A study from the corpus
What the Goetia does not care about
The Ars Goetia is the source of nearly every demon list in English, and it reads like a directory of consultants. Its spirits teach the liberal sciences, answer questions truly, find hidden things and lost treasure, reconcile enemies, and procure favour from rulers.
What they almost never do is hurt anybody. This study counts the offices the book attributes, sets them against the texts in this corpus that are about affliction, and asks what the omission is evidence of.
Counted across 72 spirits and 232 attributed offices at build time. Corpus last revised 29 August 2026.
Published · Updated
The count
0
Affliction claims from the Goetia
Out of 41 in the corpus, from 14 texts
21/232
Offices that are malefic
19 of the 72 carry any at all
67/72
With no relationships
No lineage, faction or quarrel in the book
2,645
Legions, all told
72 of 72 carry a count — the one universal
What it is interested in
Every office the book attributes, sorted by kind. Commanding legions is excluded: all seventy-two have it, so it is a format rather than a characterisation — which is itself worth noticing, since it is the only thing the text says about every spirit without exception.
- Knowledge68
- Divination54
- Material29
- Social29
- Transformation22
- Malefic21
- Martial9
| Office | Spirits |
|---|---|
| Teaches the Liberal Sciences | 24 |
| Reveals Past, Present & Future | 20 |
| Discovers Hidden Things | 12 |
| Gives Familiars | 12 |
| Reveals Treasure | 12 |
| Procures Love | 11 |
| Teaches Rhetoric & Logic | 11 |
| Teaches Astronomy | 9 |
The four silences
Each one is checkable against a text this corpus carries, which is the point: an absence only means something when you can show what its presence looks like elsewhere.
No named afflictions
The corpus records affliction claims from fourteen texts. Not one of them is the Ars Goetia, which never attaches a spirit to a disease, a symptom or a household misfortune.
The Testament of Solomon supplies the most claims of any text here, and its whole structure is the pairing: this spirit causes this complaint, and this name or this angel stops it.
Almost no malefic offices
Malefic is the smallest category of office in the book, and most spirits carry none at all. Teaching and finding outnumber harming several times over.
The Akkadian incantation material in this corpus exists for no other purpose than harm and its prevention — that is what an incantation series is.
No relationships
Sixty-seven of the seventy-two have no recorded relation to any other figure in this corpus, because the book gives them none: no lineage, no faction, no quarrel.
1 Enoch organises its watchers into tens under a named leader; the Baal Cycle is nothing but relations; even the infernal court of the nineteenth century has a chain of command.
No motive, and no war
The entries do not say why a spirit does what it does, what it wants, or whose side it is on. A spirit appears, holds a rank, commands legions, performs offices and is dismissed.
Paradise Lost and the deliverance literature both assume a war with sides and stakes. The Goetia assumes a transaction.
Who blames a spirit for what
Every affliction claim in the corpus, by the text that makes it. The Goetia is not on this list, and it is not for want of coverage — all seventy-two of its spirits are seeded, with their ranks, legions and offices.
What the omission is evidence of
A demonology records what its readers wanted from demons, and the Goetia’s readers wanted an education, a location service and an introduction to somebody powerful. The offices cluster in knowledge and in finding; the harming ones are a minority carried by a minority of spirits; and the book never once tells you what a spirit will do to you if things go wrong, which is the subject the earlier material is almost entirely about.
Set the Testament of Solomon beside it and the difference is structural rather than one of degree. There every spirit is introduced by the complaint it causes and the name that stops it — the text is a medical handbook with an angelology attached. The Mesopotamian incantation series in this corpus exists for the same reason: something is wrong with a person, and the tablet is what you do about it. Those are books for somebody in trouble. The Goetia is a book for somebody with ambitions.
The one thing it always supplies is the legion count, and the totals are worth reading as what they are: a claim about scale that costs nothing to make and cannot be checked. Every spirit is a commander, the ranks are feudal, and the arithmetic across the whole book runs to thousands of legions. A directory of consultants, each of whom brings an army nobody ever sees.
Method, and what would change it
Offices are counted from the corpus’s skill rows for the seventy-two spirits attested in the Ars Goetia, excluding the one every entry carries. Affliction claims are counted from the corpus’s own claim table, which records the text making each claim. Relations are counted from the relation graph, where an edge exists only when a source states it.
- An affliction claim sourced to the Ars Goetia — the corpus counts claims from fourteen texts and this one contributes none, so a single sourced pairing of a Goetic spirit with a named complaint would soften the central finding.
- A relation between two Goetic spirits stated in the text rather than inferred by a later compiler. Weyer and the Goetia both list; neither connects.
- A reading of the legion counts as something other than scale — if they encode rank, or a scheme, the one number the book always gives would mean more than it appears to.