Tarot Demon Possessed began with a question: how can the historical descriptions of Goetic spirits be translated into the symbolic language of tarot?
The deck is built around the seventy-two spirits of the Ars Goetia, the Seven Deadly Sins, and one additional Lilith card. But the research was never simply a matter of placing demonic names on familiar tarot images. Each correspondence had to connect a spirit’s traditional office, abilities, and symbolism with the psychological and divinatory meaning of a tarot card.
Where the Seventy-Two Spirits Come From
The seventy-two spirits did not arrive as one fixed list written at a single moment. An important earlier catalogue appears in Johann Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, published with the fifth edition of De Praestigiis Daemonum in 1577.[1] Reginald Scot included an English adaptation of related material in The Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584.[2] The best-known list of seventy-two was later preserved in the Ars Goetia, the first book of the seventeenth-century Lemegeton, or Lesser Key of Solomon.[3]
These sources do not always agree. Names change spelling, spirits move to different positions, and descriptions of rank, appearance, office, and legions can vary between manuscripts. Some figures found in the Ars Goetia do not appear in Weyer or Scot at all.
For the guidebook, we therefore treated demonology as a textual tradition rather than a perfectly consistent mythology. We prioritized early descriptions of what each spirit was said to do, while distinguishing them from later personality claims and modern reinterpretations.
How We Built the Tarot Correspondences
There is no historical source that provides an ancient, canonical list pairing the seventy-two Goetic spirits with the seventy-eight tarot cards. The correspondences in Tarot Demon Possessed are a modern creative system built from historical research.
Our method followed three steps: first, identify the spirit’s traditional office; second, translate that office into a human experience or psychological force; and third, find the tarot archetype whose upright and reversed meanings could hold that force. For the tarot side of the comparison, established card traditions—including A. E. Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot—provided a historical point of reference.[4]
Ose and the Seven of Cups
Ose is described as teaching the liberal sciences, answering questions about hidden matters, and altering a person’s perception so completely that the assumed identity appears real. That movement between possibility, illusion, and distorted self-perception closely echoes the Seven of Cups.
Dantalion and the High Priestess
Dantalion knows hidden thoughts, reveals private counsels, teaches arts and sciences, and shows visions of people at a distance. The High Priestess speaks the language of concealed knowledge, intuition, and the subconscious. Their connection rests not on appearance, but on access to what normally remains unseen.
Andromalius and the Seven of Swords
Andromalius returns stolen property, exposes secret wrongdoing, and punishes thieves. The Seven of Swords contains both sides of the same narrative: deception and concealment, followed by discovery, confession, or accountability. This correspondence shows how a spirit’s office can occupy both the upright and reversed possibilities of a card.
Berith and the King of Pentacles
Berith is associated with turning metals into gold, granting offices and answering questions about past, present, and future events—but the traditional account also warns that he can be deceptive. The King of Pentacles similarly holds material mastery and authority on one side, with greed, corruption, and misuse of influence on the other.
Seere and the Six of Swords
Seere is described as travelling extraordinary distances instantly, bringing requested objects, and carrying out commands with speed. The Six of Swords is a card of passage, movement, and transition. Here, the correspondence grows from the spirit’s mode of action rather than its moral character.
The Seven Deadly Sins: A Separate Line of Research
The Seven Deadly Sins do not belong to the Ars Goetia. They enter the deck through a different history shaped by biblical texts, Jewish and Christian traditions, literature, and later demonology.
This distinction matters. Mammon, for example, begins as wealth personified as a competing master rather than as a demon with one fixed biography.[5] Leviathan first appears as an immense and terrifying sea creature, most famously in the Book of Job, before later demonological systems connected it with envy.[6] The guidebook follows these transformations instead of presenting every later association as if it came from the earliest source.
Within the deck, Lucifer, Samael, Beelzebub, Belphegor, Leviathan, Mammon, and Lilith become expressions of pride, wrath, gluttony, sloth, envy, greed, and lust. These figures create a second layer of correspondence: not only what a spirit was believed to do, but what kind of human excess it came to represent.
A Translation Between Two Symbolic Systems
Tarot Demon Possessed does not claim that the Ars Goetia and tarot were once a single ancient system. Its purpose is different. The deck asks whether the offices of these spirits can be translated into tarot archetypes—and what becomes visible when the two systems are read together.
That is why every card combines a name, seal, attributed abilities, illustration, and tarot meaning. The historical material gives the spirit its identity; tarot gives that identity a way to speak about choices, desires, conflicts, fears, and change.
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References
- Johann Weyer, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, 1577; digital edition by Joseph H. Peterson.
- Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584, Cornell University Library Digital Witchcraft Collection.
- Joseph H. Peterson, ed., The Lesser Key of Solomon: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, Weiser Books, 2001.
- A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1911.
- Matthew 6:24, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.
- Job 41, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.