Goetia: Lamenting, wailing.
“The common Greek word for ‘magician’ in Jesus’ time was goes (plural goetes). […] Here goetia (what goetes do) is one special technique like others named, a recognized and legitimate function. It seems to have been a sort of Greek shamanism, a form of mourning for the dead in which the goetes became ecstatic and were thought to accompany the dead on their journey to the underworld.”
(Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician. P. 70)
Etymological roots:
Goös: “a highly emotional funeral lament” performed by Greek women in antiquity. The opposite of the Threnos, an emotionally controlled form of lamentation.
“Goös, in contrast, was spontaneous and emotionally powerful — sometimes excessively so. It is connected primarily with women, especially women who were related to the deceased. The songs these women sang emphasized their pain as survivors, and sometimes reproached the deceased for having left his family unprotected. In the Iliad , for example, Andromache describes to the dead Hector how Astyanax will have to beg for food at the tables of other men. Somewhat later, gooi began to carry the additional purpose of rousing the listeners to revenge; the singers did this by focusing not only on their own pain but also on the injustice of the death suffered by the deceased. Thus, the Chorus of lamenting women in the Choephoroi urges the listening Orestes to avenge his father’s death. Goös , in other words, became a means of eliciting help from the living, as well as a medium for complaining to the dead.”
[…]
“Rousing the living to action by complaining to the dead is but a step away from asking the dead themselves to bring help as well. Once the idea that the dead could be made to return had been introduced to Greek culture, it would have been natural to include such a request as part of a goös.”
(Sarah Iles Johnston, Restless Dead. P. 101)
Goao: “to lament, sing wildly, cast a spell.”
“The second phenomenon with which goetes regularly were connected was singing and more broadly music of all kinds. The Suda and Cosmas defined goeteia as an act of “calling upon” (epiklesis) the dead; earlier sources repeatedly connected goeteia with the epoide, or chanted song. The Dactyls were credited both with the invention of various forms of music and with the composition of epoidai. Their student Orpheus, of course, was the most famous singer of all – by classical times we find him using his lyre and his voice to persuade the gods of the dead to release the soul of his wife, and by Varro’s day he was known as the author of a book called the Lyre, which taught others how to invoke souls through music as well. The crediting of such a book to Orpheus verifies that in ancient eyes what Orpheus did with his music was not really different from the way a goes used epoidai or the incantations written on curse tablets to call up a soul, even if Orpheus and the goes desired the souls they invoked for very different reasons. Broadly, all of these connections between invocation of souls and song are part of a belief in the ability of all kinds of sound to enchant the individual soul.
But we need not go so far afield in proving the importance of this association between goeteia and song, for it is attested by the very term itself. As already noted, goes and its cognates are built from the same root as the older words goös and goao. This makes sense: the goes, like the lamenter, wishes to communicate with the realm of the dead…”
(Sarah Iles Johnston, Restless Dead. P. 111-112)
There is precisely one group of spirits that are “Goetic”. Mentioned in the last quote, the Dactyls were divided into two types by the Logographer Pherecydes of Leros*: those of the Left Hand, who are Goetes and Binders, and those of the Right Hand, who are Analuontes and Releasers (from Binding), and who are credited with teaching Orpheus the epoidai (binding incantations). There’s a lot of confusion about how often the Dactyls/Kouretes/Corybantes overlap. Nonetheless, the groups are quite often associated with mastery of binding spells (which were used on both humans and the dead), and of teaching humans how to perform them (or at least, teaching Orpheus how to perform them):
“As daimons whether wholly or half divine the Kouretes have all manner of magical capacities. These capacities are by Strabo rather implied than expressly stated and are especially noticeable in their Phrygian equivalents, Korybantes. The Korybantes bind and release men from spells, they induce madness and heal it. The chorus asks the love-sick Phaedra:
Is this some Spirit, O child of man?
Doth Hecat hold thee perchance, or Pan?
Doth She of the Mountains work her ban,
Or the dread Corybantes bind thee?”
(E. J. Harrison, Themis. P. 26)
Beyond this the words Goetia, Goes, etc., all refer to acts and individuals who performed them, not the spirits. It is not the spirits who are Goetic, it is the magician/sorcerer.
If you use the phrase Goetic Demon, even if you’ve seen a thousand clueless “ceremonial magicians” use it, you are most likely misapplying the descriptor. Outside the Dactyls/Kouretes as masters of enchantment and binding and as tutelary functionaries of Goetia, there are no other Goetic spirits. The application of the word Goetia to medieval books of magic stems from its association with spirit conjuration, not as a descriptor of the spirits themselves.
“The most sinister aspect of this involvement with the dead was the ability to summon such spirits for purposes other than divination. Like necromantic divination this is a natural consequence of the role of guide of souls. However it also relates very closely to the ability to deal with hostile ghosts of various kinds. The arts of exorcism and evocation are intimately related. It is from this aspect of its past that goetia is associated with demonic evocation. Distinctions between underworld demons and the angry dead have always been vague. Additionally, expertise in rites concerning the dead necessarily involves the gods and guardians of the Underworld. Consequently, in various guises, raising spirits has been associated with goetia for much of its history.”
(Jake Stratton-Kent, What is Goetia?)
Meanwhile, applying the word Goetia to the conjuration of demons from Solomonic texts is also a type of limitation. We can find spirits that intersect with the practice well outside those texts, and the catalog of spirits overlaps with several texts. Spirits found in the Lemegeton’s book entitled Goetia are also found in Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, CLM 849 (The Munich Necromancer’s Handbook), The Grimorium Verum, The Dragon texts (Black Dragon, Red Dragon), and so on. Additionally, you also practicing Goetia if you conjure a number of spirits outside those texts – such as the Fairy Sibylia, who does not appear in ‘Solomonic’ texts (but rather Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft).
* EDIT: Initially I wrote “heroic age Logographer,” which I meant to mean “Logographer of heroic age materials.” In retrospect, not only did it make it sound like Pherecydes of Leros (450s BCE) lived in the heroic age, which was wrong, but the phrase didn’t matter – most Logographers discussed heroic age materials.
Occult Aspects 