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Good, Evil, and Indifferent

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Good, Evil, and Indifferent

Seere is described as of a good and indifferent nature, which in the language of the period means neutral rather than uninterested. The vocabulary is worth unpacking, because the Lemegeton uses it across all five of its books and does not use it consistently.

Book One is headed as a book of evil spirits. Book Two, the Theurgia Goetia, is explicitly described as treating spirits partly good and partly evil. Book Four's spirits are approached as beneficent. Book Five is a collection of prayers. So the compilation as a whole spans a spectrum, and the boundary between the theurgic and the goetic, between working with elevated intelligences and compelling base ones, is one the collection asserts and then repeatedly crosses.

That boundary was contested at the time and had been for centuries. Ficino and Pico had argued for a natural and celestial magic distinct from demonic conjuring. Agrippa organised his three books along exactly that ascent, from natural to celestial to ceremonial. Trithemius wrote in cipher partly because the distinction was not one his readers could be trusted to observe. The whole Renaissance defence of magic depended on the line holding, and the grimoire tradition that followed is largely a record of it not holding.

Seere's entry, sitting inside a book of evil spirits and describing a benign figure on a winged horse who fetches things quickly, is a small piece of evidence about where the line actually fell in practice. The taxonomy in the headings is theological. The taxonomy in the entries is functional. They do not match, and the mismatch is not an error to be corrected but a fact about the material.

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