Paimon

Paimon is the ninth of the seventy-two spirits of the Ars Goetia, the first of the five books of the Lemegeton or Lesser Key of Solomon. The date should be fixed before anything else, because it is usually given wrong: **the Lemegeton is a seventeenth-century compilation**, not a medieval text, and Solomon's signature is a device of authority. The material it gathers is older, but the book as read today was arranged in seventeenth-century England.

His oldest documented appearance is earlier than that, in Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, published in 1577 as an appendix to De Praestigiis Daemonum. There he is spirit 22, and the phrase that defines him is already written: he obeys Lucifer more than the other kings do. The Ars Goetia takes it up almost unchanged, calling him "a great king, and very obedient to Lucifer".

That datum orders his whole entry, because it is the only subordination the texts ascribe to him. There are no pacts or treaties between equals: there is a declared obedience, and above it two hundred legions at his command.

Of the name, a traditional etymology is repeated deriving it from the Hebrew pa'amon, "little bell", which would sit well with the noisy retinue that goes before him. It is best taken for what it is, an old and unverified proposal, and not for a firm datum. The idea that he was a fallen angel who kept his royal rank after the rebellion is not in the Goetia: it is the general frame of Christian demonology, applied afterwards to the seventy-two.

The Ars Goetia describes him precisely and without ornament: he appears in the form of a man, seated on a dromedary, with a most glorious crown on his head. Before him goes a host of spirits in the shape of men bearing trumpets, well-sounding cymbals and all other sorts of musical instruments. It is an entrance, not an apparition: he is heard before he is seen.

The text does not explain why a dromedary, and it is best not to fill the gap. It had been written here, and it was invention, that the camel symbolises "endurance in spiritual deserts"; there is nothing of the kind in the source. The grimoires describe, and the taste for glossing every detail with a meaning is a much later habit, of nineteenth-century ceremonial magic onwards.

There is instead a detail that is in the text and is almost never told, though it is the most human thing in the whole entry: **he speaks with a hoarse, confused voice**, and the officiant must command him to speak clearly, in an intelligible voice, in order to be understood. The scene is not one of a power imposing itself, but of an interview in which one has to ask the other party to explain himself.

Hence the Ars Goetia's insistence on protocol. If he is called alone, it says, an offering must be made him. It is not a whim of infernal etiquette: it is the condition for his appearing on the agreed terms, and for the two kings who accompany him to answer as well.

It was said here that Paimon keeps hierarchical alliances "with kings such as Belial and Asmodeus". **That is not what the source says, and the error has an exact correction.** The Ars Goetia states that, if he is called alone and the due offering is made, two kings named **Bebal and Abalam** attend him, along with twenty-five legions. Those are the two names in the text. Belial and Asmodeus are other spirits of the same catalogue, the 68th and the 32nd, and no source links them to him.

His attributions are well established and among the broadest in the Goetia. He teaches all arts and sciences, and other secret things; he grants dignities and confirms them; he gives good and obedient familiars; and he subjects a man's will to that of the magician who invokes him. That last power, which the entry did not record, is among the most disquieting in the book and explains much of his fame.

There are besides two questions the text says he can answer, and they are worth more than any list of powers because they show what was really asked of a demon in the seventeenth century: **he can tell what the Earth is and what holds it up upon the waters, and what the mind is and where it is**. Cosmology and consciousness. Not gold, not revenge: the two things nobody knew.

His real relation, the only declared one, remains obedience to Lucifer. Everything else told of him (pacts, courts, treaties among infernal kings) belongs to later demonological literature, which organised hell as a European monarchy because that was the only model of power it had to hand.

For many people the name arrives not through the grimoire but through Hereditary, the 2018 film in which a cult works for generations to give a king named Paimon a male body to lodge in. It is worth saying clearly what of the Goetia is in that: the name, the title of king, and the eight legions the film mentions in passing. The rest is screenplay.

The difference is not one of nuance. The Paimon of the Ars Goetia does not seek to be incarnated and needs no host; he is called, he comes, he answers and he departs when licensed to go. He demands no lineage, no offspring, no family sacrifices. He teaches arts and sciences, grants offices and gives familiar spirits, which is what a seventeenth-century reader wanted of him: a career, an education and an invisible servant.

That distance between the demon of the text and the demon of the cinema is the rule, not the exception, and it recurs with almost every name in the Goetia. The grimoire presents them as officials of an administration: each with his rank, his number of legions and his speciality, many of them courteous, several explicitly obedient. Contemporary horror needs something else, so it keeps the name and rewrites the rest.

Knowing this takes nothing from either version. It serves to keep from ascribing to a book of 1641 what was written for a cinema, which is exactly an encyclopaedia's job.