King Paimon: A Spirit of the Lemegeton

5 May 2026

Among the seventy-two spirits of the Ars Goetia, few arrive with the courtly grandeur of Paimon, the ninth spirit and one of only a handful accorded the rank of King. The text stages his arrival as a procession: a man with an effeminate face, crowned, riding a dromedary, preceded by a host of spirits "with trumpets and well sounding cymbals, and all other sorts of musical instruments." He speaks first in a roaring voice, in a language the operator cannot understand, and must be commanded to answer plainly. His offices are notably intellectual: he teaches all arts, philosophies, and sciences, reveals "what the earth is, and what holdeth it up," gives dignities and confirms them, and binds men to the operator's will. Two kings, Labal and Abalam, attend him when the offerings are made correctly, a detail preserving the diplomatic texture of the older practice.

Textual history

Paimon predates the Lemegeton considerably. He appears in Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1577) and Scot's English rendering (1584), and earlier in the Liber Officiorum Spirituum tradition of spirit catalogues on which both drew; the recently published Book of Oberon, an Elizabethan magician's working book, shows the same court in day-to-day professional use. The entry's bookkeeping, obedient to Lucifer, observed toward the northwest, offerings before questions, preserves the directional and hierarchical protocol of late medieval necromancy. The name's origin is unknown; a derivation from a Semitic root, and the older guess of a connection to a Middle Eastern deity, remain speculation, and the honest position is that we do not know. What is documented is the career: from working catalogue to printed skeptical appendix to grimoire classic, the standard laundering cycle by which, as Owen Davies shows, exposure becomes instruction.

Modern reception

Paimon's profile in contemporary occultism is high, and was raised further by an unexpected career in prestige horror cinema, which sent a generation of viewers to search the name and, some of them, to stay for the literature. Practitioners of the grimoire revival report him, in the tradition's own idiom, as a teacher: a spirit approached for understanding, articulacy, and standing rather than upheaval, with the customary apparatus of circle, charge, and license, or along the offering-based road discussed under Focalor. The historically minded will notice how much of Paimon's entry concerns protocol: the music, the retinue, the required offering, the command to speak clearly. The grimoires assume that dealing with kings requires manners, and the assumption is the entry's most practical instruction. Readers new to the series may wish to start with What Is a Spirit? for the ontological groundwork.