Rank: President · Legions: 66 · Element: Water · Direction: South · Enn: Deyen pretore ramec Gaap
Gaap, written also Goap and in some books Tap, is the thirty-third spirit of the Ars Goetia — at once a great President and a mighty Prince, ruling sixty-six legions of spirits, and one of the small number of Goetic spirits whose entry lets the whole hidden architecture of the tradition show through. He comes only when the sun stands in the southern signs, walking ahead of four great kings as their guide and conductor. His offices are wide and strangely balanced: he makes men ignorant and makes them learned, causes love and causes hatred, answers truly of past, present and things to come, and carries a man speedily from one kingdom to another and back again. But among that list sits one office unlike anything else in the book, and it is the key to him. Gaap can deliver familiar spirits out of the custody of other magicians. In a catalogue whose rites are built almost entirely upon the binding of spirits, here is a spirit whose stated work is to set the bound ones free.
He descends to the modern practitioner as Gaap, and in the older books as Goap or Tap — a spread of spellings that has, as with several of his neighbours, caused some confusion of identity. He appears in Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum of 1577 and was carried into the Ars Goetia when that material was gathered into the Lemegeton in the seventeenth century, then fixed in modern English by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley in their edition of 1904. Across the chain the account is unusually full and unusually steady: the President and Prince of sixty-six legions, the guide of the four kings who comes when the sun is in the south, the giver and remover of knowledge, the mover of men between kingdoms, the servant of Amaymon, the deliverer of captive spirits, and a member of the angelic Order of Powers before his fall.
Almost alone among the seventy-two, Gaap keeps a season. The grimoires say he appears when the sun is in some of the southern signs — that is, in the half of the zodiac the sun travels through the southern sky — and this timed coming is one of the most distinctive things about him. Most Goetic spirits are described by form and office alone, as though they stood outside time and waited only to be called; Gaap is bound into the turning year, answerable to where the sun stands. Practitioners have read this in several ways. Some take it literally, as a window in which he comes most readily; others read it as a mark of his elemental and directional nature, for the south is the quarter of heat and of the sun's height, and a spirit who keeps the sun's southern season is a spirit knit into the machinery of the sky. Either way it sets him apart: he is not a power available at any hour, but one that keeps an appointment with the heavens.
The grimoires give Gaap a striking image: he comes in human shape going before four great and mighty kings, as if he were a guide to conduct them along their way. He is, in that picture, not the sovereign but the one who walks ahead of sovereigns — the conductor, the one who knows the road. This is an unusual station. Where most of the presidents and dukes are described by what they rule, Gaap is described by whom he leads, and the leading is a service rather than a dominion: he goes before the kings to show the way. Practitioners have long found in this the character of a guide in the fullest sense — a spirit who conducts, who moves things and people from where they are to where they are going, whether that be across the world or across a threshold of understanding. The conductor of kings and the carrier of men between kingdoms are the same office seen twice.
Gaap holds two ranks at once — a great President and a mighty Prince — and the doubling is worth marking, for it joins the presiding, teaching authority of the president to the commanding, princely authority of a ruler of hosts. Before his fall he belonged to the Order of Powers, the Potestates, one of the angelic choirs, whose traditional charge was the keeping of order and the restraint of the disordered powers of the air. That origin sits pointedly beside his present work. A spirit once charged with restraining rogue powers is now the spirit who frees spirits from the restraint of magicians — the office turned, in the fall, from keeping order for heaven to breaking the small tyrannies of those who would bind spirits to their will. Whether one reads the Orders as literal history or as symbol, the shape of it is telling.
Here is the heart of him, and it is one of the most remarkable single lines in the whole Ars Goetia. Among Gaap's stated offices is this: he can deliver familiar spirits out of the custody of other magicians. Set that against the book it sits in. The Ars Goetia is, in its ceremonial form, a manual of binding — of calling spirits into a triangle, compelling them by divine names, and holding them to service under threat, sometimes sealing a defiant one in a brass vessel. The whole apparatus assumes that a spirit worth having is a spirit made to stay. And into that book the tradition wrote a spirit whose office is to walk into another magician's working and let the captive out. Gaap undoes exactly the thing the rites around him are built to do. This Vault, which honours the seventy-two spirits and binds none of them, reads that office as no accident of the manuscript but as its quiet confession — the tradition naming, in one of its own spirits, the wrong at the centre of its own method. To free a bound intelligence is the most Left-Hand act imaginable, and the Goetia credits it to a demon. It is worth sitting with how strange, and how fitting, that is.
Like Marbas with his diseases, Gaap holds a power and its reverse in one hand. The grimoires say he makes men insensible or ignorant — and in the same breath, that in Philosophy and all the Liberal Sciences he makes them knowing. He can dull a mind and he can furnish one. This twofold power over knowledge is not a contradiction but a single mastery seen from both sides: to be able to take understanding away is to understand exactly how it is given. Practitioners drawn to him for learning approach the furnishing side — the teaching of philosophy and the liberal arts, the opening of a mind to the disciplines. The darker half, the making ignorant, the Vault names honestly and turns firmly inward: the only rightful use of a power to dull a mind is upon the noise in one's own — the quieting of a mental clamour that will not let true thought through, the clearing of a head grown too full to learn. It is never, in this Vault's reading, a thing to be worked upon another, whose mind is theirs and not yours to dim.
Gaap can cause love, and he can cause hatred. Several spirits of the Goetia touch love, and it is worth setting him beside them, for the four are constantly confused. Sitri inflames desire between people; Zepar bends a woman's love toward a man; Sallos moves love gently and with an emphasis on consent; Glasya-Labolas can cause the love of both friends and foes. Gaap is distinct from all of these in that he holds love and its opposite as a matched pair — not the kindling of affection alone but the power over the whole swing of feeling between attraction and aversion. That balance is his signature, and it carries the same ethical weight this Vault places on every working that touches another's heart: feeling that is bent by force rather than freely given is a violation of the will, and the causing of hatred especially is a thing to be approached, if at all, only as the honest naming and release of one's own — never as a weapon turned on someone else's peace.
The grimoires credit Gaap with carrying and re-carrying men very speedily from one kingdom to another, at the will of the one who calls him. This is worth separating from Bathin, the eighteenth spirit, who also moves men across the world. Bathin carries a man suddenly from one country to another — a single geographic leap. Gaap carries between kingdoms, the larger and more political unit, and the grimoire's word is re-carry: there and back, a round trip in the keeping of a guide who conducts and returns. The distinction fits their natures. Bathin is a spirit of herbs and sudden passage; Gaap is the conductor of kings, and his moving of men is the same conducting extended across the map. Modern practitioners read the crossing, as they read most Goetic travel, as much inward as outward: the swift conduct of a person from one condition or country of the self to another, and — because he re-carries — the safe return.
Gaap is one of the few Goetic spirits named as serving a particular king: he can teach how to consecrate the things that belong to the dominion of Amaymon, his King. Amaymon is one of the great kings of the cardinal directions in the Solomonic tradition, and in naming him the Goetia lets its own chain of command show through — a glimpse of the hierarchy above the seventy-two, the kings under whom the presidents and dukes and marquises serve. There is a genuine tangle in the sources here, worth reporting rather than smoothing over: some traditions count Gaap or Goap himself among the four kings of the directions, while the Goetia entry plainly has him serving Amaymon as a subordinate. The Vault does not pretend to resolve what the manuscripts leave unsettled. What matters for the practitioner is the glimpse itself — that these spirits stand within an order, answerable to powers above them, and are not the free-floating monsters of the popular imagination but ranks within a structure older and more coherent than the fear attached to them.
Gaap is placed in the element of Water and the quarter of the South, and the pairing repays attention, for it is not the obvious one. The south is the quarter of the sun's height and of fire in many schemes, yet Gaap is given to Water — and the tension resolves in his character. Water is the element of flow, of carrying and being carried, of the current that moves a thing from one place to another; a spirit whose great office is conduct and transport belongs to the moving element as naturally as a river belongs to its course. Practitioners who follow the planetary correspondences most often read him as lunar, and the reading gathers him well: the Moon governs the tides and all flowing water, rules travel and the crossing of thresholds, moves through her own swift monthly circuit as Gaap moves men swiftly between kingdoms, and stands as the great mediator between spheres — fitting for a guide who walks between kings and carries between realms. That his coming is timed to the sun even as his nature runs to the Moon and Water is of a piece with him: he is a spirit of the moving heavens, kept by the sun's season and carried on the water's flow. These correspondences are read as symbolic rather than handed down as documented tradition; the grimoires give only his element and his southern season, and the rest follows from them.
The grimoires describe Gaap coming in a human shape, walking ahead of four great and mighty kings as if he were a guide sent to conduct them along their way — and they add the condition that sets him apart, that he comes when the sun is in some of the southern signs. Later depiction has furnished him with bat's wings, though the older texts give only the human form and the retinue of kings; the wings are a fitting addition for a spirit of swift passage but belong to the tradition's later imagining rather than to the plain word of the manuscript. Those who work with him today describe him much as the text has him: a presence felt as motion rather than as menace — a sense of being led, of a road opening, of a swift and purposeful current — and, for a spirit of his rank, a striking absence of threat, as befits one whose great work is not to bind but to conduct and to free.
Enn: Deyen pretore ramec Gaap
Working with Gaap is working with a guide, and everything about the relationship follows from that. He is not a spirit who sits still and dispenses; he is a spirit who moves, who leads, who carries a person or a matter from where it is to where it is meant to be. He is a great President and mighty Prince of generous and orderly nature, and his gifts are among the most humane in the book — the freeing of what is bound, the furnishing of a mind, the safe conduct across a hard passage. What follows is a guide to that relationship in turn: how to approach him, when, and to what ends, and how to honour the one office that makes him unlike any other spirit in the Goetia.
Come to Gaap with the respect owed to a spirit of double rank and of the old angelic Order of Powers. Cleanse yourself and the space, set his seal at the centre of the working as its single focus, and, if you are able, keep to the season the grimoires name — the months when the sun travels the southern signs, from midsummer toward the year's turning — for he is said to come most readily then. Where correspondences are followed, the lunar and the watery suit him: silver and sea-green, the metal silver, the hours of the Moon and of Monday, and water itself set upon the altar as the element of his conduct. Open the way by reciting his Enn — Deyen pretore ramec Gaap — steadily until you feel the sense of motion and of purposeful presence gather. Greet him as a guide rather than a servant; he comes already conducting, already in motion, and the working goes best when the seeker is ready to be led rather than waiting to command.
This is the office that belongs to Gaap alone, and it is the one this Vault holds in the highest regard. If in your reading or your practice you have come to believe that a spirit has been bound — held in service under compulsion by another's working, kept against its nature in a vessel or a triangle or a pact — Gaap is the spirit whose stated office is to deliver it out of that custody. To seek this is to align yourself with the whole heart of the Left-Hand Path as this Vault understands it: that no intelligence is rightly held by force, and that the freeing of the captive is a good in itself. Come to it soberly and without spectacle. Name what you understand to be bound, ask his help in its release, and want nothing in return from the freed spirit — for a liberation performed in order to win the loosed one's gratitude or service is only the old binding wearing a kinder face. Free it because it should be free. That is the whole of the working, and it is enough.
To come to Gaap for knowledge is to come to the furnishing side of his double power. Name the discipline you would learn — the philosophy, the liberal art, the study you are undertaking — and ask him for the opening of your mind to it, then go and do the study, for like every teaching spirit he furnishes the diligent and not the idle. The other half of his power over the mind, the making insensible or ignorant, this Vault turns firmly inward and hands to the seeker for one use only: the quieting of one's own mental noise, the dimming of a clamour that will not let true thought through. If you come to him overfull, unable to learn for the din in your own head, you may ask him to quiet it. You may never ask him to dim another's mind; a mind is its owner's, and to dull it against their will is a violation the Vault does not countenance.
For Gaap's conduct between kingdoms, read the crossing as the tradition's travellers read it — as much a passage of the self as of the map. Name the country you would leave and the one you would reach, whether that be a literal journey or the harder crossing from one condition of life to another, and ask him to conduct you. Remember his particular grace: he re-carries. Unlike a spirit of one-way flight, he is the guide who brings you there and brings you back, and so his is the working to seek when the passage is one you must survive and return from rather than vanish into. Ask for the safe conduct and the safe return both, and follow the road he opens with your own feet, for he guides the traveller and does not spare them the travelling.
Should you consider Gaap for the moving of feeling, weigh it with the full seriousness this Vault places on every such working. His power runs the whole swing from love to hatred, and both ends touch another person's will. Feeling compelled is not feeling freely given, and a heart bent by force is a heart violated however sweet the intent. The causing of love aimed at a named and unconsenting person is a thing this Vault counsels against as it counsels against it with every love-touching spirit; the causing of hatred it counsels against more firmly still, and admits only one honest form of the work — the naming and release of a hatred already one's own, worked upon oneself to be free of it, never forged and hurled at another. If your business with feeling is with your own heart, Gaap will help you move it. If it is with someone else's, the Vault asks you to set the working down.
Practitioners describe Gaap's presence in terms of motion and of opening. There is often a sense of current, of being gently but definitely led, of a road or a way becoming suddenly clear where it had been closed. In work for learning there may be the swift ordering of a confused study, a subject that opens all at once. In work for a crossing there may be the arrival of the means to make it — an opportunity, an opening, a path that appears. In the freeing of a bound spirit, practitioners report a sense of release or lightening, as of a held breath let go. Keep a written record of what comes during and in the days after, for a guide's gifts show themselves in the opening of ways as much as in any word, and are often recognised only when the road has already begun to open.
Work with Gaap honestly and in the spirit of his best office, which is freedom. Above all, hold his power of liberation as the sacred thing it is, and never invert it — never come to the guide who frees the bound in order to bind something yourself. Turn his power over the mind inward and never against another's understanding; turn his power over feeling inward and never against another's heart. Ask his conduct as a traveller ready to travel, his teaching as a student ready to study. Keep his season if you can, and keep faith with the fact that he comes as a guide and not a slave, to be walked beside rather than driven before. He is a great and orderly Prince who answers a sincere seeker with swift and generous conduct, and who has, written plainly into his ancient office, a standing testimony against the very coercion the seeker is right to refuse.