The last of the seventy-two — man with a great serpent, who closes the catalogue with the justice that opens every order: the return of what was stolen and the punishment of those who take what is not theirs.
Andromalius appears as a man holding a great serpent in his hand. The form is one of the simplest in the Goetia — a man, a serpent — without the elaborate composite animals, multiple heads, monstrous appendages or hybrid creatures that characterise so many of the catalogue's other spirits. He is simply a man, holding simply a serpent. The simplicity of the closing form is itself a kind of statement: after seventy-one spirits of extraordinary visual complexity, the last spirit of the Goetia is the most elementally described figure, the man who stands with the snake that started everything in the Western tradition's foundational myth.
The serpent Andromalius holds is the great serpent — not a snake but the serpent, the animal that in Genesis initiated the fall of humanity by revealing what was forbidden to know, and that in every subsequent Western symbolic tradition carried the weight of that first transgression. That the final spirit of the Goetia carries this animal, and that his powers include the discovery and punishment of all wickedness, creates the most theologically complete frame possible for the closing of the catalogue: the seventy-two spirits who govern all the forces that the fall unleashed are closed by the spirit who holds the instrument of the fall, administering the justice that restores what theft and wickedness have taken.
The position of the seventy-second spirit is numerologically charged. Seventy-two is the number of divine names in Kabbalistic tradition — the Shemhamforash, the seventy-two-letter name of God, derivable from three verses of Exodus each containing seventy-two letters. The Goetia's seventy-two spirits are often understood as the inverse or shadow of these divine names — the fallen intelligences that correspond to the divine names, each a mirror image of a divine attribute rendered in the register of the fallen. The seventy-second spirit is the last of this shadow catalogue, and his powers — the restoration of justice, the punishment of wickedness — position him as the spirit who turns the shadow back toward the light.
Seventy-two is also six times twelve — the six directions of space multiplied by the twelve signs of the zodiac. The final spirit's command of thirty-six legions (the decan number) and his position at six times twelve creates a precise celestial geometry: the zodiacal completeness multiplied by the spatial completeness, closing with the forces of the complete division of the sky.
Andromalius holds four powers that together constitute the complete administration of justice in the domain of theft and wickedness: the return of stolen goods, the discovery of the thief, the discovery of all wickedness and dishonest dealing, and the punishment of all thieves and wicked persons. He is the Goetia's complete justice spirit — investigation and enforcement in a single figure, the restorer and the punisher simultaneously.
The four powers together form the complete arc of justice: discovery of the crime (stolen goods), identification of the criminal (the thief), moral characterisation of the transgressor (wickedness and dishonesty), and enforcement of consequence (punishment). Andromalius closes the Goetia as justice closes every properly ordered system: with the restoration of what was wrongfully taken and the accountability of those who took it. The catalogue that began with Bael's three kings and proceeded through seventy-one spirits of power, knowledge, love, war, philosophy, music and transformation ends with the justice that makes the exercise of all those powers meaningful.
The great serpent that Andromalius holds is the most symbolically loaded animal in the Western tradition. In Genesis it is the tempter who initiated the fall; in Revelation it is the ancient dragon who will be bound at the end of time. Between these two bookends — the serpent of beginning and the serpent of ending — the entire history of the tradition unfolds. Andromalius at the close of the Goetia's seventy-two holds the serpent that was present at the opening of the human story, the instrument of transgression now in the hands of the spirit of justice.
This is the Goetia's most structurally coherent closing gesture. A catalogue of seventy-two fallen spirits — spirits who were, according to the theology in which the grimoire operates, part of the cosmic rebellion that followed the serpent's temptation of Adam and Eve — closes with a spirit who holds the serpent and administers the justice that rebellion requires. The serpent that began the fall is held by the spirit who ends the catalogue with the punishment of the wicked: the ouroboros of the tradition, the snake that returns to where it began.
In the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, Weyer presents Andromalius without significant variation — his powers are consistently described across manuscript traditions, his form consistently identified as a man holding a serpent, his thirty-six legion command consistently recorded. He is among the most stably transmitted spirits in the Goetia, as if the scribal tradition knew that the closing spirit's description could not be permitted the orthographic instability of the middle spirits. The final word of a catalogue must be correct.
The name Andromalius contains the Greek andros (man, masculine) and possibly malia (ill-will, harm) or a related root — the man of ill-will directed at the wicked, the masculine force that punishes rather than merely discovers transgression. The etymology points toward the enforcer rather than the investigator, the punishment-giver rather than the knowledge-provider — the quality that distinguishes Andromalius from Seere (who finds stolen things) and makes him specifically the last spirit of the catalogue: the one who not only finds what wickedness has done but makes wickedness pay for having done it.