Dantalion: A Spirit of the Lemegeton

10 May 2026

Dantalion is the seventy-first spirit of the Ars Goetia, nearly the last name in the catalogue, and one of its strangest. He appears, the text says, "in the form of a man with many countenances, all men's and women's faces," carrying a book in his right hand. His offices concern the interior of the human person to a degree unusual even in this catalogue of specialists: he teaches all arts and sciences, declares the secret counsel of anyone, "for he knoweth the thoughts of all men and women, and can change them at his will," kindles love, and can show the similitude of any person "in a vision, wheresoever they be."

The face and the book

The iconography rewards a slow look. A spirit of many faces who knows and alters thought is almost an allegory of persuasion itself, rhetoric personified and given a duke's rank, and the book he carries places him in the Goetia's recurring company of teacher-spirits, alongside Paimon and the astronomer-presidents. Renaissance readers would have caught the resonance with the classical topos of Proteus, the shape-changer who must be held fast before he speaks truth. Whether any of this reflects the entry's actual genesis is unknowable; what it certainly reflects is the compiler's world, in which the powers most worth cataloguing were the powers over minds.

Textual history

Dantalion is among the spirits absent from Weyer's 1577 catalogue and peculiar to the Lemegeton's expanded list of seventy-two, which tells us something useful: the catalogue was still growing in the seventeenth century, absorbing spirits from working manuscripts of the Officiorum Spirituum type that never reached print. The name itself resists etymology even more thoroughly than most. The manuscript tradition of the Lemegeton, surveyed in Peterson's edition, shows the usual drift of seals and spellings, a reminder that the "book" was always a family of copies.

Working reputation

In the contemporary revival Dantalion is approached, unsurprisingly, for matters of understanding and influence: reconciliations, negotiations, self-knowledge, the untangling of one's own motives, that last office, the changing of thoughts, being read by many modern operators reflexively, as a power over the operator's own mind. The ethical questions raised by a spirit whose specialty is changing thoughts are real and are older than the grimoire; they are the questions of rhetoric and of every art of influence, sharpened by the ritual frame. The traditional apparatus applies, command-road or offering-road, with the usual emphases: precision in the charge, banishing before and after, records kept. And the entry's own image supplies the working caution: what one holds, with Dantalion, is a being of many faces, and the manuals' insistence on binding the spirit to truth before questioning it reads, here, less like paranoia than like literary criticism.