Ars Occulta / Ars Goetia / Ronové

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Ronové

Roneve, Ronobe

Rank

Marquis

Planet

☽Moon

Legions

19

Of Ronove, also Roneve or Ronobe, the text gives no form: it merely calls him a monster and puts a staff in his hand, a strange omission in a book obsessed with description. Nor is there any known antecedent for the name. He occupies two grades, Marquis and Great Earl, Moon and Mars, with nineteen legions. His province is speech: he teaches rhetoric and languages, and procures good servants and the favour of friends and enemies alike. The operator who called him wanted to persuade and to be well received, a social aim rather than a magical one, and the staff remains his one fixed attribute.

«Monster» did not mean what we think

The manuscript does not describe him. It says he appears «in the form of a monster» and stops there: no animal, no colour, no size, no face. He is, along with Vassago, one of the few in the catalogue with no picture.

And the word it uses did not mean in 1600 what it means today. Isidore of Seville, whose encyclopaedia was still ordinary material, explains that monstrum comes from monere, to warn: the monster is what points something out, a warning, a portent. Not a creature: a sign.

The staff he is sometimes drawn with, and the role of harvester of old souls attributed to him, are in no source at all. They are twentieth-century additions.

What he was asked for

He teaches rhetoric, gives knowledge of tongues, provides good servants and procures the favour of friends and foes.

The four things describe a single life. Rhetoric was the centre of the curriculum and the key to the pulpit, the courtroom and the secretary's desk; the tongues were Latin, Greek and Hebrew, those of the cleric and the lawyer; domestic service was the normal shape of work, and a servant's loyalty a real concern for the master; and favour with friends and foes is the patronage system, which decided whole careers.

Ronove does not promise power. He promises a career.

Where the sources disagree

Hardly anywhere. Marquis and earl at once, and nineteen legions, in Weyer, in Scot and in the Lemegeton. The double title is rare in the catalogue and survives intact.

He moves place and spelling: twenty-sixth in Weyer, twenty-seventh in the Lemegeton, and he appears as Roneve, Ronove, Ronwe and Ronoweh depending on the copy.

He is not in the Livre des Esperitz and has no traceable entry in the Liber Officiorum Spirituum. And of etymology there is nothing: not Hebrew, not Greek, not Latin. The name has no antecedent earlier than 1577.

Sources

• Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis · Ars Goetia — ms. Sloane 2731, ed. Peterson; Mathers, 1904
• Johann Weyer, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, 1577 — «Roneve»
• Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584
• Isidoro de Sevilla, Etymologiae XI.3.3 — «monstra a monitu dicta»

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Other marquises 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.