Amon

The seventh demon of the Ars Goetia is named Amon, and the name is the key to the entry. The Goetia was assembled in seventeenth-century Europe out of older demonological materials, and the seventh slot belongs to a creature whose name is one of the most important words in the religious history of the ancient Mediterranean. Amun was the king of the Egyptian gods at Thebes, the deity whose temple at Karnak still ranks among the largest religious buildings ever constructed, the god whose oracle Alexander the Great consulted at the Siwa Oasis to confirm his divine paternity. The grimoire kept the name. The grimoire kept almost nothing else.

Appearance

The Goetia describes Amon in two compatible forms. His first form: a wolf with a serpent’s tail, breathing fire from his mouth. His second form: a man with the head of a raven, sometimes specified as a “raven-headed dog.” The wolf-and-serpent composite is the older description, present in Weyer’s 1577 catalog. The raven-headed humanoid is the form he assumes after the magician commands him to become more comprehensible.

The creature is described as one of the strongest spirits of the Goetic catalog. He commands forty legions of subordinate demons. He is ranked as a “Great Marquis,” a high office in the demonological pseudo-feudal hierarchy. The Mathers-Crowley 1904 edition renders him as a thick-bodied wolf with a coiled serpent tail and flame curling from its jaws.

The Egyptian Amun has none of these features. The standard New Kingdom iconography shows Amun as a man with a tall double-plumed crown, sometimes blue-skinned to signify his association with the air, sometimes ram-headed in his form as Amun-Re. The ram is the closest the Egyptian iconography comes to the Goetic wolf. The transformation from ram to wolf in the demonological inheritance is unexplained. One plausible reading is that the medieval European illuminators, working from textual descriptions of an Egyptian animal-headed god, defaulted to a familiar northern European predator.

Function

Amon’s stated function in the Goetia is threefold: he reconciles controversies between friends and foes, he procures the love of the magician’s chosen target, and he tells of all things past and to come. The package is unusual in the catalog. Most Goetic demons specialize. Amon does diplomacy, romance, and divination at once.

The diplomatic function is the most curious. The Goetia rarely casts its demons as mediators. The magician usually conjures a demon to coerce, to inform, or to acquire. Amon is asked to settle disputes, to make peace between people who hate one another. The function survives, faintly, from the original Egyptian Amun, who was the patron of the just king and the guarantor of cosmic order at Karnak.

The romantic function is a standard grimoire offering. Many Goetic spirits procure love. Amon’s version is described without distinguishing detail.

The divinatory function is the most direct inheritance from Egyptian religion. The Siwa oracle of Amun was the most famous oracle of antiquity outside Delphi. Greek and Roman sources record consultations from Lysander, Alcibiades, Cimon, Hannibal, and most famously Alexander, who in 332 BCE rode from Memphis across the Western Desert to ask the oracle whether he was the son of a god. The answer satisfied him. Two thousand years later, the European magician summons Amon to ask about the future. The function has been preserved in stripped-down form. The temple complex at Karnak has been replaced with a chalk triangle.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The transmission line from Amun to the Goetic Amon is harder to trace than for Bael, because the Egyptian Amun did not have a sustained negative reception in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew text mentions “Amon of No” (Jeremiah 46:25), where No is Thebes, but the polemic is light. The Septuagint preserves the name. Greek and Roman writers tend to identify Amun with Zeus or Jupiter rather than demonize him.

The demonization most likely happened through the late antique magical papyri, where Egyptian deities and Hellenistic Jewish angelology mix freely. The Greek magical papyri from Egypt (PGM, third century BCE to fifth century CE) routinely invoke “Amoun” in love spells, divinatory operations, and binding rituals. By the time the Christianized late antique world is producing demonological catalogs, the Egyptian gods have been collectively reclassified as demons. The pattern is general: the gods of the conquered religion become the demons of the conquering one. Amun was particularly visible because of the size of his cult and the durability of his oracle.

The wolf-headed iconography may also draw from the Egyptian Wepwawet or Anubis, both jackal-headed gods who were sometimes confused with one another in late antique sources and who often appear in magical papyri. A medieval European reader compiling demon descriptions from disparate Greek sources could easily blend the iconography of Anubis (jackal-headed psychopomp) with the name of Amun (king of gods) into a single composite entry. The result is the wolf-with-serpent-tail of the Goetia.

The raven-headed alternative form is harder to source. Ravens are not standard in Egyptian iconography. The bird most associated with Egyptian death and divination is the falcon (Horus) or the ibis (Thoth). The raven enters the iconography from the European side, possibly through associations with Odin or with Christian apocrypha about ravens as servants of the devil.

Modern Survival

Amon survives in the contemporary occult revival as one of the more frequently summoned Goetic demons. His diplomatic and divinatory functions translate well into modern magical practice. He appears in chaos magic operations, in Thelemic ceremony, and in the Goetic-revival workings of writers like Aaron Leitch and S. Connolly. The wolf-and-serpent iconography remains the standard visual reference.

In gaming and pop culture Amon has had an active life. He appears in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise, in Final Fantasy, in dozens of fantasy novels, and as a recurring villain in heavy metal lyrics. The name is short, recognizable, and carries the weight of both ancient Egyptian theology and medieval demonology, which gives it a particular efficiency for any creator who needs a demon name with depth.

The original Amun is also having an unrelated revival. Egyptian polytheist reconstructionists worship him alongside other Kemetic deities. The Karnak temple complex is one of the most-visited tourist sites in the world. The Siwa oracle is again accessible. Two parallel modern lives for the same name: one as the king of an active reconstructed pantheon, one as a chained demon in a Goetic operation. Whether these are the same figure depends on what the reader thinks the name carries, and how much weight three thousand years of misreading is allowed to bear.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Johann Weyer, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1577)
• Lesser Key of Solomon (Lemegeton), Ars Goetia, c. 1640s manuscript
• S. L. MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley, eds., The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King (1904)
• Egyptian Coffin Texts and Theban temple inscriptions for Amun (Eighteenth–Twenty-First Dynasties)