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Sacred Correspondences
Goetic Demons

Paimon

PY-mon
Kings

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Origin 1577

Paimon is the 9th spirit of the Ars Goetia, the first book of the Lesser Key of Solomon (Lemegeton), one of the seventy-two spirits sealed and bound by King Solomon into a vessel of brass. It is ranked as a King and commands 200 legions of spirits. It appears as a man crowned upon a dromedary, going before him a host of musicians; most obedient to Lucifer, it teaches all arts and sciences and secret things, gives worthy dignities and good familiars, and can bind men to the magician's will. Studied here academically as a shadow entry, it is paired in the arrangement of Thomas Rudd with an opposing angel of the Shem ha-Mephorash: the demon of a given degree is set against, and held in check by, the Shem angel of that same degree, here Haziel.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1577 1Tradition: Weyer, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1577)
Origin Period
1584 2Tradition: Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584)
Origin Period
1904 to 2000 3Tradition: The grimoire tradition
Origin PeriodSourced to the subject's own account
Manuscripts run 1641 to 1712; text cannot predate 1665 4Tradition: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis
Origin PeriodSourced to the subject's own account
Mid-seventeenth century composition 4Tradition: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis
Place of Origin
Scot's rendering and every Lemegeton manuscript are English 3
Place of Origin
Weyer's catalogue printed on the Continent in Latin 3
Attributed Author / Compiler
Johann Weyer (1515-1588), Dutch physician to the Duke of Cleves 5
Attributed Author / CompilerSourced to the subject's own account
No compiler named in any Lemegeton manuscript 4
Attributed Author / Compiler
Printed the ancestor catalogue in 1577 against the witch prosecutions 5
Attributed Author / CompilerSourced to the subject's own account
Solomon ascription is an inherited frame, not a manuscript claim 4
Language
Latin 1
LanguageSourced to the subject's own account
English 4
Rival Systems
A Rival System's AttributionSourced to the subject's own account
That Harley 6482 pairing is associated with Thomas Rudd 4Tradition: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis
A Rival System's AttributionSourced to the subject's own account
The angel pairing by matching number belongs to the Harley 6482 tradition 4Tradition: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis
A Rival System's AttributionSourced to the subject's own account
The Ars Goetia itself assigns no angel to any of the seventy-two spirits 4Tradition: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis
Status
Standing as a Comparative CategorySourced to the subject's own account
A modern system making claims scholarship never entertained; it never held scholarly standing 4
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Now read and reprinted as a manual, inverting its original purpose 5
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Weyer compiled it to argue the accused were deluded, not guilty 5
Learn More
Two Hundred Legions: What the Numbers Count

Every entry in the Goetia gives a legion count, and Paimon's two hundred is the largest in the book. The figures are worth taking seriously as data about the text, if not as data about anything else.

They cluster tightly. Most spirits command twenty-six, twenty-nine, thirty or thirty-six legions, and those four values alone account for well over half the catalogue. The outliers are few: Bifrons has six, Valefor ten, Purson twenty-two, Belial eighty, Beleth eighty-five, Paimon two hundred. Asmoday commands seventy-two, which is the number of the catalogue itself and is unlikely to be accidental.

The counts do not track rank. Purson is a king with twenty-two legions; Sabnock is a marquis with fifty. They do not track position in the list. They do not add to any round total. And a legion, in the Roman sense the word carries here, is several thousand men, so the arithmetic implied by the catalogue as a whole runs to millions, which is roughly what Weyer's brazen-vessel passage claims when it speaks of above a thousand thousand legions.

What the numbers most resemble is the population figures in a chronicle: circumstantial detail supplied to make a list feel like a survey rather than an invention. The repetition of the same handful of values across dozens of entries suggests they were filled in by pattern rather than derived from anything.

That Paimon holds the maximum, and that the entry describes him as most obedient to Lucifer with a host of musicians going before him, places him near the top of whatever order the text is imagining. The text never draws the order out. It supplies the pieces from which a reader might assemble one, and leaves them unassembled.

Superiors the Catalogue Names but Does Not Organise

The Goetia mentions figures who stand above its seventy-two without ever placing them in a structure. Paimon's entry is the clearest case: he is said to be most obedient to Lucifer, a name that appears nowhere in the catalogue as an entry of its own.

Other superiors surface in the same glancing way. Amaymon is named in the surrounding apparatus as a power associated with a quarter of the world, and one or two entries note that a given spirit is under his authority or must be invoked in a particular relation to him. Weyer's brazen-vessel passage names Bileth, Beliall and Asmoday as chief among the seventy-two kings. The Lemegeton's Book Two, the Theurgia Goetia, has an entirely separate hierarchy of aerial princes with their own subordinates.

None of these fit together. Lucifer is not one of the seventy-two. Amaymon is not one of the seventy-two. The three chiefs named by Weyer are, but they are not the first three in either list, and nothing in the Goetia's own text sets them above their fellows. The Book Two hierarchy shares no names with Book One at all.

The reasonable reading is that the Lemegeton is a compilation of materials that were never reconciled, which is what the manuscript evidence independently suggests. Peterson describes the whole work as drawn from earlier printed sources and manuscripts and integrated rather than composed, and the loose ends in the demonology are exactly what that process would produce.

Modern accounts often supply the missing structure, a chain of command from Lucifer down through the four directional kings to the seventy-two. That structure is a later reconstruction. It is coherent, it is popular, and it is not in the text.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Attested In

Catalogued with its rank, office and seal in the first book of the Lemegeton.

Derived From

The Ars Goetia's seventy two spirit catalog draws on Weyer's sixty nine, close to seventy recognizable one for one, with the source's critical framing removed.

Source Pseudomonarchia DaemonumJohann Weyer

Originates in Language

Latin, Languages
Source Pseudomonarchia DaemonumJohann Weyer
Source Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (The Lesser Key of Solomon)Anonymous (unidentified compiler)
Sources
1. Pseudomonarchia Daemonum
Johann Weyer, Officina Oporiniana, 1577Entry for Belial
Quote, Entry for Belial
Weyer names Bileth, Beliall and Asmoday as chief among the seventy-two kings, an ordering the Goetia does not preserve.
View the Source
2. The Discoverie of Witchcraft
Reginald Scot, Elliot Stock, 1584the English rendering of Weyer's catalogue; the Goetia's text descends from the enlarged edition of 1665, not from this oneView the Source
3. Grimoires: A History of Magic Books
Owen Davies, Oxford University Press, 2009chs. on the early modern grimoire and its English manuscript traditionView the Source
4. Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (The Lesser Key of Solomon)
Anonymous (unidentified compiler)Book I, Goetia, entry 9
Quote, Book I, Goetia, entry 9
Paimon commands two hundred legions, the largest count in the catalogue, and is said to be most obedient unto Lucifer.
View the Source
5. De Praestigiis Daemonum
Johann Weyer, Johannes Oporinus, 1563the argument of De Praestigiis Daemonum against the reasoning of the prosecutionsView the Source

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