Following the recent work on the Greek text of the Stele of Jeu for Liber Samekh, the corrected transcription has now been incorporated into the Celephaïs Press edition of the Mathers-Crowley Goëtia, and a bunch of other upgrades to the editorial endnotes and general formatting made.
For various reasons I had to change the blackletter face used for the Preliminary Invocation and Enochian conjurations, as all accented letters in the font I previously used (Jeff Lee's JSL Blackletter) failed to render in the PDFs generated by the Word plugin I'm using, rendering large parts of those texts actually unreadable. The replacement is not quite as good a match for the face used in the print edition.
On re-checking, it turns out that (a) the Pseudomonarchia Dæmonum was printed in 1577, first appearing in the fifth edition of Wier's De Præstigiis Dæmonum, and (b) the MS. of the catalogue of spirits printed by Scot in the Discoverie of Witchcraft, by "T.R." (who cannot have been Captain Thomas Rudd, he was born the year the first edition of the Discoverie was published) is said to have been dated 1570; therefore, either (a) the translation was made from an earlier MS. copy of the Liber Officiorum Spirituum and not Wier's publication, or (b) the MS. was back-dated (the reference to the Pseudomonarchia in the margin of lib. xv. cap. 1 of the Discoverie could simply have been Scot noting the similarity; Scot reportedly drew on De Præstigiis Dæmonum et Incantionibus ac Veneficiis for the Discoverie). It is unclear just how far back this MS. tradition goes (a 1508 work of Trithemius includes a list of works on magic that were circulating in MS. at the time, citing De Officiis Spirituum attributed to Solomon ("excerable and entirely diabolic") and also a Liber Officiorum which divides up demons into four Imperatores and multiple Kings, Dukes, Marquises and Counts under them); however, the Ars Goëtia in its familiar form remains clearly (a) composite, (b) of English origin and (c) no older than the latter half of the seventeenth century.
EDIT: It's not clear how and when Scot acquired the "T.R." MS., but given Wier openly admitted to omitting portions of the text of Liber Officiorum in the Pseudomonarchia in order to render the whole thing unusable, and was probably responsible for interjections about various spirits being deceived in their hopes to return to their pre-Fall place and rank, and given that the only major variation between the Wier and Scot versions of the text (barring garblings due to mis-translation) is the omission in the latter of one spirit,[1] the "back-dated MS." explanation looks more likely (either that, or the Pseudomonarchia was printed independently of De præstigiis prior to the fifth edition of the latter work).
Have some links to copies of De præstigiis dæmonum et incantionibus ac veneficiis:
- 1563 first edition at archive.org
- 1564 second edition at Google Books.
- 1566 third edition at archive.org
- 1568 fourth edition at Google Books (not indicated as "fourth" on title page but adds a sixth "book" to the 1566 edition).
- 1577 fifth edition at Google Books.
- 1583 sixth edition at Google Books.
It will be observed that the Pseudomonarchia only appeared in the 1577 and later editions.
Another possibility is that the "T.R." manuscript of the Liber Officiorum is a phantom, that the translation in the Discoverie was commissioned by Scot from Wier's printing (Joseph Peterson suggests the translator was Abraham Fleming, who translated other texts from the Latin for Scot) and that the marginal note at the end of Book XV ch. 2 (p. 393, ed. 1584) describing the "T.R." MS. was placed there in error (or as a misdirection) and belonged with one or more of the other magical texts printed by Scot in Book XV.
[1] A significantly divergent version of the Offices of the Spirits, roughly contemporary with the Wier and Scot publications, including information on the four Kings of the quarters (there called Oriens, Paimon, Amaimon & Egyn) appears in an English magical miscellany (ca. 1580) in MS. (Folger Shakespeare Library, Folger MS. V.b. 26, prosaically catalogued as "Book of Magic, with Instructions for Invoking Spirits, &c." -- the overall title, if it ever had one, is lost along with the first 14 pages -- and published as a typeset with translations of Latin passages as The Book of Oberon, ed. Daniel Harms, James Clark, Joseph Peterson; Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2015). High-quality images of the MS. can be found online at the Folger's website; Peterson's transcription of the text (PDF link) is on his Esoteric Archives site.
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