BUNE, Executor of Intentions: A Clause-by-Clause Reference

The Bune entry in the Ars Goetia runs to about eighty words and every clause of it is a warning. He is an executor of the intentions of other people. He is a very good liar. He is not to be called except in time of need, and then only with a sacrifice already paid. Read for wealth, as most of the circulating material does, the entry loses all of that. Read as it is written, it describes something much narrower and considerably more useful: a mechanism for collecting what is already owed to you, and a sharp set of limits on who can be made to owe it.

The entry, in full and in order

BUNE is listed as a duke. He is described as having three heads, six eyes and four arms, as a most terrible and infernal spirit, and as belonging to the order of the angels. He appears as a great cat, or as a cat with a man's face, or as a man with a cat's face. He is called the executor of the intentions of others, and he is wonderful in the art of necromancy. He is a liar, a very good liar, and most expert in deceiving. He is not to be called or invoked unless it be in time of need, and then he is to be appeased with sacrifices. He is described in closing as a great and mighty prince.

The sequence matters more than the individual clauses. Description, domain, method, reliability, condition of use, price. That is a functioning service specification, and reading it in that order is the whole of this article. The numbering of the Goetia has shifted between editions, so identify him by description rather than position, and note the diagnostic tell: he has no assigned earthly territory and no named material powers beyond necromancy, which distinguishes him from the spirits who are actually given a field to operate in.

Executor, not provider

The single most consequential phrase in the entry is the fourth one, and almost every circulating version of this pact discards it. Bune executes the intentions of others. He is an agent, not a source. An agent requires a principal, a stated intention, and a defined act, and if any of the three is missing he has nothing to work on.

This is why the phrase 'BUNE made me rich' is a category error rather than a lucky result. An executor can enforce a claim. An executor cannot manufacture one. If you go to Bune with the intention of having money, he has no intention of his own to execute and no principal to enforce anything against, and whatever happens next is happening for reasons that have nothing to do with him. If you go to him with a specific sum that is owed to you by a named party, you have handed him a job with a completion condition, and that is a different kind of request entirely.

Necromancy, read literally, gives him a real domain

The art of necromancy is the reanimation of what is dead. Taken at face value, that is the most useful thing in the entry, because it defines a narrow and testable area of operation: things that have stopped and are not coming back on their own.

Three categories fit. Dead debts are receivables that have gone past the point where ordinary chasing works, including accounts written off, invoices with no response, and small sums where the cost of collection exceeds the sum. Dead leads are people who were interested once and then went silent, which is the most common genuine problem in the trades that this audience works in. Dead property is finished work: an app, a book, a grimoire, a course, a channel, anything that is built and complete and is not moving.

What does not fit is new wealth. A new customer who has never heard of you has nothing to resurrect. A larger income has nothing to resurrect. A salary increase is a negotiation with a person, and the entity with the documented lie-detection ability is the wrong instrument for a negotiation. The necromancy clause is the boundary of this spirit's stated competence, and the honest readings all sit inside it.

The cat form is a description of transference

He appears as a great cat, as a cat with a man's face, or as a man with a cat's face. Three forms, and in each of them the presence is neither fully what it appears nor fully who it is. That is not a detail of demonic iconography. It is the same structure that makes sigilisation work, and the same structure that makes any anonymous ritual work: the operative is stripped of the audience and of a stable identity at the moment of the act.

The practical consequence for a pact is that the transference has to be set up deliberately rather than left to the imagery. The person making the request gives up a claim to being the one who collects. The collection is attributed to something that is not the person and can therefore act without the social friction that a person faces when they pursue money they are owed. If you want that effect, the working has to be arranged so the action is genuinely not yours, and the commonest way to arrange it is not a ritual at all: it is to have a third party send the demand.

The liar clause is the most dangerous line in the entry

He is a liar, a very good liar, and most expert in deceiving. This is not the entry being coy about moral character. It is a specific warning about the reliability of the feedback you will get, and it is the clause that predicts the most common way these pacts fail in practice.

A pact with a strong enforcement mechanism produces a strong sense that something is happening, and the sense of activity is easy to mistake for a result. Write the failure condition before you start, in a form that can be marked true or false, and treat anything that arrives as a feeling as not evidence. The specific trap is that the first favourable coincidence will be read as confirmation, and it will be the first coincidence whether it came from the working or from the ordinary churn of a life. The liar clause says assume your own interpretation is the thing being deceived, because it usually is.

Need-only is a scheduling instruction

He is not to be called or invoked unless it be in time of need. A standing monthly working with Bune inverts the condition the entry sets. If you call him when nothing is genuinely pending, there is no need, so there is no defined intention for an executor to act on, so the working produces a charge with no job attached to it. Worse, it trains the habit: a charge that is repeated on a calendar becomes a routine, and a routine is exactly what a need-triggered working must not be.

The workable structure is dormant by default. Set the trigger, write it down, and do not touch the working again until the condition is met. A real trigger has three parts: a named party, a specific amount, and a date past which the ordinary route has demonstrably failed. When those three are true, the working starts and runs to a fixed completion. The review date is written in advance, and the conclusion on that date is pre-committed, because the whole value of a trigger is that you decided what happens while you were not in it.

What a sacrifice has to be

He is to be appeased with sacrifices. The classical reading is that the sacrifice enacts willingness to lose, which is why offerings in this tradition are frequently things of value rather than things of sentiment. The modern equivalent is a cost that has already been incurred, is not recoverable, and was not required by anyone else.

The failure here is substitution, and it is easy to spot once you have the definition. A candle, a drop of blood, an incantation, a sigil drawn and destroyed, an app subscription that costs nothing to give up: these are markers, and a marker tells the working that a cost exists without incurring one. The sacrifice that works is the one you were not going to do anyway, paid before the working rather than after, and specified in enough detail that a stranger could verify it happened. The entry says appeased, not impressed, which is a different transaction and a cheaper one.

Order of the angels, and what that classification rules out

He is of the order of the angels. That is unusual in a list otherwise composed largely of destructive and transactional spirits, and it is worth taking at face value rather than reading as a decorative rank. It means his operation is not territorial. He does not hold a domain, a province, a court, or an element. He is not the spirit of a subject area, and he will not supply understanding of one.

The practical reading is that Bune is a function rather than a department. He is invoked for one job, at one time, and then he is finished with. This is the most disciplined of all the Goetic relationships available: there is no ongoing relationship to cultivate, no current to follow, no tradition of study beyond the entry itself. Anyone building a long practice around Bune is building a structure the entry does not support, and the structure will be held up by the practitioner rather than by the working.

The pact that follows from the entry

Six components, and the entry supplies four of them. Principal: you, named, with the claim that is actually yours. Executor: Bune, identified by description rather than number. Object: one sum, one debtor, one date, drawn from the necromancy domain. Condition: the need-trigger, stated as the failure of the ordinary route, not as a wish. Sacrifice: a real, pre-paid, non-recoverable cost. Dissolution: what ends the working, written before it starts.

The two components the entry does not supply are the interesting ones, and both are yours to write. First, the ordinary route you have already tried, and its documented failure. An executor needs to know the job is not already being done, and the evidence for that is a record, not an intention. Second, the completion condition, which should be the arrival of the money and nothing else, since any softer definition gives you room to reinterpret and the liar clause will find it.

Three failure modes, ranked by how often they happen

The missing principal is first. You ask for wealth, he has nothing to execute, and whatever occurs is attributed to him anyway. The second is the sacrifice substitution, which produces a working that is cheap for you and therefore not paid for, so it carries no commitment and no consequence. The third is scope creep, where Bune quietly becomes a general provider and your behaviour stays exactly as it was, which is the version that looks most like success over a year and produces nothing.

Each has a check that can be run before you start rather than after. For the principal: name the debtor. For the sacrifice: ask whether the cost is recoverable and whether you would have paid it anyway. For scope creep: list every action in the plan, and if more than about two of them are things other people have to do, the object is not in the necromancy domain and the working will not resolve. Bune is strong on enforcement and useless at origination, and most of the disappointment with these pacts comes from asking him for the second thing.

How this relates to the other money spirits

Worth saying plainly, because the four names get blended together. Mammon is the spirit of usury, and a pact with him is about lending, interest and debt as a system, not about collecting a receivable. Clauneck is a spirit of arts, sciences and discovery, which is why the wealth rituals attached to him are cultural adoption rather than doctrine. BUNE is the enforcer, and the enforcer is the only one of the three whose entry describes a mechanism with a completion condition.

The practical consequence is that BUNE's domain is the narrowest and the most winnable. You are not asking for a market, you are asking for a specific thing that is currently stuck. The trade is that you give up the fantasy of an unbounded source, and in exchange you get a working with a real finish line, which is a considerably better arrangement than most money workings in this tradition manage.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is BUNE in the Ars Goetia?

A duke, described with three heads, six eyes and four arms, of the order of the angels, appearing as a great cat, a cat with a man's face, or a man with a cat's face. He is the executor of the intentions of others, excellent at necromancy, a very good liar, not to be called except in time of need, and then to be appeased with sacrifices. He holds no earthly territory.

Can BUNE be used to get rich?

The entry does not support that reading. He executes the intentions of other people, so he is an enforcer of a claim rather than a source of wealth, and he has no clause about income, market or customers. Where his documented ability does apply is necromancy, which in plain terms means reanimating what is dead, and that maps onto written-off debts, cold leads and finished work that is not moving.

What does 'executor of the intentions of others' actually mean for a pact?

That the working requires a principal, a stated intention and a defined act, and that if any of the three is missing he has no job. In practice it means naming the debtor, the sum and the date, and demonstrating that the ordinary route has already failed. An intention of the form 'I would like more money' is not an intention he can execute.

Why does the entry call BUNE a liar, and what should I do about it?

Because the risk is that you will read your own feelings as confirmation. Write a completion condition in advance that can be marked true or false, and treat a favourable coincidence or a sense of activity as not evidence. The clause predicts that the first convenient sign will be taken as the result, and the only reliable defence is having decided in advance what counts.

What counts as a sacrifice for a spirit invoked only in time of need?

Something already incurred, not recoverable, and not something you were going to do anyway. The entry says appeased rather than impressed, so the transaction is about demonstrating willingness to lose, not about impressing the spirit. Markers such as candles or drawn sigils register a cost without paying one and will not carry a working that has a real claim attached to it.