Rank: Marquis · Legions: 50 · Element: Fire · Direction: South · Enn: Tasa on ca napa Sabnock
Sabnock, written also Savnok and Sabnac, is the forty-third spirit of the Ars Goetia — a mighty, great, and strong Marquis who governs fifty legions of spirits, and the death-knight who builds. He appears as an armed soldier with the head of a lion, riding upon a pale-coloured horse — the pale horse that in the old vision is the mount of Death himself. His offices set his two natures side by side and refuse to resolve them: he builds high towers and castles and whole cities and furnishes them with armour and arms, and in the same breath he afflicts men for many days with wounds and with rotten sores full of worms. He also gives good familiars. He is at once the master-builder of the fortified city and the soldier of the rotting wound, the raiser of walls and the rider of the death-horse — and this Vault turns him firmly toward the first of those faces, holding him as a spirit of protection and resilient building, disavowing his affliction entirely, and sending those who would have a festering wound HEALED to Vepar before him, who alone of the two can close it.
He comes to the modern practitioner as Sabnock, and in the older books as Savnok or Sabnac. 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. His entry is one of those the old text introduces with the frame of King Solomon commanding the spirits into the Vessel of Brass -- the brazen prison of the binding rite -- a frame this Vault sets aside, as it sets aside all the machinery of compulsion. The account of him otherwise holds steady: the lion-headed soldier on the pale horse, the builder of towers and castles and cities, the afflicter of rotting wounds, the giver of good familiars, the Marquis of fifty legions.
Sabnock's form is one of the most overtly martial and most quietly deathly in the whole book. He comes as an armed soldier -- mailed and weaponed, a figure of war -- and his head is the head of a lion, the old emblem of martial ferocity and sovereign strength. But it is his mount that carries the deepest meaning: he rides a pale-coloured horse, and the pale horse is not a neutral detail. It is the horse of the fourth seal in the Book of Revelation, the mount whose rider is named Death, with the grave following after him. To set an armed soldier with a lion's head upon the pale horse of Death is to draw a death-knight entire -- and yet this death-knight's great office, as the very next line reveals, is not slaughter but building. That tension is the whole of him, and it is worth holding rather than smoothing: the rider of the death-horse is the one who raises the cities.
Sabnock holds the rank of Marquis -- a high, noble, martial office -- and governs fifty legions, a great host, larger than most in the book. The grimoire heaps the adjectives on him: mighty, great, and strong. His is a commanding, forceful authority, the authority of a war-captain who both raises the fortress and leads the host, and the size of his legions marks him as a spirit of real weight and power among the seventy-two.
Sabnock's headline office is building, and it is the largest-scale building in the whole Goetia. Several spirits raise towers; Sabnock raises towers and castles and whole cities, and arms them all. It is worth telling him apart from his fellow builders, for the book has a cluster of them and they run together easily. Halphas, the thirty-eighth, is the war-engineer -- he raises fortifications, stocks them, and deploys the men-of-war, the quartermaster of defence. Malphas, the thirty-ninth, builds and breaks both, and knows the enemy's mind. Raum, the fortieth, casts cities DOWN -- he is the un-throner, the destroyer of the seats of power. And Sabnock, only three places on, is the great BUILDER of them: not a single tower but the whole fortified city, walls and keeps and armouries together. Where Raum destroys the city, Sabnock raises it; where Halphas engineers a defence, Sabnock builds the whole civilisation that shelters behind it. This Vault reads his building, as it read Halphas's, inwardly and toward protection -- but on Sabnock's larger scale. He is the spirit not merely of fortifying a weak wall but of raising a whole strong life: a self built high and broad and defensible, a life with real structure and real walls, armed against the sieges that will come. Where a person must build not a single defence but a whole way of living that can stand, Sabnock is the master-mason of it.
Sabnock's dark office is the same grisly power that Vepar bears: he afflicts men for many days with wounds and with sores that rot and fill with worms. This Vault names it honestly and then turns from it entirely, for there is no reading under which the inflicting of such an affliction on any living thing belongs to a working this Vault would touch, and nothing in this entry is an instruction toward it. But here an honest distinction must be drawn, and it matters. Vepar, the forty-second spirit, bears this same power of the putrefying wound -- and the grimoire says of Vepar that, if commanded, he can HEAL those wounds again. Of Sabnock it says no such thing. Sabnock afflicts; he is not given the cure. And so this Vault draws the line plainly: if you would work with a spirit of the festering wound at all, and you would work with it rightly -- to HEAL a wound that has gone septic, in the body or in the heart -- then it is to Vepar you go, the mermaid-physician who can close what he opens, and not to Sabnock, who is given only the affliction. Sabnock's greatness is in his building. His wounding is a power this Vault names only to refuse.
Among his gifts, and more gently, Sabnock gives good familiars -- attendant spirits to serve and assist the practitioner, as Marax and Malphas do before him. It is a quiet counterweight to his fiercer offices, and a reminder that even the death-knight of the Goetia is credited with the giving of good and helpful company.
Return, at the last, to the image at his centre, for it is the key to working with him rightly: the rider on the pale horse of Death, whose office is the raising of cities. The tension is not a contradiction to be explained away but a truth to be held, and it is a deeply human one. We build in the full knowledge that we die; the pale horse is always under us, and the city is raised anyway. Sabnock is the patron of exactly that -- of building well and building strong precisely because the rider of the death-horse is at the work, of raising a life worth the raising in clear sight of its ending. His memento mori is not a counsel of despair but its opposite: the death-horse is why the building matters, why the walls are raised high and the work done well, why a life is made strong and defensible in the little while there is to make it. And the armed soldier that he is becomes, in this reading, the guardian of what is built -- the mailed sentinel who defends the raised city, the watch kept on the walls of a hard-won peace. To work with Sabnock is to build in the presence of death, and to build the better for it.
Sabnock is placed in the element of Fire and the quarter of the South -- the element of force and the forge and the martial heat, and the quarter of the sun's full strength, both entirely his. Practitioners who follow the planetary correspondences most often read him as martial, under Mars, and for so overtly a soldier's spirit no other reading is possible: Mars is the lord of the armed man, of fortification and the arms that furnish it, of the wound and the war-horse, and Sabnock -- the mailed, lion-headed soldier who builds and arms the fortress and afflicts with wounds -- belongs to that planet as fully as any spirit in the book, perhaps more fully than any. The pale horse and the rotting wound cast a darker, more saturnine shadow across that martial nature, the shadow of death and decay that rides always with the soldier; but the core is Mars, the fire of the fortress and the field. 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 martial reading follows plainly from the armed soldier at the heart of them, with the pale horse for its shadow.
The grimoires give Sabnock one form, and it is among the most vivid in the book: an armed soldier -- mailed and weaponed -- with the head of a lion, riding upon a pale-coloured horse. The lion's head is martial ferocity and sovereign strength; the arms and mail mark the soldier; and the pale horse is the mount of Death from the old vision, the fourth seal's rider. There is no fierce first form to be commanded away, for the fierceness is the whole of the appearance -- the death-knight entire. Those who work with him describe a strong, martial, weighty presence with a coolness of death in it -- a war-captain's authority and a rider's stillness together -- which shows, when he is met for his building and his guardianship rather than his wounding, as a steady and formidable protector, the sentinel on the walls of what one has raised.
Enn: Tasa on ca napa Sabnock
Working with Sabnock is working with the master-builder of the Goetia and the guardian of what is built -- a mighty Marquis of the fortress and the field, and a rider on the pale horse who raises cities in full sight of death. This Vault comes to him for his building and his guardianship, turns his one dark office of the rotting wound entirely aside, and sends those who would heal such a wound to Vepar instead. Approached so, he is among the strongest protectors in the book: the spirit who helps a person raise a whole strong life and stand armed upon its walls. What follows is a guide to that relationship, and to the boundary that keeps it clean.
Come to Sabnock with respect for his rank and his strength -- a mighty Marquis of fifty legions, mailed and mounted. Cleanse yourself and the space, and set his seal at the centre as the working's single focus. Where correspondences are followed, the martial suits him: bone-pale and iron, the metal iron, the hours of Mars and of Tuesday. Some practitioners set a small stone, a token of a wall or a keep, or an image of arms upon the altar as the emblem of his building. Open the way by reciting his Enn -- Tasa on ca napa Sabnock -- steadily until a strong, weighty, martial presence gathers, with the cool stillness of the death-horse behind it. Greet the armed soldier without fear, and name plainly that you come for his building and his guard; naming it sets the working's course and turns it from his darker office at the outset.
This is the deepest right work with Sabnock, and the largest-scale of all the builders' gifts. Where Halphas fortifies a wall, Sabnock raises a city -- and inwardly that means the building not of a single defence but of a whole strong life. When you must construct something large and lasting and able to withstand siege -- a life rebuilt after ruin, a structure of habits and supports and defences broad enough to shelter a whole way of being, a self made strong where it was weak and broad where it was narrow -- come to the master-builder and ask his help in the raising of it. Name honestly what you would build and what it must withstand, and ask for the strength to raise it high and arm it well. Then do the building, for he is a mason and not a miracle, and a city is made of real and patient labour. Ask him, too, to stand guard over it once raised -- for the armed soldier defends what the builder makes.
Sabnock is a soldier as much as a builder, and his guardianship is a gift in its own right. When something you have built and value is under threat -- a hard-won peace, a boundary, a structure of your life that others would breach -- you may ask the armed sentinel to stand watch upon its walls. This is defence, not aggression: the keeping of your own gates, never the storming of another's. Ask him to guard what is yours, and keep his soldiering to the wall and not to the field beyond it; a sentinel defends the city and does not ride out to sack the neighbour's.
Here the caution is plain and it is a matter of where you take your need. Never ask Sabnock for his affliction -- the rotting wound, the bred worms, the days of suffering -- upon any living thing; this Vault turns from that power wholly and offers no part of it. And mark the honest distinction that his own text draws by its silence: unlike Vepar, Sabnock is not given the power to heal the festering wound. If your need is to HEAL such a wound -- a septic hurt of the body, or the old rotted wound of the heart gone bitter -- do not bring it to Sabnock, who can only afflict; bring it to Vepar, the mermaid-physician, who alone of the two can close and cleanse it. Come to Sabnock for what he is given: the building, the arming, the guard.
There is one more way to work with Sabnock, quieter than the rest, and it is the heart of his image. He is the rider on the pale horse who builds anyway -- and to sit with that is to receive his deepest teaching, which is a memento mori that strengthens rather than saddens. Bring him the knowledge of your own mortality, not to be frightened by it but to be sharpened by it: ask him to help you build well and build now, in clear sight of the ending, to raise a life worth the raising in the little while there is. His death-horse is not a threat but a reason -- the reason the walls are raised high and the work done well. Let him teach you to build the better for knowing you will not build forever.
Practitioners describe Sabnock's presence as strong, martial, and weighty, with a cool stillness behind it -- the war-captain and the death-rider together. His help in building arrives as structure and solidity: a plan for a large undertaking that suddenly stands firm, a sense of foundations laid and walls rising, a growing strength in what had been shaky. In guardianship there is often a felt steadiness, a sense of a watch being kept, a threat that loses its power to breach. Keep a written record of what comes, for his gifts show themselves in the standing strength of what is built and in the walls that hold when they are tested.
Work with Sabnock honestly, and keep to his building, his guard, and his good familiars. Never ask him for his affliction upon any living thing; and if it is HEALING of a festering wound you need, take it to Vepar and not to him, for Sabnock is given only the harming and not the cure. Keep his soldiering defensive -- the watch on your own walls, never the raid on another's. Let his building be the raising of a strong life and not a fortress of isolation walling out all the world. And let his death-horse teach you to build well in the time you have, rather than to despair of building at all. He is a mighty Marquis, a master-builder and an armed guardian, the death-knight who raises cities -- and the seeker who comes to him to build strong and stand watch will find, in the rider on the pale horse, a formidable and steadfast protector of everything they raise.