Angel-body, raven's head, black wolf, sharp sword — who sows discord with absolute efficiency and is one of the few Goetia spirits who will turn on the conjurer who is not sufficiently careful.
Andras appears as an angel with the head of a raven or night raven, riding upon a strong black wolf, and carrying a sharp sword in his hand. The composite is one of the Goetia's most deliberately ominous: the celestial form of the angel with the bird most associated with death and battlefield carrion for a head; the most dangerous of the wolf's forms — the black wolf, the wolf at the darkest end of its own spectrum — for a mount; and the most direct of weapons in hand, unsheathed and ready. Nothing about Andras's presentation is ambiguous or could be mistaken for friendliness.
The raven's head is the most specifically martial of all the avian heads in the Goetia. Ravens were associated with battlefields across the entire ancient world — they followed armies, fed on the fallen, were used as augural birds to predict the outcome of battles, and in Norse tradition were Odin's own messengers (Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory), the birds who flew over the world and reported what they observed to the god of war and wisdom. A raven-headed angel is an angel of the battlefield consciousness: seeing everything, reporting everything, turning on what falls.
The strong black wolf is not merely an animal vehicle but a statement of intention. Black wolves appear in the folklore of multiple cultures as the most dangerous, most intelligent and most spiritually significant variant of an already dangerous animal. The wolf's pack intelligence is amplified in the black wolf's traditional characterisation as the leader, the strongest and most cunning member — the one who leads the pack in the hunt and takes the largest share of the kill. Andras on a black wolf is an intelligence that leads rather than follows, that hunts rather than scavenges, that commands its danger rather than merely embodying it.
The sharp sword in his hand requires no symbolic translation — it is the instrument of immediate violence held openly, not sheathed or concealed. Unlike the instruments many Goetia spirits carry (the caduceus serpents of Oriax, the bow and quiver of Leraje), Andras's sword is not a symbol of a domain but a literal weapon. The Lemegeton is explicit that he will use it: on the conjurer and their companions, if they are insufficiently careful. Andras is perhaps the most genuinely dangerous spirit in the catalogue.
Andras holds one power — the sowing of discord — and carries one warning that distinguishes him from nearly every other Goetia spirit: he will kill the conjurer and their companions if they are not very careful. Both the power and the danger proceed from the same source: a being who specialises in violence and conflict, who exists in a permanent state of martial readiness, and who does not distinguish between the enemies of the conjurer and the conjurer themselves unless the conjurer maintains the magical protections that the ritual requires.
The Lemegeton specifies that Andras is "a grand Marquis and is very dangerous" and that he can kill the conjurer and companions if they are not "very careful." This is not a general warning about the spirit's temperament but a specific operational warning: without the full ritual protections in place, Andras's discord-sowing capacity does not discriminate between targets. The conjurer who is not protected is simply another person in the space that Andras's influence fills. The sword is already drawn.
The power and the danger are structurally identical: Andras does not distinguish between friend and enemy, between the person who invoked him and the person they wish to harm. Discord is non-directional until directed, and the direction requires the conjurer to maintain the ritual boundaries that make direction possible. Without those boundaries, the discord fills the available space — and the conjurer is in that space. Working with Andras requires exceptional preparation, exceptional care throughout, and exceptional vigilance about maintaining the magical container that separates the conjurer from the target of the discord.
The Goetia contains a specific category of spirits who are identified as dangerous to the conjurer — beings whose power is difficult to contain and who, under insufficiently rigorous ritual conditions, will turn the energies they embody on the person who invoked them. This category includes Berith (who requires a ring), Furfur (who requires the triangle and will lie outside it), Malphas (who deceives those who make pacts), Shax (who requires both triangle and pact), and Andras, whose danger is the most directly physical: not deception or subversion but the sword itself.
What distinguishes Andras from the other dangerous spirits is the nature of the danger. Berith's danger is false information; Malphas's is contractual subversion; Shax's is perceptual manipulation. Andras's danger is simply violence — the same violence he would direct at the conjurer's enemies, redirected at the conjurer if the protective ritual is not maintained. He is not cunning in his danger; he does not deceive or subvert. He simply kills, the raven-headed angel on the black wolf with the sword already drawn, if the conjurer gives him reason or opportunity.
In the broader grimoire tradition, Andras occupies a position analogous to the most dangerous forces in alchemy — the volatile substances that are transformatively powerful precisely because they are so difficult to contain. The acids that dissolve, the volatile spirits that ignite: these are the materials the alchemist must handle with maximum care because their destructive capacity is inseparable from their transformative capacity. Andras's discord-sowing is the transformative capacity; his readiness to kill is the volatile nature that makes the transformation available. You cannot have one without the other.
The name Andras (also rendered as Andrас or Andrealphas in some manuscripts, though Andrealphus is separately the 65th spirit) has been connected to Greek andros (of man, masculine) — appropriate for the most aggressively masculine form in the Goetia, the warrior-spirit whose every element is an expression of armed conflict. The connection to andros would make Andras's name a statement of his nature: the spirit of the masculine war-principle in its most concentrated, most dangerous form.
Andras is approached only by those with complete ritual preparation, complete attentiveness throughout the working, and complete understanding that his discord-sowing does not spare the conjurer who invokes him if the magical container is not maintained. He is the Goetia's great spirit of conflict — the raven-headed angel who has never put down the sword, who rides a wolf that has always been hunting, who will sow the seeds of irreconcilable difference in any unprotected space. Used with perfect care, he is one of the most powerful discord spirits available. Used carelessly, he is the sword that turns around.