Marbas

Every spirit in the Goetia carries a rank, and the ranks are not infernal. They are the ranks of a European court and a European church, borrowed wholesale.

The list runs king, prince, duke, marquis, earl or count, president, prelate and knight. Marbas is a president. Set against a real early modern polity the fit is close but not exact: the secular titles are feudal and the presidency is administrative, the office of a man who chairs a council or a court rather than one who holds land. Prelate is ecclesiastical, and its presence in a demonic hierarchy is a small joke that would not have been lost on a seventeenth-century reader.

Each spirit also commands a number of legions, which is a Roman military unit, so the structure imagines a court, a bureaucracy, a church and an army at once. Nothing in the text ranks the ranks against one another. It is never said that a king may command a duke, or that a president outranks a knight, and the ordering of the catalogue does not follow rank at all, kings appear at positions one, nine, thirteen, twenty, thirty-two, forty-five, fifty-one, sixty-one and sixty-eight, scattered through the sequence.

The hierarchy is therefore decorative rather than operative. It tells a reader what sort of thing each spirit is imagined to be, in the only political vocabulary its compilers had, and it does no structural work in the text.

This is characteristic of the corpus generally. The Goetia does not describe an alien order. It describes a mirror of the world its compilers lived in, populated by figures who hold offices that world would have recognised, and the mirror is a good deal more informative about early modern Europe than it is about anything else.

The spirit called Marbas in the Goetia is Barbas in Weyer. The two forms sit at the same place in the same catalogue with the same offices, and a single letter has moved.

This is normal. The names in this corpus have travelled through Latin manuscript, Latin print, English translation, English reprint and English manuscript copy, and at each stage a copyist could mishear, misread or improve. Minuscule b and m are not easily confused, but they are not the only pair that has shifted: the catalogue also gives Samigina for Weyer's Gamigin, Sallos for Saleos, Cimeies for Cimeries, Haures for Flauros, Naberius for Cerberus in some readings. A reader comparing editions will find dozens of these.

One later layer deserves particular caution. The 1904 edition prepared by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and published by Aleister Crowley is the version through which almost every modern reader meets the text, and it introduces a number of alternate spellings of the spirit names that Joseph Peterson, working from the manuscripts, reports he cannot find support for in any of them. Where a modern book gives an unusual form, the question worth asking is whether it comes from a manuscript or from 1904.

None of this means the names are meaningless. It means that arguments built on the shape of a name, the derivation of Bael from Baal, of Caim from Cain, of Astaroth from Astarte, are being run on evidence that has passed through several hands, in several languages, over at least a century, with no critical apparatus at any stage. The resemblance may be original. It may also have been introduced by a copyist who thought he recognised something.