 According to the original publisher, the work was found by Marius Malchus in 1927 after buying an English translation of a now-lost Latin original from a defrocked priest, which he copied before discarding.No references to the work have appeared anywhere before 1960, when the work was originally published, and the story of the defrocked priest and lost manuscript is fiction meant to cover up why the author could not produce any copies older than the twentieth century.The work plagiarizes and re-hashes material from A. E. Waite's 1898 work "The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts" (particularly his translation of "Arbatel de magia veterum") and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers's introduction to the 1888 edition of "The Key of Solomon the King".