Ars Occulta / Ars Goetia / Astaroth

29 / 72

Astaroth

—

Rank

Duke

Planet

♀Venus

Legions

40

Behind Astaroth stands Astarte, the Ashtoreth of the biblical texts, a Canaanite and Phoenician goddess; Christian demonology masculinised the Hebrew plural until it became a Duke. With forty legions and a grade of Venus, he is among the best placed spirits of this stretch. He was consulted for truthful answers on past, present and future, for secrets and for the liberal sciences, but above all for one doctrinal question: to explain how and why the angels fell. The text includes an explicit operative warning: his breath is pestilent, and the magic ring must be held up before the face.

The name is a goddess with her vowels swapped

Astarte was one of the great deities of the Semitic Mediterranean, the same one called Ishtar in Mesopotamia and eventually merged with Aphrodite in Cyprus. In the Hebrew Bible she appears as Ashtoreth, «the abomination of the Sidonians».

And there is the detail. The majority scholarly view is that this vocalisation is not the original one: the vowels of boshet, which in Hebrew means «shame», were artificially laid over the consonants of the name. The goddess's name ended up written so that it would sound like an insult.

The second step came from the translations. The Greek and Latin Bibles transliterated the plural form, Ashtaroth, and it was that plural that stuck. Which is why the demon of the grimoire is called Astaroth and not Astarte: it is the plural of a goddess, turned into the proper name of a duke.

The ring, the breath and the viper

The text carries a very physical protocol: the operator must hold the magic ring near his face and not let the spirit come too close, on account of an intolerable stench. Weyer specifies that the ring is silver.

That trio — ring, smell and Solomon — has an ancient precedent. Josephus, in the first century, reports that one Eleazar drove out demons by holding under the possessed man's nose a ring bearing a root of the kind Solomon had prescribed. Fifteen hundred years later the ring is still in the hand and the smell is still the problem.

The viper in his right hand does not stand for venom. In Isidore and in Topsell's natural history of 1608, the viper is the animal whose young are born gnawing through their mother's sides and killing her. It is the emblem of parricide: the offspring that destroys what bore it, held in the hand of a fallen angel.

Where the sources disagree

The forty legions agree in Weyer and in the Lemegeton, which is rare. What changes is the adjective. Weyer writes angelica specie turpissima, an angel of most repulsive aspect; the Sloane manuscript says «unbeautiful»; and Mathers, in 1904, translates «hurtful». From ugly to harmful is a leap that is not in the original.

Before the grimoire he was painted differently too. Ælfric of Eynsham, around the year 1000, describes him as an immense Ethiopian with a sharp face and an ample beard. No dragon, no viper, no angel.

He does not appear in the Livre des Esperitz. And the grandiose titles given him today — prince of hell, grand duke of accusers, governor of America — come from Francis Barrett in 1801 and from later authors, not from the manuscript.

Sources

• Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis · Ars Goetia — ms. Sloane 2731 y edición Mathers, 1904
• Johann Weyer, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, 1577 — «angelica specie turpissima», anillo de plata
• Biblia hebrea: Jueces 2:13, 1 Samuel 7:3-4, 1 Reyes 11:5 y 33, 2 Reyes 23:13
• Flavio Josefo, Antigüedades judías 8.42-49, c. 93 — el anillo de Eleazar
• Ælfric de Eynsham, homilías, c. 1000
• Isidoro de Sevilla, Etymologiae XII.4.10 — la víbora
• Edward Topsell, The Historie of Serpents, 1608
• Francis Barrett, The Magus, 1801

Leer esta ficha en español →

Other dukes of the Goetia

WarningHistorical and artistic content. We do not recommend performing any ritual, invocation or practice involving these entities. This is outreach about texts from the 15th to the 20th century, not an operative guide.