Focalor: A Spirit of the Lemegeton

30 April 2026

Focalor appears as the forty-first spirit of the Ars Goetia, the first book of the seventeenth-century compilation known as the Lemegeton, or Lesser Key of Solomon. The catalogue entry is brief and vivid: a Great Duke commanding thirty legions, appearing as a man with the wings of a griffin, whose office is power over wind and sea. He drowns men and sinks warships, and, tellingly, "will not hurt any man or thing if he be commanded to the contrary by the exorcist." He hopes, the text adds, to return to the seventh heaven after a thousand years, "but he is deceived in that hope": a poignant fragment of the fallen-angel mythology the grimoire inherits, and one of the catalogue's few glimpses of a spirit's interior life.

Textual history

Like most Goetic spirits, Focalor is older than the Goetia. The name appears, as Forcalor or Focalor, in Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1577), the demonological appendix to his skeptical De praestigiis daemonum; Weyer, a physician and pupil of Agrippa, published his spirit list partly to ridicule the conjurers, an irony the subsequent tradition serenely ignored. Reginald Scot translated the list into English in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), another skeptical work mined as a manual, and the Lemegeton's compiler reworked the material around 1640–60, adding seals and adjusting ranks. The scribal variants of the name (Forcalor, Furcalor) are ordinary copyists' drift; attempts to find a secure etymology have not succeeded. Scholars including Jake Stratton-Kent read catalogues of this type as preserving, under demonized names, fragments of much older spirit inventories, some with plausible lines back to the chthonic and marine powers of the ancient Mediterranean, an argument treated at length in our essay on Stratton-Kent; the sober position is that the general claim is defensible and any particular identification speculative.

Working reputation

Within the modern revival of grimoire magic, Focalor has acquired a reputation as a spirit of controlled catastrophe: the dismantling of situations, the ending of what needs ending, weather in both the literal and biographical senses. Contemporary practitioners approach such spirits along two broad roads. The Solomonic road works the Goetia as written: preliminary banishing, circle and triangle, conjuration by the divine names, a precise charge, and a courteous license to depart, the whole apparatus of command whose logic is protection through hierarchy. The spirit-cult road, argued by Stratton-Kent and practitioners influenced by living traditions, proceeds by offering, alliance, and negotiated relationship instead. Both roads take seriously the entry's most interesting clause: the spirit's destructiveness is conditional on what the exorcist commands. In the grimoires' own theology, responsibility never leaves the operator, and a spirit whose specialty is shipwreck is approached, on either road, the way one approaches heavy weather: with respect, preparation, and no illusions about who is larger.