Rank: Duke · Legions: 36 · Element: Air · Direction: North · Enn: Avage ayer Dantalion on ca
Dantalion, written also Dantalian, is the seventy-first spirit of the Ars Goetia, a Duke great and mighty who governs thirty-six legions of spirits. He appears in the form of a man with many countenances — all men's and all women's faces — and he holds a book in his right hand. His office is to teach all arts and sciences unto any; to declare the secret counsel of any one, for he knows the thoughts of all men and women and can change them at his will; to cause love; and to show the similitude of any person, and to show them in a vision, in whatever part of the world they may be. The whole of him is in that first image, for with Dantalion the form and the office are not two things but one. He knows every mind because he wears every face. A being whose countenance is all countenances is a being who has stood behind every pair of eyes there is, and knowledge of what a person is thinking is, at bottom, the ability to be them for a moment. That is his genius and his danger together. He is the great knower of persons, the one spirit in the book who offers the inside of another human being — and he is, for exactly that reason, the spirit whose powers this Vault handles with the most care of any in the seventy-two.
He is Dantalion in the Ars Goetia and Dantalian in a number of manuscripts and later copies. 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 texts are consistent about him and unusually detailed: the many countenances of all men and women, the book held in the right hand, the teaching of all arts and sciences, the declaring of secret counsel, the knowledge of all thoughts and the power to change them, the causing of love, the showing of any person by vision at any distance, the thirty-six legions.
There is no image in the Goetia quite like it. Dantalion comes as a man whose face is every face — countenance upon countenance, every man's and every woman's, shifting across him without settling. Other spirits wear a shape; Dantalion wears humanity itself. And the meaning of the image is given directly by the office attached to it: because he is every face, he knows every mind. The grimoire does not present these as two separate powers but as one thing said twice. To have worn a person's face is to have thought their thoughts; to know the thoughts of all men and women is simply what it means to be a creature made of all their faces. This is why he stands slightly apart from the other knowledge-spirits of the book. Forneus and Foras and Vapula teach subjects. Dantalion knows people. His subject is the interior of the human being, and his manifestation is the visible form of that knowledge.
In his right hand he carries a book, and his first listed office belongs to it: he teaches all arts and sciences unto any. It is the broadest teaching commission in the entire Goetia — not one field or a handful but all of them, given to anyone who asks. So there are two libraries in him. The book is the outer library, the recorded knowledge of the world, the arts and the sciences as they are written down. The faces are the inner library, the unrecorded knowledge of persons, what people actually think when no one is looking. Between them he holds the two halves of everything that can be known: the world's learning in his hand, and the world's minds in his countenance. It is worth noticing, too, that the book is in his right hand — the hand of open dealing. What he teaches from it, he teaches plainly.
To declare the secret counsel of any one is the old phrase, and it is worth unfolding, because it means more than knowing an idle thought. Counsel is deliberation — the reasoning a person does about what to do, the weighing they keep private, the intention not yet declared. Secret counsel is therefore the most private layer of a mind: not what someone has said or done but what they are considering, and why, and what they have decided not to say. Dantalion declares it. He knows what people are thinking, including and especially the part they are keeping to themselves. Set beside his many faces, this is the same power once again: the inside of the person, made available from the outside.
And then the grimoire adds seven words that are, in this Vault's reading, the most serious in the entire Ars Goetia: he can change them at his will. Not read the thoughts of all men and women — change them.
This Vault will not help anyone do that to another person, and the refusal is flat. It is not squeamishness and it is not a technicality to be worked around with a clever framing. A person's mind is the last ground they own. Everything else can be taken from someone — their property, their liberty, their reputation, their body — and they remain themselves inside it, still thinking their own thoughts, still able to disagree. Reach into that and there is nothing left to violate. The wrong is also uniquely undetectable, which is what makes it so much worse than ordinary coercion. A person who is threatened knows they were threatened and can resent it, resist it, remember it. A person whose thoughts have been altered experiences the new thought as their own. There is no moment at which they can object, because the part of them that would have objected is the part that was changed. To do that to someone is not persuasion, or influence, or even manipulation as usually understood. It is the deletion of the person and the substitution of a puppet who believes it is them.
And it should be said plainly that this is why Dantalion is among the most sought-after spirits in modern practice. People come to him wanting exactly this: to make someone think differently, feel differently, want them. This Vault understands the impulse — it usually grows out of real pain, a real rejection, a real powerlessness — and it still says no. The desire to control another person's mind is a signal about the state of your own, and it is your own that wants attention. Which, as it happens, is where Dantalion's genuine gift lies.
There is exactly one mind you have any standing to alter, and it is yours. Turned there, Dantalion's most dangerous power becomes his most valuable one, and it stops being a shortcut and starts being real work.
Consider what actually holds a life in place. Not usually circumstance — more often a settled pattern of thought that has hardened past the point of examination. The belief about yourself formed at nineteen and never revisited. The loop that runs every time a particular thing happens. The story you tell about why you are the way you are, which was once an explanation and has become a cage. The reflex certainty that this is simply how you are. These are thoughts, and they feel like facts, and that is exactly the difficulty: a settled thought does not present itself as a thought at all, but as the plain shape of reality. Changing one is genuinely hard, harder than changing a circumstance, and most people never manage it.
That is the work Dantalion is fit for. Ask him not to alter another person but to help you see which of your own convictions are convictions rather than truths, and to loosen the ones that are holding you where you do not want to be. He is a spirit who understands how minds are made and unmade — that is his whole nature — and pointed inward, that understanding is a genuine instrument of change. This Vault regards this as his central and proper working.
The same turn applies to his knowing. Every person has secret counsel they keep from themselves: the real reason under the stated reason, the motive that would be uncomfortable to look at directly, the decision already made and not yet admitted. We are all in some measure strangers to our own deliberation, and much of what we call confusion is simply refusing to read what we have already written. Ask Dantalion to declare that — your own secret counsel, the thoughts behind the thoughts you are willing to have. It is less comfortable than reading someone else's mind and incomparably more useful, because it is the only mind whose contents you can actually do anything about.
The Many Faces, and the Honest Form of Knowing Others
There remains an outward gift in him, and it is the best thing he has to give: the many faces read as the capacity to genuinely see from another position. Not to extract someone's thoughts, but to understand them — to grasp why a person who is not you thinks what they think, and to hold it without immediately translating it back into your own terms. That is a real faculty. It can be developed. It is what makes people good at reconciliation, at negotiation, at teaching, at love, and at writing anything true about human beings. And it is Dantalion's own image exactly: the face that becomes every other face.
The difference between this and his forbidden power is consent, and it is not a fine distinction. Understanding someone is something you do with your own attention, at your own cost, and it leaves them entirely intact — they remain the author of their own mind, and they can correct you when you are wrong. Reading and altering them takes their interiority without asking. Ask Dantalion for the first. It is slower, and it is the one that actually improves you.
He can cause love, says the grimoire, and this Vault answers as it answers every love-compelling spirit in the book. Affection produced by working on someone's mind is not love; it is a performance of love given by someone who was not consulted, and the person who obtains it has not been chosen by anybody. Whatever the ache that sends someone looking for it — and the ache is usually real — what it delivers is a relationship with your own working, conducted opposite a person who is no longer entirely there.
What may be honourably asked of Dantalion is the other half of his nature: to be genuinely more capable of connection. To understand what the person in front of you actually needs and fears, which is his many-faced gift in its plainest form. To read your own secret counsel about what you are looking for and why. To loosen the fixed convictions about yourself that keep you unlovable in your own estimation. Those change you rather than them, and what follows from them is the real article.
Finally, he can show the similitude of any person, and show them in a vision, wherever in the world they are. Take the plain caution first: watching a person who has not agreed to be watched is a violation of them whether the means are a telescope or a vision, and the distance and the strangeness of the method do not make it less so. If someone has withdrawn from you, this power is the temptation to refuse their withdrawal, and this Vault counsels against it firmly.
Its worthy uses are quieter. To see someone far away whom you love and cannot reach. To seek word of a person who has vanished, in genuine concern for their safety. To look upon someone who has died, in grief. And, most consistent with everything else in him, to see a person as they truly are rather than as your resentment or your longing has made them — which is the many faces again, doing what they do best.
Dantalion is placed in the element of Air and the quarter of the North, Air for the thought, the intellect, and the swift movement of mind that are his whole nature. For the planetary correspondence this Vault reads him under the Moon. The book and the teaching of all arts and sciences would argue for Mercury, and any practitioner who worked him that way would have good grounds; but the deeper part of him is lunar in almost every particular. The Moon is the planet of the psyche itself — of the mind in its receptive, reflective, imagining aspect, of dreams and of visions, which is precisely the medium in which he shows a distant person. She is the mirror of the heavens, shining with borrowed light and showing a face that is never her own, exactly as he shows the likeness of others. She is the body that visibly wears many faces, changing her countenance every night of the month and never keeping one, which is his manifestation written across the sky. And in the older astrology she governs the common multitude, the general run of people — all men and women, as the grimoire has it. Where the Vault's other lunar spirits wear the Moon as the night, the dream, and the hidden, Dantalion wears her as the many-phased face and the reflected mind. Set his metal as silver, his day as Monday, and his colours the silver of the moon and the shifting sheen of pearl. These correspondences are read as symbolic rather than handed down as documented tradition; the grimoires give only his element, his form, and his offices.
In the old demonology Dantalion is noted as a Duke of unusual reach, remarkable both for the breadth of his teaching and for the intimacy of his knowledge, and his many-faced form is among the most frequently remarked images in the entire catalogue. Weyer and the Ars Goetia agree throughout: the countenances of all men and women, the book in the right hand, the arts and sciences, the secret counsel, the knowledge and alteration of thoughts, the causing of love, the vision of any person at any distance, the thirty-six legions. Commentators have long observed that his listed powers are among the most invasive in the book, and that he is placed, perhaps not accidentally, at the very end of it.
Carried into the modern revival through the 1904 Mathers and Crowley edition, Dantalion has become one of the most sought-after spirits of the entire Goetia — and it is worth being honest about why. He is approached overwhelmingly for the mind: to know what someone is thinking, to sway a decision, to be wanted by a particular person. His popularity and his danger have the same root. More thoughtful modern practitioners work him quite differently: as a teacher of any subject through the book, as a spirit of psychological insight and self-knowledge, as an aid to genuine empathy, and above all as a power to change the fixed patterns of one's own thinking. That is the working this Vault teaches, and it is not a lesser use of him. It is the harder one.
Dantalion is the great knower of persons — the man of every face, who holds the world's learning in one hand and the world's minds in his countenance, who teaches any art or science to anyone, and who sees the deliberation people keep even from themselves. He is placed second to last in the book and he is, in this Vault's judgement, the most double-edged spirit in it: the same faculty that makes him the finest teacher of empathy in the Goetia makes him the instrument of the one violation from which a person cannot recover. Met with the wish to reach into another human being, he offers the shortest road to a genuine wrong. Met with the wish to understand others truly and to change what has hardened in yourself, he is among the most valuable of all the seventy-two, and the only one who really knows how a mind is made.
Dantalion's form is among the most striking in the entire Goetia: a man with many countenances, every man's and every woman's face, shifting across him and never settling into one. Where other spirits wear a shape, Dantalion wears humanity itself. In his right hand -- the hand of open dealing -- he carries a book, the recorded learning of the world held beside the unrecorded knowledge of its people. Those who work with him describe the manifestation as unsettling in a way that has nothing to do with menace: a sense of being thoroughly and calmly known, of speaking to something that has already stood behind your eyes, accompanied by an impression of enormous accumulated familiarity with human beings. Many report a quality of attentive, almost clinical warmth. He is not a frightening presence, and practitioners consistently note that this makes his powers easier to misuse rather than harder.
Enn: Avage ayer Dantalion on ca
Working with Dantalion is working with the great knower of persons -- the many-faced Duke who teaches every art and science from the book in his right hand, who knows the thoughts and the secret counsel of all men and women, and who can, the grimoire says, change them at his will. That last power this Vault refuses outright where another person is concerned, and the refusal is not negotiable. Turned inward, the very same understanding of how a mind is made becomes the most valuable thing he has to give. What follows is a guide built on that distinction.
Come to Dantalion honestly, because honesty is the only posture that makes sense before a spirit who knows what you are actually thinking. Decide before you light anything what you truly want from him, and be willing to look at the answer. Cleanse yourself and the space, and set his seal at the centre of the working. Where the correspondences are followed, the lunar suits him: the silver of the moon and the shifting sheen of pearl, the metal silver, the hours of the Moon and of Monday, and a mirror or a bowl of water if you wish to work with his visions. Then open the way by reciting his Enn -- Avage ayer Dantalion on ca -- until a calm, attentive, thoroughly knowing presence gathers, and greet him as the Duke of many faces.
His plainest and safest office is the teaching. Bring Dantalion a subject -- any art, any science, any body of learning at all, for his commission is the broadest in the book -- and ask him to teach it to you. Ask him for the shape of the field, for what matters in it and what does not, for the way its practitioners actually think. He is particularly apt for anything concerning human beings: psychology, history, literature, negotiation, medicine, teaching, any discipline whose subject is people. Study alongside the asking; he sharpens and directs real work rather than replacing it.
Hold this line without exception. Do not ask Dantalion to read another living person's thoughts, and do not ask him to change them. A person's mind is the last ground they own, and the violation is uniquely irreparable: someone whose thinking has been altered experiences the new thought as their own, so there is no moment at which they can object, because the part of them that would have objected is the part that was changed. That is not influence. It is the deletion of a person. The Vault does not soften this for love, for grief, for justice, or for a situation in which you are certain you are right. If you find yourself constructing an argument for why your case is the exception, treat the argument itself as the thing worth examining -- the wish to govern another mind is nearly always a report about the state of your own.
This is his central working. Bring Dantalion a conviction of yours that you suspect is holding you in place: a belief about what you are, a certainty about what is possible for you, a loop that runs whenever a particular thing happens, a story about your own history that has stopped explaining and started confining. Ask him to show you which of these are thoughts rather than facts -- for a settled thought never presents itself as a thought, but as the plain shape of reality. Then ask him to loosen it. Expect this to be work rather than a gift: several sittings, real discomfort, and something in you arguing hard for the thought's necessity. That argument is the thing itself. He understands how minds are made and unmade, and pointed here, that understanding is a genuine instrument.
Ask him also to declare your own secret counsel -- the reasoning under the reasoning, the motive you would rather not examine, the decision you have already made and not yet admitted to yourself. Most of what people experience as confusion is a refusal to read what they have already written. This is less comfortable than reading someone else's mind and incomparably more useful, because it is the only mind whose contents you can act upon. Write down what surfaces, including the parts you dislike; those are usually the accurate ones.
For his outward gift, ask Dantalion for understanding rather than access: the capacity to see genuinely from a position that is not yours, to grasp why a person who is not you thinks as they do, and to hold that without immediately translating it back into your own terms. This is his image doing exactly what it depicts, and it is a real faculty that can be developed. It leaves the other person wholly intact -- they remain the author of their own mind and can correct you when you are wrong -- which is precisely what distinguishes it from the thing this Vault refuses.
Do not ask him to cause love. Affection produced by working on someone's mind is a performance given by a person who was not consulted, and whoever obtains it has been chosen by nobody. Ask instead for what honestly serves: to understand what the person before you actually needs and fears, to read your own counsel about what you are seeking, to loosen the convictions that make you unlovable in your own estimation. As for his visions, do not use them to watch someone who has not agreed to be watched -- a vision is surveillance as surely as a telescope is, and if a person has withdrawn from you, this is the temptation to refuse their withdrawal. Its worthy uses are quieter: to see someone far away whom you love and cannot reach, to seek word of a person who has vanished out of real concern, to look upon someone who has died.
Practitioners describe Dantalion's presence as calm, attentive, and disconcertingly knowing -- the sense of speaking with something that has already stood behind your eyes. When he has heard, his help characteristically arrives as sudden clarity about people: a motive that becomes obvious, a conversation you understand differently afterwards, a person whose behaviour abruptly makes sense. Inwardly it arrives as a belief you have held for years suddenly looking optional, or a reason you had given yourself quietly falling apart. Dreams are a common medium with him, as befits a lunar spirit. Keep a written record, and note especially anything you did not want to see.
Work with Dantalion honestly or not at all; there is no point dissembling before a spirit who reads your counsel. Hold the refusal absolutely: no reading and no altering of another person's mind, whatever the justification, and treat any exception you construct as evidence about yourself. Do not use his visions to watch the unwilling. Do not ask him to compel love. Expect his inward work to be genuinely difficult and slow, and do not mistake insight for change -- seeing the belief is the beginning, not the end. Take his teaching as a discipline to be practised. And remember what he is: the most double-edged spirit in the book, whose single faculty makes him either the finest teacher of empathy in the Goetia or the instrument of the one violation a person cannot recover from. Met with the wish to understand others truly and to change what has hardened in yourself, he is among the most valuable of all the seventy-two, and the only one who really knows how a mind is made.