He who goes before the four great kings — guide between kingdoms, philosopher, familiar-giver, and the one who can make any person feel or feel nothing at your direction.
Gaap appears as a man, going before four great kings as their guide and conductor. This is one of the most politically charged descriptions in the entire Goetia: not a being who arrives alone, but one who leads, who goes before, who positions himself at the head of a retinue of sovereign power. The four great kings he precedes are the four cardinal kings of the Goetia's cosmological map — Oriens (East), Amaymon (South), Paymon (West) and Egyn (North) — the four rulers whose authority spans all directions of the spiritual world.
That Gaap goes before these four kings — not as their servant but as their guide — establishes his position as something more than a mere subordinate of the royal rank above him. He precedes the most powerful beings in the Goetia's hierarchy. A President and Prince who leads four Kings is a figure of paradoxical authority: formally ranked below the Kings, functionally going before them. He is the scout, the pathfinder, the one who has already been where the kings are going and knows what will be found there.
The human form places him squarely in the Presidential daylight register — no animal features, no hybrid anatomy, simply a man of such consequence that four great kings follow his lead. The thirty-third position is a number of sacred significance: thirty-three is the age of Christ at his death in Christian tradition, the number of vertebrae in the human spine, the number of degrees in Scottish Rite Freemasonry. Gaap at thirty-three occupies a position freighted with associations of culmination, of the complete human development, of the apex of what can be achieved within the human form.
Sixty-six legions is the second largest command in the Goetia after Beleth's eighty-five — a number that reflects the breadth of Gaap's domain across emotional manipulation, philosophical teaching, familiar provision and instantaneous transport between kingdoms. Sixty-six as double thirty-three doubles the sacred human number: Gaap commands twice the apex, twice the complete human development's worth of spiritual force.
Gaap commands six distinct powers that together constitute one of the most comprehensive domains in the Goetia: emotional engineering (love and hatred and insensibility), philosophical teaching, familiar provision, transport between kingdoms, temporal knowledge and the release from magical workings of other magicians. He is simultaneously the Goetia's most emotionally sophisticated spirit and one of its most practically mobile.
The six powers together create the profile of the supreme navigator of the human world: one who can engineer every emotional state or remove emotion entirely, who teaches the wisdom of power, who provides lasting magical companions, who moves persons across political boundaries instantly, who knows what time holds, and who can undo what other magicians have done. Gaap is the Goetia's most comprehensively empowering President — the guide of kings who gives the conjurer the tools to navigate a world of sovereign power.
The four kings before whom Gaap goes — Oriens, Amaymon, Paymon and Egyn — represent the four cardinal directions of the Goetia's cosmological map. They govern East, South, West and North respectively, and each commands a portion of the Goetia's seventy-two spirits who fall under their particular compass point. The Goetia's cataloguing system is partly organised around these four royal domains, making the four kings the structural backbone of the entire system.
That Gaap guides and precedes all four of these kings simultaneously — not just one direction but all four, not just one quarter of the system but its complete compass — marks him as a spirit of uniquely comprehensive orientation. He knows every direction of the spiritual world because he has guided the sovereigns of all four. The pathfinder who has walked all four roads is the only guide who can take you in any direction with equal confidence.
The number thirty-three has attracted consistent attention in Western esoteric tradition precisely because of its associations with completion at the human level. In Dante's Commedia, each of the three books has thirty-three cantos (plus one introduction); the thirty-third degree of Scottish Rite Freemasonry is the highest; the human spine has thirty-three vertebrae; the tradition of Christ's age at death makes thirty-three the age of the perfected human life. Gaap at thirty-three is the perfected guide — the being who goes before four kings because he has himself achieved the completion that the number symbolises.
The name Gaap (also rendered as Tap or Goap in some manuscripts) has attracted various etymological proposals. The simplest connects it to the English word gap — the opening between, the space through which passage is possible. Gaap as the one who finds and creates the gap through which kings can pass, through which persons can be transported between kingdoms, through which the impossible distance collapses into the navigable passage: the name is itself a description of his primary function.
Gaap is among the most powerful and most comprehensively gifted spirits in the Goetia — a being who precedes four kings, commands sixty-six legions, teaches philosophy, engineers the full spectrum of human emotion including its absence, transports persons across political boundaries, provides excellent familiars, knows past and future, and can release persons from other magicians' workings. The name that means gap is the spirit who creates the opening through which all of this becomes possible: the guide who finds the passage that others cannot see, and leads them through it.