Beleth

The Goetia is not simply a list. It has a structure, and knowing the structure makes the catalogue legible.

The book opens with a body of ritual apparatus: conjurations, a constraint, an address, a formula of dismissal, instructions for a circle and a triangle, and descriptions of the implements, a vessel, a ring, a pentacle, a wand, said to be needed. It then gives the catalogue of seventy-two entries. Each entry supplies a number, a name, a rank, a legion count, an appearance, a set of offices, and a seal: a linear figure, drawn in the manuscripts, held to be the spirit's own character.

The seals are the part with the least visible ancestry. Weyer does not give them. They appear with the Lemegeton, they vary between manuscripts in their details, and no source explains how they were derived. Attempts to read them as compressed Hebrew letters, as planetary sigils, or as products of a magic square have all been made and none has produced a rule that generates the whole set.

Beleth's entry is among the most elaborate in its stage directions, a pale horse, trumpets and music sounding before him, a particular wand, a particular quarter of the compass, an insistence that the operator behave in a specific way. Entries at this level of detail are the exception; most run to two or three sentences.

What that detail indicates is uneven sourcing rather than special importance. Where the compiler had more material he used it. Where he had a line from Scot's English Weyer he printed the line. The result is a catalogue in which the length of an entry reflects the accidents of what survived to be copied, and not the standing of the spirit described.

Weyer's entry for Belial contains the fullest statement in the Pseudomonarchia of what the whole catalogue is supposed to be. It reports that Solomon gathered the spirits with their legions into a brazen vessel, and that enclosed there among all the legions were seventy-two kings, of whom the cheefe was Bileth, the second was Beliall, the third Asmoday.

Three things follow from that sentence.

The first is the count. Weyer asserts seventy-two while enumerating sixty-nine, which is the arithmetic problem the Lemegeton later resolves by adding four names and dropping one.

The second is the rank of Beleth. In Weyer's ordering he is chief of the seventy-two, ahead of Belial and Asmodeus. In the Goetia he is the thirteenth entry, with no statement of primacy at all, and Bael stands first. Whatever hierarchy Weyer's source imagined has not survived into the later text.

The third is the frame. The brazen vessel, and the figure of Solomon as a binder of spirits, are far older than either book. Josephus in the first century describes an exorcism performed in the name of Solomon using a ring and a root, and reports it as a technique Solomon left behind. The Testament of Solomon, a Greek text whose date is genuinely disputed and which has been placed anywhere from the first to the fifth century, is built entirely on Solomon compelling demons to name themselves and to work on the Temple.

So the container is late antique and the contents are early modern. The Goetia inherits an ancient narrative frame and fills it with a sixteenth-century list transmitted through a seventeenth-century English printing. Neither half dates the other.