Buer: the 10th spirit of the Goetia, president of healing and philosophy

The tenth spirit

Buer is the tenth of the 72 spirits of the Ars Goetia. The text describes him as a great president who appears when the Sun is in Sagittarius, teaches moral and natural philosophy, the art of logic and the virtues of all herbs and plants, heals all human illnesses and gives good familiars. He commands 50 legions of spirits.

It is a curious portrait for a "demon": a philosophy teacher who is also a herbalist and physician. That is why Buer is one of the spirits most sought out by people who work with the Goetia today.

What the sources say

The description comes from Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1577), where Buer also appears near the start of the list, and passed almost unchanged into the 17th-century English manuscripts of the Lemegeton. Weyer calls him a president, mentions the sign of Sagittarius and the same gifts: philosophy, logic, herbs, healing and familiars. The Mathers and Crowley edition (1904) fixed the form most readers know, with the seal still in use today.

Little changes between the sources: spellings, the number of legions in some copies and details of the seal. Joseph Peterson's critical edition shows these variants side by side.

The lion with goat legs

Almost every image of Buer online shows a lion's head at the centre of five goat legs arranged like the spokes of a wheel. That figure is not in the Goetia. It is one of the illustrations Louis Le Breton made for the 1863 edition of Jacques Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal. The wheel shape plays on the idea that Buer "goes in all directions", but it is a 19th-century creation, not part of the tradition.

Sagittarius, Jupiter and herbs

The mention of Sagittarius led modern occultists to link Buer with the first decan of that sign and, by extension, with Jupiter, ruler of Sagittarius and the planet of expansion and healing. In the Golden Dawn tradition, each spirit of the Goetia was paired with a decan and with one of the 72 angels of the Shem ha-Mephorash. These pairings are modern and vary by author.

For those who work with Buer, this guides practical choices: the day and hour of Jupiter, which you can calculate with the planetary hours, and the period when the Sun passes through Sagittarius, visible in the current sky. Herbs come in as a subject of study, which pairs well with the guide to magical herbs.

Buer in contemporary practice

Practitioners who work with Buer usually ask for three things: support in recovering from illness, clarity for study and learning, and knowledge about plants. Many describe a calm, teacherly presence, consistent with the portrait in the text. These accounts are personal experiences and should be read as such.

Two precautions separate serious practice from dangerous practice:

• Magic does not replace treatment. Buer can be a support, never a substitute for a doctor, medication or tests.
• A herb is chemistry. If Buer "teaches the virtues of plants", the serious practitioner studies toxicity, dosage and interactions before using any of them.

Going further

See Buer and the other 71 spirits, with rank and source, in the Goetia catalogue, and learn how the book came to be in the history of the Goetia.