Vassago

Four spirits in the Goetia have no counterpart in the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, and Vassago is the first of them. The other three are Seere, Dantalion and Andromalius, numbers seventy, seventy-one and seventy-two.

The pattern of the addition is worth noticing. Three of the four sit at the very end of the list, appended after the material inherited from Weyer has run out. Vassago is the exception: he is inserted early, at position three, between Agares and Samigina. Whoever assembled the seventy-two did not simply tack four names onto a sixty-eight-name list and stop.

Where the four came from is not known. They are not in Weyer. They are not in the Latin or English printings that stand behind him. No earlier grimoire has been shown to contain them in this form, and the compiler of the Lemegeton says nothing about his sources for any part of the book. Suggestions have been made, that the names are corruptions of entries already in the list, that they come from a manuscript tradition now lost, that they were invented to make the arithmetic work, and none of them has evidence behind it.

That last possibility is the one that would be most interesting if it could be shown, because the number seventy-two is the whole reason the addition was needed. If four names were manufactured to bring a sixty-eight-name catalogue up to the count of the Shem ha-Mephorash, then a quarter of the last four entries in the most influential demonological list in English is editorial filler. It is a reasonable suspicion. It is not a demonstrated fact, and it should not be reported as one.

What is demonstrable is the negative: these four are late, they are unattested before the Lemegeton, and any account that presents Vassago as an ancient or traditional figure is going beyond the evidence.

The Lemegeton's own table of contents calls Book One a Book of evill spirits. Vassago does not read like one.

The entry describes a spirit of good nature, who declares things past and things to come and uncovers what is hidden or lost. There is no menace in it, no warning, and no demand for offerings. The same is true of several other entries: Seere is described as good and indifferent in nature, Orobas as faithful and unwilling to let the operator be deceived, Marchosias as a truthful answerer who hopes to return to a heavenly rank. Andras, at the other end, is said to be lethal.

This is not an inconsistency so much as a fossil of how the list was made. A catalogue of spirits with named offices, teaching, finding, transporting, healing, belongs to a tradition of ritual magic that did not sort its entities into the good and the damned with any consistency. The framing of the whole set as evil spirits bound by Solomon is a wrapper placed around that catalogue, and the wrapper does not fit every item underneath it.

Weyer, whose list is the ancestor here, was writing to argue that this material was delusion, and his catalogue reads as an exhibit rather than as a manual. The Lemegeton's compiler took the exhibit and re-presented it as working material within a demonological frame. Entries like Vassago's show the seam.

The practical consequence for a reader is that the moral vocabulary in the Goetia, evil, good, indifferent, obedient, faithful, should not be read as a system. It is inherited language, applied unevenly, in a text with at least two purposes layered on top of each other and no author to reconcile them.