The five-pointed star who becomes a man — who knows every herb and stone, and sends birds to sing and live beside the conjurer as if they were born to the hand.
Decarabia appears first as a star or pentagram — not a being in animal or human form but the geometric figure of the five-pointed star itself, the shape that is its own enclosure, the figure that contains itself within the inner pentagon that its lines create. He is unique among the Goetia spirits in having a purely geometric initial form: where Amy appears as flaming fire (elemental) and Buer appears as a wheel of legs (quasi-geometric), Decarabia appears as a specific mathematical figure with a specific number of points and a specific symbolic history.
The pentagram's symbolic history in Western esotericism is extensive and contested. In Pythagorean tradition, the five-pointed star was the symbol of health and the recognition sign of the brotherhood — the figure whose five points encoded the proportions of the human body and the ratios of the divine in the material world. In medieval Christian tradition, the pentagram represented the five wounds of Christ. In later occult tradition, it became the primary symbol of magical protection and the emblem of the practitioner's authority over the spiritual world. That Decarabia arrives as this figure — the symbol of magical authority itself — is a statement about his nature before he takes human form: he is the principle of pentagrammatic order, the intelligence behind the magical structure.
When commanded, he takes the form of a man and stands before the conjurer. The transition from pentagram to man is the transition from the geometric principle to its human expression — the five-fold mathematical structure of the star becoming the five-sensed, five-digited human body that the star was understood to encode. Decarabia becomes what the pentagram represents: the human being in its complete sensory and physical form.
Sixty-nine is the product of three times twenty-three — the sacred ternary at the number associated with the threshold of concealed knowledge in various traditions. As the penultimate President in the catalogue, Decarabia stands at the position of near-completion within his Presidential rank — the last President before Andromalius's closing Earl.
Decarabia holds two powers of complementary natural scope: the knowledge of the virtues of herbs and precious stones, and the ability to make birds appear and sing and remain with the conjurer as familiars. Together they constitute the complete natural knowledge of the kingdom below (minerals and plants) and the kingdom above (birds that sing in the air) — the full vertical range of the natural world from stone to sky.
The two powers create a vertical axis of natural knowledge: from the deepest (precious stones, mineral kingdom) through the middle (herbs, plant kingdom) to the highest (birds, aerial kingdom). Decarabia's knowledge spans the complete hierarchy of natural substances — the three kingdoms of the natural world that medieval natural philosophy identified as the mineral, the vegetable and the animal (here specifically the avian). He is the President of the natural world's complete spectrum, from stone to singing bird.
The bird familiars are particularly distinctive: not merely birds that appear temporarily but birds that remain, that continue their singing and their presence as ongoing companions. The singing companion is the gentlest of all familiar types — not the powerful magical helper of Glasya-Labolas or the herb-wise companion of Marax, but the singing bird who stays beside the conjurer, whose song accompanies the work, whose presence is both companionship and continuous natural music. Decarabia's familiar is Amdusias's invisible music made visible and domestic.
The name Decarabia contains the Greek dekar — ten — and is connected by many researchers to the Pythagorean tradition of the decad, the number ten as the completion of the numerical sequence. The pentagram's five points, when doubled (as in the ten-pointed star or decagram), produce the decadic figure that the Pythagoreans considered the most sacred of all geometrical forms. Decarabia's name may encode the relationship between the five-pointed star of his form and the ten-fold completion of the decad: the spirit of the pentagram who carries the decadic completion in his name.
In the grimoire tradition, the pentagram was used not merely as a symbol but as a functional magical instrument — drawn on the floor or on parchment, used to constrain spirits, to protect the conjurer, to establish the sacred space within which the working proceeded. That Decarabia appears as a pentagram before taking human form suggests a spirit whose initial presentation is itself the tool of magical work — the protective and constraining figure appearing before the figure that needs constraining, the symbol of magical authority appearing before the being who will submit to it (by taking human form at the conjurer's command).
The bird familiars that Decarabia provides connect him to the augural tradition that Camio (53rd) also inhabits — the tradition of birds as bearers of meaningful communication, as creatures whose behaviour encodes information about the natural world and its future states. Where Camio gives understanding of what birds say, Decarabia gives birds themselves as companions who will say it constantly, daily, in the conjurer's presence. The augur who understands bird-language and the familiar who provides the birds are the two sides of the same avian intelligence applied to the conjurer's practice.
In the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, Weyer presents Decarabia (as Carabia) with consistent powers. The thirty legions he commands is the lunar month, the complete cycle of light and dark that governs the visibility of herbs in the moonlit garden, the song of birds at dawn and dusk, the lustre of precious stones in changing light. Thirty legions of the complete lunar cycle: the forces of the full natural world's complete rhythm of day and night.
Decarabia is the Goetia's spirit of the natural world in its complete aesthetic and practical range — the geometric intelligence who knows the properties of what grows in the earth and what flies above it, and who provides the most companionable of all familiars: the bird who sings. He arrives as the symbol of magical practice itself, the pentagram that every practitioner draws at the beginning of their work, and then becomes a man who gives them what their practice needs: the knowledge of nature's properties and the singing companions who make the practice a pleasure rather than merely a labour. The star becomes the naturalist who sends the birds, and the birds sing while the practitioner works.