Andromalius

Andromalius closes the catalogue, and he is one of the four spirits that exist only because it had to be closed at seventy-two.

He has no entry in Weyer. He has none in Scot's English translation of Weyer. He appears, so far as the record shows, for the first time in the Lemegeton, alongside Vassago at number three and Seere and Dantalion immediately before him. Between them these four are the difference between the sixty-eight names the compiler inherited and the seventy-two he needed.

The name has attracted the usual speculation, a Greek compound involving andros, a garbling of some other entry, a borrowing from a lost source, and none of it has evidence. The honest statement is that the name is unattested before this text and its origin is unknown.

What is more interesting is his position. The last entry in a list of demons is a place of some rhetorical weight, and the compiler gave it to a spirit who recovers stolen goods, names the thief, punishes him, and exposes wickedness and underhand dealing. The catalogue that opens with a three-headed king who grants invisibility closes with a thief-taker.

Whether that was designed is unknowable, and there is no reason to assume it was. But it does describe the book's centre of gravity accurately. Behind the dragons and the fiery chariots, most of what the Goetia offers is recovery of property, detection of wrongdoing, advancement at court and success in love, the ordinary business of a legal system that did not work very well, addressed by other means.

Recovering stolen goods and identifying the thief is the single most concretely practical office in the Goetia, and it is not confined to this entry. Purson discovers hidden things and treasure. Seere discovers thefts. Others reveal secrets and uncover hidden dealings. Between them these entries describe a service that was in constant demand.

The historical background is well documented. In early modern England, property crime was common, policing was effectively non-existent outside the parish, and recovery depended on identifying the culprit locally. Cunning folk, village practitioners who told fortunes, found lost objects, healed livestock and named thieves, were a fixture, and thief-detection was among their commonest jobs. The church courts and the assizes record both the practice and the periodic attempts to suppress it.

A grimoire promising the same service is therefore not exotic. It is the learned, expensive, Latin-derived version of something available in most villages from someone charging a great deal less. The difference is one of register and of clientele, not of function.

This is the argument for reading the Goetia as social history rather than only as demonology. Its offers can be checked against what people actually wanted and actually paid for, and they match closely. The book is unusual in its cosmology and entirely ordinary in its economics.

It also explains the catalogue's longevity. A list of spirits who supply learning, money, advancement, love and justice speaks to durable wants. The theology around it dated quickly. The wants did not.

It is worth setting out plainly what the primary text leaves unanswered, because secondary sources habitually fill the gaps without saying that they are gaps.

Who compiled it. No manuscript names a compiler, no contemporary source attributes it, and whether one hand assembled all five books is open.

When it was composed. The date 1641 appears in the text and the Goetia's catalogue descends from a printing of 1665, which sets a floor; the surviving copies run from the later seventeenth century into the nineteenth. Beyond that, nothing.

Where the four added spirits came from. Vassago, Seere, Dantalion and Andromalius have no antecedent anywhere that has been found.

Why the order changed. Weyer's sequence and the Goetia's share a population and almost nothing else. The best editorial suggestion available is that leaves of an ancestor manuscript were disarranged.

How the seals were derived. They are not in Weyer, they vary between manuscripts, and no rule has been found that generates the set.

What the ranks mean. They are never related to one another, and the catalogue is not ordered by them.

Whether any of the names descend from pagan deities. Bael and Baal, Astaroth and Astarte, Balam and Balaam, Caim and Cain: all argued, none demonstrated, and the texts themselves are silent.

Against that list of unknowns, the volume of confident detail in the modern literature is difficult to justify. The seventy-two are a well-preserved early modern compilation with a traceable immediate ancestor and a great many open questions behind it, and a reader is better served by holding the questions open than by adopting any of the answers on offer.