Asmoday

Of all seventy-two spirits, this one has by a wide margin the best documented pedigree, and it is worth being precise about what that pedigree does and does not establish.

Asmodeus appears by name in the Book of Tobit, a work of the Second Temple period preserved in Greek and, since the discoveries at Qumran, known also in Aramaic and Hebrew fragments. In it he is a demon who kills seven successive husbands of a woman named Sarah on their wedding nights, and who is driven off by the smoke of a fish's heart and liver and then bound in Egypt. Tobit is canonical for Catholic and Orthodox Christians and deuterocanonical or apocryphal for Jews and Protestants, so the book's standing varies but its antiquity does not.

The name is generally connected to the Avestan aeshma daeva, a demon of wrath, which would make it one of the clearer traces of Iranian influence on Jewish demonology in the Persian period. That derivation is widely held and is argued rather than proven; it rests on the phonetic match and on the plausibility of the contact, not on a text that records the borrowing.

Asmodeus also appears prominently in the Testament of Solomon, and in rabbinic material as Ashmedai, notably in a Talmudic narrative in which he displaces Solomon from his throne.

What none of this establishes is continuity with the Goetia. The Goetia's Asmoday has three heads, a serpent's tail and goose's feet, rides a dragon, teaches arithmetic and geometry, and guards treasure. The name is ancient. The figure in this catalogue is not, and the intervening chain of transmission runs through the same late medieval and early modern channels as the rest of the list.

Asmoday commands seventy-two legions. In a catalogue whose defining feature is its own count of seventy-two, that is unlikely to be coincidence, and it is one of the few internal patterns in the book that looks deliberate.

The number seventy-two carries weight independently across the traditions the Lemegeton draws on. The Shem ha-Mephorash is seventy-two-fold. The Letter of Aristeas has seventy-two translators produce the Greek Pentateuch. The table of nations in Genesis was counted as seventy or seventy-two depending on the textual tradition followed, and the sending out of the disciples in Luke is seventy in some manuscripts and seventy-two in others. Seventy-two is five degrees of the zodiac multiplied out to the full circle, which is the arithmetic underlying the decan attributions the Golden Dawn later applied to both the angels and the spirits.

Weyer's text already asserts seventy-two kings in the brazen vessel while listing sixty-nine, so the number was attached to this material before the Lemegeton's compiler set to work. What the Lemegeton did was make the enumeration match the assertion.

Whether the seventy-two legions in this entry were placed here to echo that, or inherited from a source, cannot be recovered. Weyer's Sydonay, his form of the name, also commands seventy-two legions, so the figure predates the Lemegeton at least by that step.

The caution worth attaching is that patterns of this kind are easy to find in any list of numbers, and the catalogue supplies dozens of them. This one is more striking than most because the number is the number of the book. It remains an observation about the text rather than an explanation of it.