The great wheel of Sagittarius — philosopher, healer and herb-master who appears when the archer's sign is in the sky and cures what no physician can reach.
Buer appears in Sagittarius — uniquely among the Goetia spirits, his appearance is tied not to a time of day but to an astrological sign. The Lemegeton specifies that he appears when the sun is in Sagittarius, linking his manifestation directly to the zodiacal calendar rather than to the daily cycle of sunrise, noon and night that governs most Goetia invocations. He is, in this sense, a seasonal spirit — most accessible in the late November through December window when Sagittarius holds the sun.
His form is one of the most debated in the Goetia. Some manuscript traditions describe him as a great wheel or star-shape with legs projecting outward like spokes, rolling and walking simultaneously — a form so unusual that artists across the centuries have struggled to render it coherently. Other traditions describe him as having a lion's head with five goat's legs arranged around the body like a wheel. Both versions share the same structural principle: a being who moves in all directions simultaneously, whose locomotion is rotational rather than linear, who can face every direction at once.
This wheel-form has fascinated scholars and artists since the first illustrated grimoires. The pentagrammatic arrangement of five legs suggests a being whose physical form encodes the five-pointed star — the pentagram of magical tradition — in its very movement. Buer does not walk forward; he rolls, turns, revolves. His form is that of a spirit who does not have a front and a back, who approaches from every direction simultaneously, who cannot be ambushed or surprised because he is already facing you from every angle.
As a President, Buer appears in human form in the daytime. His wheel-form may be the initial presentation before he settles into the Presidential human appearance for the work of teaching and healing. The Sagittarian sign that governs his appearance connects him to the centaur Chiron — the wounded healer of Greek mythology who was himself a Sagittarian figure, half human and half horse, who taught medicine, philosophy and music to heroes.
Buer commands four interrelated powers that together constitute the profile of the complete natural physician: moral philosophy, logic, herb knowledge, healing of all distempers, and the procurement of good familiars. He is the Goetia's most comprehensive healer — the one spirit whose domain explicitly includes the philosophical foundations of medical knowledge alongside its practical applications.
The combination of moral philosophy, logic and healing is not arbitrary — it is the ancient ideal of the philosopher-physician. Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, Paracelsus: each understood medicine as inseparable from philosophy, as a practice that required not only knowledge of remedies but the wisdom to know when and how to apply them, and the ethical grounding to apply them in the patient's genuine interest. Buer is the Goetia's spirit of this integrated tradition: the physician who heals because he understands, who understands because he reasons clearly, who reasons clearly because he has been properly grounded in moral philosophy.
The Sagittarian connection is the key to Buer's character. Sagittarius is the archer-centaur of the zodiac, the sign associated with philosophy, with the pursuit of truth through directed inquiry, with the expansive reach of the arrow that aims beyond what can be seen. The centaur is itself a hybrid — half human, half horse — whose dual nature allows access to both the philosophical (human) and the natural (animal) registers of knowledge simultaneously.
The specific Sagittarian centaur of mythology is Chiron — not the wild, drunken Centaurs of the Lapiths battle, but the civilised and wise one, the tutor of Achilles, Asclepius and Jason. Chiron taught medicine, music, philosophy and the martial arts; he was both healer and warrior-trainer, both philosopher and practitioner. When he was accidentally wounded by one of Heracles's poisoned arrows, the wound would not heal — Chiron, the great healer, could not heal himself. He eventually surrendered his immortality to free Prometheus, choosing death over endless pain.
The Chiron resonance illuminates Buer's domain at every point. The philosopher-healer who appears in Sagittarius, who knows all the virtues of herbs, who heals all distempers — Buer carries the complete Chironic inheritance. The wheel-form that rolls in all directions echoes the centaur's dual locomotion: the creature that runs on four legs and reaches forward with two arms, that moves through the world in a different register from either pure human or pure animal.
The name Buer has uncertain etymology. Some scholars connect it to German büren (to lift, to carry) — the healer who lifts the burden of illness; others propose Norse or Old English roots for dwelling or abiding — the spirit who abides with the sick until they are well. The number ten that marks his position is the number of completion and perfection in the Western tradition: the decimal base, the ten commandments, the ten sephiroth. Buer at ten is the complete President, the physician at the completion of the first decade of the seventy-two.
Buer is invoked in traditions of magical healing and natural medicine — by those who seek to understand the philosophical principles behind natural remedies as well as the remedies themselves, and by those who need healing that conventional medicine cannot provide. His Sagittarian timing gives practitioners a specific seasonal window for his invocation, and his refusal to specialise — "all distempers" — makes him the most broadly applicable healing spirit in the entire Goetia. The wheel that rolls in every direction is also the healer who can turn to face whatever illness arrives, from any direction, at any season when the archer's sign holds the sun.