Ars Goetia art
Ars Goetia
Within the grimoire tradition one of the most famous is a book known as ‘The lesser key of Solomon‘ or as it was called in Latin: ‘Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis’ or simply ‘Lemegeton’. This is a book compiled of five books, which as the legends say are derived from the testament of Solomon. This king from the bible used 72 demons to build his famous temple and ‘the lesser key’ gives modern day practitioners the tools to evoke these demons for their own bidding.
One of the books within ‘the lesser key of Solomon’ is the Ars Goetia, which is a list of these 72 demons and their qualities. They come in many forms, shapes and from diverse abilities. Some say they are evil, others (like me) that they are deities worshipped in pre-Christian times and no more evil than the forces of nature. What you see is mostly a way of perspective, how you are looking at things.
The seventy-two demons
Most people call working with the deities in the Ars Goetia ‘demon-magick‘ like it is something bad or evil. It is not. What most people call demons are deities with a free will, like us humans. They can choose to do our bidding or help us, but they can also have alternative motives, not aligning with our own. Does that make them bad or evil? It makes them more human than we like to admit. For them we are the deities, for them we can be equally scary.
Within the Ars Goetia there are description of how the demon may appear to the practitioner. And making depictions of those descriptions is not something new. For me, as a spiritual artist, it is something like a calling. Not to leave a mark in the world of grimoire magick, but as something that was asked to be done. A task gladly taken.
For this I draw each sigil of the demon on paper and meditate upon it. With the words from the Ars Goetia still resonating in my mind, images start to flow. Lines begin to form and the drawing is started. All forms, shapes, colors and images are created intuitively. This is how the deity wants to be depicted by me, like they are guiding my hand in the process. These images can be used in your ceremonial magick practice. Or just for meditations, helping you understand what these demons are.
A little footnote: For this series I am using the Lemegeton edition of Gemma Gary. This edition is closer to the original source material, than the revised version from S.L. MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley. For aesthetic reasons these men changed the sigils, made them more stylized and added circles with the name, as if they could contain the demon.
/ongoing series
