Volume II · Goetic Magic

Agares

The Duke Who Makes Them Return

Part of the series Goetic Magic — Seventy-two volumes — one for each spirit of the Ars Goetia.

When does holding back the one who wants to leave cease to be love and become a prison?

There is an old house where every door leads back to the same room: you enter by one, follow the corridor, turn right and then left, and come out again where you left. Beside the doorframe stands a packed suitcase, its straps buckled, ready long ago and never lifted; and the floor trembles faintly, once, each time someone thinks of rising to leave. There reigns the second of the seventy-two of the Ars Goetia, duke of the East at the head of thirty-one legions, who teaches every tongue, brings back those who flee, and shakes the earth beneath the feet of whoever says farewell. The name that this closed embrace takes, when it consents to speak, is Agares.

In the second volume of Goetic Magic, Eisenheim — the evocator — calls Agares by the art, sits before the duke who lets no one go, and questions him without asking anything of him. The book does not show the rite, only the conversation that followed. Agares answers with an anxious sweetness and a lucidity that at times seems like care: he rarely lies outright, he inverts — he takes a living word (loyalty, care, union, constancy) and twists it one degree, only one, until it still seems the same and already means the opposite. Across ten interrogations, the conversation descends from the love that sustains to the chain that smothers: the tongue that binds, the forced return, the blackmail of affection, the care that imprisons, the earthquake of one who makes another person his own ground, and the families that traded the nest for the cage. Each topic closes with a Note of discernment, in the author’s voice, naming the shadow examined and the virtue it holds captive.

It is not a manual, and it is not fiction: it is the record of a real evocation, set down in the form of a dialogue. And what it measures is the exact distance between the love that sustains and the love that imprisons — between holding the one who stays and holding back the one who wants to leave.

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