I already dealt with one aspect of Paul Summers Young’s second edition of the Ars Goetia — his connection of Daniel Defoe with Lovecraft’s Alhazred. How does the rest measure up?
To put this into some context, the Lemegeton is a collection of magical texts from the seventeenth century, incorporating and transforming previous writings into a single work with five sections. The first section, the Goetia, became famous when Aleister Crowley took MacGregor Mathers’ transcription of the book and published it himself in 1904. As such, it is one of the most widely known grimoires within the occult community. The Black Letter Press intends to release each of the five sections separately, with this being the first.
First, it’s fair to say that the book is gorgeous, with a striking cover, nice binding and a lovely bookmark ribbon. (The ribbon’s end did start to fray shortly after arrival. This happens a lot when I order a book with a ribbon, so this should be considered more of a general comment and helpful advice to specialty publishers.) It’s nothing less than what we’d expect from Black Letter.
What about the text itself? Young presents are a number of texts of and related to the Goetia, beginning with Reginald Scot’s spirit list from The Discouerie of Witchcraft. Also present are the corresponding sections of the early eighteenth-century text from Harley 6483 copied by Peter Smart and attributed to Doctor Rudd, that of the nineteenth-century Welsh service magician John Harries (see here), nineteenth-century English material from Henry Dawson Lea and Frederick Hockley (Wellcome 3203, and perhaps others), and the infamous Crowley/Mathers edition. In addition, Young includes material from other authors of the time to contextualize the magical material. To my knowledge, the Harries and Lea material has not been published before, so it’s likely even knowledgeable readers haven’t seen all of it.
(I tossed in those references above for a reason. We’ll get back to it.)
Given that different manuscripts sometimes have additional material or omissions, some sections of Young’s book contain more elements than others. The same is also true of the spirit list, although the differences among the various entries for the same spirit are often subtle.
(EDIT: I should add that the book also includes redrawn versions of the spirit seals from each manuscript tradition, which I know many readers will appreciate.)
Yet there are some concerns arising from the editorial choices. A minor one is the lack of context or footnotes for some of the sections. If there’s a passage that might need explication, this book will not provide it, and you’ll have to seek it elsewhere.
Also, some context is missing from the magical sources. Although Young mentions Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia daemonum, the source of Scot’s spirit list, he doesn’t quote from it. I’m not actually expecting him to insert the text and undercut his own book (my review) — I’m just surprised he doesn’t promote it more. Also, there’s little discussion of the pre-Weyer spirit lists in Oberon and other sources. If he had simply mentioned them and that he wouldn’t cover them, that would be sufficient, as keeping a project like this under control is understandable.
There’s an even more critical gap, however. The book omits the first copies we have of the Goetia itself — Joe Peterson provides a list — from the seventeenth century. So we have the precursors, and the versions that came after — but the original manuscripts of the Goetia proper aren’t here.
To be fair, I’m not sure how much this matters for the spirit list — that’s a matter of close comparison that would be quite a project. It does become relevant, however, in the sections thereafter, in which Young provides quotes on the brazen vessel, the seal of Solomon, and the conjuration from later copyists and editors. These are elements found in the seventeenth-century tradition, but as Young quotes from the later sources without context, some readers might get the impression that these are innovations on the part of Sibly, Harries, Mathers, and others.
Also, there are certainly omissions from what appears in the family of texts. Notably, we lack the ring, pentagon, and hexagonal figures attributed to Solomon in the other texts. More puzzling, despite the book’s section of commentary “Of Magical Circles,” is the exclusion of any magical circle from the Goetia itself.
Thus, it seems that this book is less an edition of the Goetia itself, and more of a book describing what parts of the text Young wants to discuss. To be fair, if you read the marketing description a bit, it does suggest this isn’t a proper edition per se, but it’s good to emphasize this before purchasing. Young himself, to his credit, is explicit about this (p. 33):
This can only be an illustrative introduction to a blossoming field. If it inspires exploration of the extensive primary sources, it will have done its work.
At the same time, he also says (p. 32):
The final volume of this series is going to include a decent bibliography of primary and modern secondary sources. But not today.
Look, folks — you can do one of these two things, but not both. I’d be willing to cut Young some slack if he had bothered to give manuscript references for his material, but he doesn’t even do that. That’s why I had that monster paragraph above with all the references and links. Don’t state a goal for your book and then make me have to do the work to achieve it.
Thus, the question as to whether you should get this book is fairly simple. If you don’t have Joe Peterson’s edition from Weiser, which has all five books of the Lemegeton with a bibliography and commentary, you should know it’s about the same price as Young’s edition. (If you want to get a taste, or to see what Joe has found out since, check out Joe’s online edition.)
That is not to say Young’s version does not have merit, as some of the versions of the text and peripheral material is of some interest. At the same time, it is more of his own conception of his priorities regarding the text than a proper edition of the Goetia, so you should be aware of that going in.
