Bael

The catalogue that opens the Lemegeton did not begin with seventy-two entries.

Its direct ancestor is the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, a list appended by the Dutch physician Johann Weyer to the fifth edition of his De Praestigiis Daemonum in 1577. Weyer enumerates sixty-nine spirits. The count is not a matter of interpretation: the entries are numbered, and the last of them carries the number sixty-nine.

The discrepancy is visible inside Weyer's own pages. His entry for Belial repeats the old story of the brazen vessel in which Solomon is said to have confined the spirits, and reports that shut up within it were seventie two kings, chief among them Bileth, Beliall and Asmoday. So a text that could produce only sixty-nine names was already asserting the number seventy-two. The catalogue and the claim did not agree.

The Goetia closes the gap. It carries sixty-eight of Weyer's spirits, drops one, Pruflas, also written Bufas, and adds four that Weyer does not have at all: Vassago, Seere, Dantalion and Andromalius. Sixty-nine, less one, plus four, is seventy-two.

Why seventy-two rather than seventy or eighty is nowhere stated in the manuscripts, and any answer is an inference. But it is difficult to separate the number from the Shem ha-Mephorash, the seventy-two-fold divine name derived from three verses of Exodus, which by the seventeenth century had been circulating in Christian Kabbalah for over a hundred years. Seventy-two binding angels and seventy-two bound spirits make a symmetry, and the arrangement associated with Thomas Rudd sets them against one another name for name.

The direction of the fitting is the point worth holding on to. The angel list is the older and the more fixed. The demon list is the one that was adjusted to match it.

Bael stands first in the Goetia and first in Weyer, and the resemblance of the name to Baal is the most frequently repeated derivation in the entire corpus. It deserves to be stated properly rather than asserted or dismissed.

The case for it is real. Baal is a Northwest Semitic title meaning simply lord, borne by the storm god Hadad at Ugarit and by a number of local deities across the Levant. Hebrew scripture treats Baal as the standing example of a foreign god, and the mechanism by which a displaced deity becomes a demon in the literature of the religion that displaced it is well documented across late antiquity. Beelzebub, from Baal-zebul, is the clearest instance, and it is clear precisely because the transit can be traced through surviving texts: an Ekronite god in the Book of Kings, a prince of demons in the Gospels.

The case against treating Bael as settled is also real, and it is usually left out. Nothing in Weyer or in the Lemegeton says that Bael is Baal. The Goetia's Bael has three heads, toad, man and cat, speaks hoarsely, and grants invisibility, and none of that has any counterpart in Ugaritic or biblical material about a storm god. The name may equally have arrived through a long chain of Latin and Greek intermediaries in which the original referent was already lost, and the same catalogue contains names that resemble nothing identifiable at all.

What can be said without argument is that the resemblance exists, that it is old, that the primary sources do not comment on it, and that the identification is an inference made by modern readers rather than a claim made by the texts. Exactly the same caution applies to Astaroth and Astarte, which is the other case always cited alongside this one.

Weyer's list and the Goetia's list contain almost the same spirits in almost entirely different positions, and no one has accounted for it.

Bael heads both. Agares follows in both. After that the two sequences come apart and never recover a shared logic. Weyer's sixty-ninth and final entry is Stolas, who sits at number thirty-six in the Goetia. A reader who lays the two lists side by side finds a shared population and a scrambled sequence.

The editor Joseph Peterson, who has collated the surviving manuscripts, states the problem and declines to solve it, offering only the suggestion that the leaves of some ancestor manuscript may have come loose and been reassembled out of order. No better account has been proposed, and the honest description is that this is an open question rather than a settled one.

The transmission route itself, by contrast, is known with unusual precision. Reginald Scot printed an English translation of Weyer's catalogue in The Discoverie of Witchcraft, and the Goetia's text descends specifically from the enlarged 1665 edition of Scot rather than from Weyer's Latin or from Scot's own first edition of 1584. Peterson establishes this from errors and spellings unique to that printing, which is the kind of evidence that settles a question of descent rather than merely suggesting one.

That fixes a floor under the whole book. Whatever earlier material may stand behind the Lemegeton, the version of this catalogue preserved in the surviving manuscripts cannot predate 1665. Presentations of the Goetia as a medieval or an ancient text are not supportable, at least for this part of it. The compilation is early modern, its immediate source is a printed English sceptic's book, and its ordering is a puzzle its own tradition has never addressed.