Gaap walks before four mighty kings as their guide. He can make people ignorant or learned, cause love or hatred, release other magicians’ familiars and carry people swiftly between kingdoms. [1]
Making people insensible or ignorant or learned in philosophy and the liberal sciences; causing love or hatred; teaching consecration under Amaymon; freeing familiars; answering across time; and carrying people between kingdoms. [1]
Gaap appears in human form when the Sun occupies one of the southern signs, leading four great kings as a guide. Both president and prince, he has sixty-six legions and formerly belonged to the Potentates. The Goetia calls Amaymon his king. [1]
His powers over understanding have opposed results: he makes people insensible or ignorant, but also knowledgeable in philosophy and all the liberal sciences. He causes love or hatred, teaches the consecration of things belonging to Amaymon’s dominion, and releases familiars held by other magicians. He answers truly and perfectly about past, present and future and carries people swiftly between kingdoms at the exorcist’s will. [1]
Tap and the rival account of the art
Scot also calls the spirit Tap and includes invisibility among his offices. His longer passage interrupts the spirit’s portrait with a dispute about an art used by necromancers. It rejects their claim that Solomon made it and instead names Cham, Noah’s son, as the first to invoke wicked spirits after the Flood and as the maker of an art in Bileth’s name. [2]
The same passage separately attributes an epistle of divine names to Solomon, invoking Helias Hierosolymitanus and Helisæus as authorities. It refuses to reveal certain means of constraint as abominable. [2][1]
S. L. MacGregor Mathers, translated; Aleister Crowley, edited, The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King (1904), first-edition facsimile supplied by Keep Silence. Shemhamphorash, entry 33; printed p. 21, PDF p. 18
Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584); Brinsley Nicholson’s reprint of the first edition (1886), Project Gutenberg transcription. Book XV, chapter II, Gaap; Nicholson’s 1886 reprint, pp. 321–322.
