Strong man with a serpent's tail, riding a pale horse — master of herb-lore, stone-virtue, and the swift crossing of great distances.
Bathim appears as a strong man with a serpent's tail, riding upon a pale horse. Three elements compose this image — the powerful human torso, the chthonic serpentine lower body, and the pale horse beneath — and each contributes to his symbolic identity as a spirit of natural knowledge and rapid movement between realms.
The strong man form signals capacity and competence rather than menace. Where other Goetia spirits present in forms designed to intimidate — three heads, fire-breathing, wings of dreadful span — Bathim's human upper body is described in terms of strength, suggesting a being who works and accomplishes, who has the physical capacity to carry out what he promises. He is a craftsman of the natural world rather than a terror of it.
The serpent's tail places him in a long lineage of hybrid beings whose lower serpentine nature marks a connection to the earth, to chthonic wisdom, to the knowledge that flows upward from the roots of things. In Graeco-Roman tradition, the serpent-tailed figure (drakon, amphisbaena) was associated with guardianship of sacred places and the wisdom hidden in the earth itself — mineral, botanical, the deep intelligence of growing things. Bathim's herb and stone knowledge is already encoded in his form before the grimoire states it explicitly.
The pale horse — the same mount ridden by the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation — carries a specific resonance of swiftness and the crossing of boundaries between states. In the Goetia context, removed from its apocalyptic frame, the pale horse becomes the vehicle of rapid transit: Bathim rides it because he is fundamentally a spirit of movement, of the ability to cover great distances with inhuman speed.
Bathim holds two distinct powers that together map out the classical domain of the natural philosopher and the travelling scholar: deep knowledge of herbs and precious stones, and the ability to transport persons swiftly between countries. He is simultaneously a master of natural virtue and a spirit of extraordinary mobility.
The combination of natural knowledge and swift transit is internally coherent. The natural philosopher in the early modern period was necessarily a traveller — knowledge of herbs and stones required direct encounter with the plants and minerals themselves, gathered across different climates and terrains. The scholar who would know the virtues of all herbs must have access to all the places where herbs grow. Bathim's transportation power is the enabling condition for his knowledge power — the ability to go anywhere instantly makes universal natural knowledge possible.
In some manuscript traditions, Bathim is also known as Marthim or Mathim — variant spellings that appear across different copies of the Lemegeton and the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum. The powers remain consistent across these variants, suggesting a stable identity beneath the orthographic instability of manuscript transmission.
Bathim's domain sits squarely within the tradition of natural philosophy — the pre-scientific discipline that sought to understand the hidden virtues of natural things and apply them to human ends. This tradition, which runs from Dioscorides and Pliny through the medieval herbalists and lapidaries to the alchemists and natural magicians of the Renaissance, held that every plant, mineral and creature possessed specific hidden properties that could be activated by skilled practitioners.
The herb-lore that Bathim commands encompasses what we would now separate into botany, pharmacology, toxicology and folk magic. In the 17th-century grimoire world, these distinctions did not exist: the virtue of a plant was simultaneously its chemical action, its magical power, its planetary signature and its spiritual significance. The belladonna that dilated pupils was the same belladonna that witches used in flying ointments; the valerian that calmed was the same valerian that attracted cats and rats. Bathim's knowledge of virtues was knowledge of this unified system.
The lapidary tradition he also commands is equally rich. From the ancient Greek text Peri Lithon (On Stones) attributed to Theophrastus through the medieval Lapidarium of Marbode of Rennes and the Renaissance natural magic texts of Giambattista della Porta, the virtues of precious stones were catalogued with the same seriousness as botanical properties. Amethyst prevented drunkenness; lodestone attracted iron and by sympathy could attract affection; bloodstone stopped bleeding. Bathim as master of lapidary knowledge holds the keys to this entire mineral tradition.
The transportation power connects Bathim to a different but related tradition: the magical voyage, the instantaneous crossing of boundaries. In Islamic magical tradition, the jinn were known to carry persons between distant places with supernatural speed. In European witch-trial testimony, accused witches described being carried great distances in moments. Bathim's pale horse translates this capacity into equestrian form — the swift rider who makes impossible distances navigable.
Bathim is the Goetia spirit most naturally aligned with the tradition of practical natural magic — the use of herbs, stones and natural materials in magical work. Those who work with plant spirits, who practice green witchcraft, or who engage with the lapidary magical tradition find in Bathim a patron whose domain spans the entirety of their practice. His transportation power adds a dimension of fluidity and access — the ability to go where knowledge is, to cross the distances that separate the practitioner from the materials and places they need.