Rank: Earl · Legions: 30 · Element: Air · Direction: East · Enn: Furca na alle laris Raum
Raum, written also Raim and Raym, is the fortieth spirit of the Ars Goetia — a great Earl who governs thirty legions of spirits, and one of the strangest and most coherent of the seventy-two once his contradictions are read together. He appears first as a crow, and at the command of the one who calls him he takes a human shape. His offices, laid side by side, look at first like a spirit pulling in four directions at once: he steals treasure out of the houses of kings and carries it wherever he is bidden; he destroys cities and the dignities of men; he tells of all things past, present, and to come; and he causes love and reconciles those who were enemies. And he was, the grimoire says, of the Order of Thrones — one of the highest choirs of heaven. It is that last fact that unlocks him. The Thrones are the very seat of sovereignty, the bearers of the throne of God; and Raum, fallen from that choir, has become its dark inversion — the un-throner, the one who robs the king's house and casts down the dignities of the mighty. Read so, his scattered offices resolve into a single character, and even his gentlest gift, the reconciling of enemies, turns out to be part of the same work.
He comes to the modern practitioner as Raum, and in the older books as Raim or Raym. He appears in Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum of 1577 among the earls, 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, the Earl of thirty legions, the thief of kings' treasure, the destroyer of cities and dignities, the teller of all times, the reconciler of enemies, and the fallen angel of the Order of Thrones.
Raum comes as a crow, the second spirit in immediate succession to do so, for Malphas before him wears the same shape — and the doubling is worth a word, because the crow means something different in each. Malphas's crow is the cunning watcher and the deceiver, the bird that spies out the enemy's mind. Raum's crow is the taker and the ruin-bird: the corvid of the battlefield and the gallows, the one that descends on the fallen city and carries off what it can, the black wing over the sacked place. Both are corvids and both are dark, but Malphas's crow watches and knows, while Raum's crow takes and tears down. The bird is the truth of each of them, and the same feathers cover two very different natures.
Raum holds the rank of Earl — a noble, martial office — and governs thirty legions. But the fact that matters most about his standing is his origin: he was of the Order of Thrones, and among the choirs of angels the Thrones are very high indeed, ranked in the old scheme third from the summit, below only the Cherubim and the Seraphim. Their name is their office. The Thrones are the seats — the bearers of the divine throne, the very foundation of sovereignty and judgement, the choir upon which the authority of the highest King is said to rest. To have been of the Thrones is to have been part of the seat of power itself. And that is what gives Raum his terrible coherence, for a spirit who was once the support of the true throne has become, in his fall, the enemy of every false one.
Here is the heart of him. Look at what his offices actually are, once the Thrones origin is held in mind. He steals treasure out of the houses of kings — not from the poor, not from the common house, but from kings. He destroys the dignities of men — the ranks, the honours, the standing, the titles by which the mighty are set above the rest. He casts down cities, the seats of earthly power. Every one of his works is aimed at sovereignty, at the throne and its trappings; the fallen bearer of the true seat has become the un-maker of false seats. This Vault reads that, as it reads all of the dark offices, morally and inwardly rather than as a licence. It is not a permission to rob any actual king or ruin any actual person; nothing in this entry is an instruction toward theft or the destruction of anyone's standing, and the offices as the grimoire states them are named honestly here only to be turned. Turned rightly, Raum is the spirit of the levelling of false sovereignty — the humbling of ill-gotten power, the exposure that the great man's dignity is not as deserved or as secure as it pretends, the pulling-down of a throne that was never rightly raised. And turned upon oneself, which is where this Vault sends it most firmly, he is the caster-down of one's own false thrones: the pretensions, the self-importances, the little sovereignties of ego one has quietly enthroned within and defends as if they were real. The Left-Hand Path's self-deification is the raising of a true and earned sovereignty; Raum is the spirit who tears down the false and unearned one, including — especially — your own.
His most specific office is theft, and it is worth setting apart from Valefor, the sixth spirit, who is also a thief. Valefor's theft is intimate and personal — the shadow of taking that lurks in a close friendship, the mirror he holds to one's own capacity to take from those who trust one. Raum's theft is political: it is aimed at the king's house, at concentrated and often ill-held power, and it comes paired with carrying — he bears what he takes wherever he is commanded. In this he is a very Mercurial spirit, for the god of thieves in the old world was also the god of couriers and messengers: Hermes, who stole the cattle of Apollo on the day he was born and who carries the words and souls of gods and men wherever they must go. Raum steals and Raum carries, the taking and the bearing joined in one office, exactly as they were joined in the trickster-god. The Vault keeps the moral reading of the theft — the levelling of ill-held power, never the robbing of a person — but the resonance is worth knowing, for it explains why so unlike a set of gifts sit together in him.
Raum casts down cities, and this is the largest-scale of the destructive powers in the Goetia — not a tower, as with Halphas and Malphas, but the whole seat of a people's power. As with every such office, this Vault names it and turns it, and turns it hard. There is no reading under which the destruction of an actual city or an actual community belongs to any working this Vault would touch. Inwardly, the casting-down of cities becomes the demolition of the great fortified structures of the false self — not a single wall but the whole entrenched city of a way of being that has outlived its truth: the elaborate, defended, long-built edifice of a false life, cast down so that a true one can be raised on the cleared ground. It is drastic work, and Raum is a drastic spirit; but the ground he clears is one's own, and never another's.
The strangest of his gifts, beside all this destruction, is that Raum causes love and reconciles enemies — and it is here that his whole character finally makes sense. For what is it, most often, that sets people against each other and holds them there? It is dignity: pride, standing, the question of who outranks whom, the false thrones each has raised in their own esteem and will not climb down from. Most enmity is a war of thrones. And Raum is precisely the spirit who casts those thrones down. His destruction and his reconciliation are not two opposite offices but one motion seen at its two ends: he tears down the false dignities that divide people, and across the levelled ground, with the pride that fed the quarrel pulled down, reconciliation at last becomes possible. This distinguishes him from the other peacemakers of the book. Botis reconciles friends and foes; Gaap moves the whole swing of love and hatred; Glasya-Labolas causes the love of both. Raum reconciles by un-throning — by demolishing the standing and the pride that kept the enemies enemies. His is the peace that comes after the humbling, the reconciliation that only the levelling makes possible.
Among his gifts, more quietly, Raum tells of all things past, present, and to come — the knowledge that reaches across time, the seeing of what was, what is, and what will be. It sits naturally in a spirit of his origin and his crow's-eye vantage: the ruin-bird that watches from above sees the whole field, the rise and the fall together, and a spirit who was of the seat of judgement knows how thrones are raised and how they come down. His prophecy has the flavour of that long view — less the fortune-teller's particular answer than the understanding of how things tend, of where a proud thing is heading and what the levelling will leave.
Raum 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 mercurial, under Mercury, and the reading gathers his scattered offices into one figure better than any other could. Mercury is Hermes, and Hermes is the god of thieves and the divine courier both, which is Raum's paired office of stealing and carrying to the letter; Hermes is the mediator and reconciler of quarrels, which is Raum's peace-making; Hermes-Thoth is the knower and recorder of all things, which is Raum's telling of all times; and the crow is a trickster's bird, quick and clever and not to be trusted with your valuables. Only Raum's destruction of cities strains against the mercurial reading, and even that has a Hermetic edge, for Hermes is the crosser of boundaries and the unmaker of settled orders. Where his fellow crow Malphas showed the saturnine face of the corvid — the cold builder and deceiver — Raum shows the mercurial one: the thief, the carrier, the reconciler, the quick dark wing that takes and bears and knows. 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 mercurial reading follows from the thief-and-carrier at the centre of them.
The grimoires give Raum a crow's form first and a man's second. He comes as a crow -- the ruin-bird, the corvid of the battlefield and the fallen city, the black wing that descends on the sacked place and carries off what it can -- and only at the command of the one who calls him does he put on a human shape. It is the same shape his fellow Malphas wears, and yet not the same bird in nature: where Malphas's crow watches and deceives, Raum's takes and tears down. There is no fierce composite beast to be commanded away; the crow is the whole of the first form. Those who work with him describe a quick, dark, unsettling presence with a levelling edge to it -- something that pulls down rather than builds, and yet, once its work of humbling is done, an unexpected capacity for peace, as befits the spirit who reconciles by casting the false thrones down.
Enn: Furca na alle laris Raum
Working with Raum is working with the spirit of levelling -- the casting-down of false and ill-held power, and the peace that becomes possible once the pride that divided has been pulled down. He is a great Earl and a fallen angel of the high Order of Thrones, and his work is drastic: he tears down, he humbles, he un-thrones. Approached rightly, and turned firmly inward and morally as this Vault turns him, he is a spirit of profound and clearing honesty -- the demolisher of one's own pretensions, the reconciler of quarrels rooted in pride. Approached wrongly, as a licence to rob or ruin another, he is refused, for this Vault turns his theft and his destruction only ever upon false thrones and never upon a person. What follows is a guide to the right relationship.
Come to Raum with respect for his rank and his origin -- an Earl of thirty legions, and once of the choir that bore the throne of heaven itself. Cleanse yourself and the space, and set his seal at the centre as the working's single focus. Where correspondences are followed, the mercurial suits him: crow-black and tarnished silver, the metal quicksilver, the hours of Mercury and of Wednesday. Open the way by reciting his Enn -- Furca na alle laris Raum -- steadily until a quick, dark, levelling presence gathers, and greet the crow without fear; when he takes his human shape you will find, beneath the ruin-bird, a spirit of surprising clarity about what is false and what deserves to fall.
This is the deepest and most rightful work with Raum, and the one this Vault most commends. We all enthrone things within us that have no right to the seat: a pretension, a self-importance, a grievance we have crowned and defended, an image of ourselves we rule from and will not question. These are the false thrones, and they are heavier than we know. To bring them to Raum is to ask the un-throner to help you cast them down -- to see clearly which of your dignities are unearned, which of your certainties are only pride, which of your defended positions is a throne that ought never to have been raised, and then to pull it down. This is humbling work, and it is meant to be; but it is the humbling that clears the ground for something true. Name honestly the false throne you would cast down, ask his help in the casting, and then do the hard work of climbing down from it yourself, for he levels what the seeker is genuinely willing to see levelled.
For his gift of reconciliation, understand first what it rests on, for it is unlike the other peacemakers'. Where a quarrel is rooted in pride and standing -- as most lasting quarrels are -- Raum reconciles by casting down the false thrones on both sides: the who-was-right, the who-owes-whom-an-apology, the dignities each party is defending instead of the relationship. Come to him with a division you genuinely wish to heal, and be prepared for the humbling half of the work to fall on you as much as on the other -- for you cannot ask him to level your enemy's pride while defending your own. Ask him to show you the false thrones that keep the enmity standing, including your own, and to help pull them down, that reconciliation may become possible across the levelled ground. This is not a working to bend another's feeling by force; it is the clearing-away of the pride that stands between two people who might otherwise be at peace.
For his telling of all times, come to Raum less for a particular fortune than for the long view his origin and his vantage give: the understanding of how a thing tends, how a proud or ill-founded structure is likely to fall, what the levelling of a situation will leave standing when the false parts have come down. Ask him to show you the shape of a matter across time -- where it came from, what it truly is, and where it is heading -- and take what he shows you as understanding to be weighed, not as fixed fate. His prophecy is the crow's-eye seeing of the whole field, the rise and the fall together.
Practitioners describe Raum's presence as quick, dark, and levelling -- a sense of something that strips away and pulls down, unsettling at first and then oddly clearing. His help characteristically arrives as a humbling clarity: the sudden, uncomfortable seeing of a pretension for what it is, the collapse of a defended position that could not bear examination, the falling-away of a false dignity and the lightness that follows it. In reconciliation-work there is often the humbling of one's own pride before any peace comes, and then the peace. Keep a written record of what comes, for his gifts do their work by subtraction -- by what they take down -- and are best recognised in the clearer ground they leave.
Work with Raum honestly, and keep his levelling turned where it belongs. Never aim his theft or his destruction at an actual person -- not their goods, not their standing, not their city; his robbing of kings and casting-down of dignities is turned, in this Vault, only ever upon false and ill-held power in the abstract and upon one's own false thrones, and never as a weapon against another. Be ready, when you ask him to level a pride, for the pride he levels first to be your own. Take his prophecy as understanding, not as fate. And come to him prepared to be humbled, for that is his gift and his medicine both. He is a great Earl and a fallen angel of the seat of sovereignty itself, and the seeker who lets him cast down their false thrones will find, on the cleared ground, the beginning of a truer and better-founded self -- and, where there was enmity, the possibility of peace.