Angel of three creatures — lion's authority, goose's swiftness, hare's cunning — who knows all times and makes those who invoke him sharp-witted and bold.
Ipos appears as an angel with a lion's head, a goose's foot and a hare's tail. Three animals encoded in one angelic body — each contributing a distinct symbolic register to a composite form that is one of the Goetia's most precisely described and most symbolically compressed. Where other multi-animal spirits blend their creatures into continuous hybrid bodies, Ipos assembles his three animals at specific anatomical stations: the head, one foot, and the tail. The rest of his body is angelic.
The lion's head places Ipos in the solar, regal tradition shared with Alloces (52nd) — the authority of the king of beasts, the commanding gaze that surveys all directions, the mane that frames the face of power. But where Alloces is a lion-faced soldier entirely, Ipos's lion head sits on an angelic body, moderating the animal's raw authority with the intelligence and celestial heritage of the angelic form. He is sovereignty in the service of the higher nature, not sovereignty as an end in itself.
The goose's foot is the most anomalous element. The goose in medieval bestiaries was the bird of vigilance — sacred to Juno as the guardian creature, the animal whose honking warned Rome of the Gauls' night attack in 390 BCE. In northern European tradition, the goose was associated with migration, with the reliable return of the seasonal cycle, with the memory of routes that spans individual lifetimes. The goose foot on an angelic body marks Ipos as a being of reliable navigation: he finds his way through time's full arc as the goose finds its way between its winter and summer grounds.
The hare's tail completes the composite. The hare is the animal of speed, of the wit that survives through quickness, of the lunar creature who races across the face of the full Moon in the folklore of multiple cultures. The hare's tail — the white scut that flashes as the animal vanishes — is the sign of departure, of the thing that was there and is already gone. As the tail of Ipos, it marks the quality he bestows: the wit that acts before the opponent has perceived the situation, the bold quickness that gets there first.
Ipos holds two powers that together constitute the complete toolkit of the person who must succeed in an uncertain world: knowledge of past, present and future, and the active gifts of wit and boldness. He is simultaneously a spirit of intelligence (knowing) and of character (acting on what is known with appropriate speed and confidence).
The connection between temporal knowledge and wit-plus-boldness is the connection between understanding and action. To know past, present and future is to understand the complete context of any situation — where it came from, where it is, where it is going. But this knowledge is only valuable if the person who holds it can act on it with sufficient speed (wit) and sufficient confidence (boldness). Ipos gives both the map and the courage to follow it at the pace the territory requires.
Ipos as Earl and Prince occupies a dual rank that differs from the Earl-President combinations of Botis and Marax. Princes govern aerial and spiritual domains, appearing at the boundary between the earthly and the celestial; Earls govern the nocturnal domain of the dead and hidden knowledge. The Earl-Prince combination therefore spans the complete vertical axis of the non-solar spiritual world: from the depths of night knowledge to the heights of aerial sovereignty.
This vertical axis maps perfectly onto Ipos's composite form. The lion's head at the top is the sovereign aerial element — the creature who surveys from the highest position, whose authority commands the full range of the visible world. The goose's foot grounds him in reliable navigation — the earth-touching element that knows the routes between places. The hare's tail at the back is the nocturnal quick-escape element — the sign of the creature who survives by speed in the darkness. Head to foot to tail, Ipos encodes his dual rank in his anatomy.
The name Ipos (also rendered as Ipes, Ayperos or Aiperos in various manuscript traditions) has attracted various etymological proposals. Some researchers connect it to Latin ipse (self, the very one) — Ipos as the spirit of the authentic self, the wit and boldness that arise from genuine self-knowledge rather than imitation. Others propose Greek or Hebrew connections. The orthographic variants across manuscripts suggest a name that was phonetically unstable in Latin transmission, perhaps originating in a non-Latin phonological system.
In the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, Weyer presents Ipos with consistent powers. The number twenty-two that marks his position is the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet — the complete set of building blocks from which all language and all revealed divine meaning is constructed. Ipos at twenty-two holds the complete alphabet of temporal knowledge, the full set of signs from which the meaning of past, present and future is assembled.
Ipos is invoked by those who need both clarity of vision and the confidence to act on what they see — the person facing a situation that requires quick accurate assessment followed by decisive action. His lion's authority, goose's reliable navigation and hare's swiftness are the three qualities that such situations demand: you need to command the situation (lion), know where you are and where you need to go (goose), and get there fast enough that the opportunity hasn't passed (hare). Ipos's wit and boldness are the human expressions of his three animal signatures, delivered through a being who was once an angel and still carries those wings.