Dantalion

Dantalion is credited with reading and changing the thoughts of men, declaring the secret counsel of anyone, and showing the likeness of any person in a vision. He is the clearest instance of a small group of entries whose promises are psychological rather than material.

The group is worth isolating. Alongside Dantalion: several spirits stir up love or hatred between named people; one makes men insensible; one makes men witty; several give the favour of friends and of foes; several sow discord. Set against the treasure, the preferments and the liberal sciences, this is a distinct category of offer, influence over other people's inner states.

The interest is not that the Goetia contains such promises but that it states them so flatly. Early modern legal and ecclesiastical records are full of accusations of exactly this: love magic, the manipulation of affection, the procuring of a marriage, the breaking of one. These were among the commonest allegations brought against cunning folk and among the commonest reasons ordinary people consulted them. The catalogue reads, in this respect, like a price list for services that demonstrably had a market.

Dantalion is also one of the four spirits with no antecedent in Weyer, appearing for the first time in the Lemegeton. So whoever supplied him supplied, along with the name, a set of offices that are among the most socially specific in the book.

That is a small argument against the possibility that the added four are arbitrary filler. Filler tends to be generic. This entry is not: it is detailed, distinctive, and answers to a documented demand.

Dantalion is described holding a book, and showing many faces of men and women. The book is a small detail with a long background.

Books appear repeatedly in this iconography. The spirit who teaches holds one; the seal itself is a written character; the operator works from a manuscript; the whole tradition is a literate one and knows it. Ritual magic of this kind was never a folk practice. It required Latin, or at least an English translation of Latin, access to expensive manuscripts, the leisure to copy them, and enough education to follow instructions built on astronomical timing and on a technical vocabulary inherited from Agrippa. The people who could do this were clergy, physicians, lawyers, scholars and gentlemen.

This is one of the sharper distinctions in the historiography of European magic, and it is often blurred. Learned ritual magic, grimoires, conjuration, Solomonic material, and the popular witchcraft prosecuted in the trials were different practices, carried on by different classes of people, drawing on different sources. Weyer and Scot both understood the difference and used it: their argument was in part that the illiterate women being burned could not possibly be doing what the learned conjurors claimed to do, and that the conjurors were frauds.

The figure holding a book, then, is a fair emblem for the whole corpus. The Goetia is a text about texts, transmitted by copyists, addressed to readers, and preoccupied with knowledge that was formally taught and formally restricted. Its promises are the promises of a library, offered to people who had noticed how much libraries cost.