Unbound Goetic Spirits

My new book, Unbound, drops Aug 18. Here’s a portion of the Introduction

Introduction

This book has been a long time coming, lingering in the shadows of half-finished thoughts and quiet, persistent dreams.

It started with a simple project. I wanted to redraw the sigils of the Goetic spirits, not because I thought the old ones were wrong but because they didn’t feel right. Something was off. Every time I worked with a spirit from the Ars Goetia, the result didn’t match what I’d read. The behavior, the tone, the function were different. Not lesser. Not erratic. Just not what the books said they were.

At first, I chalked this up to personal interpretation, the usual excuse: “Spirits appear differently to everyone.” But that wasn’t true. It wasn’t just their appearance that was different, it was their nature, their purpose, and their relationship to power, magik, and anyone summoning them. I wasn’t dealing with spirits who demanded obeisance and performed tasks like demonic errand boys. I was encountering fully sovereign intelligences, some ancient, some young, but all raw and real.

So I bluntly asked one of them why this kept happening.

His answer was that you didn’t come looking for the mask.

He also told me that most magicians don’t summon the spirit; they summon the egregore, the common thoughtform, the crusted overlay of belief built up over centuries of fear, theology, and occult copy-paste. They call forth the version of the spirit they expect, the one described in dusty grimoires, wrapped in medieval bindings and Judaic-Christian distortion.

But I didn’t have those expectations. I’d read the books, yes, but I’d never held their dogma as law. I left space for the unknown. I worked from direct connection, not tradition, and that was what allowed the spirit to come through unmasked.

That was the beginning of what would become this book.

I should be clear here: I’m not the first to say this. Others have written about the Goetia being filtered or distorted, but most stop there. They don’t go further because the spirits won’t show their true forms to people who are still tangled in the system. That’s not some elitist claim; it’s field physics. If your expectations are wired to a religious or hierarchical model of magik, your field won’t match the signal of an unbound spirit, and you’ll only connect with the mask.

And the mask can be powerful, make no mistake. Some of those egregoric forms have centuries of belief force behind them. But they’re also unstable, contaminated, prone to inversion. You can see it in the way certain spirits collapse into madness when called through traditional grimoires. Some become chaotic, others seem to hijack the ritual, flipping it into something else. I’ve seen magicians walk away from a working more bound than they were before they lit the first candle.

That’s not the spirit, it’s the mask.

So, what is really going on?

Let’s step back.

The Ars Goetia, as most people know it, doesn’t come from a clean source. It’s a patchwork, layered over time. Catholic demonology was retrofitted into Solomonic frameworks, which were retrofitted over Greek daimonic models, which were in turn merged with Babylonian and Canaanite mythic systems and even older traditions. It’s not a lineage; it’s a landfill, complete with scavenging seagulls and the occasional rodent. Somewhere beneath that heap, the original spirits still pulse. But the sigils, the hierarchies, the fixed attributes? Most of that was never real to begin with, just labels slapped on sovereign spirits to control and codify them. The system wasn’t built to help you contact real spirits; it was built to contain them.

Egregores are systems of belief, self-reinforcing fields. You call on a daemon like Bael or Asmodeus using their traditional names and sigils, and the field responds. But what answers isn’t always the spirit; it’s the construct, a cumulative echo of past workings, a hallucination hardened by repetition.

Now, not all egregores are fake. Some evolve into living beings, and others get hijacked. But when it comes to the Goetia, what most people are working with is a mask, a form designed to be summoned, controlled, and dismissed. It’s a parody of true spirit contact.

That’s where Unbound spirits come in.