Fallen angel in foul form, riding an infernal dragon — once the great goddess Astarte, now the Goetia's keeper of hidden history, liberal sciences and the secret of the angels' fall.
Astaroth appears as a foul angel — the description is deliberate and loaded — riding upon an infernal dragon, and in his right hand he carries a viper. The Lemegeton adds a specific warning: his breath is so stinking and noisome that the conjurer must hold a magical ring to the face to guard against it. This caution, shared with Berith's ring requirement, marks Astaroth as among the most physically overwhelming presences in the Goetia.
The description "foul angel" encodes Astaroth's history in two words. He is an angel — winged, celestial, of a higher order than the merely demonic — but foul, degraded, fallen from a former state of splendour. The wings are present but corrupted; the celestial form persists but in a condition of decay. Astaroth appears as what he is: a being of enormous original power that has passed through a catastrophic diminishment and retained both the power and the mark of its fall.
The infernal dragon mount parallels Bune's dragon form and Bathim's viper mount, but with a specific qualifier: infernal, belonging to the lower realm. The dragon is not merely a creature of power but a creature of the pit, marking Astaroth's domain as extending through the underworld as well as the heights his angelic form once occupied. He rides what he has become associated with — the creature of the deep that matches his fallen state.
The viper in the right hand completes the image. In the Western symbolic tradition, the right hand is the hand of power and action; the viper is the creature of hidden venom, of wisdom purchased at a price, of the serpent that knows what the garden concealed. Astaroth carries in his right hand the instrument of fallen knowledge — the wisdom that came through the fall itself, the gnosis of the transgression.
Astaroth commands a remarkable range of powers that span temporal knowledge, secret revelation, academic instruction and cosmological history. He is one of the most intellectually rich spirits in the entire Goetia, a being whose primary domain is knowledge in its most expansive sense — what happened, what is happening, what will happen, and why any of it occurred.
The power to explain the fall of angels is unique in the Goetia. No other spirit claims eyewitness authority over the primordial event that structured the entire cosmological framework within which the grimoire operates. Astaroth's willingness to explain how he fell and by what means gives the conjurer access not merely to information but to the experiential knowledge of catastrophe — what it feels like, from inside, to pass from the celestial to the infernal. This is theological and cosmological intelligence of the highest order, available from no other source in the catalogue.
Astaroth is one of the most historically traceable figures in the Goetia. The name is transparently derived from Ashtoreth — the Hebrew rendering of Astarte, the great goddess of the ancient Near East. Astarte was the supreme female deity of the Phoenicians, worshipped across the Levant, Cyprus, Carthage and Egypt under various names: Ishtar in Babylon, Inanna in Sumer, Hathor in Egypt. She governed love, war, the morning star (Venus), fertility and the heavens. She was arguably the most widely worshipped deity in the ancient Mediterranean world.
The transformation of Astarte into Astaroth follows a pattern visible throughout the Goetia and the grimoire tradition more broadly: the gods of older religions become the demons of newer ones. What was once divine becomes infernal; what was once worshipped becomes feared; what was once invoked for blessing becomes summoned for power and knowledge. Astaroth is the grimoire tradition's way of acknowledging that the great goddess existed — was real, had power, was worshipped by millions — while reframing that power within the demonological system of 17th-century Christian magic.
The description "foul angel" carries this history. Astarte was not merely a goddess but a being of enormous celestial significance — associated with Venus, the brightest object in the night sky, present at both dawn and dusk, governing the cycles of love and war that structured human existence. As a fallen angel in the Goetia, she retains the angelic form — the wings, the celestial status — while the "foul" qualifier marks the Christian theological judgment of her previous worship as the worship of a false god.
The stinking breath is a particularly pointed detail in this context. Astarte's temples were associated with fragrance — incense, flowers, the sweet offerings of devotion. The reversal of sweet scent into stinking breath is the grimoire's way of inverting every positive attribute of the goddess: beauty becomes foulness, fragrance becomes stench, celestial light becomes infernal dragon. Yet none of the knowledge is removed. Astaroth knows everything Astarte knew — and more, because she now knows the fall itself.
Astaroth is among the most significant spirits in the Goetia for those interested in the deep history of the Western magical tradition. His page is, in a sense, the grimoire tradition's acknowledgement of its own origins in the goddess worship of the ancient world — the point where the Hebrew, Phoenician, Babylonian and Egyptian currents converge in a single degraded but still immensely powerful figure. To invoke Astaroth is to reach back through the entire history of Western religion to a time before the monotheistic transformation, when the great goddess ruled the morning star and her name was spoken with reverence rather than in whispers through a ring held before the face.