Demonic · Goetic Spirit · c. 400 BCE
Belial
Also called Beliall, Beliar, Bofi
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.

Deep source base
Form. Two beautiful angels in a chariot of fire, speaking with a comely voice.
Offices. Distributes presentations, senatorships and other dignities; causes favour of friends and foes; and gives excellent familiars.
Note. Said in the Goetia to have been created next after Lucifer, and to have fallen among the first. Requires gifts and sacrifices, and will not give true answers otherwise.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
What the name means
Hebrew *beliyya'al*, which BDB (1906) reads as a compound of *beli*, 'without', and *ya'al*, 'worth, use, profit' — the quality of being good for nothing. It is a common noun for centuries before it is anybody's name: the sons of Belial in Judges and Samuel are worthless men, not a demon's children. BDB records a second strand of use in which the word carries ruin or destruction, as in the floods of Belial standing parallel to Sheol at 2 Samuel 22:5, and that is the sense the name grows out of.
Where it was actually worshipped
None. The Ars Goetia is a conjuring manual and not a liturgy: its spirits are constrained, put to work and dismissed, never housed or offered to. Not one of the seventy-two has a temple, a shrine, a festival or a place-name anywhere.
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
- Rank
- King
- Order
- Goetic Spirit
- Base of operations
- None. The Ars Goetia is a conjuring manual and not a liturgy: its spirits are constrained, put to work and dismissed, never housed or offered to. Not one of the seventy-two has a temple, a shrine, a festival or a place-name anywhere.
- Era
- c. 400 BCE
- Traditions
- Solomonic, Folk & Demonological
Traits
- Traditional form
- Two beautiful angels in a chariot of fire, speaking with a comely voice.
- Goetic rank
- King
5 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 5 offices attributed to Belial, 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.
- material1
- social1
- martial1
- transformation1
- malefic1
material
social
martial
transformation
malefic
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.
7 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 7 texts that names Belial, 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.
7 texts spanning roughly 2,313 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as Belial, Beliar, Bélial
- Rank: given as Not a name — an abstraction; Personified adversary; King; Chief of the Vessels of Iniquity; Ambassador to Turkey; The King
- Position in list: 23, 68 depending on the text

The Hebrew beliya'al means 'worthlessness'; 'sons of Belial' is an idiom for scoundrels, not a reference to a spirit.
“Certain men, the children of Belial, are gone out from among you.”

By 2 Corinthians the abstraction has become a person: 'what concord hath Christ with Belial?'

Weyer lists this spirit 23th 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.

Heads Barrett's third infernal order, opposed to the Thrones.

Given a diplomatic post in de Plancy's infernal court.
“Bélial, démon adoré des Sidoniens. L’enfer n’a pas reçu d’esprit plus dissolu, plus crapuleux, plus épris du vice pour le vice même.”Belial, a demon worshipped by the Sidonians. Hell has received no spirit more dissolute, more debauched, more in love with vice for its own sake. — translated for ColossiansOne

Distributes presentations, senatorships and other dignities; causes favour of friends and foes; and gives excellent familiars.
“The Sixty-eighth Spirit is Belial. He is a Mighty and a Powerful King, and was created next after LUCIFER.”

“Found frequently as a personal name in the Vulgate and various English translations of the Bible, is commonly used as a synonym of Satan, or the personification of evil.”
Connections
What is it connected to?
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
The Three Infernal Hierarchies
Third Hierarchy → Belias
Carried here as Michaelis spells it; the corpus files the figure as Belial.
The Nine Infernal Orders
3. Vessels of Iniquity
Headed by Belial. Opposed to the Thrones.






The Infernal Court
Great Officers → Belial
Ambassador to Turkey.




Ranks of the Seventy-Two
King → Belial
50 legions




Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Belial?
Is Belial the same as Satan?
What rank is Belial?
How else is Belial spelled?
What is Belial said to do?
How old is Belial?
Nearest in the corpus
If Belial 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.

Bael
King · Goetic Spirit
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.
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 Belial
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

New Testament
Various · c. 50–110 CE · Koine Greek
Read New Testament in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Wikimedia file page

Pseudomonarchia Daemonum
Johann Weyer · 1577 · Latin
Read Pseudomonarchia Daemonum in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Pieter Holsteyn II · Wikimedia file page

The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer
Francis Barrett · 1801 · English
Read The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Unknown author · 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

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)
Various; ed. Charles Herbermann · 1913 · English
Read The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Herbermann, Charles George, 1840-1916 · 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.