The beautiful man on the winged horse who goes anywhere instantly — good-natured, willing, and one of the most generous spirits in the Goetia's final pages.
Seere appears as a beautiful man riding upon a winged horse. The image is one of the Goetia's most purely gracious — not the terrible leopard or the cruel old man or the raven-headed discord-sower, but a beautiful man on a winged horse, the figure of aerial beauty and swift flight that the Greek tradition encoded in the myth of Pegasus and Bellerophon. He brings with him the Lemegeton's most explicit character note: he is good-natured and willing to do whatsoever the conjurer requests.
Good-natured and willing: these two qualities, explicitly stated in the text, distinguish Seere from the large portion of the Goetia's catalogue who are described in terms of their powers, their appearances and their dangers — but rarely in terms of their disposition. Orobas (55th) is faithful; Seere is good-natured. The difference is significant: faithfulness is relational, describing the bond between spirit and conjurer; good-naturedness is characterological, describing what the spirit is like to work with. Seere is genuinely pleasant. Of the spirits who appear in the Goetia's final sections, he is the one the conjurer is most likely to find agreeable.
The winged horse is Pegasus — the horse born from the blood of the slain Medusa, the creature that created the spring of the Muses with a blow of his hoof, the mount of the heroes who attempted the greatest journeys. Pegasus in Greek mythology was the horse of divine poetry and heroic aspiration, the creature that enabled the reach beyond the normal bounds of human capacity. Seere on a winged horse is a being whose swiftness is not merely physical but metaphysical — the speed that Pegasus represents is the speed of inspiration, the sudden arrival of what could not be approached by walking.
Seventy is the position of completion within the context of the complete: seventy is seven times ten, the sacred number of completion multiplied by the base number of completion. As the seventieth spirit, Seere stands at the position of the doubly complete: the penultimate spirit of the catalogue, the one before the final pair, the good-natured prince who arrives almost at the end and brings abundance before the closure.
Seere holds three powers whose common element is the elimination of distance — spatial distance (he goes anywhere instantly), temporal distance between desire and fulfilment (he brings things abundantly), and the concealing distance of theft and hidden things (he discovers them). He is the spirit who eliminates every form of distance between the conjurer and what they need.
The three powers are three expressions of a single principle: the elimination of distance. Spatial distance (instant transport), material distance (abundance brought swiftly), concealing distance (theft and hidden things discovered). Seere is the spirit of the overcome obstacle — the being who makes what seemed far near, what seemed scarce abundant, what seemed lost found. His good nature makes him the most approachable agent of this principle: he does not merely have the power to overcome distance but is genuinely willing to use it on the conjurer's behalf.
The Pegasus mythology that Seere's winged horse invokes is rich with the specific qualities that his powers express. Pegasus was born from the contact between divine violence (Perseus's sword killing Medusa) and the earth (the blood and sea foam from which Pegasus sprang) — the speed of divine action producing the creature of impossible flight. When Bellerophon rode Pegasus, he attempted to reach Olympus itself — the mortal aspiring to the divine on the back of the creature that could cover that distance. Seere's winged horse carries this aspiration into the grimoire: the conjurer who invokes Seere rides, in a sense, the same horse — accessing through the spirit what cannot be reached by walking.
The spring of the Muses created by Pegasus's hoof-strike at Helicon connects the winged horse to creativity and inspiration as well as to transport. The spring that arose where Pegasus struck the earth was the Hippocrene — the horse-spring — whose waters gave poets the inspiration to compose. Seere's abundance may carry this Muse-dimension: the things he brings abundantly include not only material provision but the creative abundance that inspiration provides, the sudden arrival of what was needed before the work could proceed.
The name Seere (also rendered as Sear, Seir or Seere in various manuscripts, with relative stability) has been connected by some researchers to Hebrew seir (rough, hairy — a goat-like figure) or to older Semitic roots for prince or leader. The Greek seir (chain, cord) would make Seere the Prince who is bound by his own good nature to serve — the spirit whose willingness is not a weakness but a structural feature of his character, the chain that connects his capacity to the conjurer's need without requiring the binding that most Goetia spirits demand.
As a Prince, Seere governs the aerial and liminal domain that the Prince's rank traditionally occupies — appropriate for a being whose winged horse transcends the surface of the earth, who operates in the space between the earthly and the celestial. His good-naturedness in this context is the good nature of the aerial being: free from the territorial concerns of the earthly spirits, generous with the speed that his position above the earth grants him.
Seere is among the most immediately approachable spirits in the Goetia's final section — the beautiful man on the winged horse who is genuinely good-natured, who goes anywhere instantly to bring what is needed, who finds what was stolen and returns what was hidden. Near the end of a catalogue that contains terrible leopards, raven-headed discord-sowers, and spirits who will kill the conjurer if they are not careful, Seere arrives as a relief: the spirit who is glad to help, whose speed is a gift rather than a threat, whose abundance arrives without the requirement for elaborate binding and protective ritual. The good-natured prince on the winged horse near the catalogue's close — the penultimate grace before Dantalion's last wisdom and Andromalius's final justice.