PANDEMONIUM: A Decade of Discordant Concordance

In 2016 Jake Stratton-Kent delivered unto us a book devoted to the exploration of diverse Spirit catalogues, a bird’s eye view analysis of the grimoire corpus which went far beyond any prior examination by any prior author. This book, Pandemonium,[1] is about far more than any one individual forbidden text, but instead takes on the mysteries which reside throughout the genre. It explores themes and patterns that emerge when we take a step back and appraise the entire edifice, the entire monolith that is the grimoire tradition, and while it is not the final answer, it certainly remains, even ten years later, the first real question.

Jake’s vision in this text was one of attempting to pull on the infinite jumble of threads and cords which are woven throughout the tapestry of history found in the Names, in the Offices, and in the patterns of consistencies which conglomerate throughout the various streams of the grimoires. His goal was never one of attempting to recreate something like an Ur Text, but instead Jake began an exploration of the most important aspect of our tradition, the characters, the demons which populate the pages of the catalogues, the spirits of these auxiliary manuals and little blue secrets. This was no small feat, and Jake was extremely successful in beginning this exploration, highlighting many areas of study such as the corruption found within Ars Goetia, the mystery of the number eighteen, the nature of the demonic Trinity, the importance of the interior and exterior Four Kings, the Ghosts of Spirits, and the conspicuous absence of the demon Pruslas.

Jake proposed that we stop considering each individual grimoire as a specific, unique grand expression of the Cosmos or the Mind as many nineteenth century magicians and authors may have rather ignorantly assumed, but instead that each grimoire is but a snapshot of Medieval sorcerers attempting to describe a vast spiritual ecosystem which extends far beyond anything ever captured within any single document. Jake goes so far as to express that the grimoires themselves, while being important manuscripts, should not be the entire focus of our attention, but instead our gaze should be directed towards the multitude of characters that populate them, and that our focus should fall upon these individuals, these demons, if we are to attempt to understand something of what we have tentatively begun to call a tradition. What’s more, he brings the reader’s attention to the Spirit’s overall capacity for contradiction, something I think many people overlook in their search for concrete attributions and correspondences.

The opening chapters of Pandemonium remain striking and powerful even today, and I argue that this one book alone will give anyone interested in studying or practicing the sorceries of the grimoires a sufficiently wide-angled purview. After treating the upper layers of the Infernal hierarchies of Spirits and the various temporal Intelligences, Jake makes a rather profound argument, one he repeated throughout his many online interviews, stating that all Spirits the sorcerer could possibly ever interact with are by nature Sublunar, going so far as to propose an entire Nocturnal Cosmology of seven Spheres which begins with the Sphere of the Moon, followed by the four Directions of the aerial realm, with the final two going to the Spirits ‘upon the Earth and under the Earth’, the former being distinct from Elemental Earth, and the latter being the sphere of the Sun in the Underworld. Jake was interested in the core concepts, not in the centuries of philosophy that had accreted over it. He emphasised here that we are not beholden to the rationalisations of the past, but that we can, with our far wider understanding, attempt to recontextualise – a powerful message that remains with me to this day. I simply cannot adequately express how deeply transformative this paragraph of text has been on my personal expression and exploration of magic, and I can’t underscore enough how it has enabled me to frame medieval thought and Natural Philosophy from a more animistic, a more goetic perspective.

Taking a handful of grimoires that we had available to us prior to 2016 such as The Testament of Solomon, Le Livre des Esperitz,[2] the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, A Book of the Offices of Spirits, The Grimoire of Pope Honorius, The Grand Grimoire, the Grimorium Verum, The Grimoire of Arthur Gauntlet, and The Book of Treasure Spirits, Jake proceeded to connect the dots between the Spirits, finding shared yet unspoken entries, aliases, associations, relationships and concordances. As Pandemonium progresses, Jake began to create a map – a map he never explicitly expresses, but one which implicitly roils and ferments beneath the surface of his words.

This is perhaps the most important part of Pandemonium in its totality, as it is here that, in subtle cartography, Jakes outlines in apophatic shadow the coastline of the precursor of both Grimorium Verum and Grand Grimoire. These two manuals share a strong genetic lineage which opens up their similar methodologies to the wider corpus, as it is in the Grand Grimoire that we find the upper hierarchy of the Verum paired with the first eighteen Spirits found in the work of Agrippa’s student, Weyer, and the catalogues that develop downstream of his False Monarchy. We gain a tentative insight into the ever-shifting, ever-transforming, eternal revolution occurring within the depths of the Underworld, but most valuable of all, by coming to understand Jake’s goal with this book, we gain a compass that guides us through the turbulence.

Another of Jake’s lasting contributions is the analysis he offered of the ‘Long Text Group’, the unique descriptions of five Spirits found in Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia and subsequently in Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, catalogues which would go on to become the foundation of what is found in the Lemegaton’s first Book, the Ars Goetia. The offices of these five Spirits, namely Paimon, Bileth, Belial, Asmoday, and Gaap, almost certainly predate the formation of Weyer’s satire, probably preceding the main catalogue of whatever text Weyer was drawing from, most likely a far earlier recension of A Book of the Offices of Spirits, a text in the genre of Liber Officiorum Spirituum, two of which are known to have belonged to the German Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius under whom both Agrippa and Paracelsus studied, and which also belonged to the first of the Author Magicians, Berengarius Ganellus who composed the Summa Sacre Magice. Jake took these five Spirits, all of whom have unusually long descriptions, and placed them under a microscope, examining their histories, myths and inter-textual relationships, discovering a great deal as he did so, but perhaps most importantly, outlining areas of further research, something I have personally taken great pleasure in exploring.

Ten years on, and we have made lightyears of advancement, not only in the number of translations which have been completed of other grimoires (many of which aid greatly in filling in missing parts of the grand picture Jake was attempting to pull into focus), but also in our academic understanding of what the grimoires actually are and their place in history. To understand where academic thinking on this subject rests at the time of my writing, you should absolutely seek out the work of Gal Sofer, who’s recent book, Solomonic Magic[3] adds significantly to our understanding of how illicit magical manuals and the characters that populate them were transmitted back and forth across multiple cultures over centuries of time.

Perhaps one of the most notable contributions to the specific field of research Jake sparked in Pandemonium can be found in David Rankine’s two volume Grimoire Encyclopaedia,[4] which surveys a far wider array of texts and Spirits but leaves the analysis to the reader. It is an invaluable resource for those interested in the advancement of our understanding of this particular field of research and I truly can’t recommend it any higher.

Jake’s research in Pandemonium aided me greatly in my own exploration of Hygromanteia, as it was his manner of analysis which inspired me to turn my own gaze towards the Trinity, the Four Kings, and Temporal Spirits found in those early Byzantine and Italian forms of the Clavis Solomonis and attempt the effort of reconstruction. As I was writing, Pandemonium was always close to hand, and it remains one of the single-most referenced books in my entire library. I still believe, even after all these countless read-throughs, that I don’t quite fully grasp the ethereal object over which Jake was spilling ink to elucidate. There are patterns and threads to follow, and many of his questions remain unanswered. Jake was good at doing that in his writing, and I still can’t believe we have lost his light.

The pages of my copy of Pandemonium have grown worn and tatty over the past decade, the corners have become brown and dog-eared. There was a time that I kept my books pristine and untouched, but now I find when a book has made a lasting impact on me it ends up getting filled with notes, paragraphs get highlighted and colour-coded tabs get stuck all over them. I have quoted from Pandemonium extensively in my work, and no doubt will continue to do so for a very long time. There are still so many things left unanswered, and I hope you too can find that same spark of inspiration that Jake lit within the pages of this book.

His writing, and the questions he left with us, endure.