President

President is one of the ranks assigned to the spirits catalogued in the grimoire tradition, and above all in the Ars Goetia, the first book of the seventeenth-century Lesser Key of Solomon (Lemegeton). It denotes a rank drawn from civil rather than feudal office, borne by several spirits and sometimes held jointly with a noble title.

The ranks of the spirits

The Goetia lists seventy-two spirits and gives most of them a rank, King, Prince, Duke, Marquis, Earl or Count, President, or Knight, borrowed from the feudal and civil offices of the human world, together with the number of legions each is said to command. The scheme draws on earlier sources, notably the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum printed by Johann Weyer in 1577.

The rank is described here as a feature of these documented magical texts, studied as historical literature; the spirits so ranked are not reified.

President stands apart from the catalogue's other titles by its origin in civil rather than feudal or military office: it derives from the Latin praesidere, "to preside," a term used for the head of a council, court or assembly rather than for a commander of troops or a landholding nobleman. That civil sense carries through into the Goetia itself, where several of the spirits ranked President are credited specifically with teaching sciences, philosophy or the mechanical arts rather than with commanding legions in the field, a pattern of stated function that tracks the rank's administrative background more closely than it tracks the martial vocabulary used for Kings, Dukes and Marquises.

Sources Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (The Lesser Key of Solomon)Anonymous (unidentified compiler) with Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

Twelve of the seventy-two are ranked President, commanding 446 legions, with counts running from 29 to 60. That is a narrow band and a high floor: no President in the catalogue commands fewer than 29 legions, which is more than the minimum for any other rank including King.

What holds the twelve together is a curriculum. Read their entries in sequence and the Presidents come out as the teaching rank of the book. Marbas is asked about mechanical arts and about diseases. Buer is credited with moral and natural philosophy, logic, and the virtues of herbs. Marax teaches astronomy and the liberal sciences and the properties of herbs and stones. Foras is given logic and ethics along with the virtues of herbs and stones. Ose and Amy are both credited with the liberal sciences, Amy with astrology in particular. Caim is asked about the voices of birds. Glasya-Labolas is credited with all arts and sciences at once.

Set beside the Kings, who are addressed with protocol, and the Dukes, who do a little of everything, the Presidents look less like a rank in a court than like a faculty in a university, and the offices attributed to them read as a syllabus of the medieval arts with natural magic added.

The twelve are Marbas, Buer, Botis, Marax, Glasya-Labolas, Foras, Malphas, Haagenti, Caim, Ose, Amy and Valac. Botis, Glasya-Labolas and Marax each carry the title jointly with Earl in the text, and are filed here under the rank given first.