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The Spellbook · Prosperity

The Spellbook · Solomonic Magic

Goetic Treasure-Finding Evocations: A History

A history of treasure-seeking by conjuring spirits: the Goetic spirits said to reveal hidden treasure, English cunning-folk and the laws against such magic.

  • TraditionEarly modern European treasure magic: English cunning-folk and clerical magicians of the 16th–17th centuries; spirit catalogues from Weyer's Pseudomonarchia (1577) to the Ars Goetia
  • ForProsperity, Luck
  • Presented asHistory only
  • WhenTreasure magicians favoured particular nights, hours and seasons, often linked to saints' days and the Moon

For centuries, Europeans believed the earth was full of hidden treasure, buried by Romans, monks or fleeing nobles and guarded by spirits, and a whole branch of magic grew up to find it. The demonic catalogues of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, culminating in the Ars Goetia, named spirits whose office was to "discover treasures", and cunning-folk, clerics and adventurers tried to conjure them. The Spellbook presents this as history only: these rites summoned spirits regarded as demons, and treasure magic was closely bound up with fraud and danger.

How it was done§

The spirit catalogues supplied the theory. In Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia daemonum (1577), translated by Reginald Scot in 1584, and in the later Ars Goetia, several spirits are credited with treasure-finding. Barbatos was said to reveal treasures hidden by the enchantment of magicians; Purson to know hidden things and discover treasure; Foras to discover treasures and recover lost goods; and others likewise. A treasure-seeker who wished to use them followed the Goetic apparatus of circle, triangle, seals and conjurations, described in the Spellbook's history of Goetic evocation.

Treasure magic in practice was more varied. Surviving English manuscripts and trial records describe groups who first located a hoard by divination, using a crystal or mirror with a "skryer", a rod, or a sieve and shears, then went to the site at night with a magician to conjure away the guardian spirit, often imagined as a demon or the ghost of the person who buried it. They traced a circle around the spot, recited conjurations and prayers, and dug in silence, since speaking was believed to make the treasure sink. Some manuscripts, such as the seventeenth-century texts edited by David Rankine as The Book of Treasure Spirits, gather conjurations of spirits for this purpose; others mixed Christian prayer and exorcism with the names of demons.

Origins and history§

The belief in guarded treasure is ancient and international, from the dragon-hoards of Germanic legend to Arabic manuals for finding buried riches. In late medieval and early modern Europe, treasure-hunting with spirits was common enough to attract legislation. The English Witchcraft Act of 1542 made it a felony to use invocations or conjurations of spirits "to get or find money or treasure"; it was repealed in 1547, but the Act of 1563 again punished those who claimed by such means to tell where treasure might be found.

A famous case is that of William Stapleton, a Benedictine monk of St Benet's Hulme in Norfolk, who in a confession written around 1527 described borrowing magical books and a "plate" for conjuring spirits, and his attempts, with associates, to find treasure in Norfolk; the venture drew in local gentlemen and ended in recrimination. Owen Davies's studies of cunning-folk show how often clients paid wise men and women to find hoards, and how often they were cheated. In Germany and Central Europe treasure-hunting was so common that Johannes Dillinger, in Magical Treasure Hunting in Europe and North America (2012), describes it as a mass phenomenon of the early modern and Enlightenment periods, with hundreds of trials.

The practice crossed the Atlantic. In New England and New York in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, treasure-digging with seer stones and rods was widespread; the young Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-day Saints, was involved in such digging in the 1820s, as D. Michael Quinn and other historians have documented.

Why this is presented as history§

Goetic treasure magic required summoning spirits its own authors considered demons, and the Spellbook does not give instructions for that. It also had a long association with fraud and exploitation. It is described here for its importance in the history of magic, law and popular belief.

Safety and good sense§

Treasure stories still lead people to dig on land they do not own, damage archaeological sites or fall victim to fraud. In many countries metal-detecting and digging are regulated, and finds of treasure must be reported by law. Anyone offered magical help to find wealth in exchange for money should treat it as a likely scam.

Sources and further reading§