Ask anyone with a passing interest in Western ceremonial magic to name the most famous grimoire in history, and the answer will almost certainly be the Ars Goetia — the first book of the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, the Lesser Key of Solomon. Its seventy-two demons, each with a rank, a sigil, and a catalogue of abilities, have become the default vocabulary of modern occultism. They appear in encyclopedias, in horror films, in video games. Names like Paimon, Beleth, Asmodeus, and Bael have crossed from the grimoire tradition into popular culture with a reach that no other magical text has achieved. And yet almost no one who uses these names realizes that the system they belong to is not the original. It is not even close.
The Ars Goetia as we know it dates to the seventeenth century, compiled from earlier European manuscripts that were themselves translations and adaptations of still older material. But the Solomonic magical tradition — the vast body of operative literature attributed to the prophet-king Sulayman ibn Dawud — is not European in origin. It is Arabic. And in the Arabic Solomonic manuscripts, the hierarchy that governs the spirit world is not a catalogue of seventy-two rebellious demons. It is a precise, astronomically ordered system of seven jinn kings, each ruling one day of the week, one classical planet, one angelic counterpart, and a specific domain of human affairs. Their names, their attributes, and the methods for working with them bear almost no resemblance to anything in the Goetia.
This article presents those names. Not as speculation, not as syncretic reconstruction, but as they appear in the primary Arabic manuscripts themselves.
The System the West Never Received
The Arabic Solomonic tradition rests on a cosmological framework that is fundamentally different from the one assumed by the European grimoires. In the Western model — formalized by texts like the Key of Solomon (Clavicula Salomonis) and systematized by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy — spirits are essentially adversarial. They are demons, fallen angels, or infernal beings who must be compelled through threats, bound into brass vessels, and constrained by divine names invoked against them. The operator’s posture is that of a commander forcing compliance from hostile entities.
The Arabic system operates on entirely different premises. The jinn kings are not “demons” in the Christian theological sense. They are jinn — a separate order of creation, made from smokeless fire as humans were made from clay. And the seven kings who rule the jinn are described in the manuscripts as mu’minin: believing jinn. Pious. Obedient to divine law. They do not serve the practitioner because they are forced to. They serve because the practitioner has met the conditions of spiritual legitimacy — purity of intention, ritual correctness, and divine authorization — that entitle him to their cooperation.
This distinction is not cosmetic. It changes everything about how the operative system works. In the Goetia, timing is loose: perform the conjuration at the right general time of day, and the spirit should appear. In the Arabic system, timing is astronomical and non-negotiable. Each king rules a specific day. Each must be contacted during the planetary hour that corresponds to his planet. The practitioner must know not merely the day but the exact hour — calculated from sunrise, varying with latitude and season — in which the king’s authority is at its peak. Miss the window, and the operation is void.
This planetary-hour system is documented in Ahmad al-Buni’s Shams al-Ma’arif, in the Ghayat al-Hakim (known to Latin Europe as the Picatrix), in the Kitab al-Ajnas attributed to Asif ibn Barkhiya — Sulayman’s own vizier — and in the operational manual al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a (The Radiant Jewels) attributed to Ali Abu Hayy Allah al-Marzuqi. The Sihr Muluk al-Jann, another key manuscript in this tradition, provides additional correspondences and variant methods.
The 7 Jinn Kings: Names, Days, Planets, and Domains
Here they are — the seven jinn kings as recorded in the Arabic Solomonic manuscripts. Each king is listed with his day, his planet, his governing angel, the color associated with his operations, and his primary domains of authority.
| Day | Planet | Jinn King | Angel | Color | Domains |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sunday | Sun | Al-Mudhhab “The Golden One” |
Ruqiya’il | Gold | Approaching rulers, gaining awe and respect, opening doors of success |
| Monday | Moon | Murra Abu al-Harith |
Jibra’il | Silver | Affection, extracting hidden treasures, neutralizing hostile magic |
| Tuesday | Mars | Abu Muhriz al-Ahmar “The Red One” |
Samsama’il | Red | Destruction, enmity, sickness, warfare and martial operations |
| Wednesday | Mercury | Barqan Abu al-‘Aja’ib |
Mika’il | Mixed | Solving talismans, gaining affection of scholars, uncovering mysteries |
| Thursday | Jupiter | Shamhurash Abu al-Walid |
Sarfiya’il | Yellow | Peace, wealth, acquiring hidden knowledge |
| Friday | Venus | Zawba’a Abu al-Nur al-Abyad |
‘Anya’il | White / Green | Love, marriage, joy, reconciliation between hearts |
| Saturday | Saturn | Maymun Abu Nukh |
Kasfiya’il | Black | Separation, causing illness, unearthing hidden talismans |
These are not obscure names pulled from a single manuscript. They appear consistently across the major Arabic Solomonic texts spanning at least five centuries. Al-Buni records them. The Kitab al-Ajnas records them. The al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a provides their full conjuration protocols. The Shams al-Anwar of Ibn al-Hajj al-Tilmsani cross-references them with Quranic verses and fumigation recipes specific to each king. This is not one author’s idiosyncratic system. It is the standard hierarchy of the entire tradition.
Seven Kings of Jinn: Names and Epithets in the Arabic Manuscripts
Whether you spell them jinn, jin, or djinn, the 7 djinn kings of the Arabic tradition are the seven names in the table above. For readers who want the names of the seven kings of jinn exactly as a manuscript writes them, the Kitab al-Ajnas gives each king his full Arabic name, with its kunya, in a table headed “The Kings of the Seven Days”: Aba Sa‘id al-Mudhhab for Sunday, Aba al-Harith Murra for Monday, Aba Muhriz al-Ahmar for Tuesday, Aba al-‘Aja’ib Barqan for Wednesday, Aba al-Walid Shamhurash for Thursday, Aba al-Nur Zuba‘a al-Abyad for Friday, and Aba Nukh Maymun for Saturday — each beside the same governing angel shown in the table. Spellings drift from manuscript to manuscript, and so, occasionally, does the seating of a king on a given day; the table above follows the arrangement of the Kitab al-Ajnas. For the hour in which each king is approached on his day, see the seven jinn kings by day of the week and planetary hour.
Three of these names draw most of the questions. Al-Abyad, “the White,” is in this table an epithet rather than an eighth king: it belongs to Friday’s ruler, Aba al-Nur Zuba‘a al-Abyad, whose day the table above marks with white. Maymun, king of Saturday, is among the most frequently invoked of the seven: Sihr Muluk al-Jann devotes a chapter to “The Investiture of King Maymun,” and the Kitab al-Ajnas records “the seal of Maymun Abu Nukh” and “the Names of Slaying for Maymun, who answers in all arts.” Shamhurash is the Thursday king, and the Kitab al-Ajnas singles out “Shamhurash with his adjurations and the swiftness of his response.” Tuesday’s Abu Muhriz al-Ahmar, the red jinn of the seven, has his own study in Who Is al-Ahmar? The Red King of the Jinn, and his adjuration is translated in the Adjuration of the Red King.
Good Jinn Names, Believing Jinn, and the Quran
Many readers searching for good jinn names are really asking whether any jinn are benevolent at all. The manuscripts say yes, and the seven kings are their clearest example — described, as noted above, as believing jinn. Other volumes in the series name more. The Tested Remedies of the Monks calls Ibn Sa’duya “the king of the believing jinn and the best among them,” and Shams al-Anwar speaks of “the believing jinn, who serve the righteous.” Sihr Muluk al-Jann states the underlying theology plainly: “God, exalted be He, created the jinn from smokeless fire and created Adam from clay.”
Two related questions deserve a straight answer. First, these seven royal names are not in the Quran; they come from the Arabic Solomonic manuscripts, so anyone looking for good jinn names in the Quran will not find this list there. Second, if you are asking who is the most powerful jinn in Islam, the manuscripts’ own ranking is instructive: Shams al-Anwar places the angels above every jinn as “the noblest and most powerful” of the spiritual beings — the same order the table preserves by setting an angel over each king of the jinn.
It matters just as much what is not on the list. The Arabic hierarchy is built on seven kings, not on the Goetia’s seventy-two spirits; readers looking for 72 jinn names are looking at the European catalogue, whose debt to Arabic sources is traced in What the Ars Goetia Got Wrong. And the names of jinns that turn up in popular lists — Jann ibn Jann, al-Jathoom, Palis — do not appear among the seven kings in these manuscripts.
What the Goetia Actually Is — and Where It Came From
The Lemegeton as a compiled text appears in European manuscripts no earlier than the seventeenth century, though individual sections draw on older material. The Ars Goetia itself — the famous list of seventy-two spirits — derives in part from Johann Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1577), which itself borrowed from earlier demonological catalogues. These catalogues, in turn, show unmistakable traces of Arabic originals: names transliterated through Latin, hierarchies garbled in transmission, planetary correspondences stripped out or reassigned.
Consider the name Paimon — one of the most prominent kings in the Goetia. The name has no Latin or Greek etymology. Scholars of Arabic magical literature have noted its probable derivation from an Arabic root, possibly a corruption of a title or epithet that was transliterated, mispronounced, and eventually codified as a “demon name” in European manuscripts. The same pattern repeats across the Goetia: names that make no sense in any European language but become recognizable when traced back to Arabic originals.
What happened is not complicated. The Arabic Solomonic material entered Europe through two primary channels: the Latin translation of the Ghayat al-Hakim (the Picatrix) in the thirteenth century, and the various Solomonic manuscripts that circulated in the Mediterranean world where Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin cultures overlapped. At each stage of transmission, the system was simplified. The seven-king planetary hierarchy — which requires astronomical calculation, ritual purity, and theological legitimacy to operate — was replaced with a flat catalogue of spirits that could be conjured by force. The Quranic scaffolding was stripped out. The planetary-hour requirements were reduced to vague time-of-day suggestions. The result was the Goetia: a text that preserves the spectacle of the Arabic originals while discarding the operative infrastructure that made them functional.
Why the Differences Matter
This is not merely a question of historical curiosity. The differences between the Arabic and European systems are operative — they determine whether the procedures described in these texts can actually be performed as their authors intended.
The Arabic system requires piety. The practitioner must be in a state of ritual purity (taharah), must have completed a period of fasting and spiritual retreat (riyadah), and must approach the jinn kings not as a sorcerer commanding hostile spirits but as a servant of God requesting lawful assistance from beings who are themselves obedient to divine authority. The entire framework is covenantal: the practitioner fulfills specific conditions, and in return, the king provides specific services within his domain.
The Goetia requires force. The operator draws a circle, inscribes constraining names, threatens the spirit with divine punishment if it disobeys, and binds it to a brass vessel or a triangle of art. The relationship is adversarial from the first word to the last. There is no concept of spiritual qualification. There is no fasting. There is no retreat. The operator’s authority derives not from his spiritual state but from the names he wields — names which, in many cases, are garbled transliterations of Arabic divine names whose pronunciation and meaning have been lost.
The Arabic manuscripts are explicit about what happens when an unqualified practitioner attempts to contact the jinn kings. The al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a describes the consequences in clinical detail: the operation fails silently, or worse, the practitioner attracts the attention of lower-order jinn — not kings, not believing jinn, but predatory entities drawn to the disruption caused by an incompetent operator working with power he has not earned the right to invoke.
“He who approaches the kings without purity is like a beggar who storms the palace gate — he will not find the sultan, but he will find the guards.”
That passage does not appear in any European grimoire. It should.
The Angels Behind the Kings
One detail that has no parallel whatsoever in the Goetia is the role of the governing angels. Each jinn king operates under the authority of a specific angel — Ruqiya’il, Jibra’il, Samsama’il, Mika’il, Sarfiya’il, ‘Anya’il, and Kasfiya’il — and the conjuration protocols in the Arabic manuscripts typically require the practitioner to invoke the angel first, before addressing the king.
This is the hierarchical logic of the system. God commands the angels. The angels command the jinn kings. The jinn kings command their subordinates. The practitioner’s legitimacy flows downward through this chain: he petitions God, invokes the angel by name, and the angel authorizes the king to respond. Without this chain of authority, the king has no reason and no obligation to appear. The Goetia preserves none of this. Its spirits operate in a theological vacuum — constrained by divine names, yes, but disconnected from any coherent cosmological hierarchy that would explain why those names have power.
The Shams al-Ma’arif provides the angelic invocations in full, with the specific divine names and Quranic verses that accompany each. The Kitab al-Ajnas provides variant formulas attributed to Sulayman’s own court. The Shams al-Anwar provides the planetary-hour calculations required to determine when each angel is at the zenith of his authority. None of this material has ever appeared in any edition of the Goetia or any Western Solomonic text.
What Has Been Published — and What Is Now Available
The seven jinn kings have been referenced in passing by a handful of Western scholars — notably in academic studies of Arabic magic that were never intended for practitioners and that deliberately omitted the operative details. The names have appeared. The system behind the names has not.
The Complete Magic of the Jinn Kings (Volume VII of the John Friend Publishing series) presents the jinn kings in English, with conjuration protocols, planetary-hour tables, angelic invocations, fumigation recipes, talisman designs, and day-by-day operational procedures. This volume translates one anonymous Arabic manuscript, the Sihr Muluk al-Jann.
The source’s own title, Sihr Muluk al-Jann, uses al-Jann, the collective Arabic name for the jinn: it is, literally, the magic of the kings of the jinn. Its chapters include “The Investiture of King Maymun” and “The Delegation of the Golden King and His Seal”; the volume’s contents are described on the Complete Magic of the Jinn Kings page.
For the conjuration material specific to each king and the Solomonic protocols that form their foundation, see also al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a: The Radiant Jewels for Summoning the Kings of Jinn (Volume V). For the planetary magic and talismanic framework that undergirds the entire system, see Shams al-Anwar wa Kunuz al-Asrar al-Kubra (Volume III).
The Goetia is not wrong in the way that a forged document is wrong. It is wrong in the way that a photocopy of a photocopy of a painting is wrong — the outlines are visible, the colors are gone, and the details that made the original powerful have been lost in transmission. The Arabic tradition preserves the original. These texts make it available, in English, for the first time.
