The lion on horseback with two hissing serpents — who teaches what the stars and planets actually do to human lives, and can move a person's rank and dignity to any position he chooses.
Oriax appears as a lion riding upon a horse, holding two great hissing serpents in his right hand. The image is one of the Goetia's most compositionally striking: the lion as rider rather than as mount, the horse serving the lion rather than the human conjurer, and the two serpents held in one hand — not resting but actively hissing, alive with the dangerous potential of venom. Every element is in motion; nothing is static.
The lion on horseback reverses the usual rider-mount hierarchy in which the human mounts the animal. Here the animal rides the animal — the regal lion, the creature of sovereign authority and solar power, riding the creature of speed and noble partnership. The lion-on-horse combination suggests a being of doubled animal authority: the sovereign's animal directing the messenger's animal, the commanding force on the back of the swift force, a composite of command and velocity that moves with both the lion's authority and the horse's speed.
The two hissing serpents in the right hand — the hand of power and action — carry the serpent's full symbolic range: the ancient wisdom that predates human knowledge, the chthonic intelligence of the earth's depths, the dangerous knowledge that changes whoever receives it irreversibly. Two serpents suggest the caduceus — Hermes/Mercury's staff of two intertwining serpents, the symbol of communication, commerce, and the power to move between worlds. Oriax holds what Mercury carries as his attribute: the instrument of planetary influence made literal in two living, hissing snakes.
As a Marquis, Oriax appears at twilight — the lion's hour between the day's solar authority and the night's serpentine wisdom. Fifty-nine is a prime number, the last prime before sixty — the Babylonian base number. Oriax at fifty-nine stands at the threshold of the complete cycle, one step from the number that governs all celestial measurement. The spirit who teaches the influence of stars and planets stands one step from the number by which the stars and planets are measured.
Oriax holds two powers that together constitute the complete domain of applied celestial influence: the teaching of stars' and planets' influences on human affairs, and the transformation of dignities and prelacies. He is the Goetia's specialist in the practical application of astrological knowledge — not the observation of the stars but the mechanics of how stellar force actually operates on human social standing.
The two powers are structurally integrated. The influence of the stars and planets is precisely the force that transforms human dignities in the astrological tradition: the position of Jupiter at birth determines one's relationship to authority and honour; the transiting Saturn alters one's standing through its passage; the malefic or benefic aspect of Mars on the natal chart affects one's capacity to maintain or acquire rank. Oriax teaches this system and then demonstrates his mastery of it by actually transforming dignities. He teaches the theory and provides the practice simultaneously — the two serpents of his caduceus, one for each power.
Oriax's specific domain — the influence of stars and planets — positions him within a tradition of practical astrology that is as old as civilisation itself. The Babylonian astrologers who first systematised celestial observation understood the stars not as mere lights but as forces that actively influenced human affairs — the conjunction of planets portended political events, the position of Mars at a king's birth determined his military fortunes, the eclipses that darkened the sky announced imminent dangers to the state.
The distinction between knowing the positions of stars (astronomy and theoretical astrology) and knowing their influences (applied astrology) is the distinction between the map and the territory — between knowing where the planets are and knowing what their positions actually cause in human life. This is the distinction that Oriax specifically occupies: not the astronomer who locates the planets but the astrologer who reads their effects, not the theorist who describes the celestial system but the practitioner who applies it.
The two hissing serpents that Oriax holds connect him to the Hermetic tradition within which applied astrology was most fully developed. Hermes Trismegistus — the syncretic figure who combined the Greek Hermes with the Egyptian Thoth — was the patron of both astrology and the serpent's hidden wisdom. The Hermetic Corpus, the body of ancient texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, contains extensive discussion of the planets' influence on human affairs and the techniques for working with that influence. Oriax with his two serpents is the Goetia's Hermetic astrologer: the lion of solar authority riding the horse of swift transmission, carrying the serpents of Hermetic wisdom in his right hand.
The name Oriax (also rendered as Orias or Nauras in various manuscript traditions) has been connected to Greek Orion — the great hunter constellation that was one of the most watched and most mythologically significant stellar formations in the ancient world. If the Orion connection holds, Oriax carries the influence of the most powerful visible constellation in his name — the hunter whose belt marks the celestial equator and whose stars were the basis for multiple ancient calendar systems.
Oriax is the Goetia's practitioner's astrologer — the spirit for those who need not merely to understand where the stars are but to understand and use what those positions actually do. His lion authority commands the planetary forces; his horse swiftly transmits their effects; his two serpents hold the Hermetic wisdom of how to work with what the stars provide. At twilight, between the day's solar force and the night's planetary configurations, the lion-rider with his hissing serpents teaches the conjurer the most practically useful of all celestial knowledge: not what the sky looks like, but what it does.