Agrippa on Goêteia
Overview
Today, Agrippa of Nettesheim’s ‘De Occulta Philosophia’ is the most widely read historic source of Western magic. In stark contrast, the same author’s late work ‘Of the Vanitie and Vncertaintie of Artes and Sciences’ has remained largely overlooked in magical circles until today. It is in this book (Cologne, 1527), though, that Agrippa devotes a full chapter to that form of magic which was known as goêteia and often was read in close connection with classical necromancy.
This source should be of special interest to any serious practitioner. Agrippa formulated it in retrospect of his youthful authorship of the Occulta Philosophia, as part of a broad, often cynical portrait of human manners and morality. In it, he freely admits to having studied the secret sciences extensively and thoroughly himself. In retrospect, he now portrays much of what he encountered in literature and his own practice as heresy, idolatry, superstition, and ultimately a waste of time. It is precisely for Agrippa’s thoroughly critical view of his own past, that this text is of such great interest. For where the look back does not end in cynicism, but sincerely acknowledges knowledge, art and craftsmanship, we should listen carefully to the old man.
Below I offer a new English translation of the entire chapter, based on the German edition by Gerhard Güppner (Akademie Verlag, 1993). In addition, I have consulted the original Latin edition to ensure that all mentions of the term goêteia or its derivatives are restored here. These were readily rendered in later translations with general terms such as sorcerer or conjurer. Agrippa frequently uses the spelling goetia for the art and goetici for the practitioners. Both terms have been given here in the classical spelling of goêteia and goês.
The two parts of the following text can be read in any order. For easier introduction, I have placed my explanatory remarks and conclusions at the beginning; followed by the translation of Agrippa’s text.
LVX,
Frater Acher
May the serpent bite its tail.
Tenets of a Forbidden Art
Agrippa introduces goêtia both as an archaic and an essential heretic and sacrilegious one. Right at the outset of his chapter, he defines goêtia as the art that “deals with unclean spirits, consists of sacrilegious rites, forbidden prayer-like incantations, as well as spells.”
In an interpolated quotation without citation, he describes the practice as a distinctly telluric one, as chthonic sorcery in the truest sense of the word. A practice which expresses itself not in subtle apparitions but through the disruptive, raw powers of nature. At the same time, goêtia appears as an art that subverts worldly power structures through its radical interventions in the natural balance of creation. The apostasy that is goêtia attacks from the periphery of the polis, from the fringe existence of the solitary practitioner who dares to undermine, reverse and overthrow the created order.
In all these aspects, Agrippa refers us to ancient patterns that have shaped the concept of the goêtic myth for more than two and a half millennia. (I have elucidated these historical and mythological structures in detail here.) However, in contrast to the classical-ancient derivation from the barbarian cultures that preceded Greek antiquity, Agrippa presents goêteia as a transcultural and transhistorical phenomenon. Its renegade practitioners were to be found among all cultures and religions. Rather than belonging to a particular creed, to Agrippa goêteia indicates a particular craft. It is not to be located on a timeline, but in a cosmology where it is readily available, far from the divine center and its emissaries, close to the body and hidden in the depths, for the one who cares neither for his salvation nor for social taboos.
To speak of a goêtic tradition is thus correct only insofar as its practice depicts a damnable topos that transcends time and culture, defined by a particular way of approaching and working with the demonic realm. Such a disparate tradition then found access to its own literary genre, albeit in a highly pseudepigraphic manner and of thoroughly mythical origin. The names of the original authors intermingle with figures from the distant past, alluding to the occult history of transmission of this forbidden knowledge to the human community. For example, the mentioned Zabulus is no other than Diabolos as the devil is called in Latin sources. Once again we come across a topos that lifts the authorship, invention, and transmission of these heretical cultural techniques out of the circle of humans and makes even literary goêtia descend directly from fallen angels, chthonic entities or primordial ancestors.
The forefathers of this art – “in ancient times, when people were still acquainted with spirits” – knew that mastery could be approached in two ways: Either with the help of celestial messengers who help the practitioner to exercise power over the lower demons, or in the even more radical way, by the making of a pact between daemon and goês. However, much of this craft was lost over time. It degraded into frightening stage-theatre to impress poor and rich alike and to return a quick coin. The degenerate state of this craft, however, does not mean, as Agrippa points out, that it was not an art in its own right in antiquity, though even then, of daring and reprehensible nature.
Agrippa gives two main reasons as to why this damnable practice has survived for millennia: First stands the simple fact that chthonic daemons respond more readily to the invocation of humans than the angels of celestial rank. So here the permanence of the goêteia is based on human opportunism as well as cosmic proximity of man and daemon. As a second reason, Agrippa cites basic traits of the human species, namely our easy seductiveness, insatiable curiosity, our moral instability and overwhelming lack of education. According to his time, he sees these characteristics as gender-typical, especially inherent in women, which explains for him the multitude of female pythonesses and goêtes in antiquity.
In the last two paragraphs, Agrippa drifts into a gnostic doctrine of salvation, which has little to do with archaic ideas of the Ancient Greek or even earlier history. Here the Old Testament doctrine of celestial ascension dominates, from which gnostic currents fed and the Jewish Merkabah mysticism developed. The body and its flesh is here the food of the chthonic serpent, from which man has to separate, if they strive for ascent into the divine realm.
Thus, in this short chapter of Agrippa we recognise some essential points, about the ancient goêtic art. If we begin with the end of Agrippa’s elucidations, it becomes immediately clear that this archaic practice has not only always been despised, but over the last two millennia also been completely eclipsed and supplanted by apocalyptic-Old Testament notions of the elevation of souls to God. To venerate Enoch, Elijah, and Moses as magical ancestors while at the same time working with the daemons of the underworld requires a complexity and multi-layered worldview that we cannot expect to find in sixteenth-century literature. Especially not since, as Agrippa and also his teacher Trithemius had to painfully experience in their own lives, all publications took place under the suspicion of a church divided within itself, which was on its violent crusade to maintain its own social relevance and supremacy.
However, returning to Agrippa’s earlier sections in this chapter, we learn about quite a few particular tenets of the archaic goêtic craft:
A central component of goêteia seems to have been the acquisition of an operative familiar spirit on the side of the individual practitioner – or even an entire guard of associated daemons. The goês thus worked as a hive.
Contact with such chthonic entities was not in itself a problem, for the telluric or ‘impure’ demons seem eager to mingle with humans. However, often this is for parasitic and not at all altruistic reasons. The goês thus had to be prudent in negotiating an appropriate relationship with their non-human associates.
Some of these associated daemons – or fractions of their spiritual bodies – were enclosed in bottles or other containers. Others were embedded in the goêtes own bodies, as evidenced to Agrippa by the example of Socrates’ ‘inner voice’. Managing the relations of inside and outside, body and environment, must therefore have constituted a central part of goêtic practice.
The operative work of the goêtes was rooted deeply in Nature. This damnable craft was not about personal salvation scenarios, but about successfully attuning to and eventually gaining power over the flow of chthonic powers. Goêteia was therefore not a library-art, but a path that wanted to be explored in nature, in the wilderness, in caves and on mountains, as well as in the depths of one’s own body.
Especially the quotation from an unnamed source that Agrippa cites at the very beginning gives rich food for thought. It says that the goêtes could force the heavens under the earth and uproot mountains. This can be read as expressing the stereotype of classical pagan abominations, i.e., the power to reverse natural conditions. But it can also be read as a hidden reference to a worldview that was not yet caught in the polarity of the celestial and chthonic divide. That is, a worldview that understood everything in creation as permeated by, intertwined with, and intermingled with the same demonic forces.
The literary genre of the goêtic books, as Agrippa knew them in the 16th century and judged them professionally towards the end of his life, presents itself as a hodgepodge of pseudo-epigraphic writings to be enjoyed with extreme caution. What stands out here, though, is the ancient topos that the original authorship did not lie with humans, but that the actual goêtic knowledge was gained through the direct spirit contact and mediation of the daemons themselves. As such, genuine goêtia wants to be approached as an oral interspecies tradition, involving human and non-human actors.
Agrippa thus casts a shadow on the wall. It’s the shadow of an art – if the latter ever deserved that name – that was largely considered lost already during his own time. What remained of it seemed to Agrippa mainly a poor distortion, practiced for the exploitative breadwinning of swindlers. Where this was not the case, and where folklore still preserved authentic remnants of goêtic art, they were mostly practiced for base desires aimed at increasing personal power.
At the same time, however, this shadow that Agrippa has left us suggests a way back to the very object that once cast it. It is an occult path that leads on the time axis into the archaic past, on the social axis into the farthest periphery, and on the geographical axis into telluric depths. So somewhere there – deep down and far out – Agrippa testifies, dwells a living knowledge, in the bodies of spirits, of rock, of cold and fire, of sand and metals, that can be reawakened in our own bodies, if only we are willing to pay the price.
Agrippa of Nettesheim
De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum
CHAPTER XLV: Of Goêteia and Necromancy
Ceremonial magic is divided into goêteia and necromancy. Goêteia, dealing with unclean spirits, consists of sacrilegious rites, forbidden prayer-like incantations, as well as spells, and is also subject to all conceivable laws of contempt and banishment. This includes people who are nowadays called necromancers and sorcerers:
Clan, abhorrent to the gods, capable of desecrating the heavens.
Fiends they are, and have the power to reverse even the fixed laws given by nature to heaven:
They know how to send lightnings, to hinder the movement of heaven, they force heaven still beneath the earth, uproot mountains.*
These people conjure the souls of the dead (in ancient times they were called epodoi, i.e. conjurers), put boys in a trance by magic and elicit oracular spells from them, they carry their personal demons with them (the same is reported about Socrates) and keep spirits in a bottle with the help of which they supposedly can prophesy. With these people, there are two methods: One of them tries to summon evil demons by the power of mostly divine names and to make them subservient to them, because every creature feels shyness and fear before the name of its creator. So, it is no wonder that goêtes and all unbelievers, be they pagans, Jews or Saracens, as well as members of all conceivable groups and sects, bind demons to themselves by invoking the divine name. Others again, and these are the very worst, submit themselves (a heinous crime punishable only by death by flame!) to demons, sacrifice to them and worship them, thereby making themselves guilty of idolatry and thus of the most serious crime of all. The representatives of the first mentioned group have not committed this crime, but they are also in immense danger because the spirits controlled by them are constantly searching for an opportunity to deceive us erring people.
From the cesspool of these spirit conjurations came all these books of darkness, which the jurist Ulpian calls illicit reading and destined for destruction. A man named Zabulus, who practiced forbidden arts, is said to have been the first to write such a book, then later a Cyprian named Barnabas, and even today books with fantasy titles under the names of Adam, Abel, Enoch and Solomon are in circulation, as well as writings by Paul, Honorius, Cyprian, Albertus, Thomas, Jerome and by a man from York. This direction was foolishly joined by King Alfonso of Castile, Robert Anglicus, Bacon, Abanus and many others of deplorable mind.
Not only men, namely saints and patriarchs, but also angels of God were claimed to be the authors of such detestable teachings, and it was even claimed that these books were delivered to Adam and Tobias by the angels Raziel and Raphael. But if one examines more closely the content of the precepts, the ritual instructions, the choice of words and images, and the homemade expressions in these writings, it does not remain hidden that they contain nothing but nonsense and lies, and that they were concocted only in later times by wicked people who were totally ignorant of all varieties of ancient magic. In the process, some pagan rites were merged with ceremonies, and numerous foreign names and symbols were inserted in order to terrify the uneducated and simple-minded, and to impress people with little understanding and no study.
This does not mean, of course, that such arts belong to the realm of imagination alone, for if there were no truth in them at all, and if no miraculous things and harm occurred through them, then there would be no need for strict human and divine laws to banish them from the face of the earth.
The reason the goêtes surround themselves only with evil demons is that good angels rarely appear because they do something only at God’s command and meet only with people who are pure of heart and lead a pious life. The evil ones, on the other hand, appear easily and pretend to be friendly, as if they possessed divine essence, are always quick at hand to practice deceit full of shrewdness and to let themselves be worshipped, even adored. And because women are especially curious about secrets, careless, superstitious and easily fooled, the evil demons show themselves to them quite willingly and perform mighty miracles, as the poets describe Circe, Medea and other women. Testimonies for it offer Cicero, Plinius, Seneca, Augustinus and many other, philosophers like church fathers and historians, even the holy writings because one can read in the 1. Book Samuel that a diviner lived in Endor and called the soul of the prophet Samuel up. Now many people think that it was not the soul of Samuel, but an evil spirit in his form. But the teachers of the Jews claim, and also Augustinus explains this to Simplicianus for possible, that it was really Samuel's spirit, which one could have called up again easily within one year after the separation from the body, as it is claimed by the goêtes.
Also, the necromancy practicing magicians are convinced that such things are possible by certain forces and connections of nature, as I have described in detail in my book ‘De Occulta Philosophia’. Therefore, in ancient times, when people were still acquainted with spirits, they ordered, for valid reasons, that the dead should be buried in consecrated places, that lights should be burned when they were laid out, that they should be sprinkled with holy water, and that they should be expiated with incense and prayers while they were not yet in the ground.
As the teachers of the Jews say, our whole body, everything carnal, based on weak matter, is given to the serpent or, as they express it, Azazel to devour. This is the lord of flesh and blood, the prince of this world, and is called the prince of the wilderness in Leviticus, to whom it was said in Genesis, “Earth shalt thou devour all thy days.” And in Isaiah it is said, “But the serpent must eat earth.” What is meant here is our body created from earthen dust, as long as it has not yet been sanctified and changed into something better, so that it no longer belongs to the serpent, but to God, and thus has been changed from a fleshly body to a spiritual one according to the words of Paul: “Sown is a natural body, and risen is a spiritual body.” And in another place, “Though all shall rise, yet shall not all be changed, for many remain serpent's food forever.”
So then, in death we strip bare of this vile and loathsome matter of the flesh, the food of the serpent, in order to receive it again one day, transformed into the better, into the spiritual, and this will happen at the resurrection of the dead. And this has already happened to those who have already tasted the first fruits of the resurrection: Many were made worthy of it by the power of God’s Spirit already in this earthly life, e.g. Enoch, Elijah and Moses. Their bodies were transformed into spiritual natures, therefore they did not fall prey to decay and were not handed over to the power of the serpent like other dead bodies. Precisely for this reason, there was the dispute of the devil with the archangel Michael about the body of Moses, which is mentioned in the Epistle of Jude. But this is enough about goêtia and necromancy.
* Agrippa does not provide a source for this quote in his original. Johann Christian Goetze notes in a book of 1743 a manuscript, which was at that time in the Royal Library at Dresden and probably came from the 14th century, and which contains in the marginalia to Lucans Pharsalia, book 6, line 442, exactly these 5 lines written in Latin by a second hand.
Gens invisa deis maculandi callida cali,
Numinibus magicis arcana conscia lingue,
Quam genuit natura parens, ut federa mundi
Juraque fixarum tentarel vertere rerum,
Legibus adstricto ne quid non posset in orbe.
