Let’s recap where we are in our Solomonic ritual. We’ve consecrated our tools, our spaces, and ourselves. We’ve drawn out our circle. We’ve invoked various powers (God, angels, intermediary spirits, patrons, directional guardians, etc.) to set the stage. Now we’re ready to actually summon the spirit we are trying to contact. Before we can get into the actual meat of the conjuration, it’s important to know which spirit we’re attempting to call.
How do we choose a spirit? It depends a lot on what we’re trying to accomplish. Different spirits have different powers and affinities. For any given spirit, certain types of change will come easier to them than others. Our work is most likely to be successful if we’re matching our desired outcome to a spirit who is well suited to bring it about. This is just like in the mundane world; depending on the kind of work I need done, I might be more successful approaching someone in a library, or a dive bar, or a Home Depot parking lot.
In many grimoires, spirits are assigned (more or less explicitly) to astrological concerns, most commonly the seven classical planets. This gives a good hint at the domains in which a spirit is likely to be potent. Venusian spirits (such as the Dukes of the Goetia) tend to be oriented around relationship engineering, Mercurial spirits (the Goetia’s Presidents) more oriented around knowledge and intellectual pursuits, etc. But even within a particular celestial attribution, there are differences in how spirits show up. This is where spirit catalogs come in handy.
Spirit catalogs are books where previous magicians have documented long lists of spirits, along with descriptions of their powers and offices. Far and away the most famous example of this is the Lemegeton’s Goetia; most of the book is taken up by a catalog of 72 different demons – along with their appearances, ranks, offices, and the number of legions under their command.
We can also look to the mythology of a particular spirit or their antecedents for ideas of affinities. Let’s look at a concrete example: Astaroth. In the Goetia, Astaroth is listed with the following entry:
The 29th spirit in order is Named Astaroth, he is a Mighty & strong duke and appeareth in the forme of an unbeautifull angel, ridding on an Infernall like dragon, and carrying in his right hand a viper (you must not lett him come to neare yu least he doe yu damage by his stinking Breath. Therefore ye Exorcist must hold ye Magicall Ring nere to his face and yt will defend him. He giveth true answares of things present past & to come & can discover all secreets; he will declare willingly how ye spirits fell, if desired, & ye reason of his own fall. He can make men wounderfull knowing in all Liberall siences; he rules 40 Legions of spirits…
So a Duke, and therefore a Venusian spirit, likely related in some way to relationship engineering. But the specific powers listed – giving true answers, discovering secrets, teaching the liberal sciences – don’t have an obvious tie in there. Let’s compare that to the Grimorium Verum.
Verum lists Astaroth as a Grand Duke, part of the ruling triumvirate of hell, specifically ruling over the spirits of the Americas.1 It also notes:
Astaroth appears in black and white, most often in human form, and sometimes in the form of a donkey.
The most helpful piece of this, honestly, is the designation of Astaroth as ruler of North and South America. That suggests a highly placed spirit in the infernal hierarchy, one whom a large number of other spirits would be bound to obey.
Finally, there is a fairly compelling body of work that ties the origins of the demon Astaroth to the pagan goddesses Astarte, Ishtar, and Inanna. We can therefore look to myths and legends surrounding these goddesses. These reveal a figure associated with Venus – specifically in her appearance as the morning and evening star. A figure associated with sex (but not childbirth or motherhood) and battle; one ferocious in both passions and ambitions. It would be reasonable to approach Astaroth with petitions in any of these domains.
It is worth noting, however, that we shouldn’t be bound too tightly by the listed office of a spirit. There are many ways to solve a problem, and often we are better served by approaching a spirit with whom we already have a relationship – even on things that are only tenuously related to their listed offices – than we are cold-calling a spirit who might, on paper, be better suited. Some of my most dramatic results, in terms of effects on the material world, have come through workings with spirits whose offices had nothing to do with the task at hand.2
So we’ve chosen a spirit we want to call. What information about them do we need? The classical pieces are their name and seal, both of which should be listed in the spirit catalog. Name is pretty self-explanatory. Seal in this case means a graphical depiction of their sign or character.3 If we have the name and seal of a spirit, we should be able to conjure them successfully.
What if we don’t? What if we’re missing one or both of these pieces of information? There are a number of systems for taking a name and attempting to turn it into a seal. Mostly these involve laying out symbols in space (for example Hebrew letters in the Golden Dawn’s rose-cross diagram, or numbers in a planetary kamea) and then using transformations on the name to generate a sequence of points in that symbol space. Playing connect-the-dots with those points gives a shape, derived from the name itself, to be used as a seal of the spirit.
That’s a very erudite approach. In his Renaissance work The Devil’s Scourge, exorcist Girolamo Menghi gives the alternate suggestion of using a picture of the demon in the similar way to a seal, treating its image as a concrete earthly representation of its powers. This suggests some interesting possibilities around the intersection of seals and devotional art.
What if we don’t even have a name for the spirit we’re attempting to contact? Here we can look to The Arbatel of Magick, aphorism 18:
…Therefore it is most safe for the young practisers of Art, that they work by the offices of the Spirits alone, without their names; and if they are pre-ordained to attain the Art of Magick, the other parts of the Art will offer themselves unto them of their own accord…
Here it is not only possible but encouraged to conjure a spirit by its office alone, without referencing a specific name. In this way one might conjure the angel of a minor celestial body, or the genius loci of a particular place, without knowing the name of this spirit beforehand. Such local spirits may actually be more influential in your own life than a famous spirit named in a traditional grimoire.
But generally, we should be using the name and seal of a spirit in our conjurations. In instances where we are missing these, we can attempt to derive them or omit them entirely. In either case, after successfully making contact with a spirit, we should ask if there is a name or seal we can use in the future to more easily make contact with them again.
Thus, with the spirit we are attempting to summon firmly in our minds, with their name on our lips and their seal displayed before us, we are ready to begin our Solomonic evocations.
This post is part of a series on Solomonic magic. You can find the next post here.
- Alongside Lucifer, who rules in Europe and Asia, and Beelzebub, who rules in Africa. ↩︎
- This is where your divination skills serve you in good stead. ↩︎
- Think signet ring, rather than binding glyph. ↩︎