Rank: President · Legions: 40 · Element: Air · Direction: East · Enn: Lirach tasa vefa wehlc Malphas
Malphas is the thirty-ninth spirit of the Ars Goetia — a mighty and powerful President who governs forty legions of spirits. He appears first as a crow, and at the request of the one who calls him he takes a human shape and speaks with a hoarse voice. He builds houses and high towers and strongholds, and he throws down the works of the enemy; he brings to a seeker's knowledge the desires and the thoughts of those set against them, and what they have done; and he gives good familiars. But the line that defines him, and that makes his entry unlike any other in the book, is the last thing the grimoire says of him: if you make a sacrifice to Malphas, he will receive it kindly and willingly — and then he will deceive the one who made it. He is the spirit who takes your offering with a smile and tricks you for it. And, read rightly, he is the sharpest lesson in the whole Goetia about why the sacrifice was the wrong thing to bring.
He comes to the modern practitioner as Malphas, a name stable across the manuscripts. He appears in Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum of 1577, was carried into the Ars Goetia when that material was gathered into the Lemegeton in the seventeenth century, and was fixed in modern English by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley in their edition of 1904. The account holds steady wherever he is found: the crow who becomes a man with a hoarse voice, the President of forty legions, the builder of towers and the breaker of the enemy's, the knower of enemies' minds, the giver of good familiars, and the one who receives a sacrifice kindly and then deceives the giver.
Malphas comes first as a crow, and the choice is worth setting beside Stolas, who comes as a raven, for the two corvids are cousins and yet not the same bird in the old symbolism. The raven is the noble far-seer, the great black bird of Apollo and Odin, the gatherer of knowledge from the whole sky. The crow is its cleverer, more earthbound kin — the cunning watcher, the bird that remembers faces and holds grudges, the trickster of a hundred folk-tales, the intelligence that haunts the battlefield and the gallows and misses nothing that passes below. If the raven is wisdom, the crow is cunning; if the raven is the astronomer, the crow is the spy. That Malphas wears the crow's shape rather than the raven's is exactly right for a spirit who knows the enemy's secret thoughts and who will, if you let him, cleverly deceive you. The bird is the truth of him: watchful, sharp, and not to be taken at face value.
Malphas holds the rank of President — an office of presiding, governing authority — and forty legions is a considerable host, larger than most. The grimoire calls him mighty and powerful, and the works it gives him are large ones: the raising of houses and high towers, the casting down of an enemy's strongholds, the command of a knowledge that reaches into other minds. His is a presidency of building and of intelligence, of the shaping of great structures and the knowing of hidden things — a lordly and capable spirit, and, the text is careful to add, a dangerous one to approach in the wrong spirit.
Two spirits of the Goetia in succession are builders of towers, and they are worth telling apart. Halphas, the thirty-eighth, is the war-engineer: he raises fortifications, stocks them with arms, and deploys the men-of-war — the quartermaster of defence. Malphas is the master-builder and the master-breaker both. He builds houses and high towers and strongholds, works of peace as much as of war; and in the same breath he throws down the enemy's — he raises and he ruins, the mason and the wrecking-crew in one. Where Halphas fortifies, Malphas builds and demolishes, and adds to it the strategist's knowledge of the opposing mind. His is the fuller and more dangerous office: not merely the infrastructure of defence but the whole art of raising one's own works and tearing down another's, guided by an intelligence that knows what the other side intends.
Among Malphas's gifts is a striking one: he brings to a seeker's knowledge the desires, the thoughts, and the deeds of those set against them. This is the office of intelligence, of reconnaissance — the knowing of what an enemy truly wants, plans, and has done. It is a genuinely useful power and a genuinely dangerous one, and this Vault frames it with care. It is not a licence to spy on the innocent, to feed a paranoia, or to cast every difficult person as an enemy to be surveilled; a seeker who comes to Malphas to pry into someone who has done them no wrong has already misunderstood the working and, given what else the text says of him, is exactly the sort he most enjoys deceiving. Rightly used, the gift is for the understanding of real and declared opposition — for seeing clearly what is actually arrayed against you when you are genuinely under threat, so that you may meet it wisely rather than blindly. And it turns inward as readily as most of his fellows' powers: to know one's "enemy" is very often to understand a conflict truly, to see plainly the shape of what one is really up against, which is the beginning of dealing with it.
Like Marax before him, Malphas gives good familiars — attendant spirits to serve and assist the practitioner. The grimoire is careful with the word good, and it sits strangely beside the deceit the same entry warns of: the familiars he gives are said to be good, yet the one who bribes him for them is said to be deceived. The tension is the whole of him, and it points, as everything about Malphas points, to the single question of how one comes to him.
Here is the heart of Malphas, and it is the sharpest teaching the Goetia offers on the subject this Vault cares about most. The grimoire says: make a sacrifice to Malphas, and he will receive it kindly and willingly — and then he will deceive you. Read that as a warning about Malphas and it is merely frightening. Read it as a warning about the sacrifice, and it becomes the most honest line in the book. For what is a sacrifice, in the old transactional model of the grimoires? It is a payment. It is a thing offered to buy a spirit's favour, to place the spirit under obligation, to purchase a service — the assumption being that a spirit, like a hired hand, can be bought. And Malphas is the spirit who exposes exactly what that assumption is worth. He takes the payment, because you offered it; and he deceives you, because a favour you tried to buy was never a real favour, and a relationship built on bribery was never a real relationship, and a sovereign intelligence you approached as a vending machine owes you nothing but the treatment a vending machine's logic deserves. The deceit is not Malphas's cruelty. It is the natural and just fruit of coming to a spirit with a purchase in hand. He is the mirror the whole Goetia holds up to the transactional magician, and what it shows is a fool being separated from his offering.
This Vault, therefore, does not come to Malphas — or to any spirit — with a sacrifice meant as payment, and with Malphas the reason is written plainly into the text itself. Bring him honour freely given, a gift with nothing owed in return, offered in genuine relationship rather than as a bribe, and the deceit-clause loses its hook entirely — for there is no purchase to exploit, no obligation you are trying to force, no vending-machine logic for him to punish. You cannot be cheated in a transaction you refused to make. The one spirit the book says will deceive the sacrificer is disarmed completely by the seeker who has stopped sacrificing.
Malphas is placed in the element of Air and the quarter of the East — the element of the mind and the far-flying bird, and the quarter of dawn. Practitioners who follow the planetary correspondences most often read him as saturnine, under Saturn, and for Malphas the reading gathers almost everything about him into one figure. The crow is the black bird of Saturn, the corvid of the old alchemists' nigredo; Saturn is the lord of building in stone and of its ruin, the master-mason and the wrecker both, which is Malphas's double office of raising towers and casting them down; Saturn is the traditional greater malefic, the cold and treacherous planet, which is the deceiver in him; and Saturn is the ruler of the hidden, the buried, and the deep, which is his knowledge of secret thoughts. Where Foras before him showed Saturn's face as the patient structure of thought, Malphas shows its harder face: the black bird, the raised and ruined wall, the cold intelligence, the treachery held ready for the one who comes wrongly. 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 saturnine reading follows from the crow, the tower, and the deceit together.
The grimoires give Malphas a crow's form first and a man's second. He comes as a crow -- not the noble far-seeing raven of Stolas but its cleverer, sharper kin, the cunning watcher that remembers faces and haunts the field -- and at the request of the one who calls him he takes a human shape and speaks with a hoarse voice. There is no fierce composite beast to be commanded away; the crow is the whole of the first form, and it is the truest image of him: watchful, intelligent, and not to be taken at face value. Later depiction sometimes gives him a more ominous crowned or armoured figure among towers; the older texts give the crow and the hoarse-voiced man. Those who work with him describe a sharp, capable, watchful presence with a genuine edge to it -- a spirit of real power and real usefulness who must be met in the right spirit, because he is precisely as trustworthy as the approach that is brought to him.
Enn: Lirach tasa vefa wehlc Malphas
Working with Malphas turns, more completely than with almost any other spirit, on a single point: how you come to him. He is a mighty President of great capability -- a builder, a breaker, a knower of hidden minds, a giver of good familiars -- and to the seeker who approaches him rightly he is powerful and genuinely helpful. But he is the one spirit the grimoire explicitly says will deceive those who come to him wrongly, and the wrong way is named exactly: the sacrifice offered as a purchase. Get that one thing right and the rest of the relationship opens; get it wrong and you become the fool in his oldest story. What follows is a guide built around that hinge.
Everything with Malphas begins here. Do not come to him with an offering meant as payment -- do not bring a sacrifice to buy his favour, place him under obligation, or purchase a service, for that is precisely the approach the text says he receives kindly and then punishes with deceit. Come instead as this Vault comes to all the spirits: in relationship, not transaction. If you bring anything at all, bring it as honour freely given, a gift with nothing owed in return, offered because it is fitting and not because you expect it to bind him. Hold nothing back as leverage and demand nothing as your purchased due. Approached so, the deceiver has nothing to deceive, because you have made no bargain for him to break. This is not a trick to get past his guard; it is the actual difference between the seeker he deceives and the seeker he serves.
With that understood, come to Malphas with respect for his rank and his sharpness. Cleanse yourself and the space, and set his seal at the centre as the working's single focus. Where correspondences are followed, the saturnine suits him: crow-black and stone-grey, the metal lead, the hours of Saturn and of Saturday. Open the way by reciting his Enn -- Lirach tasa vefa wehlc Malphas -- steadily until a sharp, watchful, capable presence gathers, and greet the crow without either fear or flattery; he sees through both. When he takes his human, hoarse-voiced form, state your business plainly, for he is a spirit who respects clarity and preys on the muddled.
For his building, name what you would raise -- a structure in your life, a work, an undertaking that needs to be built solid and high -- and ask his help in the raising of it, then do the building, for he is a master-builder and not a genie. For his breaking, the Vault counsels the inward turn: the throwing-down of the enemy's works becomes, rightly understood, the dismantling of what opposes you within -- the tearing down of a structure in your own life that has become a stronghold of the wrong thing, a fortified habit, a wall you built that now imprisons you. To turn his demolishing power outward against another person's life or works is to leave what this Vault stands for; keep the wrecking to your own walls that deserve it.
For his knowledge of enemies' minds, come only with a real and declared opposition, never with a suspicion aimed at the innocent -- and remember that this is exactly the pretext under which he most enjoys deceiving the unworthy. When you are genuinely and knowingly under threat, ask him to help you see clearly what is actually arrayed against you: the true desires and intentions of a real adversary, so that you may meet the situation wisely. Take what he shows you and test it, for he is a deceiver by reputation and his intelligence is only as good as your discernment of it. And let the gift turn inward where it can: to know your enemy is often to understand your conflict, and understanding is the beginning of resolving it.
Practitioners describe Malphas's presence as sharp and watchful -- a sense of a clever, capable intelligence turned upon the matter, quick and a little cold. His help arrives as structure and as insight: a building that begins to take real shape, a clarity about what one is truly up against, the sudden understanding of an opponent's actual aim. Because of his reputation, the honest practitioner watches their own results with particular care, testing what comes and noting whether it proves out -- and finds, when the approach has been right, that the deceit the text warns of simply does not appear. Keep a written record, and let it teach you the difference between the spirit met in relationship and the spirit met with a bribe.
Work with Malphas with clarity and with clean hands. Above all, never offer him a sacrifice as payment, for that is the one act the grimoire says he punishes with deceit -- come in relationship or do not come. Do not turn his breaking-power outward against another's life, nor his intelligence against the innocent; keep the demolition to your own walls and the reconnaissance to real and declared threats. Meet the crow without flattery and state your business plainly, for he respects the clear and cheats the muddled. Test what he gives, as befits a spirit the tradition marks a deceiver. He is a mighty and capable President who serves the seeker that comes to him honestly and freely, and deceives, exactly and only, the one who tries to buy him -- which makes him, in the end, one of the truest teachers in the book of the single lesson this whole Vault is built on: that these are sovereign beings to be met in relationship, and never things to be purchased.