Reading the archive
Texts and Editions
Manuscript leaves, photographic facsimiles and edited plates preserve the pentacles in different forms. Their inscriptions, arrangements and accompanying explanations identify each design within its particular witness. [1][2][5][6]
The English printed editions
The 1904 Goetia prints a numbered spirit catalogue, individual seals, a concluding vessel account and a classified rank list. Mathers’s 1889 Greater Key supplies a different sequence: forty-four planetary pentacles, figures 11–54, with notices in Book I chapter XVIII. The two publications share a Solomonic attribution while arranging their material around different subjects. [1][2]
Mathers’s Greater Key is an edited presentation. His notes identify names, biblical passages and magical alphabets, and sometimes offer tentative readings or proposed corrections. His restoration of Hebrew and mystical characters is recorded in these notes, alongside readings he leaves uncertain.