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Last in the List, and Newest in It

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Last in the List, and Newest in It

Andromalius closes the catalogue, and he is one of the four spirits that exist only because it had to be closed at seventy-two.

He has no entry in Weyer. He has none in Scot's English translation of Weyer. He appears, so far as the record shows, for the first time in the Lemegeton, alongside Vassago at number three and Seere and Dantalion immediately before him. Between them these four are the difference between the sixty-eight names the compiler inherited and the seventy-two he needed.

The name has attracted the usual speculation, a Greek compound involving andros, a garbling of some other entry, a borrowing from a lost source, and none of it has evidence. The honest statement is that the name is unattested before this text and its origin is unknown.

What is more interesting is his position. The last entry in a list of demons is a place of some rhetorical weight, and the compiler gave it to a spirit who recovers stolen goods, names the thief, punishes him, and exposes wickedness and underhand dealing. The catalogue that opens with a three-headed king who grants invisibility closes with a thief-taker.

Whether that was designed is unknowable, and there is no reason to assume it was. But it does describe the book's centre of gravity accurately. Behind the dragons and the fiery chariots, most of what the Goetia offers is recovery of property, detection of wrongdoing, advancement at court and success in love, the ordinary business of a legal system that did not work very well, addressed by other means.

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