Seere

One spirit in Weyer's catalogue is absent from the Goetia, and almost nobody has heard of him.

Pruflas, also given as Bufas, stands at number four in the Pseudomonarchia. He is described as a great prince and duke whose seat is around the Tower of Babylon, and twenty-six legions are under him. He is the only spirit on Weyer's list that does not appear in the Lemegeton.

His absence is the other half of the arithmetic that produced the seventy-two. Weyer has sixty-nine. Remove Pruflas and sixty-eight carry over. Add Vassago, Seere, Dantalion and Andromalius and the total is seventy-two. Without the deletion the sum does not work, so the compiler was not simply padding a short list; he was editing it to a target.

Why Pruflas in particular was dropped is not recorded. It may be that a manuscript in the chain lacked the entry. It may be that the compiler had a reason. There is a further complication in the transmission: Reginald Scot's English version, which is the demonstrated ancestor of the Goetia's text, omits the Pruflas entry, so the deletion may have happened one step earlier and not been the Lemegeton compiler's decision at all.

That is a genuinely satisfying detail, because it converts a mystery into a mechanism. If Scot dropped Pruflas, then the Goetia's compiler inherited a sixty-eight-name English list, needed seventy-two, and supplied four. The gap he was filling was one his own source had partly created.

The evidence is good but not complete, and the honest form of the claim is that this is the most economical account of the arithmetic, not a documented decision.

Seere is described as of a good and indifferent nature, which in the language of the period means neutral rather than uninterested. The vocabulary is worth unpacking, because the Lemegeton uses it across all five of its books and does not use it consistently.

Book One is headed as a book of evil spirits. Book Two, the Theurgia Goetia, is explicitly described as treating spirits partly good and partly evil. Book Four's spirits are approached as beneficent. Book Five is a collection of prayers. So the compilation as a whole spans a spectrum, and the boundary between the theurgic and the goetic, between working with elevated intelligences and compelling base ones, is one the collection asserts and then repeatedly crosses.

That boundary was contested at the time and had been for centuries. Ficino and Pico had argued for a natural and celestial magic distinct from demonic conjuring. Agrippa organised his three books along exactly that ascent, from natural to celestial to ceremonial. Trithemius wrote in cipher partly because the distinction was not one his readers could be trusted to observe. The whole Renaissance defence of magic depended on the line holding, and the grimoire tradition that followed is largely a record of it not holding.

Seere's entry, sitting inside a book of evil spirits and describing a benign figure on a winged horse who fetches things quickly, is a small piece of evidence about where the line actually fell in practice. The taxonomy in the headings is theological. The taxonomy in the entries is functional. They do not match, and the mismatch is not an error to be corrected but a fact about the material.