The twentieth spirit of the Ars Goetia — a great King with the face of a lion, carrying a fierce viper in his hand, riding upon a great bear with many trumpeters before him. He knows hidden things, the creation of the world, divine and secret things, and finds buried treasure. He speaks of past, present and future with clarity and authority. He can take either human or aerial form.
Purson's appearance is one of the most symbolically dense in the entire Goetia catalogue. He comes as a man with a lion's face, carrying a fierce viper in his hand, riding upon a great bear — with many trumpeters sounding before him. Each element of this image speaks to his nature and his powers in the language of symbolic correspondence that runs through all Western occult iconography.
The lion is the king of animals — strength, authority, solar power, the ability to see clearly and act decisively. A lion-faced spirit is a spirit of sovereign intelligence, one who surveys from a position of natural dominance and whose gaze penetrates to the truth of things. The bear represents the earth and its hidden contents — bears dig, they root into the ground, they find what is buried — appropriate for a spirit who discovers buried treasure and hidden knowledge. The viper in his hand is the wisdom of the serpent: ancient knowledge, the ability to perceive the ground-level truth beneath surface appearances, transformation and the shedding of skins.
Together the three animals describe a being of complete knowledge: the lion sees from above with sovereign clarity, the bear knows what is buried in the earth, and the serpent carries the primordial wisdom that precedes all other forms of knowing. Purson holds all three simultaneously — and thus has access to hidden things at every level.
The Twentieth Spirit is Purson, a Great King. His appearance is with a great Lion's face, carrying a cruel Viper in his hand, and riding upon a Great Bear. Going before him are many Trumpets sounding. He knoweth all things hidden, and can discover Treasure, and telleth all things Past, Present, and to come.
— Ars Goetia, Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, 17th centuryPurson's domain is knowledge — but knowledge of the deepest kind. Not mere information but understanding of hidden, divine and cosmological things. He is one of the few spirits in the Goetia who is described as knowing the creation of the world — a claim that places him in the category of spirits who have access to origins, to first causes, to the knowledge of how things came to be as they are.
The 22 legions correspondence: Purson commands exactly 22 legions — the same number as the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the Tarot's Major Arcana and the paths on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Whether this is deliberate or coincidental is unknown, but the number 22 in Western esotericism always carries the weight of complete symbolic structure — the full alphabet of creation. A King commanding 22 legions may be commanding, symbolically, the full range of creative forces.
The Goetia's description of Purson as knowing "divine and secret things" is unusual. Most Goetia spirits have clearly defined practical domains — love, treasure, teaching arts, revealing hidden things. Purson's access to "divine things" places him in a different category: a spirit who has knowledge not merely of the material and psychological worlds but of the theological and cosmological order itself.
In the context of the Goetia's worldview — in which the spirits are beings who were present before the creation of the world or who exist at levels of reality that predate human history — this claim makes a specific kind of sense. Purson, as a spirit who knows the creation of the world, was presumably present for it or has access to knowledge of it that transcends what any human scholar could learn from texts. He knows the structure of things at the level of origins.
For a magician working within a system that seeks to understand the deep structure of reality — the relationship between the divine and the material, between what is hidden and what is manifest — Purson is a spirit of exceptional value. He offers not just answers to specific questions but the kind of foundational cosmological understanding that allows those questions to be asked correctly in the first place.
Purson appears in the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum as "Curson" — a variant spelling that has led to some confusion in later texts. The core description is consistent across sources: a great King with a lion's face, bearing a viper, riding a bear, preceding trumpeters, with knowledge of hidden and divine things. He is present in virtually every major version of the Goetia tradition from Weyer's 1563 compilation forward.
In modern practice, Purson is particularly valued by those engaged in philosophical, historical or cosmological inquiry — researchers, historians, philosophers and those seeking to understand the deep structure of things rather than merely its surface. His combination of hidden knowledge, past-present-future sight and access to the knowledge of creation makes him something like a spirit of fundamental understanding — not a specialist but a generalist of the deepest level.
The bear as mount is worth particular attention for those working with Purson. In many shamanic traditions across Eurasia, the bear is the primary spirit-animal associated with healing and with access to the underworld — the bear that digs into the earth to hibernate and emerges transformed in spring. To ride the bear is to have command of this digging, earth-rooting, transformative power. Purson does not merely know what is hidden — he is carried by the very force that finds what is hidden.
On working with spirits of cosmological knowledge: spirits like Purson who claim knowledge of the creation of the world and of divine things raise the question of how such knowledge is transmitted and received. The tradition suggests that this knowledge does not arrive as a lecture or a text — it comes in the form of direct understanding, intuition elevated to certainty, the sudden apprehension of why things are as they are. Working with Purson is less like consulting an encyclopedia and more like being briefly positioned at a vantage point from which the structure of things becomes visible. What the conjurer does with that vision afterward is their own work.