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Bileth, First Among the Chiefs

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Bileth, First Among the Chiefs

Weyer's entry for Belial contains the fullest statement in the Pseudomonarchia of what the whole catalogue is supposed to be. It reports that Solomon gathered the spirits with their legions into a brazen vessel, and that enclosed there among all the legions were seventy-two kings, of whom the cheefe was Bileth, the second was Beliall, the third Asmoday.

Three things follow from that sentence.

The first is the count. Weyer asserts seventy-two while enumerating sixty-nine, which is the arithmetic problem the Lemegeton later resolves by adding four names and dropping one.

The second is the rank of Beleth. In Weyer's ordering he is chief of the seventy-two, ahead of Belial and Asmodeus. In the Goetia he is the thirteenth entry, with no statement of primacy at all, and Bael stands first. Whatever hierarchy Weyer's source imagined has not survived into the later text.

The third is the frame. The brazen vessel, and the figure of Solomon as a binder of spirits, are far older than either book. Josephus in the first century describes an exorcism performed in the name of Solomon using a ring and a root, and reports it as a technique Solomon left behind. The Testament of Solomon, a Greek text whose date is genuinely disputed and which has been placed anywhere from the first to the fifth century, is built entirely on Solomon compelling demons to name themselves and to work on the Temple.

So the container is late antique and the contents are early modern. The Goetia inherits an ancient narrative frame and fills it with a sixteenth-century list transmitted through a seventeenth-century English printing. Neither half dates the other.

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