Foundation Course: A Goetia of the Four Kings
taught by Dr. Alexander Cummins

Three Part Class + Mentorship
(Three 2 hour Sessions + 1 hour one-on-one sessions via telephone, skype, or Zoom to be arranged with instructor)
 

This class is not currently being offered live. If you'd like to purchase the recordings of the most recent class, please feel free to purchase them below and after signing and returning the agreement, you will receive all the links and can communicate directly with the instructor should you have quesitons.

Cost: $250
 

Lords of unclean spirits. Demonised dead kings. Seniors of the cardinal directions. Princes of Hell. The very thorns of the compass rose. The mighty spirits Oriens, Paymon, Amaymon, and Egyn (also known as Ariton) are known by many titles and have many glosses. Deliberately excised by Weyer from the spirit-lists which would later inform the Lemegeton or Lesser Key of Solomon, these Four Regents have been somewhat historically overlooked until relatively recently. Yet in our rediscoveries of the Book of the Offices of Spirits we find testament of their absolute authority; indeed the Four Regents form the very means of organising and working with the miscellany of spirits called 'goetic'. By most pre-modern practices of conjuration, calling these Four Regents was considered quite simply operatively essential to successful goetic conjuring.

In this course, the Doctor will lead us through an exploration and analysis of various conjurations and methodologies for working with the Four Regents and their courts of "sub-kings" and messengers, drawn from a combination of historical evidence, grimoiric manuscript record, and a personal practice of spiritwork, divination, and experimentation. Intimate links to early modern English conceptions of the Sorcerer Saint Cyprian and his dread Black Book are further elucidated. We will track the Four Kings through grimoiric texts such as the Excellent Book, Sloane 3850, the Book of the Dannel, and a variety of other nigromantic treatises. This course furthermore includes an hour of one-to-one consultation and coaching with the instructor, designed for students to be able to go over the material, address queries and consider follow-up in a way that best supports their practice and extant pacts and projects.

Materia, methodologies, and manners of such a goetia are shared in the understanding that these Four Regents represent a significant - nay, central - component of pre-modern European traditions and techniques of conjuration and spiritwork that should be honoured by all enterprising karcists and nigromancers who engage with such spirits.

The course is taught by Dr. Alexander Cummins, who by day is a professional diviner and mild-mannered historian of early modern magic and by night finds himself conjuring shades, demons and the occasional angel. Goetia and the grimoiric nigromancies of the British Isles have been a long-standing passion and practice for him. The course will include access to scans of primary source texts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century nigromancy and further bibliography. All of these resources are of course additional support, as the Good Doctor will cover everything necessary to understand the fundamentals of the Four Kings in the course itself.

If you have any questions, please email info@wolf-and-goat.com.