Paimon

Paimon arrives with music. The Ars Goetia, the most famous demon catalog in Western occultism, describes him riding a dromedary, preceded by a host of spirits playing trumpets and cymbals. He wears a glorious crown. Two kings attend him. He commands two hundred legions, the largest force assigned to any spirit in the entire seventy-two-entry catalog.

He is the ninth spirit listed. He is a King of Hell. And until 2018, when the film Hereditary put his name in front of a mainstream audience, almost nobody outside grimoire scholarship had heard of him.

The Goetic entry

Johann Weyer, the Dutch physician and demonologist, listed Paymon in his 1577 Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, the direct ancestor of the Ars Goetia. Weyer’s catalog had sixty-nine demons; the Goetia, compiled in the seventeenth century, expanded the list to seventy-two to match the Kabbalistic Shem HaMephorash, the seventy-two-fold Name of God.

Paimon’s entry in the Goetia is longer than most. The standard template gives a demon’s appearance, rank, legion count, and abilities in a few sentences. Paimon gets a full paragraph: the dromedary, the musical procession, the two attendant kings (Labal and Abali), the instruction that the conjurer must face northwest when summoning him, and a note that he speaks with a great voice but must be compelled to speak clearly.

His abilities are broad. He teaches all arts and sciences. He reveals secrets hidden in the earth and the wind. He grants dignities and lordships. He confirms familiars, spirit servants who attend the magician. He makes people subject to the conjurer’s will. If the Goetia is a service catalog, Paimon is the entry that offers the most comprehensive package.

The Order of Dominations

The Goetia adds a theological detail absent from Weyer’s earlier version: before his fall, Paimon belonged to the Order of Dominations. This places him in the pseudo-Dionysian angelic hierarchy, the nine-rank system described in the fifth or sixth-century text attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite. The Dominations (or Dominions) are the fourth rank, responsible for regulating the duties of lower angels.

The detail matters because it frames the Goetic demons as fallen angels with specific former ranks, not as primordial chaos spirits or pagan gods in Christian clothing. Paimon was once an angel of governance. His current role, commanding legions and granting lordships, reflects the skills of his former station. The fall did not change what he could do. It changed whom he served.

Several other Goetic spirits carry similar notes about their pre-fall orders. The consistency suggests a theological framework behind the catalog, one that treated the Goetic demons as a complete parallel hierarchy to the angelic orders, a shadow government in which every rank of heaven had its infernal counterpart.

The name without a source

Most Goetic demon names trace to identifiable traditions. Astaroth comes from the Canaanite Astarte. Asmodeus traces to the Avestan Aeshma Daeva. Bael derives from the Canaanite Baal. Paimon’s name does not follow these patterns. It is not Greek, Hebrew, Latin, or obviously Semitic.

Some scholars have proposed a pre-Islamic Arabian origin, noting that the name could relate to a jinn tradition that entered European demonology through Arabic magical texts transmitted via medieval Spain or the Crusader states. Others have suggested a connection to an unidentified Near Eastern deity. The lack of a clear etymology is itself a data point: Paimon may represent a layer of the Goetic tradition that came from a source European compilers could not translate.

Related reading

• The Ars Goetia. The full article on the seventy-two demons and the text that catalogs them.
• Asmodeus. A demon whose etymology is traceable, unlike Paimon’s.
• Beelzebub. Another high-ranking demon with ancient Near Eastern roots.

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) — earliest named source (as Paymon)
• Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, Ars Goetia (17th-century manuscripts, British Library Sloane Collection)
• S. L. MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley, The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King (1904) — influential modern edition
• Joseph H. Peterson, The Lesser Key of Solomon (2001) — critical edition with manuscript variants