Dantalion

The seventy-first spirit of the Ars Goetia is the only one whose whole business is what is happening inside other people. Most of the catalogue trades in things: a demon teaches a craft, finds buried gold, names the hour of a death, builds a tower, carries a message. Dantalion deals in thought itself. The Goetia says he knows the thoughts of all men and women, that he can change them at will, and that he can put the likeness of any absent person before you in a vision. He arrives wearing every human face at once, with a book in his hand.

Appearance

The text is exact about the form. “The Seventy-first Spirit is Dantalion. He is a Duke Great and Mighty, appearing in the Form of a Man with many Countenances, all Men’s and Women’s Faces; and he hath a Book in his right hand.” That is the whole description: a man carrying the faces of everyone, holding a single book.

No literal picture can hold the claim. A head that wears every face ever worn is a description that defeats illustration, and the early occult tradition mostly left it alone. The 1863 Dictionnaire Infernal, the source of the engravings that fixed how most Goetic spirits look, did not draw him at all. Louis Le Breton’s plates illustrated the demons Collin de Plancy chose, and Dantalion, one of the spirits added late to the list, was not among them. The image on this page is a house engraving in Le Breton’s manner, made for this entry: a robed figure crowned by a ring of human faces, men and women who look out in every direction while a central face reads from the open book. It is a rendering of the words, not a historical plate.

The book is the part the eye can hold. It sits in the right hand in every account, a closed or open volume against the impossible crowd of faces. Read one way it is the standard medieval shorthand for learning, the attribute of a teacher. Read another way it is the more uncomfortable object: a single text held up by a being who is also every reader of it.

Function

Dantalion’s offices are stated in one breath, and each one points at someone else’s interior. “His Office is to teach all Arts and Sciences unto any; and to declare the Secret Counsel of any one; for he knoweth the Thoughts of all Men and Women, and can change them at his Will. He can cause Love, and show the Similitude of any person, and show the same by a Vision, let them be in what part of the World they Will. He governeth 36 Legions of Spirits.”

The teaching gift is the broadest in the catalogue. Many Goetic spirits tutor in one field, astronomy, geometry, rhetoric, the virtues of herbs. Dantalion teaches all arts and sciences to anyone, with no subject named because none is excluded. He is the spirit a person calls who wants not a fact but a discipline, and wants it fast.

The “secret counsel” gift is the one that gives the entry its strange charge. To declare the secret counsel of a person is to report their hidden deliberation, the thought they have not spoken. The Goetia grounds it in the claim that he knows the thoughts of all people and can change them at his will. No restriction is placed on the target, on distance, on consent. A spirit who can read any mind and alter it is, in the logic of the manual, a master key to other people. The text states the power flatly and stops there, which is its own kind of statement.

The third office, causing love and showing the likeness of any absent person in a vision, sits naturally beside the second. Both reach across the world into a particular life. The vision of the distant beloved and the reading of the distant thought are the same gesture, the office of a spirit who collapses the space between the operator and someone he cannot see. That the love-working stands next to the mind-changing in the same sentence is suggestive: in this entry, affection and thought are handled by the same hand.

Cross-Cultural Connections

Dantalion is a latecomer to his own list. Johann Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum of 1577, the catalogue that lies behind the Ars Goetia, names sixty-nine spirits. The English Goetia raises the count to the round seventy-two, the traditional number of names, by adding four: Vassago, Seere, Dantalion, and Andromalius. Dantalion is therefore not in Weyer at all. He is a product of the seventeenth-century English compilation of the Lemegeton, and his powers are pitched higher than most of the older entries, as if the compiler, building a spirit to fill a slot, reached for the largest possible office.

No firm etymology for the name has been established in the scholarship. The links sometimes offered, to the prophet Daniel, to a Latinate coinage, are guesses rather than documented derivations, and the likeliest reading is that the name was made to sound like a Solomonic spirit and fit the seventy-first place. The faces are easier to place. The many-faced supernatural being is an old visual idea in the West, from the four-faced living creatures of Ezekiel 1, each bearing the face of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle, onward. Dantalion’s variation is that his faces are not symbolic animals but human and particular, the specific faces of specific people, which is what makes the image read less as cosmic vision and more as a crowd.

The mind-reading office places him in a small group inside the Goetia. Paimon teaches secret things and what the earth holds; Astaroth answers truly of things past and to come; Stolas opens the correspondences of the cosmos. These are demons of hidden knowledge, summoned for what the operator cannot otherwise reach. Dantalion belongs with them, with one difference worth holding open: the hidden thing the others retrieve is information about the world, while the hidden thing Dantalion retrieves is another person’s thought, and then offers to rewrite it. Where Asmodeus is the great spirit of lust and the ring of Solomon, and Bael the first king who teaches invisibility, Dantalion is the spirit pointed at the mind of someone in the world rather than at the world itself.

Modern Survival

The catalogue has had a long life since the 1640s, and Dantalion has traveled with it into modern occult practice and into the games and comics that mine the Goetic list for names. The mind-reading and teaching offices have kept him in circulation; some contemporary practitioners treat the “all arts and sciences” power as study magic and decline the thought-reading office on living people as a matter of consent, which is its own quiet commentary on what the entry actually offers.

The most durable thing about him is the image, not the demon. A figure who wears the faces of every man and woman who has ever lived is a picture that outgrows its grimoire. It has been borrowed by artists with no interest in demonology at all, as a way to draw the universal person, the everyone-at-once, the face of the crowd. The compiler who set this spirit in the seventy-first place gave him a power the manual treats as plainly as any other: he knows what you are thinking, and he can change it. The entry records the claim and explains nothing about it, and the unease of a being defined entirely by access to other minds is left, as the Goetia leaves most things, for the reader.

Sources

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

• The Lesser Key of Solomon (Lemegeton), Book One: Ars Goetia, English manuscript tradition (c. 1640s)
• S. L. MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley, eds., The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King (1904)
• Joseph H. Peterson, ed., The Lesser Key of Solomon: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (Weiser, 2001)
• Johann Weyer, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (appended to De praestigiis daemonum, 1577)