Belial

Belial is the one name in the catalogue with a continuous documentary history running back to the Hebrew Bible, and the history is not quite what the grimoire assumes.

In biblical Hebrew beliyya'al is not a personal name. It is a noun, of disputed etymology, often read as without worth, used in constructions such as sons of Belial or a man of Belial, meaning a worthless or lawless person. English versions from the Authorised Version onward transliterate rather than translate it, which is why generations of English readers have met it looking like a proper name when in the Hebrew it is not.

The personification is later and is documented. In the Dead Sea Scrolls Belial is a figure: the prince of the dominion of wickedness, opposed to the Prince of Light, commanding the spirits of his lot, in a dualism that structures the War Scroll and the Community Rule. That is the point at which an abstraction becomes an actor. 2 Corinthians asks what concord Christ has with Belial, treating the name as the opposing principle. From there the figure passes into Christian demonology and appears widely in the medieval and early modern literature.

The Goetia inherits the end of that chain. Its Belial appears as two beautiful angels in a chariot of fire, speaks in a fair voice, distributes preferments and senatorships, and requires offerings before he will answer truly. He is also, in the entry, said to have been created next after Lucifer.

The transit from a Hebrew noun to a courtly patronage broker in an English manuscript takes roughly two thousand years and passes through at least four languages. Very little of it is guesswork, which makes this entry the best-documented case in the book.

The most misreported fact about this corpus concerns the man who compiled its ancestor.

Johann Weyer was a physician, a pupil of Agrippa, and one of the most important early opponents of the witch trials. His De Praestigiis Daemonum, first published in 1563, is a sustained attack on the reasoning behind the prosecutions, in substance a rebuttal of the Malleus Maleficarum, arguing that the women being tried were deluded, melancholic or ill, that their confessions described things that had not happened, and that they should be treated rather than burned. It was a dangerous book to write and it was written at the height of the killing.

The Pseudomonarchia Daemonum was appended to the fifth edition, in 1577. It is a catalogue of demons with their ranks and offices, presented as an exhibit: this is the kind of nonsense the conjurors trade in. Weyer states that he has deliberately left material out, saying that lest anyone mildly curious should rashly imitate this proof of folly, he has omitted passages in order to render the whole work unusable.

Everything that happened afterwards ran the other way. Reginald Scot translated the catalogue into English in 1584, again to discredit it. The Lemegeton's compiler took Scot's 1665 text, restored the apparatus Weyer had withheld, added four spirits to make the count seventy-two, and produced a working book. Mathers and Crowley printed it in 1904. It is now the most widely circulated demonological list in any language.

So the founding document of Goetic practice is a sceptic's exhibit, deliberately sabotaged by its author to prevent exactly the use it was eventually put to. That is not a minor irony about the tradition. It is the tradition's central textual fact.

The literature on the seventy-two is very large and very uneven. A few habits make it navigable.

Date every claim. Ask which century a given detail comes from. Weyer is 1577. Scot's English is 1584 and the edition that matters is 1665. The Lemegeton's manuscripts run from the later seventeenth century into the nineteenth. Rudd's angel pairing is seventeenth-century. The decan, tarot and elemental correspondences are Golden Dawn, from the 1880s. The familiar pictures are Le Breton's, from 1863. These layers are routinely printed as one.

Go to the manuscripts where you can. Sloane 3825, Sloane 3648, Harley 6483 and their relatives survive in the British Library and have been edited and published. A striking proportion of confident statements in secondary sources cannot be traced back to them.

Distinguish contested from unsourced. Whether Astaroth derives from Astarte is genuinely contested and should be reported that way. Whether the Lemegeton had one compiler is genuinely open. But a claim that a spirit governs a particular hour, or answers to a particular incense, or has a documented traditional attribute, is usually not contested at all, it is simply unsourced, traceable to one twentieth-century book that has since been copied without attribution.

Treat confident specificity as a warning sign. There is a commercial market in this material, and detail sells better than uncertainty. The primary texts are far barer than the secondary ones.

Do not mistake coherence for provenance. The seventy-two make an elegant system once the angels, the decans and the tarot are laid over them. That elegance was manufactured, in stages, by people whose names are known.