Orobas

Orobas's entry says he is faithful, and that he will not suffer the operator to be tempted by any spirit. It is a striking claim to find in a catalogue of bound demons, and it is not unique.

Several entries make comparable promises. Vassago is of a good nature. Seere is good and indifferent. Marchosias answers truly. Amy and Foras and others are said to give true answers. The recurring formula he answereth truly appears throughout.

The insistence tells you what the anxiety was. In a tradition where a spirit is compelled rather than petitioned, the obvious risk is not harm but deception: an entity that appears, complies in form, and lies. Much of the ritual apparatus in the front of Book One addresses exactly that, the constraints, the repeated adjurations, the insistence on a spirit appearing in a fair shape and in the assigned place. And the catalogue's notes about truthfulness are the same worry expressed as a property of the individual spirit.

This is a real feature of the wider literature. The angel conversations recorded by John Dee and Edward Kelley in the 1580s return to it constantly, with Dee testing statements for consistency and worrying about false spirits impersonating true ones. The concern is structural to the whole enterprise and not peculiar to the Goetia.

It also has a consequence for how the catalogue reads. A list that has to keep certifying its own entries as honest is describing a practice in which honesty was not assumed. That is more revealing about the tradition than any individual attribute in the book, and it is the sort of detail that survives translation, recopying and a century of derivative publishing largely intact.

Orobas is said to answer on divinity and on the creation of the world. Astaroth discourses on the fall of the spirits. These two entries are the only places where the catalogue puts theology in a spirit's mouth, and they are worth reading together.

Both concern origins, and both concern matters on which the compiler's own church had settled positions. Asking a demon about the creation is not a neutral request for information; within a seventeenth-century Christian frame it is a request for testimony from a hostile witness about the doctrine the witness rebelled against.

There is an intellectual context for this, and it is not disreputable. The Renaissance revival of ritual magic ran through serious figures, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, who understood their work as natural philosophy and as a route to knowledge of the divine order rather than as trafficking. Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy of 1533 is the great synthesis of that programme and stands behind everything in this corpus. In that setting a spirit who explains the structure of creation is a source, and the demand is epistemological.

By the time the Lemegeton was compiled that programme had largely collapsed under Reformation and Counter-Reformation pressure, and what survived of it in the grimoires was decoupled from the philosophy that had justified it. The Goetia inherits the ambition without the argument.

Two lines about creation and the fall, in a book otherwise concerned with treasure and preferment, are what remains visible of it.