Buer Demon: The Goetia’s Healer President and His Wheel Form

Quick answer: The Buer demon is the tenth spirit of the Ars Goetia, the first book of the Lesser Key of Solomon. The text ranks him as a Great President commanding fifty legions, says he appears when the sun is in Sagittarius, and credits him with teaching moral and natural philosophy, logic and the virtues of herbs, as well as healing illnesses and giving good familiar spirits. His famous wheel-shaped form, a lion's head with five goat legs, comes from a nineteenth-century illustration.

Related guides: Ars Goetia names, offices and seals, Goetia ranks and demon hierarchy, full list of the 72 demons, Stolas, the owl prince, what a sigil means, manuscript and printed Goetia editions.

Who Is the Buer Demon in the Goetia?

Buer is the tenth of the seventy-two spirits catalogued in the Ars Goetia, the first part of the seventeenth-century compilation known as the Lemegeton or Lesser Key of Solomon. The text calls him a Great President and places fifty legions of spirits under him. His entry is one of the more unusual in the book because it gives almost no physical description. Where other spirits appear as soldiers, animals or monsters, Buer is simply said to appear “in Sagittary,” that is, in the sign of Sagittarius, and “that is his shape when the sun is there.”

What the entry does describe is a set of offices. Buer teaches philosophy, both moral and natural, and logic. He teaches the virtues of all herbs and plants. He heals all distempers, meaning illnesses, in human beings. And he gives good familiars, the helper spirits that early modern magic imagined attending a practitioner. Taken together these make Buer one of the most benign-sounding figures in a book that elsewhere offers spirits who cause wars, raise storms or strip people of their senses.

Readers meeting the name for the first time usually arrive through the striking picture of a lion’s head surrounded by five goat legs arranged like the spokes of a wheel. It is not in the grimoire. Separating what the texts say from what the illustrators added is the first step in understanding any Goetic spirit, and the names, offices and seals of the Ars Goetia make a good framework for doing so.

Where the Buer Entry Comes From: Weyer, Scot and the Lemegeton

The earliest printed source for Buer is Johann Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1577), an appendix to his treatise against the witch trials, De praestigiis daemonum. Weyer, a physician and pupil of Agrippa, reproduced a catalogue of spirits from a manuscript in order to show how absurd ceremonial magic was. His Buer entry reads much as the later Goetia does: a great president who appears in Sagittarius when the sun is there, teaches moral and natural philosophy and logic, knows the virtues of herbs, heals every sickness and gives good familiars, and commands fifty legions.

Reginald Scot translated Weyer’s list into English in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), another skeptical work, and the English wording of Buer’s offices has barely changed since. When the compilers of the Ars Goetia assembled their seventy-two spirits in the mid-seventeenth century, they took Buer from this line of transmission, assigned him the number ten, and added a seal.

The most widely read modern version is the 1904 edition by S. L. MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley, which standardized the ordering and the seals and added material of its own. Joseph H. Peterson’s 2001 critical edition, based on British Library manuscripts, is the scholarly reference.

Rank, Legions and Offices: What a Great President Does

The Goetia arranges its spirits in a court modelled on European nobility. Presidents form one of the ranks, alongside kings, dukes, princes, marquises, counts or earls and knights. In the planetary scheme that later commentators attached to the list, presidents are linked with Mercury, the planet of learning and speech, which fits the fact that several presidents, including Buer, Marbas, Foras and Caim, have teaching offices. The full scheme is set out in the article on demon hierarchy and Goetia ranks.

Fifty legions is a mid-ranking command. The legion counts are symbolic, signalling status rather than literal armies, and they vary between manuscripts for some spirits, though Buer’s fifty is stable across Weyer, Scot and the Lemegeton.

• Philosophy. Buer teaches moral philosophy (ethics) and natural philosophy (what we would now call science). In the sixteenth century these were the core of a university education.
• Logic. The art of reasoning and argument, the third of the subjects a learned spirit might be expected to tutor.
• Herbs. Knowledge of the virtues of plants, shared with several other Goetic spirits and reflecting the importance of herbals in early modern medicine.
• Healing. Buer heals all distempers. Only a few spirits in the list have an explicitly medical office; Marbas is the other prominent example.
• Familiars. He gives good familiars, helper spirits. In the grimoire’s logic these were assistants in further operations.

Buer’s profile is that of a physician-philosopher. Historians have noted that the offices of the Goetic spirits often mirror the ambitions of the scholars who copied the manuscripts: knowledge, health, eloquence and a reliable assistant.

Why Is Buer Drawn as a Wheel of Legs?

The famous image of Buer, a bearded lion’s head at the center of five goat legs radiating like spokes, comes from the 1863 edition of Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, illustrated by Louis Le Breton. Le Breton drew dozens of the Goetic spirits for that edition, and his Buer is among the most reproduced of all his engravings. The design is entirely his invention. Nothing in Weyer, Scot or the Lemegeton describes a lion, goats or a wheel.

Why did Le Breton choose it? One plausible reading is that he was illustrating the phrase “appears in Sagittarius.” The sign’s symbol is a centaur-archer, and a half-animal figure is an obvious response. Another is that the wheel suggests the turning of the sun through the zodiac, since Buer’s appearance is tied to the sun’s position. The lion may evoke Leo, the sun’s own sign, or simply nobility. The five legs may be a visual pun on the word for star, or may mean nothing at all. The artist left no explanation.

Collin de Plancy’s text, for its part, describes Buer as a demon of the second order who teaches philosophy and logic and heals the sick, and it is this short entry that the engraving accompanies. The same pattern holds for Stolas, the owl prince, whose owl is also Le Breton’s: nineteenth-century art has become the public face of seventeenth-century text.

Buer Compared with Jinn, Biblical Demons and Other Spirits

Buer has no presence in scripture. He does not appear in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Quran or the Greek Testament of Solomon. Unlike Asmodeus, Beelzebub or Belial, whose names were old when the grimoires were written, Buer belongs to the group of spirits first attested in sixteenth-century European manuscripts. Attempts to find an origin for the name in Hebrew, Greek or Latin have not produced agreement, and the most honest statement is that its derivation is unknown.

This makes him a useful point of comparison with the jinn of Islamic tradition. Jinn in the Quran are a created community with free will, some faithful and some not, who eat, marry, die and face judgment. Buer is nothing of the kind. He is an office-holder in an imaginary court, defined by rank, number and function, without biography or moral character. The Goetia’s spirits are instruments; jinn are persons.

Buer’s healing office does echo an older pattern. The Testament of Solomon pairs each demon with the illness it causes and the formula that stops it. The Goetia inverts this by making a spirit the healer rather than the cause, a shift that reflects the hopes of the physicians and scholars who copied these manuscripts.

Common Misunderstandings About Buer

Because the picture is far better known than the text, Buer attracts a predictable set of errors.

• “Buer looks like a lion-wheel.” That is Le Breton’s 1863 engraving. The grimoire says only that he appears in Sagittarius.
• “Buer is a duke” or “a king.” He is a president in every version of the text.
• “Buer is a fallen angel.” The Goetia does not say so. Later writers sometimes assume all seventy-two are fallen angels, but the text gives Buer no origin story.
• “Buer is the demon of medicine.” He heals and teaches herbs, but so do Marbas and others. The text assigns no exclusive domains.
• “The sigil is ancient.” Buer’s seal appears with the seventeenth-century manuscripts. There is no earlier version.
• “Buer is good.” The Goetia does not rank its spirits morally. Benign offices do not make a benign spirit in the book’s own terms, which treats all seventy-two as beings to be constrained.

Buer in Modern Culture: Why People Search for Him Now

For centuries Buer was a line in a catalogue. His modern prominence is almost entirely a product of the wheel image and of video games. The Castlevania series has used a Buer enemy, a rolling wheel of legs with a central head, since the 1990s, and the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona games include a Buer modelled closely on Le Breton. The design is so distinctive that it transfers easily to pixel art and three-dimensional models, which is probably why designers keep returning to it.

He also appears in tabletop bestiaries, in comics and in the growing body of online videos that walk through the seventy-two spirits one by one. In those contexts the healing and philosophy offices are often emphasized, and Buer is sometimes presented as a friendly or wise demon. That characterization is a modern reading, not something the grimoires support.

Searches for Buer come from gamers who met the wheel and from readers of the Goetia who want to know why the wheel exists. The answer to both is a French engraver in 1863 interpreting one Latin phrase about Sagittarius.

How to Read the Sources on Buer Carefully

Three texts cover almost everything. Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum gives the earliest entry; Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft gives it in Elizabethan English; and Peterson’s edition of the Lemegeton gives the Goetic text with the seal. Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal is worth consulting for the engraving and for his short entry, but it is a nineteenth-century encyclopedia, not a primary grimoire.

Read Buer in context. Compare him with the spirits on either side, Sitri at number nine and Gusion at number eleven, and with the other presidents. The complete list of the 72 demons makes this easy, and it shows how stock the offices are: teaching, healing, familiars and herbs recur throughout the list, suggesting a formulaic compilation rather than seventy-two distinct personalities.

Keep the layers apart. The text describes offices and a zodiacal appearance; the 1863 engraving shows a lion-wheel; modern games show a monster. Each is interesting, and none is evidence about the others. This site treats the Goetia and its spirits as history and literature. It does not provide instructions for evocation or any other ritual, and nothing here should be read as a claim that any spirit described in the grimoires exists or produces an effect.

Disclaimer

This article describes Buer as he appears in early modern European grimoires and later illustration and fiction. The material is offered for historical and cultural understanding; beliefs about spirits are described, not endorsed, and no ritual instructions or outcome claims are made.