Knight

Knight 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 the lowest of the ranks named, held in the Goetia by a single spirit, Furcas.

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.

Knight differs from the catalogue's other ranks in one further way: in the medieval and early modern European system the word described, it was not, strictly, a title of the peerage at all but a personal military rank and honour, conferred individually rather than inherited, standing below Duke, Marquis, Earl and even Baron in most formal precedence. Furcas, the sole spirit given this rank in the Goetia, is described in the text as an old man with a long beard riding a pale horse and carrying a sharp weapon, credited with teaching logic, rhetoric, astrology and related sciences, a scholarly rather than martial portrait despite the military title attached to him.

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

The rank of Knight has exactly one holder in the whole catalogue. Furcas, the fiftieth spirit, commands twenty legions and is the only spirit of the seventy-two to whom the Ars Goetia gives the title.

A category with one member in a working taxonomy is nearly always a sign of something. Either it is a residue, a class inherited from an older source that the compiler kept without needing, or it is a deliberate outlier put in to mark the bottom of a scale. Both readings are available here and neither can be confirmed from the text, but the structure gives a hint. The other six ranks descend in an orderly way, and the rung below Earl in a human peerage is not knight at all: knighthood is a personal dignity rather than a peerage rank, and it sits outside the ladder rather than beneath it. Reaching for it once and never again is what a compiler does when the borrowed ladder has run out and one more entry still needs placing.

Furcas himself is not a small figure. He is described as appearing in the form of a cruel old man with a long beard, riding a pale horse and carrying a sharp weapon, and he is credited with teaching philosophy, astronomy, rhetoric, logic, chiromancy and pyromancy. That is a longer list of subjects than most of the Presidents are given, and it sits oddly beneath a rank that ought to be the humblest in the book.

Rank and function, once again, do not predict each other in this catalogue.

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