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The seal of Ose, from the 1904 edition
S. L. MacGregor Mathers & Aleister Crowley (1904 edition). Wikimedia Commons ↗ · Public domain.

the 57th spirit

Ose

Also called Oso.

  • Titles President
  • Seal in Mercury
  • Legions 30
  • Of seventy-two No. 57

Reading this entry

The number places Ose in this edition's seventy-two-part catalogue. Its titles and the metal assigned to its seal come from the edition's classified appendix; the legion count is read from the entry itself. The passage below may describe an appearance, an office, a voice or an older order of beings. These are things the book says, not independent facts about a spirit. The original wording is left intact so a reader can check exactly where the description ends and our notes begin.

Edition: Mathers translation, Crowley edition, 1904. View the printed volume ↗

What the book says

From the 1904 edition, with its spelling and capitalisation preserved.

The Fifty-seventh Spirit is Oso, Ose, or Voso. He is a Great President, and appeareth like a Leopard at the first, but after a little time he putteth on the Shape of a Man. His Office is to make one cunning in the Liberal Sciences, and to give True Answers of Divine and Secret Things; also to change a Man into any Shape that the Exorcist pleaseth, so that he that is so changed will not think any other thing than that he is in verity that Creature or Thing he is changed into. He governeth 30° Legions of Spirits, and this is his Seal, etc.

The Goetia, trans. Mathers, ed. Crowley, 1904 — spirit 57.

Sources

Goetic office canonical

President, 30 legions

Rank and legion count as the 1904 edition gives them. The legions come from the phrase that closes almost every entry; the rank comes from the book's own appendix, which classifies all seventy-two and states the metal each rank's seal is to be made in — mercury for this one. The entries use rank words descriptively as well — Eligos appears 'in the form of a goodly Knight' and Barbatos comes 'with four noble Kings' — so a rank harvested from the prose would invent titles the book does not give. Only the appendix classifies.

Sources (1)
  1. Lemegeton , The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King — The Goetia, spirit 57
    “The Fifty-seventh Spirit is Oso, Ose, or Voso. He is a Great President, and appeareth like a Leopard at the first, but after a little time he putteth on the Shape of a Man. His Office is to make one cunning in the Liberal Sciences, and to give True Answers of Divine and Secret Things; also to change a Man into any Shape that the Exorcist pleaseth, so that he that is so changed will not think any other thing than that he is in verity that Creature or Thing he is changed into. He governeth 30° Legions of Spirits, and this is his Seal, etc.”

    Verbatim, cut from the 1904 text by script/extract_goetia.rb. Mathers' spelling and capitalisation are left exactly as printed.

    Read at archive.org ↗

Goetic rank canonical

The APPENDIX classifies this spirit, not its entry. The entries use rank words descriptively as well — Eligos appears 'in the form of a goodly Knight' — so a rank taken from the prose would invent titles the book does not give.

Sources (1)
  1. Lemegeton , The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King — Classified List of the 72 Chief Spirits

    Read at archive.org ↗

Other presidents

Correspondences 1 sourced correspondence
Relation To First attested
Goetic rank President 1600 CE

See it on the map As a table The goetic spirits table