Dark angel of the Order of Powers — who fills the air with the sound of rushing water, speaks of hidden things, and teaches the geometry of the world he once helped order.
Crocell appears as a dark angel — not an animal, not a hybrid creature, but an angel whose darkness marks his fallen state. Of the Goetia spirits who retain angelic form, Crocell is among the most explicitly positioned within the hierarchy of celestial orders: the Lemegeton specifies that before his fall he was of the Order of Powers, one of the eight or nine orders of angels in the Pseudo-Dionysian celestial hierarchy that structured medieval Christian angelology.
The Order of Powers (Potestates in Latin) occupied the sixth position in the Pseudo-Dionysian hierarchy, between the Virtues above and the Principalities below. The Powers were understood as the angels who governed the boundary between the celestial and terrestrial realms — those who regulated the passage of divine influence downward into the world and who maintained the order of the cosmos against the forces of chaos. Their specific function was the administration of cosmic order: the powers that keep the world coherent, that maintain the structures within which earthly life is possible.
That Crocell was once of this order is both a mark of his former dignity and an explanation of his current powers. A fallen Power has lost his position in the celestial hierarchy but retains the knowledge his order possessed: the understanding of how the world is structured, the geometry of its organisation, the hidden principles that maintain its coherence. What he once administered as divine law he now teaches as acquired knowledge — the geometry of the cosmos reduced to the geometry of the schoolroom, the hidden things of the Powers made available to the human conjurer.
The number forty-nine is the square of seven — seven times seven, the number of complete cycles multiplied by itself. Seven planets, seven days, seven heavens — the sacred number of completion squared into the number of supreme completion. As the forty-ninth spirit, Crocell stands at the intersection of two complete cycles, a position that resonates with his origin in an angelic order that governed cosmic order itself.
Crocell holds three powers whose common thread is the hidden structure of things: secret knowledge, the acoustic phenomenon of rushing water, and the teaching of geometry. All three concern what lies beneath or behind the visible surface — the secrets behind appearances, the sound that fills a space in the absence of visible water, the mathematical structure that underlies all visible form.
The three powers together form the profile of a fallen administrator of cosmic order. He knows the hidden things because he once governed them; he can produce the sound of water where none is because he once commanded the ordering of waters; he teaches geometry because geometry is the language of the order he once enforced. Crocell is the Goetia's great spirit of structural knowledge — of the principles that organise the world, accessible now through the inverted path of the fallen angel rather than through the upward path of the celestial hierarchy.
The Pseudo-Dionysian celestial hierarchy that places Crocell's former order is the most influential angelic taxonomy in the Western tradition. Composed in the 5th or 6th century CE under the pseudonym of Dionysius the Areopagite (the Athenian convert of St Paul), it organised the angels into three triads of three orders each: Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones at the top; Dominions, Virtues and Powers in the middle; Principalities, Archangels and Angels at the bottom.
The Powers occupied the sixth position — the middle of the middle triad, the heart of the entire hierarchy. Their specific role was to prevent demons from overcoming the order of the world: they were the angelic police force that maintained cosmic coherence against the forces of disruption. The irony of Crocell's situation — a former Power who is now himself a spirit of the type the Powers once constrained — is one of the Goetia's most theologically pointed characterisations. He has become what he once fought.
The sound of rushing waters that Crocell produces connects him to a deep strand of cosmological symbolism. In the creation narratives of Genesis, the Spirit of God moves upon the face of the waters before the ordering of the cosmos begins; in Revelation, the voice of the Almighty is like the sound of many waters. Waters in the Hebrew cosmological imagination are the primordial chaos that precedes and underlies the ordered creation — the medium from which the world was drawn. Crocell, who once helped maintain that order, now produces the sound of the pre-ordered waters in the spaces where order holds: the ghost of chaos audible within the structure of the world.
The name Crocell (also rendered as Crokel, Procell or Pucel in various manuscript traditions) has been connected to Latin procella (storm, squall) — apt for a spirit who produces the sound of turbulent water. The connection to the Latin root for storm would make Crocell's name a description of his most distinctive power: the storm-sound angel, the one who brings the acoustic presence of troubled waters into spaces where calm prevails.
Crocell is the Goetia's most explicitly theological spirit — the one whose entire character is shaped by his position within a specific celestial hierarchy and his fall from it. For those who study sacred geometry, the Kabbalistic understanding of cosmic structure, or the angelological traditions that underlie Western esotericism, Crocell offers a unique vantage point: knowledge of the world's hidden structure from the perspective of one who was once its administrator. The geometry he teaches is not merely mathematical but cosmological — the shape of the world as it was designed to be, visible from the outside now that he no longer maintains it from within.