Ars Occulta
Ars Occulta / Ars Goetia / Forneus
30 / 72
Forneus
Forners
- Rank
- Marquis
- Planet
- ☽Moon
- Legions
- 29
With no documented antecedent, Forneus, Forners in some lists, is presented simply as a great sea monster. His grade is that of a Mighty Marquis, a lunar correspondence, with twenty-nine legions under his charge. His gifts are matters of reputation: he teaches rhetoric and languages, gives a good name, and makes friends and enemies alike love the operator. He was invoked in order to speak well and to be well liked, the same pair of ends that appears in Ronove and in Naberius, a sign that eloquence was a constant demand of the conjurer. The marine form bears no apparent relation to these functions, and the text does not justify it.
What he was asked for
What he offers is to speak well, to know languages, to have a good name and to be liked even by enemies. It sounds like little and it was the opposite. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries rhetoric was not an ornament: it was the spine of the curriculum and the working tool of the cleric, the lawyer and the secretary. Knowing how to build an argument decided whether you got the post.
And being «beloved of foes as well as of friends» points at the same thing as Amon: lawsuits and feuds, which were the normal state of affairs, not the exception.
Why a sea monster
He appears as a great monster of the sea, and in 1600 that had a precise and published meaning. Olaus Magnus, in his 1555 history of the northern peoples, writes of the great serpent of Norway that its appearance does not happen without signifying some wonderful change of the kingdom at hand: that the princes shall die or be banished, or that war shall presently follow.
That image can be traced piece by piece to the English reader: from Olaus' sea chart of 1539 it passes into Conrad Gesner's book of animals in 1558, and from there into Edward Topsell's history of serpents in 1608. It is literally the figure someone in 1600 had in mind on reading «monster of the sea». Not a large animal: the warning that a power was about to fall.
Where the sources disagree
In this case, in almost nothing, and that says something too. Twenty-nine legions in every version. The same rank, the same form, the same gifts in Weyer, in Scot and in the Lemegeton. It is one of the steadiest entries in the catalogue: the only thing that moves is his place on the list.
Of the name there is nothing. He does not appear in the Livre des Esperitz and has no entry of his own in the Liber Officiorum Spirituum, and the derivation from the Latin fornus, «oven», sometimes repeated, is a modern guess with no support at all: nothing connects an oven to a sea monster or to rhetoric.
Sources
- Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis · Ars Goetia — manuscritos del siglo XVII
- Johann Weyer, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, 1577 · Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584
- Olaus Magnus, Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, 1555 — la gran serpiente de Noruega
- Olaus Magnus, Carta Marina, 1539
- Conrad Gesner, Historiae Animalium, libro IV, 1558
- Edward Topsell, The Historie of Serpents, 1608
Other marquises of the Goetia
The hyperrealistic reconstruction of Forneus and those of the other 143 entities are published on Instagram as they are completed. See Forneus on Instagram →
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.