Purson is said to discover hidden things and to find treasure, and if the offices of all seventy-two spirits are tabulated, that turns out to be one of the commonest promises in the book.
The catalogue's offices fall into a small number of groups. There is knowledge: teaching the liberal sciences, astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, rhetoric, the properties of herbs and stones. There is discovery: finding treasure, revealing thefts, identifying thieves, uncovering secrets, telling of things past, present and to come. There is advancement: procuring dignities, senatorships, the favour of friends and of enemies, good familiars. There is love and its opposite: procuring the love of a man or a woman, stirring up hatred, sowing discord. There is power over the physical world: transporting men, building towers, throwing down walls, making waters stormy, setting places alight. And there is a small group of oddities, understanding the voices of birds, changing men into other shapes, granting invisibility.
Read as a whole, the list is a fair statement of what an early modern European might have wanted and could not get: money, preferment, security, information, a marriage. The learning on offer is the university curriculum. The advancement on offer is patronage. The discoveries on offer are the things litigated in the church courts, which spent a great deal of time on accusations about lost goods and cunning folk who claimed to find them.
That correspondence is the strongest argument for reading the Goetia as a social document. It maps the anxieties and ambitions of the world that produced it more precisely than it maps any cosmology, and its concerns are conspicuously worldly for a book about damned spirits.