Agares Demon: The Goetia’s Second Spirit, Duke of the East

Quick answer: The Agares demon is the second spirit of the Ars Goetia, a duke who rules under the power of the east and commands 31 legions. The Lemegeton describes him as a mild old man riding a crocodile with a goshawk on his fist. His offices are teaching languages, making those who stand still run, returning runaways, destroying dignities and causing earthquakes. Weyer calls him Agreas; de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal gave him his familiar nineteenth-century portrait.

Related guides: the full list of 72 Goetia demons, Goetia ranks from king to president, Bael and Paimon, kings of the Goetia, Vassago, the third spirit, Duke Barbatos and the hunting horn, what a sigil or seal means.

Who is the Agares demon in the Goetia?

The Ars Goetia, the first book of the Lemegeton or Lesser Key of Solomon, lists 72 spirits in a fixed order with ranks, seals and offices. Agares holds the second place, immediately after King Bael. In the Mathers and Crowley edition of 1904 the entry reads that ‘the Second Spirit is a Duke called Agreas, or Agares’, that he is ‘under the Power of the East’, and that he ‘cometh up in the form of an old fair Man, riding upon a Crocodile, carrying a Goshawk upon his fist, and yet mild in appearance’.

His rank is duke, which the Goetia’s own introductory notes associate with the planet Venus and with a gentler disposition than the kings and marquises. He is said to govern 31 legions of lesser spirits, a modest number beside Bael’s 66, and to have belonged before his fall to the angelic Order of Virtues. The phrase ‘power of the east’ places him among the spirits attached to the eastern quarter, a detail inherited from Weyer that later editors treated as a directional attribution.

Nothing in the Goetia gives Agares a personality beyond these lines, and the text supplies no story about him. What readers encounter today is a short catalogue entry that has been expanded by four centuries of engravers, occult commentators and game designers. Readers new to this material may want to start with the full list of 72 Goetia demons to see where Agares fits.

Appearance, offices and legions as the Lemegeton describes them

Three features define the traditional image of Agares. He is old and fair, meaning handsome or pleasant rather than frightening. He rides a crocodile, an animal that in early modern Europe was known mostly from travelers’ reports and natural histories and that carried associations with Egypt and the Nile. And he carries a goshawk, the large hunting hawk of European falconry, on his fist in the manner of a nobleman out hawking. The composite suggests a courtly, exotic figure rather than a monster.

The offices attributed to him are unusually varied. The Lemegeton lists five:

• He ‘maketh them to run that stand still’, and conversely brings back those who have run away, a pairing that early commentators read as power over motion and flight.
• He teaches ‘all Languages or Tongues presently’, that is, immediately.
• He can destroy dignities ‘both Spiritual and Temporal’, meaning he is credited with toppling church and civil office-holders.
• He causes earthquakes.
• In Weyer’s version he ‘fetcheth backe all such as runne awaie’, which later editors expanded to include deserters and fugitives.

The 31 legions are a standard Goetic device. Each spirit is a commander, and the number of legions functions as a rough index of standing. The ranks themselves and what they imply are explained in our guide to Goetia ranks from king to president.

The Agares sigil described in words

Every Goetia spirit has a seal, and the manuscripts instruct that it be engraved or drawn before the spirit is addressed. The Agares sigil in the Mathers edition is a compact, mostly horizontal figure. Its backbone is a long baseline with upturned, hook-like terminals; from this line rise several short vertical strokes, and a larger central element curves over them like a bridge. Small circles sit at the ends of some strokes, a feature shared with many Goetic seals. The whole reads as a stylized, almost script-like design rather than as a picture of anything.

Because the seals were copied by hand for centuries, no two manuscripts draw Agares’s sigil identically. The British Library’s Sloane manuscripts, the source for Mathers, differ in small details from the versions reproduced in modern printed editions and in online images. Collectors who compare editions will notice that strokes are added or dropped, and that the proportions shift.

The seals were understood by the compilers as the spirit’s ‘character’ or signature, a device that identifies and, in their belief, compels the spirit. This site describes the sigils as historical artifacts and does not provide instructions for their ritual use.

Agares in Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum and de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal

The Lemegeton’s catalogue did not appear from nowhere. Johann Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, printed as an appendix to his De praestigiis daemonum in 1577, gives 69 spirits in a different order, and Reginald Scot translated it into English in 1584. In Weyer, Agares appears as the second entry, ‘the first duke under the power of the east’, who ‘commeth up mildlie in the likenes of a faire old man, riding upon a crocodile, and carrieng a hawke on his fist’. The offices match almost word for word: he teaches tongues presently, fetches back those who run away, makes them run that stand still, overthrows dignities, and makes earthquakes. Weyer also records the Order of Virtues and the 31 legions.

This is a reminder that the Goetia is a compilation. Weyer claimed to be exposing a foolish book called the Liber officiorum spirituum so that readers would laugh at it, yet his summary became the seed of the most famous grimoire catalogue in English.

Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal (first edition 1818) summarized Weyer’s entry in French, calling Agares a grand duke of the eastern part of hell who appears as a kindly old lord riding a crocodile with a sparrowhawk on his wrist. The 1863 edition added Louis Le Breton’s engraving: a bearded, robed elder seated calmly on a snarling crocodile, hawk raised, with a faint smile. That engraving is the picture most people now associate with the Agares demon.

How Agares compares with other Goetia spirits

Agares is best understood beside his neighbors in the list, because the compilers grouped spirits with shared forms and themes.

Bael, the first king

Bael opens the Goetia with 66 legions and a monstrous triple form. Agares follows as the first of his dukes in the east. The two names travel together from Weyer onward, which is why older commentators treated Agares as Bael’s lieutenant.

Vassago, the third spirit

Vassago is described as being ‘of the same nature as Agares’ and is said to take the same form. He is a prince with 26 legions who declares past and future and finds lost things. The close pairing suggests that in some earlier list the two were variants of one figure.

Barbatos, the eighth spirit

Barbatos is another duke, with 30 legions, who appears when the sun is in Sagittarius with four noble kings and their companies. He understands the voices of birds and animals; Agares understands human tongues. Both belong to the courtly, hunting-themed group of dukes.

Gamigin and the teaching spirits

Gamigin, Marbas, Buer and several others teach sciences, languages or arts. Agares’s gift of ‘all tongues’ places him in this group of instructor spirits, which may reflect the scholarly ambitions of the grimoire’s early modern readers.

Common misunderstandings about Agares

The first confusion is the name. Agares, Agreas and the occasional Aguares are all the same spirit; the variants come from scribal spelling, not from different beings. Some online sources list Agares and Agreas as two demons, which the manuscripts do not support.

The second is the hawk. Weyer and Scot say ‘hawke’, Mathers says ‘Goshawk’, de Plancy’s French translators say ‘épervier’ (sparrowhawk). All are falconry birds; the species shifts with each translator. The third is the claim that Agares is a Mesopotamian or Egyptian god in disguise. Unlike Bael (from Baal) or Astaroth (from Astarte), Agares has no clear ancient ancestor. The crocodile has prompted guesses about Sobek, but no source links them, and the resemblance is probably decorative.

A fourth misunderstanding is that his power over ‘dignities’ makes him a political spirit of revolution. In the sixteenth-century context dignities meant offices and ranks, and the line simply catalogues one more thing the spirit was credited with. Finally, as with every Goetia entry, readers should not take the catalogue as a record of events. It is a literary and ritual tradition compiled from older lists, and its claims about what spirits do are beliefs of its compilers.

Agares in modern culture and why people search for him

Agares is a minor spirit in literary terms, with no appearance in Milton, Dante or Goethe. His modern visibility comes almost entirely from the de Plancy engraving and from the digital age’s appetite for demon rosters. The Megami Tensei family of video games includes him among their recruitable demons, usually drawn as an elder on a reptile. Tabletop and card games borrow the Goetia’s rank-and-legion structure and give him stats accordingly. Manga and anime series that draw on the 72 spirits sometimes feature him as a gentle or scholarly figure, playing on the ‘mild’ description.

Searches for the Agares demon also come from readers of twentieth-century occult literature, where the Goetia was reprinted in Mathers and Crowley’s 1904 edition and in later paperbacks, and from people drawing or tattooing Goetic seals.

For most readers the useful takeaway is historical: Agares shows how a single sentence in a 1577 Latin appendix could pass through English translation, manuscript grimoires, a French dictionary and a Victorian edition to become a character with a fixed portrait. The appearance of the figure is stable; the meaning readers attach to him has changed with every century.

How to read the Agares sources side by side

The quickest way to understand any Goetia spirit is to read its entry in three places. First, Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum in Scot’s 1584 English, which is widely reprinted and freely available in facsimile. Second, the Mathers and Crowley Goetia of 1904, which supplies the sigil, the legion count and the planetary rank table. Third, de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, ideally the 1863 edition with Le Breton’s plates.

Note what changes and what stays fixed. For Agares the appearance, the eastern attribution, the Order of Virtues and the 31 legions are constant across all three. The bird species, the exact wording of the offices and the sigil’s details drift. This kind of comparison is the core method of occult history, and it works for every spirit in the list.

Remember that none of these books is a neutral record. Weyer was a physician arguing that witchcraft trials were cruel nonsense; Mathers and Crowley were ceremonial magicians; de Plancy began as a skeptic and ended as a devout Catholic. Each shaped the material to his purpose, and the Agares demon who emerges is their joint creation.

Disclaimer

This profile describes Agares as a figure in Renaissance demonology and the grimoire tradition. The attributes reported are the beliefs of historical compilers, not claims of fact, and this site provides no ritual instructions.