The 72 Spirits of Goetia

The Ars Goetia is the most structurally complete entity catalogue in Western grimoire literature, and almost nothing about how it is used matches what it is. It presents seventy-two spirits arranged in three ranks, further grouped into families of two, three, or four, each with a stated office, a visible form, and a specific set of powers. That organisation is genuinely useful. The problem is that the version most people meet arrived through film, music, and games, where the administrative and disciplinary context of the source was stripped away and replaced with a torturer's roster. This article reads the catalogue as a document: where the material came from, what rank and family mean, how to use an entry without smuggling the film version in with it, and where the honest objections sit.

Three ranks, and why the rank order matters

The catalogue divides into nine Presidents, thirty-six Dukes, and thirty Kings, thirty in total at the top of the hierarchy with the two lower ranks beneath them. The order runs from the most powerful office to the least, and the count of thirty Kings is where the numbering confusion in modern sources comes from: people see thirty, count to seventy-two, and conclude the list is misprinted when the arithmetic was always correct.

Rank is not a difficulty rating. A President is not a harder working than a King, it is a broader office with more jurisdiction. The practical consequence is that a spirit's rank tells you the scale of what it is described as governing, which is useful when you want something that operates on a large or structural level and unhelpful when you want something narrow.

Families of two, three, and four

Grouped by office, the seventy-two fall into thirty-nine families, sized two, three, or four. Members of a family share a thematic territory, and they share it loosely, which is why families are more useful as a starting point for selection than the individual entries are. If you want something in the territory of contracts and agreements, you browse the family and then read the three entries to see which office actually fits.

Family membership also explains a lot of apparent arbitrariness in the catalogue. Two spirits can share a family and have almost non-overlapping powers, because family membership was assigned on office and circumstance rather than on a single axis. Reading the family first and the individual second produces fewer mismatches than the reverse order, and it is the order most experienced practitioners recommend.

The lineage underneath the catalogue

Its sources are Jewish and Christian demonological texts, and the Pseudepigrapha Book of Enoch in particular supplies a tribunal of fallen angels together with the duties assigned to them. That list is the ancestor of the seventy-two: names that do not correspond to Enoch's seventy, offices assigned to supernatural functionaries, and a taxonomy of powers that read like an administrative brief rather than a horror list. The path runs forward through early modern compilation, including the seventeenth-century Conjuratio Ben-Maimon and the ritual of Lemuria.

None of that means the catalogue is a transcription of a real list. It means it is a late, composite document that repackages older material into a form usable by conjurers. It also means the seventy-two as a numbered set is an early modern invention, and the search for a missing ancient source of exactly seventy names is a search for something that probably never existed in that shape.

What a President, a Duke, and a King claims

Read the rank as a statement about jurisdiction. Presidents are described with the widest authority, including the power to grant what they are asked for within their domain and to operate across the boundaries of the other ranks. Dukes are given narrower but very specific powers, often in the territory of discovery, information, or transformation. Kings are given offices that a conjurer would find directly useful, and the catalogue is frank about it, listing them as good at teaching, bestowing, and concealing.

The honest reading is that rank tracks how much authority the text gives the spirit, not how dangerous it is. These are functionaries in a fictional bureaucracy, and the catalogue's own logic is closer to an org chart than a bestiary. Reading it as an org chart makes it far easier to use, because you can then ask the useful operational question: what does this office do, and is that the job I need done?

Reading an entry without importing the film version

A catalogue entry gives you four things and nothing else: the spirit's name, its rank and family, a description of its visible form, and a list of things it can do. That is a thin record by modern expectations, and the temptation is to fill the gaps with material from elsewhere. Every element you import from pop culture makes the entry harder to use, because the imported material is not addressing the same problem the entry addresses.

A useful discipline is to write the four fields on paper and stop there. If the entry says it can be seen as the form of a cat, work with a cat. If it says it teaches freely, ask what you would want to be taught. Reading for what is written rather than what has been said about it is the single change that turns the catalogue from trivia into a working document, and it takes about ten minutes per spirit.

Malphas and Flauros, a clean worked contrast

Two Kings make the point well. Malphas is described as a prescriber of medicines and giver of general knowledge, appearing as a crow, and also as a man holding a sceptre or a firebrand. Flauros, listed under the older name Furfur, is described as a prince of the dukes' order who appears as a man or a monkey, speaks with a hoarse voice, and duels with fire. Neither description includes anything menacing, and both give you a specific, usable competence.

Set side by side they show why the film version collapses the text. A crow that dispenses knowledge and a monkey that fights with fire are not frightening in themselves, and the difference between them is a difference of function. If you wanted a working about learning or a working about conflict, the entries point straight at the thing. If you wanted a horror prop, the entries would be the wrong place to look and you would find nothing to work with at all.

The Goetia as a legal and disciplinary text

Many of the offices described are administrative. Spirits are given duties over contracts, the recording of actions, disputes between people, the movement of souls through particular states, and the enforcement of bargains. They are, in other words, functionaries in a system that governs obligation. Read that way, the catalogue's preoccupation with making and keeping agreements becomes a coherent worldview rather than a collection of arbitrary powers.

This is the reading the source most supports and the one modern use most often abandons. Spirits who enforce contracts, who record, who testify, who arbitrate, are doing things a practitioner might actually want done in their own life. The torturer framing replaces that with something the text never claimed, and in doing so it removes the parts that were usable.

How the catalogue became a brand

Goetia as a cultural product is a twenty-first-century phenomenon layered over early modern material. Music, illustration, tabletop role-playing, and film each took the seventy-two names and attached a visual and tonal identity that the catalogue does not contain. Once a name has an album cover and a recognisable silhouette, the original entry becomes decorative and the invented persona takes over.

This is worth naming because it affects how much material you will encounter and how little of it is usable. Searching for a spirit's identity online returns mostly art and lore written by people with no particular stake in the text. The catalogue itself is short, public domain, and takes an hour to read end to end. Anyone willing to spend that hour is working from better material than almost anything found by browsing.

Using a family as the unit of selection

Start from the family, read the entries, and pick the one whose stated office matches what you want. This is slower than searching for the spirit that grants money and it produces working relationships that survive contact with reality, because you will have chosen based on the description rather than on reputation. Reputation in this catalogue is mostly a record of how well each spirit has been depicted.

It also keeps the scale honest. A spirit whose listed office is small and specific will usually produce a smaller and more reliable result than one described as governing something vast. Most disappointing workings in this material are attempts to extract something structural from a spirit the text describes as having a narrow office, and the disappointment is a category error rather than a failure of the spirit.

What a working with a listed spirit amounts to

Formally, a working amounts to describing the office you want exercised, attuning to the entity, making the request explicit, and recording what you asked for and what you then observed. That sequence works whether you hold the entity to exist independently, as an aspect of your own mind, or as a useful descriptive fiction, and the fact that it works under all three framings is itself the strongest practical argument against insisting on one.

Peter Carroll's position, that entities are best treated as aspects of the magician's own mind, has the useful side effect of dissolving most of the risk without requiring anyone to become sceptical. Nothing you attribute to the spirit can then act on you independently, because there is no independent party to act. Practitioners who work this way are not thereby proving the catalogue is fiction, and nobody who reads the catalogue seriously needs them to.

The counterargument about role-play at scale

The strongest criticism of contemporary Goetia practice is that it is large-scale role-play with a strong prior on success. People select a spirit for a desired outcome, describe it as a personality that would grant the outcome, and then report the grant. No test is available that would distinguish this from a genuine result, and the practitioner has no incentive to build one.

That criticism lands. The remedy is not to abandon the catalogue but to impose measurement: write the request down beforehand, fix a date to check, decide in advance what result would count as partial, and record the outcome whatever it is. A practice with a written request and a fixed review date is no longer unfalsifiable, and it is also no longer much fun, which is the actual tension practitioners are negotiating when they resist the discipline.

A sensible way in

Read the catalogue rather than the adaptations, which takes an hour and changes everything that follows. Pick a family that matches a real, small problem. Write the request in one sentence. Do the working, note the date. Come back on a fixed day and write down what happened, including nothing. Repeat with the same spirit three or four times before drawing any conclusion, since single workings tell you almost nothing about whether anything is operating.

Keep the framing modest and the record exact. There is no evidence that any of these seventy-two has ever harmed anyone, and the realistic risk in this material is interpretive rather than supernatural, arising from the practitioner building a private mythology elaborate enough to make ordinary setbacks feel meaningful. The catalogue is a good document, the workings are workable, and the discipline that keeps them honest is a written record kept before you know the outcome.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many spirits are in the Ars Goetia?

The number is seventy-two, and they divide three ways: nine Presidents, thirty-six Dukes, thirty Kings. The thirty Kings are the top of the hierarchy, so the numbering runs from thirty downward rather than ascending from one. That ordering is the usual source of confusion when people count the ranks and conclude the list is short.

What is the difference between a President, a Duke and a King?

Rank tracks the breadth of the office the text assigns, not the difficulty of a working. Presidents have the widest authority and cross-rank jurisdiction, Dukes have narrower and more specific competences, and Kings are given offices a conjurer finds directly useful, such as teaching or bestowing. Choosing by office rather than by power is what makes the catalogue usable.

Are the 72 demons of Goetia historically real?

There is no evidence for seventy-two distinct beings, and the source material points the other way. The catalogue descends from Jewish and Christian demonological texts, especially the Pseudepigrapha Book of Enoch, compiled into its numbered early modern form. It is a real historical document that repackages older material, not a record of seventy-two actual entities.

How do Goetia spirit families work?

The seventy-two are grouped by office into thirty-nine families of two, three, or four members that share a thematic territory. Family membership was assigned on office and circumstance rather than on one single axis, so members of a family can have noticeably different powers. Browsing the family first and reading entries second produces far fewer mismatched workings.

Is it safe to work with a Goetic spirit?

No evidence links any of the seventy-two to harm, and the realistic risk is interpretive. The danger is the practitioner building an elaborate private mythology in which the spirit takes on demands and grievances, which makes ordinary setbacks feel significant and hard to dismiss. A written request, a fixed review date, and modest framing remove most of that.