Rank: Marquis · Legions: 30 · Element: Air · Direction: South · Enn: Avage secore Andras on ca
Andras is the sixty-third spirit of the Ars Goetia, a Great Marquis who governs thirty legions of spirits, and he is one of the darkest and most dangerous spirits in the whole book. He appears in the form of an angel with the head of a black night-raven, riding upon a strong black wolf, and brandishing aloft in his hand a sharp and bright sword. His office is to sow discord — to break bonds, to set people against one another, to raise strife and quarrel and enmity where there was peace. And the grimoire gives him a warning it gives to almost no other: that if the one who calls him has not a care, Andras will slay both that person and their companions. This Vault does not soften him, for to do so would be dishonest and unsafe. Andras is the author of discord and a spirit of real danger, and the Vault names him for exactly what he is: the dark mirror of the spirits who reconcile and bind together, the sower of the strife they heal, and a power that turns lethally upon the careless. What this Vault does with such a spirit is what it does with every dark power in this book — it names the harm honestly, refuses without reservation to wield it against anyone, and reads the danger itself for the truth it teaches. And the truth Andras teaches is written in his own lethality: that discord is a fire which consumes the one who spreads it, and that the sword of division turns, in the end, upon the hand that raised it.
He is Andras in the grimoires, a consistent name. He appears in Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum of 1577, passed into the Ars Goetia as it was gathered into the Lemegeton in the seventeenth century, and was set into modern English by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley in their 1904 edition. The account is grim and consistent across the texts: the raven-headed angel upon the black wolf, the bright sword, the sowing of discord, and the plain and unusual warning of his lethal danger to the careless. He is a Great Marquis of thirty legions, and among the most feared spirits in the book.
Andras's form tells his nature before a word is spoken. He has the body of an angel — the celestial shape, the sign of what he once was — but crowning it, the head of a black night-raven. The raven is the bird of death and of the battlefield, the carrion-bird that feasts upon the slain, the ancient omen of ill tidings and of doom; it is the messenger of discord and the herald of ruin. To set that head upon an angel's body is to make an image of a celestial thing turned to death and strife — beauty crowned with the death-bird, the fallen angel wearing the mark of doom. It is one of the most ominous forms in the whole Goetia, and it is meant to be. Andras does not hide what he is behind a fair face; he wears the raven of death openly, upon the very head from which his counsels come.
He rides a strong black wolf and brandishes a sharp, bright sword aloft, and both are weapons of his nature. The black wolf is the predator, the killer, the ferocity of the pack that runs down and tears — the wild and destroying force, dark as night, that he masters and rides. And the sword he holds is raised, flourished aloft, ready to strike: the sword of division and of the cut, the weapon that severs and slays, held not sheathed but bared and lifted. Together the wolf and the sword are the two faces of what he does — the predatory strife that hunts and destroys, and the bright blade that divides and kills. There is no gentleness anywhere in the image. Andras is armed and mounted for destruction, and his sword is always drawn.
His named office is the sowing of discord, and it must be named plainly for what it is: the breaking of bonds and the making of strife. Where the reconcilers of the Goetia — Amon the mender of quarrels, Uvall who crosses the desert to bring foes to friendship — heal and bind together, Andras does the exact opposite. He sets friends against each other, turns love to enmity, sows the quarrel where there was peace, breaks the bond that held. He is the spirit of division and of strife, the author of the discord that ruins friendships, families, alliances, and peace. This is a power of pure harm to others, and this Vault holds no illusion about it: to sow discord in the lives of other people is to do them a grave and cruel wrong, and it is a thing the Vault refuses absolutely to countenance or to teach.
Andras is dangerous, and the danger is not incidental but central, and it deserves the plainest possible statement. The grimoire warns that he will slay the careless and their companions, and the tradition has always counted him among the most perilous of the seventy-two — a spirit who turns lethally upon those who deal with him without the utmost care. This Vault sets down its refusal here without any reservation. It will not use Andras, or teach the use of Andras, to sow discord in anyone's life, to break anyone's bonds, to set people against each other, or to harm or to kill. That reading of his office — the wielding of his discord and his sword against other people — is disavowed entirely and forever. No purpose justifies it; no framing excuses it. The Vault studies Andras, as it studies every spirit of the book, to understand the whole of what the tradition holds; but understanding a power is not the same as wielding it, and this is a power the Vault names, refuses, and warns against.
There is, however, a genuine truth to be drawn from Andras, and it is drawn not from his gift but from his danger — and it is one of the most valuable warnings in the whole book. Andras slays the careless who deal in his discord. Read this rightly and it is the deepest lesson about strife itself: that discord is a fire which consumes the one who spreads it. The person who sows quarrels finds their own life poisoned by quarrel; the one who breaks others' bonds finds their own bonds broken; the sword of division, once raised, turns upon the hand that raised it. Andras's lethal danger is not a random cruelty but the very nature of discord made visible — for those who deal in strife are, in the end, destroyed by it. In this he is his own warning, the clearest in the Goetia: he shows, in his own peril, exactly why the sowing of discord must be left alone. To understand Andras truly is to understand why one must never become him.
If there is any rightful and inward use of the power beneath Andras's dark office, it is a narrow one, and it must be hedged with the heaviest caution this Vault gives to anything. His sword is the sword of severance — the cutting, the division, the breaking apart. And there are things in a life that genuinely must be cut. The toxic bond that harms you, the tie to what poisons you, the relationship that is a chain and not a love, the false "peace" that is really the suppression of a truth that needs to be faced — these are things that sometimes must be severed, and the honest naming and cutting of them is a real and freeing act. This, and only this, is the inward turn of Andras's blade: the sword turned not upon another but upon one's own wrongful chains, to cut what must be cut in one's own life. But even here the warnings crowd in, and they are his own. The blade that severs can wound the one who wields it; the discord you raise, even in yourself, can consume you if you are careless; and the line between cutting a chain that must be cut and simply becoming a sower of strife is perilously thin. This is the most dangerous working in the book, and the Vault offers it only with the plain statement that for most seekers, the right relationship with Andras is to understand him, to learn the warning he embodies, and to leave his sword in his hand.
Andras is placed in the element of Air and the quarter of the South. For the planetary correspondence this Vault reads him, unmistakably, under Mars — and under Mars in its darkest and most destructive aspect. The wolf he rides is Mars's own sacred beast, the animal of the war-god across the ancient world; the sword he brandishes is Mars's weapon; and strife, discord, division, and slaughter are Mars's own dark domain, the shadow-side of the planet of war. Where the other martial spirits of this book wear Mars as the soldier, the war-engineer, the disciplined warrior, or the fierce builder — Mars turned to a purpose, however hard — Andras wears Mars as pure discord, war and division for their own sake, strife without cause or end. He is the Lesser Malefic at its most malefic, Mars stripped of every redeeming purpose and left as naked destruction. Set his metal as iron, his day as Tuesday, and his colours the raven-black of his head and mount and the blade-bright of his lifted sword. These correspondences are read as symbolic rather than handed down as documented tradition; the grimoires give only his element, his form, and his offices, and the martial reading follows plainly from the wolf, the sword, and the strife at the heart of them.
In the old demonology Andras is among the most feared of all the spirits, singled out from the beginning for the danger of his nature and the plain warning of his lethality. Weyer and the Ars Goetia give the same grim account — the raven-headed angel, the black wolf, the bright sword, the sowing of discord, the peril to the careless — and later commentators have consistently marked him as one of the spirits to be approached, if at all, with the very greatest caution, or not at all. He is a Marquis regarded with dread rather than fondness, a byword in the tradition for the danger of dealing with the darkest of the spirits.
Carried into the modern revival through the 1904 Mathers and Crowley edition, Andras is a spirit most modern practitioners treat with great wariness, and many leave entirely alone. Responsible modern practice reads his office of discord as a power not to be wielded against others, reads his lethal danger as a genuine warning, and takes from him chiefly the hard lesson he embodies — that strife consumes the one who spreads it. Those few who work with him at all do so, when they are wise, only for the inward severance of their own wrongful chains, and only with the utmost care. He remains a dark and dangerous Marquis, more studied and warned-of than worked with.
Andras is dark, dangerous, and destroying — the raven-headed angel upon the black wolf, the sword forever raised, the sower of discord and the peril of the careless. He is the dark mirror of every spirit that heals and binds, the author of the strife they mend, and a power this Vault names honestly, refuses to wield against anyone, and warns of without softening. His lethality is his truest teaching: that discord destroys the one who deals in it, that the sword of division turns upon its wielder, and that the sowing of strife must be left alone. Met at all, he is to be met with the greatest caution and the plainest conscience — never to harm another, and only ever, if at all, to cut the wrongful chains in one's own life, and even then with care. He is, above all, the warning the Goetia keeps: the spirit whose danger teaches why one must never become him.
The grimoires give Andras one of the most ominous forms in the whole book: an angel -- the celestial body, sign of what he was -- but crowned with the head of a black night-raven, the carrion-bird of death and the battlefield and ill omen. He rides upon a strong black wolf, the dark predator and killer, and brandishes aloft in his hand a sharp and bright sword, drawn and raised to strike. Every part of the image is death and strife: the raven of doom, the wolf of slaughter, the bared blade of division. There is no gentleness anywhere in it, and it is meant to warn. Those who have dealt with him describe a cold, sharp, dangerous, and deeply unsettling presence, charged with an edge of real menace -- not a spirit to be trifled with, and one whose danger is felt at once. It is among the most fearsome and forbidding of all the manifestations in the Goetia, and the wise take the warning of it seriously.
Enn: Avage secore Andras on ca
Working with Andras is a thing this Vault approaches with more caution than it brings to any other spirit in the book, and much of this guidance is caution rather than method -- for Andras is the sower of discord and a spirit of real and lethal danger, and the first and most important thing to understand about working with him is that, for most seekers, the wisest course is not to. This Vault names his power honestly, refuses absolutely to wield it against anyone, and offers what follows less as an invitation than as the careful and heavily-warned truth of a dark spirit.
Before anything else: Andras is dangerous, the tradition counts him among the most perilous of all the spirits, and the grimoire warns plainly that he will slay the careless and their companions. This is not to be treated as colourful language. If you have not the greatest care, the most settled and protected practice, and the plainest conscience, do not call him at all -- and even if you have all of these, understand that the right relationship with Andras, for nearly everyone, is to study him, to learn the warning he embodies, and to leave his sword in his hand. There is no shame and much wisdom in choosing not to work with a spirit this dark. This Vault names that as the first and best option.
Hold this without any exception: Andras's office of sowing discord is never, on any account, to be turned against another person. Not to break someone's bond, not to set people against each other, not to raise strife in anyone's life, not to harm or to kill. To do so is a grave and cruel wrong, and it is refused here entirely and forever. No grievance, no enemy, no provocation justifies the wielding of his discord against another. If any wish to use him so arises in you, that is precisely the moment to stop, to close the working, and to leave him alone -- for the wish to sow discord is the beginning of the strife that will consume you.
If Andras is engaged at all rightly, it is only for the severing of one's own wrongful chains -- and even this is the most dangerous working in the book. Where there is a bond in your own life that genuinely must be cut -- a tie to what poisons you, a relationship that is a chain and not a love, a false peace that suppresses a truth you must face -- his sword is the sword of that severance. To work it, name honestly and precisely the chain that must be cut, be certain it is truly a wrongful chain and not merely a hard or an inconvenient one, and ask him only to help you sever what binds you wrongly -- never to harm the other, only to free yourself. And hold every warning as you do: the blade can wound the one who wields it; the discord you raise, even in yourself, can spread and consume you if you are careless; and the line between cutting a chain that must be cut and becoming a sower of strife is perilously thin. Do this, if at all, from a place of great steadiness, with your conscience wholly clear, and with the readiness to stop the moment it turns toward harm.
For most who come to Andras, the true gift is not any working but the warning he embodies, and it is worth taking deliberately. Sit with what his lethality teaches: that discord consumes the one who spreads it, that the person who sows quarrels poisons their own life with quarrel, that the sword of division turns upon its wielder. Let this be a caution you carry into your own life -- into the temptation to sow a little strife, to break a bond in anger, to answer a wrong with the spreading of discord. Andras shows, in his own peril, exactly why these must be resisted. To learn that lesson and to leave his sword alone is to have taken from him the best and safest thing he gives.
Let caution govern the whole of any dealing with Andras, for he is the darkest and most dangerous of the spirits treated here. Recognise that the wisest choice, for nearly everyone, is not to work with him. Never, under any circumstance, turn his discord against another person. If you engage him at all, do so only for the severing of your own wrongful chains, from great steadiness and a clear conscience, and stop the instant it bends toward harm. Take his lethality as the real warning it is, and his deepest teaching -- that strife destroys its own sower -- as the true and safest gift of him. He is the warning the Goetia keeps, the spirit whose danger exists to teach why one must never become him; and to understand that, and to walk carefully around him, is the whole of wisdom with Andras.