Reading Guides

Ranks and Terminology

A spirit’s title, office, legions and appearance answer different questions. Pentacles have another vocabulary, including names for their geometry and two kinds of numbering. [1][2]

Titles, offices and legions

Rank is the title given to a spirit: King, Duke, Prince, Marquis, President, Earl or Knight. Some notices pair titles. Viné is King and Earl; Gaap is President and Prince. The classified list also uses Prelate with Prince and Count with Earl. Its note treats Prince and Prelate as apparently interchangeable terms. [1]

The individual notices and classified list sometimes distribute those titles differently. Ipos is Earl and Prince in his notice but appears only among princes in the list; Murmur is Duke and Earl but appears only among dukes. The rank groups in this collection follow the titles in the individual notices.

[1]

An office is the work assigned to the spirit. Foras teaches logic and ethics, explains the virtues of plants and stones, and recovers lost things. A legion count concerns the companies under a spirit’s command: Foras has twenty-nine. A familiar is a spirit-helper supplied to the caller; Paimon’s familiars are specifically described as able to teach the arts. [1]

An appearance can unfold

Many descriptions follow a sequence. Marbas appears first as a lion and becomes human at the caller’s request. Furfur begins as a hart with a fiery tail and takes an angelic form within the triangle. [1]

A mount, voice, carried object or attendant may identify the spirit as clearly as the body. Paimon rides a dromedary, wears a crown and arrives after trumpet- and cymbal-bearing spirits; his first speech is a roar. Vassago’s notice instead records nature, office and legions without describing a bodily form. [1]

Pentacles and their geometries

Pentacle is the Greater Key’s broad name for its written figures. The designs include letter squares, wheels, crosses, triangles, a face and a gateway. A pentagram is specifically a five-pointed star. The second Venus and first Mercury pentacles use that shape, but many other pentacles have a different construction. [2]

The first Sun pentacle is introduced as the Countenance of Shaddai; Mathers’s note identifies its head as Metatron, Shaddai’s representative. The first Moon pentacle is a gateway. [2]

Numbers within and across groups

Mathers gives seven pentacles each to Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and the Sun, five each to Venus and Mercury, and six to the Moon. An ordinal counts within its planet: the first Sun and first Moon pentacles are each first in their own group. The continuous figure numbers run across all forty-four designs, from 11 to 54. [2]

The Goetia has seventy-two numbered spirit notices but eighty printed seal figures because eight spirits have alternatives. Paimon is spirit 9, while later spirit and figure numbers increasingly diverge. In a manuscript group, a page, folio or position may identify the figure instead of a Mathers planetary number. [1][2]

Sources and editions

The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King
S. L. MacGregor Mathers, translation; Aleister Crowley, editor, first edition, 1904. Numbered notices 3, 5, 9, 22, 31, 33–34, 45 and 54; printed pp. 12–15, 18, 20–21, 24 and 26. Classified list and following note, pp. 32–33, with the original seal plates.
The Key of Solomon the King
S. L. MacGregor Mathers, 1889. Book I, chapter XVIII: planetary order, p. 58 (PDF p. 65); Sun 1, p. 65 (PDF p. 84); Venus 2, p. 67 (PDF p. 90); Mercury 1, p. 68 (PDF p. 91); Moon 1, p. 69 (PDF p. 96); figures 11–54.

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