The Great Slander:
How the Original Gods were branded in the “Goetia”, A Cultural Inversion of the Ancient Gods

One, in order to approach the Original Gods and Demons, must shed of any false notions or any recent notions that were created by systems opposing them. The system of Abrahamism is merely a system of control, that seeks to disconnect Humanity from it's True Gods.

The *Ars Goetia*, the first and most infamous section of the 17th-century grimoire *The Lesser Key of Solomon*, presents a hierarchy of seventy-two spirits, each with a unique name, seal, and set of powers. They are labeled "demons," "devils," and "evil spirits," bound to appear at the conjuror's command, often in monstrous or terrifying forms. This is the surface narrative, a product of a specific theological and historical moment. To accept it at face value is to ignore the vast, churning ocean of history that lies beneath. The entities cataloged within the Goetia are not, in their essence, the malevolent fiends of Christian dogma. They are the ancient gods of pre-Abrahamic paganism, stripped of their divinity, recast in chains, and subjected to a 2,000-year campaign of systematic slander.

The process of this cultural inversion was a deliberate and potent tool of religious conquest. As Christianity, Judaism, and Islam spread from their desert origins, they encountered a world saturated with a panoply of divine beings. These were the gods of Canaan, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome – all were powerful entities who had been worshipped for millennia, who embodied natural forces, kingship, wisdom, and war. For the new monotheistic faiths to establish absolute theological dominance, the old gods could not simply be ignored; they had to be actively delegitimized. The most effective method was not to erase them, but to demonize them. By rebranding the deities of rival cultures as unholy demons, the Abrahamic priesthoods achieved two goals simultaneously: they discredited the old faiths, rendering their worshippers as servants of evil, and they co-opted the power and familiarity of these ancient figures, folding them into their own cosmic narrative as adversaries to the one true God.

Consider the evidence etched within the Goetia itself. The very name "Goetia" derives from the Greek *goēteia*, meaning sorcery or witchcraft, a practice often associated with the chthonic deities who predated the Olympian order. The spirits listed bear names that are transparent corruptions of older god-forms. Bael, the first and purported "king" of Hell, is a direct echo of the Canaanite deity Baal. Baal was a storm god, a bringer of rain and fertility, a figure of immense royal authority. To transform him into a demon is to transform the life-giving thunderstorm into a symbol of destructive, unholy power. Astaroth, a "duke" who supposedly teaches liberal sciences, is a demonized version of the goddess Astarte, a supreme deity of fertility, sexuality, and war in the Near East, later syncretized with the Greek Aphrodite. Her wisdom and power become perverted, her divine feminine authority twisted into a masculine, fallen duke.

This pattern repeats relentlessly. Amon, who commands legions and reveals the past and future, is a shadow of the Egyptian god Amun, the hidden one, the king of the gods and the ruler of the air. Paimon, a great king who teaches all arts and sciences, is likely derived from an ancient Middle Eastern god, possibly associated with the Philistine Dagon or a Babylonian deity of water and wisdom. Buer, a spirit who teaches philosophy and logic, is a corruption of the name of the Greek hero Bellerophon, tamer of the winged horse Pegasus. Even the forms they take are symbolic of their original domains: Agares, who teaches languages and can make dignitaries run, is tied to the earth and its tremors, a vestige of a chthonic or agricultural deity. Valefor, a duke who appears as a lion with an ass's head, combines symbols of royalty (the lion) and base servitude (the ass), a deliberate mockery of a god's majesty.

The assertion of their inherent "evil" is a theological fiction, a label applied retroactively to justify their suppression. Evil is a relative concept, defined by the moral framework of the dominant culture. To a Roman, Mars was the glorious father of the people, the spirit of righteous war. To a Christian chronicler centuries later, the same archetypal energy of conflict, once detached from the Roman state, could only be seen as demonic. The gods of the old world were not paragons of modern morality; they were primal forces. They embodied the full spectrum of existence: creation and destruction, wisdom and cunning, love and lust, healing and plague. They were complex, capricious, and demanded respect. This complexity is flattened into a monolithic "evil" by the simplistic, dualistic worldview of Abrahamicism, which cannot accommodate rival powers of equal stature. To call them "evil" is not a statement of their nature, but an admission of the threat they posed to a new religious order.

The timeline of this slander is critical. The classification of these ancient beings as demons is a relatively recent phenomenon in the span of human history, confined to the last two millennia.

Their true identities, however, are rooted in a far deeper past. The worship of figures like Baal and Astarte can be traced back to the third and second millennia BCE.

The archetypes they represent the fertility goddess, the storm god, the underworld lord, the trickster are far older still. They echo back to the Neolithic revolution, to the first human attempts to categorize and personify the forces of nature.

Carvings and figurines from 40,000 years ago suggest a proto-religious reverence for fertility, the hunt, and the cycles of life and death. These are the primordial templates from which the gods of Sumer, Egypt, and Canaan were forged.

The Goetia, therefore, is not a list of devils; it is a distorted census of humanity's oldest companions, a fossil record of the divine imagination, viewed through the warped lens of medieval paranoia.

In conclusion, the entities of the Goetia are not the infernal fiends of Christian nightmare. They are the ancient gods of a thousand fallen temples, the spirits of a world that existed before the concept of a single, exclusive God took hold.

Their "demonic" status is a brand, a scar inflicted upon them by a rival ideology seeking to erase their legitimacy. It is a testament to their profound power that they could not be erased, but only recast in negative lights.

To engage with them is not to traffic with evil, but to connect with the deep, heavenly and chthonic, and primal currents of human consciousness that flow beneath the thin veneer of the last 2,000 years.

Their true essence remains untouched by the slander, waiting in the archives of history for those with the will to see beyond the chains and recognize the gods within the demons.