King

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.