Demonic · Goetic Spirit · c. 400 BCE
Bael
Also called Baël, Baal
First of the seventy-two and, by the Goetia's own account, chief among them — a three-headed thing on spider's legs, ruling in the east and granting invisibility. The name is the Canaanite storm god Baal, three thousand years and one demotion later.
Well sourced
Form. Three heads — a toad, a man and a cat — on spider's legs; speaks hoarsely.
Offices. Makes the operator go invisible. First and chief spirit, ruling in the East.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
None of his own. Baal-Hadad, the storm god the name is taken from, had Ugarit, Sidon, Tyre and the high place on Carmel — and Baal-zebub had Ekron. The Goetia keeps the name and none of the geography.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon · c. 900–100 BCE
- Named there as
- Baal
- Rank
- King
- Order
- Goetic Spirit
- Base of operations
- None of his own. Baal-Hadad, the storm god the name is taken from, had Ugarit, Sidon, Tyre and the high place on Carmel — and Baal-zebub had Ekron. The Goetia keeps the name and none of the geography.
- Era
- c. 400 BCE
- Traditions
- Solomonic, Folk & Demonological
- Placed in
- Ranks of the Seventy-Two
Traits
- Traditional form
- Three heads — a toad, a man and a cat — on spider's legs; speaks hoarsely.
- Goetic rank
- King
Stats
Known connections
Identified with
2 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 2 offices attributed to Bael, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- martial1
- transformation1
One plate
Does it have a seal?
This is the engraved shape from the 1904 Mathers and Crowley printing of the Ars Goetia, which is long out of copyright. It is not a manuscript drawing: the Lemegeton witnesses — Sloane 2731, Sloane 3648, Harley 6483 — carry hand-drawn seals that differ in line and sometimes in detail, and none of those are held here. The seals also arrive some seventy years after the list of spirits itself, so a seal is evidence about the printed tradition rather than about the figure.
It is reproduced as an object of study. What the text says such a seal was for is described in the sources below; this site does not carry the procedure for using one.
S. L. MacGregor Mathers & Aleister Crowley (1904 edition) · Public domain · 01-bael-sigilo-ars-goetia.svg
1 mark
Which marks is it attached to?
A mark a figure carries and a mark used against a figure are opposite claims, so each link says which it is.
4 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 4 texts that names Bael, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
4 texts spanning roughly 2,304 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as Baal, Baël, Bael
- Rank: given as Foreign god; King; First king of the infernal court; The King
The Canaanite storm god, whose title 'lord' survives here as a personal name three thousand years later.
Weyer lists this spirit 1th of his sixty-nine, with substantially the same offices. His order is not the Goetia's — the two texts arrange the same spirits quite differently.
Given command of the eastern regions of hell.
“Baël, démon cité dans le Grand Grimoire, en tête des puissances infernales. C’est aussi par lui que Wiérus commence l’inventaire de sa fameuse Pseudomonarchia dœmonum.”Bael, a demon cited in the Grand Grimoire, at the head of the infernal powers. It is with him too that Wier begins the inventory of his famous Pseudomonarchia daemonum. — translated for ColossiansOne
Makes the operator go invisible. First and chief spirit, ruling in the East.
“The First Principal Spirit is a King ruling in the East, called Bael. He maketh thee to go Invisible.”
Connections
What is it connected to?
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Bael?
Is Bael the same as Beelzebub?
What rank is Bael?
How else is Bael spelled?
What is Bael said to do?
How old is Bael?
Nearest in the corpus
If Bael is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Asmoday
King · Goetic Spirit
Commands seventy-two legions, one for every spirit in the book. He is the Asmodeus of Tobit, who killed Sarah's seven husbands and was driven into Upper Egypt by Raphael, and behind that the Avestan Aeshma-daeva, the demon of wrath — one of very few Goetic spirits with an ancestry that can be traced.
Belial
King · Goetic Spirit
In the Hebrew Bible beliya'al is not a name but a word meaning worthlessness; by 2 Corinthians it is a person, and by the Goetia a king in a chariot of fire handing out senatorships. The text says he was created next after Lucifer and fell among the first, and will not answer truly without gifts.
Balam
King · Goetic Spirit
For all the apparatus — three heads, flaming eyes, a bear to ride and a goshawk on the fist — his offices are modest: true answers on past and future, invisibility, and quickness of wit.
Beleth
King · Goetic Spirit
The Goetia's instructions here are unusually anxious: hold a hazel wand, and be courteous. He arrives in a fury on a pale horse with every kind of music sounding ahead of him, and he causes all the love that may be until the operator's desire is met.
Paimon
King · Goetic Spirit
Commands two hundred legions, more than any other spirit in the book, and arrives crowned on a dromedary ahead of a host with trumpets and cymbals. The Goetia names him one of the four kings of the cardinal points, and the most obedient of them to Lucifer.
Purson
King · Goetic Spirit
A finder — of hidden things, of buried treasure, and of what has happened and what is coming. A king of the Ars Goetia, he arrives lion-faced on a bear with a viper in his hand and trumpets sounding before him.
The books behind Bael
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon
Various · c. 900–100 BCE · Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek
Read Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon in full ↗Cover: Public domain · see en:Aleppo Codex; scanned by · Wikimedia file page
Pseudomonarchia Daemonum
Johann Weyer · 1577 · Latin
Read Pseudomonarchia Daemonum in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Pieter Holsteyn II · Wikimedia file page
Dictionnaire Infernal
Jacques Collin de Plancy · 1818; illustrated ed. 1863 · French
Read Dictionnaire Infernal in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Collin de Plancy · Wikimedia file page
The Lesser Key of Solomon, Book I: Ars Goetia
Anonymous; ed. S. L. MacGregor Mathers & A. E. Waite · 17th c.; ed. 1904 · English (from Latin)
Read The Lesser Key of Solomon, Book I: Ars Goetia in full ↗Cover: Public domain · anonymous design, redrawn by User:Fuzzypeg · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.