Demonic · Goetic Spirit · c. 1577 CE
Gaap
Also called Tap, Goap · also recorded as Coap, Taob (per Wikidata)
His powers run in opposed pairs: love and hatred, philosophy and induced ignorance. He comes with four great kings before him while the Sun stands in the southern signs, and carries men between kingdoms.
Single lineage
Form. A human shape preceded by four great kings; appears when the Sun is in the southern signs.
Offices. Makes men insensible or ignorant, teaches philosophy and the liberal sciences, causes love and hatred, and carries men swiftly from kingdom to kingdom.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
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
- Pseudomonarchia Daemonum · 1577
- Rank
- President and Prince
- 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. 1577 CE
- Traditions
- Solomonic, Folk & Demonological
Traits
- Traditional form
- A human shape preceded by four great kings; appears when the Sun is in the southern signs.
- Goetic rank
- President and Prince
Stats
5 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 5 offices attributed to Gaap, 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.
- knowledge1
- social2
- martial1
- transformation1
knowledge
social
martial
transformation
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.
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Gaap, 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.
2 texts spanning roughly 327 years
Where the texts differ
- Rank: given as President and Prince; The President and Prince
- Position in list: 36, 33 depending on the text
Weyer lists this spirit 36th 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.
Makes men insensible or ignorant, teaches philosophy and the liberal sciences, causes love and hatred, and carries men swiftly from kingdom to kingdom.
“The Thirty-third Spirit is Gaap. He is a Great President and a Mighty Prince.”
Connections
What is it connected to?
Nothing, and that is what the source says. The Ars Goetia gives Gaap a rank, a number of legions, a list of offices and a seal, and no relationship to any other spirit in the book — no lineage, no faction, no quarrel. Sixty-seven of the seventy-two are in the same position. A catalogue of self-contained entries is what that text is, and the emptiness here is the shape of it rather than work outstanding.
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Gaap?
What rank is Gaap?
How else is Gaap spelled?
What is Gaap said to do?
How old is Gaap?
Nearest in the corpus
If Gaap 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.
Astaroth
Duke · Goetic Spirit
The Canaanite goddess Astarte, three thousand years on, made a male duke of hell with her name intact. The Goetia has him discourse willingly on the fall of the spirits, and warns the operator to hold a ring to his face against the stench of his breath.
Beelzebub
Prince · Infernal Court
'Lord of the Flies' — a Philistine god of Ekron whose name was almost certainly deformed as a Hebrew insult, then inherited by Christian demonology as the second power of hell.
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.
The Spirits of Affliction
Group of Named Spirits · Deliverance tradition
The remaining 'spirit of X' phrases, grouped because the tradition's whole method stands or falls on how they are read.
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.
The books behind Gaap
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.
Pseudomonarchia Daemonum
Johann Weyer · 1577 · Latin
Read Pseudomonarchia Daemonum in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Pieter Holsteyn II · 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.