Earl

Earl is one of the ranks assigned to the spirits catalogued in the grimoire tradition, and above all in the Ars Goetia, the first book of the seventeenth-century Lesser Key of Solomon (Lemegeton). It denotes a rank sometimes given with the alternative title Count, standing among the middle nobility of the hierarchy.

The ranks of the spirits

The Goetia lists seventy-two spirits and gives most of them a rank, King, Prince, Duke, Marquis, Earl or Count, President, or Knight, borrowed from the feudal and civil offices of the human world, together with the number of legions each is said to command. The scheme draws on earlier sources, notably the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum printed by Johann Weyer in 1577.

The rank is described here as a feature of these documented magical texts, studied as historical literature; the spirits so ranked are not reified.

Earl is the odd one out among the Goetia's titles in a specific linguistic way: it descends from Old English and Old Norse eorl, a native Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian rank of nobility, where every other title in the catalogue, Duke, Marquis, Prince, comes into English through French. After the Norman Conquest, the incoming French nobility used comte, "count," for the equivalent continental rank, and English retained earl for the man while nonetheless adopting the French-derived countess for his wife, since no native feminine form existed, a mismatch that survives in English today and explains why the catalogue itself gives the rank as "Earl, or Count.

Sources Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (The Lesser Key of Solomon)Anonymous (unidentified compiler) with Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

Only five of the seventy-two are ranked Earl in this collection: Furfur, Halphas, Raum, Bifrons and Andromalius, commanding 124 legions between them. That is the smallest rank apart from the solitary Knight, and it contains the smallest command in the whole catalogue, the six legions given to Bifrons.

The small number is an artefact of how the rank is used, and the artefact is worth stating plainly because it affects any count anyone makes from this data. In the Ars Goetia, Earl is more often a spirit's second title than its first. Vine is a King and an Earl. Murmur is a Duke and an Earl. Ronove is a Marquis and a Great Earl. Botis and Glasya-Labolas are each a President and an Earl. Marax is given as an Earl and a President, and Ipos as an Earl and a Prince.

This collection assigns one rank to each spirit, which is what a single column can hold, and files compound titles under the first of the pair. The five Earls listed here are therefore the spirits for which Earl stands alone. Counted the other way, by every spirit to whom the text gives the title at any position, the rank would be roughly twice the size.

Why Earl in particular should behave this way is not obvious from the text. It may be no more than that comes and its vernacular equivalents were the most elastic of the borrowed titles, general enough to be added to a spirit already described as something else without contradicting it.