Andras

Andras is said to sow discord, and to kill the operator and his companions if the operator is not careful. It is the most explicit threat in the catalogue, and it belongs to a small group of similar notes scattered through the seventy-two.

Elsewhere the warnings are milder and procedural: a spirit is proud and must be addressed bare-headed; a spirit's breath is foul and the operator should hold a silver ring to his face; a spirit must be received courageously; a spirit will not answer truly unless it receives offerings. Together they form a thin layer of caution over an otherwise businesslike list.

Their function is best understood as generic rather than instructional. Warnings of this kind are a standing feature of magical literature across periods and languages: they establish that the material is potent, that the practitioner is undertaking something serious, and that failure will be the practitioner's fault rather than the text's. A book that promised results with no conditions attached would be refuted by its first disappointed reader. A book with conditions is not.

There is a second function, specific to this corpus. The Goetia's frame is Solomon's mastery of the spirits, which requires the spirits to be dangerous enough that mastering them means something. A catalogue of entirely compliant servants would undercut the premise. The occasional lethal entry keeps the frame standing.

None of which requires a judgement about the tradition. It is simply how texts of this genre are built, and Andras's clause is doing work that the same clause does in a herbal, an alchemical recipe or a book of surgery from the same century.

The Goetia is one fifth of a larger compilation, and the other four fifths are rarely read.

Book One, Goetia, is the catalogue of seventy-two spirits with its ritual front matter. Book Two, Theurgia Goetia, treats spirits of the air described as partly good and partly evil, arranged under emperors and kings of the compass points, with a hierarchy of its own that shares no names with Book One. Book Three, Ars Paulina, deals with the spirits of the hours of the day and night and of the degrees of the zodiac, and is attributed in the tradition to an apostolic revelation. Book Four, Ars Almadel, describes twenty chief spirits governing four altitudes covering the three hundred and sixty degrees of the world. Book Five, Ars Notoria, is quite unlike the rest: a collection of prayers and orations for obtaining learning and memory, and much the oldest component, with a manuscript tradition running back to the thirteenth century.

The five do not agree with one another. Their hierarchies are incompatible, their sources are different, and their dates are different. The Ars Notoria is medieval; the Goetia's catalogue descends from a printing of 1665. Book Two draws on Trithemius's Steganographia. The binding element is the attribution to Solomon and the fact that a seventeenth-century compiler bound them together.

That is why the question of a single compiler stays open. Someone assembled the collection, but nothing in it was necessarily written for it, no manuscript names a compiler, and the seams between the parts are visible enough that assembly rather than authorship is the natural reading.