Questions, answered by counting
Studies
Everywhere else on this site the job is to record what a text says and get out of the way. A study is the exception: it picks a question the corpus can actually answer, answers it, and says what the answer is worth. Two rules keep that honest — a study has to be settled by counting or by reading a named text, and it has to say what would have changed its mind. A third governs the writing: lead with the best picture, never with the correction.
10 published · 5 queued
A study from the corpus
· upd. 29 August 2026What the Goetia does not care about
It contributes nothing to the corpus's affliction claims, gives most spirits no harmful office at all, and connects none of them to each other. What it supplies without exception is a legion count.
The most famous demonology in English lists seventy-two spirits with ranks, legions and offices. What does it never say about any of them?
A study from the corpus
· upd. 29 August 2026How many angels are actually named?
Two names are in books every canon receives. Raphael is deuterocanonical, Uriel is in an appendix nobody received, and fifteen of the entries people count as angels are plurals, ranks or offices rather than names.
Seven archangels with portfolios, nine choirs in three spheres, a name for every office. How much of that roster is in the books?
A study from the corpus
· upd. 29 August 2026The divine council
Every Canaanite deity in the corpus is named somewhere in the Hebrew Bible. No Egyptian one is, out of forty-three — and the institution comes through with the vocabulary.
Psalm 82, Deuteronomy 32, 1 Kings 22 and Job 1 describe a heavenly assembly with members and business. How much of it is inherited?
A study from the corpus
· upd. 29 August 2026Four words flattened into one hell
Four different kinds of object: a condition everyone ends in, a god with a kingdom, a valley with an address, and a verb used once of angels. Only two involve punishment, and only one of those punishes people.
Sheol, Hades, Gehenna and Tartarus all arrive in English as hell. What are the four words actually naming?
A study from the corpus
· upd. 29 August 2026The seals are younger than the list
The spirits were catalogued with ranks and offices some seventy years before anyone drew a sigil. All seventy-two are sealed, including the four the earlier list lacks.
The Goetic seals are the most reproduced images in Western occultism. When do they actually arrive, and what are they for?
A study from the corpus
· upd. 29 August 2026The Courts of Heaven
The two claims it gets cleanly are the two it did not invent. The procedure is inferred, and several of its own proof-texts are courtroom scenes announcing the case is closed.
The courtroom model of prayer that spread through charismatic teaching after 2014 — judge, accuser, advocate, legal rights. Which passages carry it?
A study from the corpus
· upd. 29 August 2026How a god becomes a demon
Six mechanisms, not one. Two are deliberate defacements still legible in the Hebrew vowels, and hell turns out to be recruited overwhelmingly from a single small region.
The gods of Israel's neighbours ended up as the officers of hell. What was actually done to the names to get them there?
A study from the corpus
· upd. 29 August 2026Who invented the infernal court?
Two men invented it. Weyer supplies the peerage in 1577, de Plancy the civil service in 1863 — and the demons wearing the titles predate them by up to 2,877 years.
Hell has kings, dukes, a grand admiral and an ambassador to Russia. Where did that structure come from, and how old is it?
A study from the corpus
· upd. 29 August 2026The ten plagues and the gods of Egypt
Exodus names no Egyptian god anywhere in the plague narrative. The scheme rests on one collective half-verse, and of the ten pairings only two hold up well.
The familiar table pairs each plague of Exodus with an Egyptian god it humiliated. Where does that table come from, and does it hold?
A study from the corpus
· upd. 29 August 2026How old are the Goetic demons?
Only four of the seventy-two are named in any text predating the early-modern grimoire tradition — and those four were famous already.
The Ars Goetia lists seventy-two spirits in a fixed format and is the source of nearly every demon list online. How much of it is actually old?
Queued
Questions the corpus is close to answering, and one it currently cannot. Listed rather than held back, because a section showing only finished work implies the finished work is the whole subject.
The recurring pattern
Creation out of water, an assembly of divine beings, a flood with a warned survivor, a serpent that has to be dealt with, an adversary bound and released at the end. The same shapes arrive in traditions with no contact between them. How much of that do shared ancestry and borrowing account for, and what is left over?
Ready to write, and the hardest one here to write well. It is the study the maintainer's position on /about implies, so it argues an inference in the first person rather than reporting a count — which means the counting has to be done first and the counter-evidence handled rather than avoided: the Buddhist material has no creator by doctrine, Egypt never reconciled its three cosmogonies, and this corpus's own syncretism graph is a record of borrowing. The plan and the constraints are written down in docs/recurring-pattern-study-outline.md.
ha-Satan to Satan: how a job title became a name
In Job and Zechariah the accuser carries a definite article — ha-satan, the satan, a role rather than a person. By the New Testament it is a proper name, and Isaiah's morning star, addressed to a Babylonian king, has become a separate fallen angel by way of the Vulgate's lucifer. Two transformations, both datable.
What the phrase 'spirit of X' is doing
The Bible's 'spirit of' constructions — of divination, of infirmity, of jealousy, of fear — read as named entities by one whole tradition and as dispositions by another. Counted and classified rather than argued: what the phrase does across every occurrence, and how the distribution falls.
Weyer's arithmetic
Pseudomonarchia lists sixty-nine spirits and the Ars Goetia seventy-two. The insertions are identifiable, and every ordinal downstream of them shifts — which is how the corpus's own verification scripts caught a set of wrong attributions.
Which seals vary between the manuscripts
The dating is settled — see the study above. The finer question is which individual seals differ between the Lemegeton witnesses and the 1904 plates, seal by seal.
Needs a collation this corpus does not hold: Sloane 2731, Sloane 3648, Harley 6483 and their relatives against the printed edition. The manuscripts are in known collections and much of the work exists in published editions, so this is an acquisition problem rather than an open question.