC-BY, precisely so a primary reading can be checked against Campbell and JSK instead of taken on my say-so. If a folio-by-folio comparison of the two witnesses would be useful to anyone here, I'm glad to share what I've got — corrections very welcome, since you and MorganBlack have worked this far harder than I've read it.
(And yes — busted on the same thing I told Faria: I use an assistant for the transcription grunt-work and the first-pass reads. The judgment about what's actually on the page, and what to throw out, is the part I don't delegate.)
Pandaemonium also contains an English translation of Livre des Esperitz, something I wish I had known before making my own translation around the same time the book came out lol. You said you ordered a copy, but fyi there should be a link to a pdf here on the forum. As for Of The Arte Goetia, a digital version doesn't exist at this time. Very relevant book for this discussion though, the side-by-side printing is very useful (each spirit entry basically fills 2 pages of text.)
The mention of incantation bowls is just wild speculation on my part, not really relevant to this. But regardless of any direct link it undoubtetly sits somewhere along the path of this tradition's development.
Many other posts on this thread may not be on the exact topic of the textual sources or their development, and instead are talking about religious, philosophical, and mystical interpretations of the world which give rise to a system like this and allow it to function. It's in some of these conversations that the real benefit of a forum like this lies, because these are the interpretations and worldviews of the actual people putting these systems to use. No amount of historical source material can give you that insight.
Nice, kvzlx. All respect to be you guys doing hard work to track down the historical threads.
If you're researching the Four Demon Kings you might like Mat Hadfied's recent work. He's a 'Verum guy' doing excellent work uncovering some lost threads of our shared tradition.
To be clear, I had none of this wonderful, but extra information when I worked my own early 'starter Verum' in the 1990s, piecing it together from scraps like in Idries Shah's potboiler, The Secret Lore of Magic.
"Written in the early fourteenth century and referencing many works which are now lost to history, the Commentary provides us with another missing piece in the early development of this tradition. Whilst challenging in its scope, this text is significant, containing important keys such as one of the first known attributions of the four kings of the directions, Oriens, Amaymon, Paymon, and Egyn, to the cardinal signs of the zodiac, as well as the first known appearance of the mysterious spirit Floron and his mirror."
Back when I first attempted this practice I was working from an incomplete copy of Mather's Goetia. Sometimes, all of this extra information can get in the way and hold one back from practice. It certainly isn't entirely necessary to contact the spirits and work some magic. We're all just here for the love of the game.
Not to be a Verum thumper, but it tells us "that spirits who will come according to the character and temperament of the one who wishes to invoke them." I have found this to be quite true, and in the dymanic of the Sublunar world, with us as magicans , this very much in play (a pun, for later). While I have my own suspicions about the underlying metaphysics of how that exactly works, at the end of the day I'm less concerned with abstract metaphysical 'Truth' than I am with operative truth for evocation work.
I agree with you almost completely in your description of the dynamics of operative evocation work, but the reason I'm harping on this subject, the reason I think this philosophical point (which we can call, roughly, Platonism vs Phenomenology) is in fact rather important, is that it guides our understanding of what we are aiming at in our magical and spiritual work. Under the Platonic view, the aim is generally some kind of anagoge in which we find our truth above and outside the dynamic realm in which life occurs. Under the Phenomenological view, truth is found right here, in the continual coming-into-presence of the life process, and our aim is to be true to that process (which requires nuanced understanding of and attunement to that process), participating by bringing forth greater fullness of life for ourselves and others.
Certainly Christianity knows something about this, as the Trinity does serve as a decent model of dynamism within the divine life, and especially in the notion of the world to come, in which our greatest fulfillment is found in a rectified embodied life rather than in 'heaven,' but the matter is quite confused by the platonic overlay and much of the spiritual technology does end up orienting toward a hierarchical eternalism.
Quite side note, I do have one caveat with abandoning classic Platonism - which ties back , per Verum and the pooled experinces of magicans comparinng our ritual notes online - the daimons mirror the magican to some degree. So we have to be careful not to swing to the opposite extreme into an an unthinking, bestial Vitalism. I have been there. Throwing out abstract forms shouldn't mean surrendering to raw, uncritical passions or the chaotic flux of the Sublunar world.
The only reason so many people attack the grimoires is becasue of the Christian language they use, but whether you look at Catholic mysticism, Buddhist Kaula traditions, or Hermeticism, every deep tradition realizes that navigating the Daimonic Sublunar realm requires discernment, and self-coherence (Logos, imho ) along with the immersion to swim safely in it. The goal isn't to erase the patterns, or avoid the Daimionic which is impossible, but to realize that the patterns and its performance are co-created - and then write better plays.
A good point. Certainly one needs discernment. It is easy to get swept away by alluring, intoxicating, dramatic, or otherwise compelling energies that are ultimately rather superficial, and thus to lose one's integrity and to be drawn away from bringing forth with wholeness and from a place of depth. Likewise it is certainly true that while the meaning of a text remains incomplete, the text doesn't mean anything you want it to. When reading, we should be seeking a true reading of a text, but we do that by bringing its meaning forth into presence, not by using our minds to find some pre-manifest meaning. This is a model for working with ourselves and our personal integrity. We have a depth, and we want to be centered in and moving from that depth as much as possible, but that depth is a creativity and being true to it is a creative process.
