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Haborym, Aym, Aim

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Haborym, Aym, Aim

This spirit carries more forms of its name than almost any other in the catalogue. Weyer has Aym, and also Haborym or Haborim; the Lemegeton manuscripts give Aim, Aym and Haborym in various combinations, sometimes presenting them as alternatives for one spirit and sometimes reading as though two entries had been merged.

The variety matters because Haborym has occasionally been connected to the Hebrew haverim, companions, and through that to speculative derivations of the kind this corpus attracts. The connection is a guess. Nothing in Weyer or the Lemegeton offers an etymology for any spirit in the list, and no medieval or ancient source has been produced in which a demon of this name appears with these offices.

What is documented is a pattern in the transmission. Where a Latin list gave two forms for one entry, a name and an alias, English translation and recopying could preserve both, lose one, or split the entry in two. The Goetia's catalogue shows evidence of all three outcomes at different points. Naberius and Cerberus stand as alternatives in some readings. Cimeies appears as Cimeries and Cimejes. Haures appears as Flauros, Hauras and Havres.

For a reader this has a practical consequence. The apparent stability of the seventy-two names is an artefact of the modern editions, which pick one form and print it. In the manuscripts the list is looser than that, and a name is often a small dossier of variants rather than a fixed label. Arguments that depend on precise spelling need to be checked against a source that reports the variants rather than smoothing them away.

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Aim, Goetic Demons
Source Divinity Atlas Long-Form Articles, First Edition
Sources
Divinity Atlas Long-Form Articles, First Edition
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