Vassago

Open the Ars Goetia to the Third Spirit and you find something unusual: almost nothing. His name is Vassago. He is a Mighty Prince. He commands 26 legions. He is “of a Good Nature.” He declares things past and to come. He discovers all things hidden or lost. His seal is provided.

What he looks like is not.

Every other major demon in the seventy-two comes with a portrait. Asmodeus rides a dragon with three heads. Baal appears with the heads of a cat, a man, and a toad. Agares, the Second Spirit, rides a crocodile with a goshawk on his fist. The Goetia is a catalog, and catalogs describe their merchandise. Vassago is the one entry where the clerk left the description blank and moved on.

The Missing Face

The full text of Vassago’s entry in the Ars Goetia reads: “The Third Spirit is a Mighty Prince, being of the same nature as Agares. He is called Vassago. This Spirit is of a Good Nature, and his office is to declare things Past and to Come, and to discover all things Hid or Lost. And he governeth 26 Legions of Spirits, and this is his Seal.”

That is it. No form. No animal parts. No size, no color, no wings, no weapons. The phrase “of the same nature as Agares” has led some later practitioners to depict Vassago as an old man on a crocodile, borrowing Agares’ physical description. But the text does not say he looks like Agares. It says he shares Agares’ nature. This could mean disposition, rank, or function. It does not mean appearance, because if it did, the compiler had no reason to omit a description.

The absence is unique among the seventy-two. Even the briefest Goetia entries specify a form: “appears as a soldier on a red horse” or “takes the shape of a crane.” Vassago gets nothing. In a text whose entire structure depends on identifying, categorizing, and controlling spiritual beings, one being resists the category.

Usagoo

Vassago does appear in an older text, and that text gives him more.

The Liber Officiorum Spirituum, the Book of the Office of Spirits, survives in multiple manuscript copies in the British Library’s Sloane Collection and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Johannes Trithemius referenced it in his 1508 catalog of necromantic texts, placing its origins in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Daniel Harms and Joseph H. Peterson published a related manuscript tradition in 2015 as The Book of Oberon.

In the Liber Officiorum Spirituum, Vassago appears under the variant name “Usagoo.” He appears in the form of an angel. He is described as “just and true in all his doings.” He rules 20 spirits (not the 26 legions of the later Goetia). He incites the love of women and reveals hidden treasures. He is, in every respect, a cooperative spirit who tells the truth and does not harm the practitioner.

This is the oldest known source for Vassago by more than a century. And it provides the physical description that the Ars Goetia omits: he looks like an angel.

The gap between the two texts raises a question. The compiler of the Ars Goetia, working in seventeenth-century England, clearly had access to the Liber Officiorum Spirituum or a manuscript descended from it. He took the name (regularizing “Usagoo” to “Vassago”), kept the powers (divination, finding lost things), adjusted the legion count, and dropped three things: the angelic appearance, the love magic, and the statement that the spirit was “just and true.” He kept only “of a Good Nature.” Whether the omissions were deliberate editorial choices or the result of working from an incomplete copy, nobody knows. The angelic appearance vanished from the canonical text, and the demon with no face was born.

The Demon Who Was Not in Weyer

Johann Weyer published his Pseudomonarchia Daemonum in 1577 as an appendix to De Praestigiis Daemonum, a work arguing that witches were mentally ill and should be treated by physicians rather than burned. Weyer’s demon catalog listed 69 spirits. It was the direct ancestor of the Ars Goetia’s list of 72.

Vassago is not in Weyer.

He is one of four demons present in the Goetia but absent from the Pseudomonarchia. The other three are Seere (#70), Dantalion (#71), and Andromalius (#72). Meanwhile, Weyer includes Pruflas, who the Goetia drops. The arithmetic: 69 minus 1 plus 4 equals 72, which is the number of names in the Shem HaMephorash, the 72-fold Name of God derived from Exodus 14:19-21 in Kabbalistic tradition.

The four added demons appear to come from English manuscript sources that circulated independently of the Continental Weyer tradition. Vassago’s presence in the Liber Officiorum Spirituum confirms this: he survived in English magical manuscripts while Weyer, working in the Netherlands, never encountered him. The Ars Goetia’s anonymous compiler merged both streams, the Continental list and the English manuscripts, and rounded the count to the sacred number.

Vassago is therefore a product of the English grimoire tradition in a way that most Goetia demons are not. His textual DNA runs through the Sloane manuscripts, the Folger Library, the practical magic notebooks of Tudor and Stuart England. He does not appear in Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal (1863), which means Louis Le Breton never illustrated him. He has no iconic image from the nineteenth century. He is a demon whose entire visual history has been filled in by modern artists working without a source text.

The Practical Uses

The Sloane manuscripts at the British Library preserve specific ritual procedures, called “Experiments,” for working with Vassago. Sloane MS 3824 contains an “Experiment of Vassago” designed to capture the spirit in a crystal, likely a beryl or quartz sphere. Once bound in the crystal, Vassago could be consulted for information about lost objects, hidden treasures, and future events.

This connects Vassago to the crystal-gazing tradition that was widespread in early modern English magic. The same tradition produced the famous partnership of John Dee and Edward Kelley in the 1580s, where Kelley scryed in a crystal and reported the communications of angels (or entities claiming to be angels). Vassago’s specialty, declaring things past and to come, made him ideal for this kind of work. A spirit captured in a crystal who could answer questions about the future and find lost things was, in practical terms, a portable oracle.

The treasure-hunting context matters too. Early modern England saw extensive use of grimoire magic for locating buried treasure, and spirits like Vassago who specialized in “discovering things hid or lost” were among the most sought-after for this purpose. These were not abstract theological exercises. They were attempts by real people to find real money using the tools their manuscript traditions provided.

Thomas Rudd, writing in the seventeenth century, added another layer. His manuscript (Harley MS 6483, British Library) paired each of the seventy-two Goetia demons with a corresponding angel from the Shem HaMephorash and a verse from the Psalms. Vassago’s angelic counterpart is Sitael, the third of the seventy-two sacred angels. The practitioner would inscribe Sitael’s name and the Psalm verse on the reverse side of Vassago’s seal, creating a double-sided talisman. One side summoned the demon. The other side invoked the angel who could restrain him.

For a spirit already described as “of a Good Nature,” the additional angelic insurance might seem excessive. But the grimoire tradition operated on the principle that no spirit, however cooperative, should be trusted without safeguards. The magic circle, the Triangle of Art, the divine names, the angel on the back of the seal: these were not just ritual theater. They were engineering tolerances built into a system designed to work with forces that could not be fully understood.

What Survives

Vassago occupies a strange position in modern occultism. He is one of the most frequently invoked Goetia spirits, popular among practitioners who describe him as gentle and easy to work with. This reputation tracks directly to the original texts: “of a Good Nature,” “just and true in all his doings.” He is the Goetia spirit you start with, the one experienced practitioners recommend to beginners, the least dangerous door into a dangerous system.

And he remains faceless. The Ars Goetia gives no form. The Liber Officiorum Spirituum says he looks like an angel. Modern practitioners report a range of appearances, from the borrowed image of Agares (old man on a crocodile) to hooded figures, to glowing humanoid shapes, to nothing visible at all, only a presence and a voice answering questions. The absence of a canonical image has made Vassago a kind of mirror: practitioners see what they expect, or what they need, or what the tradition they trained in has taught them to see.

He does not appear in the Testament of Solomon. He has no ancient Mesopotamian or biblical pedigree. He is not a fallen angel from the Book of Enoch or a Canaanite god demoted to demon. He entered the record through English magical manuscripts in the sixteenth century, was absorbed into the Ars Goetia in the seventeenth, and has been invoked continuously since. His entire history fits inside the era of print.

Among the seventy-two, Vassago is the most honest about what a grimoire demon actually is: a name, a function, a seal, and a set of rules for contact. Strip away the elaborate physical descriptions that the other entries provide, and what remains is what Vassago always was. A prince of the air with a reputation for truth-telling, written into existence by an English scribe whose name we do not know, preserved in manuscripts that crossed from hand to hand through the centuries of practical magic that produced the modern occult tradition.

The seal exists, the name exists, the function exists. The face was never specified. Whether that makes Vassago more or less real than the demons with three heads and serpent tails is a question the texts leave open.

Sources

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

• Liber Officiorum Spirituum (16th century; Sloane manuscripts, British Library)
• Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, Ars Goetia (Sloane MS 2731, begun 1686; British Library)
• S.L. MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King (1904)
• Stephen Skinner and David Rankine, The Goetia of Dr Rudd (Golden Hoard Press, 2007)
• Daniel Harms and Joseph H. Peterson, The Book of Oberon (Llewellyn, 2015)