Rank: Earl · Legions: 6 · Element: Earth · Direction: North · Enn: Avage secore on ca Bifrons
Bifrons, written also Bifron and Bifrous, is the forty-sixth spirit of the Ars Goetia, an Earl who commands only six legions of spirits — one of the smallest commands in the whole book. He appears first in the form of a monster, and then, at the command of the one who works with him, puts on the shape of a man. His offices are three: he makes one knowing in astrology, geometry, and the other arts and sciences; he teaches the virtues of precious stones and woods; and he changes dead bodies, moving them from one place to another, and lights seeming candles upon the graves of the dead. These offices seem at first to have little to do with one another — a scholar, a lapidary, and a keeper of graves in one spirit — until his name is understood, for the name is the key that opens him. Bifrons is a Latin word, and it means two-faced, or two-fronted: it is the very epithet of Janus, the old god of the doorway, who bears two faces and looks with one toward what has been and with the other toward what is to come. Read through his name, Bifrons resolves into a single thing: he is the keeper of the threshold. The two forms he wears are his two faces; the past and future his astrology reads are the two directions Janus looks; and the graves he tends are the great doorway of all — the threshold between the living and the dead, at which he stands as keeper, lighting his small lights. He is the two-faced warden of the doorway, and everything he does is done upon a threshold.
He is Bifrons in most modern books, Bifron or Bifrous in the older ones. 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. But the name reaches back further than any grimoire, for bifrons is good Latin and was an ancient title of the god Janus — Janus Bifrons, the two-faced — guardian of doorways, gates, and thresholds, of beginnings and endings, of the turning of one state into another. Janus looked both ways at once, back toward the past and forward toward the future, and stood at every doorway as the god of passage through it. Whether the grimoire's authors meant the borrowing or inherited it without knowing, the name carries the whole meaning of the spirit within it, and this Vault reads him in its light: Bifrons the two-faced, the warden of the threshold.
Bifrons shows himself in two forms, and this is the first proof of his nature. He comes first as a monster — a shape strange and hard to look upon — and only afterward, when commanded, does he put on the shape of a man. Several spirits of the Goetia change their forms, but in Bifrons the doubling is the whole point: he is the two-faced one, and his two forms are his two faces made visible. The monstrous face and the human face are both truly his, and the operator who bids him take the human shape is not driving away a false form to reach a true one, but asking the two-faced spirit to turn his human side forward. There is an inward reading here that costs nothing to see. Every person wears two faces — the composed face shown to the world and the stranger, harder face beneath it — and to work with Bifrons is in part to be reminded that both are real, that the monstrous is not a lie to be denied but a face to be acknowledged and then, by will, turned from in favour of the human. He does not ask you to pretend the monster was never there. He asks you to command which face comes forward.
Gather his offices under his name and Bifrons stands revealed as the warden of the doorway. Janus, whose title he bears, was the god of every threshold — the door of the house, the gate of the city, the turning of the year, the passage from one condition to the next — and he was invoked first in any undertaking, for every beginning is a doorway and every doorway his. Bifrons keeps thresholds in just this way. His astrology looks both directions in time, as Janus looks; his changing of forms is a passage from one shape to another; and his tending of the graves keeps the greatest doorway of all. To work with him is to work with transition itself — with the endings that are also beginnings, the passages between one state of a life and the next, the doorways a person must walk through and would rather not. He is the spirit to call upon when one stands at a threshold and must cross it: the leaving of an old life, the entering of a new, the turning that cannot be turned back. He does not make the crossing for you. He is the keeper who tends the doorway and lights it, so that you may cross knowing where the passage lies.
The office that names him a necromancer is also, read rightly, the gentlest thing about him, and it deserves to be freed from the grim colours the old books painted it in. Bifrons, the grimoire says, changes dead bodies and moves them from one place to another, and lights seeming candles upon the graves of the dead. This Vault will not read that as the body-snatcher's art or the violation of the grave, and disavows entirely any turning of it toward disturbing the dead for gain or spectacle; the dead are owed their rest, and nothing here is an instruction against it. Read as his name asks, it is the office of the keeper of the resting-places. To move the dead to another place can be to bring them to their proper rest, to set right a grave ill-made. And the candle upon the grave is the tenderest image in his whole account — the small light lit for the dead, the flame kept burning at the threshold, the ancient gesture of the torch carried to the tomb that the old world personified in Hecate, torch-bearing lady of the graves and the crossroads. Bifrons is the one who tends that flame. Turned inward, this is the work of grief and remembrance: the tending of our own dead, the lighting of a light for what and whom we have lost, the giving of a proper resting-place in memory to what has passed so that we may honour it and then walk on. He keeps the graves not to trouble the dead but to keep faith with them, and to teach the living how the dead are rightly kept.
Bifrons is also a teacher, and makes one knowing in astrology, geometry, and the other arts and sciences. His astrology is of a piece with the rest of him: to read the stars is to read time, and time is exactly what the two-faced one looks upon, backward and forward, the past that shaped a thing and the future toward which it tends. His geometry is the art of measure and proportion, the hidden order of shape and structure. Together they mark him as a spirit of the ordered mind as much as of the graveside, and the two are not so far apart as they seem — for the one who keeps the threshold of the dead is well placed to teach the measure of time and the order of the heavens, both of which are ways of standing at a doorway and looking through it at what lies beyond.
He teaches, further, the virtues of precious stones and of woods — the hidden powers held in the enduring things of the earth. This places him among the Goetia's several teachers of natural virtue, but with his own particular materia: not the herbs of the physicians Buer, Bathin, Marax, Foras, and Stolas, but the stones and the woods, the durable substances rather than the green and perishing ones. There is a quiet fitness in it for a keeper of graves, for stone and wood are the matter of the marker and the bier, the things that stand at the resting-place and endure. From him one may learn which stone holds which virtue and which wood carries which power — the lore of the lasting materials, held by the spirit who keeps the lasting threshold.
Bifrons commands only six legions of spirits, among the very smallest counts in the Ars Goetia, and it should not be mistaken for weakness. He is not a great king of vast dominion but a keeper of one particular doorway, and his smallness is the smallness of the specialist — the warden who tends one threshold well rather than the sovereign who rules many. There is a rightness in it: the keeper of a doorway needs no army, only his two faces, his small lights, and his long watch. Those who work with him describe exactly this — a precise, particular, attentive spirit, narrow in his domain and deep within it, who gives much to the seeker who comes to the one threshold he keeps.
Bifrons is placed in the element of Earth and the quarter of the North — fitting for a spirit of the grave, which is made in the ground, and of the cold northern dark in which the dead are kept. For the planetary correspondence this Vault reads him under the Moon, but the Moon in her dark and chthonic aspect rather than her tidal one: the underworld Moon that the ancients knew as Hecate, mistress of the graves, the crossroads, and the necromancer's art, who bears the torch to the tomb as Bifrons bears his candle. Where the sea-spirits before him wore the Moon as sovereign, force, and physician of the waters, Bifrons wears her as the lady of the dead and the keeper of the threshold — a different face of the same changing light. Thus two doorway-powers illuminate him together: Janus, whose name he bears and whose two faces are his own, keeper of the thresholds of time and passage; and Hecate, whose torch is his candle and whose graves are his charge. Set his metal as silver, his day as Monday, his colours the twilight grey of the threshold hour and the pale gold of a candle-flame. These correspondences are read as symbolic rather than handed down as documented tradition; the grimoires give only his element, his forms, and his offices, and the lunar and threshold readings follow from the graves, the two faces, and the small lights at the heart of them.
In the old demonology Bifrons is a minor but distinct figure, noted for his necromantic office and his teaching, and treated without much of the fear reserved for the greater and fiercer kings. Weyer and the Ars Goetia agree in their account of him — the monstrous first form, the human shape on command, the sciences, the stones and woods, the moving of bodies and the candles on the graves — and later commentators have tended to seize, as this Vault does, on the striking image of the grave-lights, and on the resonance of his name with Janus, as the keys to his character. He is small in his legions and quiet in his reputation, a spirit more studied than dreaded.
Carried into the modern revival through the 1904 Mathers and Crowley edition, Bifrons is worked today chiefly by those drawn to the threshold and to the honouring of the dead — practitioners of grief-work and ancestor-work, students of the crossing-points of life, seekers who stand at a great transition and want a keeper for the doorway. His necromancy is read gently in modern practice, as tending and remembrance rather than disturbance, and his candle-lights have become for many a beloved emblem of the small flame kept for the beloved dead. His teaching offices — astrology, geometry, the virtues of stones and woods — keep him useful to the scholar as well. He remains a quiet, particular spirit, sought not for power but for passage.
Bifrons is two-faced in the truest and least treacherous sense — a spirit of the doorway, who looks both ways and keeps the threshold between one state and the next. He wears the monster and the man, reads the past and the future, and tends with small lights the great passage between the living and the dead. He is precise rather than vast, a keeper rather than a conqueror, and he gives to the seeker who comes to him in the right spirit — respectful of the dead, honest about the two faces, ready to cross a threshold — the quiet and considerable gift of a warden who will light the doorway so that the passage may be made well.
The grimoires give Bifrons two forms, and the doubling is his whole nature made visible. He comes first as a monster -- a shape strange and hard to look upon, unnamed in the texts and left to the imagination -- and then, when commanded, puts on the shape of a man. He is the two-faced one, and both forms are truly his: the monstrous face and the human face, shown one after the other, as his name (bifrons, two-faced, the epithet of Janus) declares. To bid him take the human shape is not to banish a false form but to ask the two-faced spirit to turn his human side forward. Those who work with him describe a precise and attentive presence, quiet and particular rather than overwhelming, often accompanied by the impression of small lights -- the seeming candles of his graves -- and by a sense of standing at a doorway or a threshold, at the turning-point between one state and another.
Enn: Avage secore on ca Bifrons
Working with Bifrons is working with the keeper of the threshold -- the two-faced warden of the doorway, who tends the great passage between one state and the next and, above all, between the living and the dead. He is a quiet and particular spirit, an Earl of only six legions, precise within his narrow domain and deep in it. This Vault comes to him for two things above all: for passage through the hard thresholds of a life, and for the honouring and tending of the dead -- always with respect for the dead and never to disturb their rest. What follows is a guide built around that threshold and that respect.
Come to Bifrons quietly and with respect, for he is a keeper, not a conqueror, and answers a considered approach far better than a forceful one. Cleanse yourself and the space, and set his seal at the centre of the working. A single lit candle suits him as no other furnishing does -- it is his own emblem, the small light at the threshold -- and where the correspondences are followed, the lunar and chthonic suit him: twilight grey and candle-gold, the metal silver, the hours of the Moon and of Monday, worked fittingly at dusk or in the dark, the threshold hours. Then open the way by reciting his Enn -- Avage secore on ca Bifrons -- steadily until a precise, attentive presence gathers at the edge of the light.
When Bifrons comes first in his monstrous form, do not be alarmed and do not flee it; it is one of his two true faces, not a threat. Steadily, and with respect, bid him put on the shape of a man, as the grimoire directs. Understand what you are doing as you do it: you are not driving out a false form but asking the two-faced spirit to turn his human side forward. There is a discipline in this that carries over into the self -- the acknowledging of the monstrous face as real, and the willed turning-forward of the human one -- and to perform it consciously with Bifrons is to practise it within.
Tending the Dead -- The Work of Grief and Remembrance
For his gentlest and most valued office, come to Bifrons as the keeper of the graves. This is not the disturbing of the dead but the honouring of them, and it must be held in that spirit throughout. Light a candle -- a real one -- for the one you have lost, and ask Bifrons to help you tend their memory and keep faith with them: to give them a proper resting-place in your remembrance, to help you carry what should be carried and lay down what should be laid to rest. This is grief-work, and it is among the most healing of any spirit's gifts -- the giving of a threshold to a loss, a place to set it down and a light to keep beside it, so that the dead are honoured and the living may walk on. Never ask him to trouble or move the dead for gain, for knowledge idly wanted, or for spectacle; the dead are owed their rest, and Bifrons is their keeper, not their disturber.
For the great transitions of a life, come to Bifrons as Janus, the god of the doorway whose name he bears. When you stand at a threshold you must cross and would rather not -- the ending of a chapter, the leaving of an old life, the entering of a new and uncertain one -- name the doorway plainly and ask him to keep it and light it for you. He will not make the crossing in your place, but he tends the passage, and to have the threshold kept and lit is to cross it knowing where the passage lies rather than stumbling through in the dark. Ask him, in the spirit of Janus, to let you look honestly both ways -- back at what is ending without flinching, and forward at what is beginning without false hope.
For his teaching, come with a clear subject. For astrology, ask him to school you in the reading of time, the past that shaped a matter and the future toward which it tends. For geometry and the ordered sciences, bring the study you would master and ask his instruction. For the virtues of stones and woods, bring the material you would understand -- the gem, the wood -- and ask him which power it holds and how it is rightly used. As with all such teaching spirits, take what he gives as a beginning to be studied and tested, not a finished mastery handed over.
Practitioners describe Bifrons as a quiet, precise, attentive presence rather than an overpowering one, often felt as a sense of standing at a doorway or of small lights at the edge of sight. When he has heard a grief-working, his help tends to arrive as a settling -- a loss that begins to find its proper place, a mourning that softens from a wound into a kept and honoured memory. When he keeps a threshold, practitioners report a clarity about the crossing, a sense of the passage lit and knowable. Keep a candle and a written record of your workings with him, for his gifts are quiet ones that reward being noticed.
Work with Bifrons in the spirit his office asks: reverence for the dead above all. Never turn his necromancy toward disturbing the dead, and keep it always to tending, honouring, and remembrance. Do not let his grave-work tip into morbidity or a dwelling among the dead that keeps you from the living -- his gift is to honour the dead so that you may walk on, not to hold you at the graveside. Meet his monstrous face without fear and command the human one with respect. Take his teaching as a beginning to study, not a mastery to assume. He is a small Earl of a single great threshold, precise and quiet and deep, and to the seeker who comes respectful of the dead and ready to cross a doorway, he is among the tenderest and most trustworthy keepers in the whole book.