The winged man who commands the sea — who drowns the unwary and overturns their ships, yet holds within him a hope older than his service: to return to the heaven he left.
Focalor appears as a man with gryphon's wings — one of the catalogue's most directly humanoid forms, without animal head or hybrid body, simply a man whose wings give him the aerial reach of the gryphon's dual sovereignty. The gryphon wings that have appeared on Sitri, Glasya-Labolas, Marchosias, Haagenti and Vapula arrive here on their most purely human carrier: a man, not an animal with wings, but a human being elevated into the aerial domain by the wings that authority and aspiration require.
The winged man form carries obvious angelic resonance — the fallen angel who retains his wings from the celestial order he has left, the being who flies between worlds as the angel does but is no longer of the angelic company. Focalor's wings are not decorative but functional: they carry him over the sea whose surface he commands, they express the ambition that his hope of return encodes, and they mark him as a being whose nature is fundamentally aerial even when his powers are maritime.
Forty-one is a prime — indivisible, between the perfect forty (the number of trial and transformation) and the forty-two of Vepar (the sea-dwelling Duke who shares his maritime domain). Focalor at forty-one stands between the trial and the sea: the winged man at the irreducible prime between the number of sustained ordeal and the mermaid who follows him in the catalogue's maritime sequence.
Focalor holds three powers that span elemental command and maritime destruction, along with the personal aspiration that distinguishes him within the Goetia's fallen hierarchy: power over the sea and winds, the drowning of men and overturning of ships, and the hope — explicitly stated — of returning to the seventh heaven after 1,000 years.
The maritime command and the heavenly aspiration create Focalor's defining paradox: the being who commands the lowest of the natural elements — the ocean, the storm, the drowning — holds the highest of personal aspirations, the return to the seventh heaven. The winged man who flies over the waves that destroy ships is the same being whose wings were given for celestial flight, who hopes to fly again in the direction they were originally designed for. The destroyer of ships aspires to the highest heaven: the most earthly power in service of the most heavenly ambition.
Focalor joins Phenex (37th), Marchosias (35th) and Amy (58th) as the four Goetia spirits who explicitly hope for celestial restoration — but he is distinct from the other three in his specific timeline (1,000 years rather than 1,200) and in the nature of his powers. Where Phenex is a fire-poet, Marchosias a fire-breathing wolf, and Amy a flaming fire President, Focalor is a maritime destroyer. Three fire spirits and one water spirit hold the same aspiration, expressing it through the opposite elemental registers: the flames that aspire upward and the waters that flow downward, all directed toward the same highest heaven.
The sea and the seventh heaven are the maximum possible distance in the vertical cosmological axis — the sea as the lowest material element, the seventh heaven as the highest celestial position. Focalor commands the lowest and aspires to the highest. This vertical extremity is his defining characteristic: a being of the complete vertical axis, at home in the deepest waters and dreaming of the highest heavens, with the wings that could carry him between the two if the millennium of his service were complete.
The note that Focalor will not hurt any man or thing if commanded not to is worth attention. This specific qualification — that his destructive power is completely subject to the conjurer's direction — places him among the controllable rather than the dangerous spirits. Unlike Andras (63rd), whose violence cannot be easily checked, Focalor's maritime destruction stops when told to stop. The winged man over the sea is violent when directed and harmless when directed otherwise: a maritime force completely under the conjurer's command.
The name Focalor (also rendered as Forcalor or Furcalor in some manuscripts) has been connected to Latin focus (hearth, centre point) combined with -alor — a suffix of uncertain origin. The hearth-point at the centre of the storm: the calm focus within the maritime violence, the still point around which the winds rotate. The name may encode his dual nature as both the destroyer (the storm) and the aspirer (the stillness that watches the storm from within it).
Focalor is invoked for maritime power — for influence over the sea, weather at sea, and the fates of ships and sailors — and for the controlled direction of maritime forces that his specific qualification enables: he does not hurt what the conjurer protects. The winged man over the waves who hopes for the seventh heaven in a thousand years is the Goetia's spirit of the complete vertical aspiration: commanding the lowest of the natural elements while dreaming of the highest celestial position, his wings carrying him between the two in the long service before his hoped-for restoration.