Where "your demon by birth date" actually comes from. I checked the manuscripts, would value your corrections

[kvzlx]

Hey all. For a while I kept bumping into those sites where you type your day and month and they hand you a demon from the Ars Goetia sigil, office, the whole thing and almost none of them say where that result comes from. It bugged me enough that I went digging through the actual sources, and I ended up building a small tool just to keep the systems straight. I wanted to share what I found and, honestly, get corrected by people here who know this material better than I do.

A note on how I'm treating this first: I've tried hard to keep separate what is actually documented in a source, what is modern interpretation, and what is simply unresolved. A match in some online table isn't evidence of an old tradition, and "documented" doesn't mean "you can reliably calculate it from a birthday." If I overstate anything below, please call it out.

The short version: there isn't one system. There are at least three, and they disagree with each other.

1) Decans — Liber 777 (1909). Each sign is split into three decans of 10°, and the 72 goetic spirits get distributed across them: nº 1–36 "by day", 37–72 "by night". This gives you a demon. But Crowley published it in Liber 777, crediting a Mathers / Golden Dawn manuscript. It is not in the old grimoires reproducible, but modern, not inherited. And the sources don't fix when a person gets the "day" vs the "night" spirit, which is part of why two sites hand you different answers.

2) Lenain's quinaries (1823). This distributes the 72 Shem angels not demons in roughly 5-day spans anchored to the equinox (Vehuiah, the first, runs 20–24 March), each with its psalm and magical character. It gives you an angel. And it isn't a 19th-c. invention: the day/zodiac distribution already appears in an 18th-c. manuscript (Arsenal Ms 2495). Lenain's actual natal method also gives three genii per person, not one.

The 72 angelic characters of the Shem ha-Mephorash, hand-transcribed and vectorized from Arsenal Ms 2495 (18th c.).

3) The "Dr Rudd" Goetia, Harley MS 6483 (around 1712).
I went through all 72 openings of the manuscript. Every spirit sits right next to the Shem angel of the same ordinal number, with its sigil and its psalm, and I didn't find a single exception. But here's the thing: that's an ordinal pairing, not a birth-date one. The angel is the spirit's counterpart, it isn't your "natal angel."

Harley MS 6483 (Dr Rudd): each goetic spirit paired with the Shem angel of the same number, with its psalm. Here the spirit's seal beside the angel's.

(There's also the Ars Paulina angels-by-degree a separate set of 360 which is not a demon table. I mention it only so it doesn't get folded into the above.)

A guess at the history (and it is a guess). The 72 angel names and psalms are already in Kircher (1652). From there it seems to split and I stress "seems", the direct dependency isn't proven into an English manuscript branch (Rudd) that pairs demon/angel, and a continental printed branch (Lenain) that distributes by days. Both feed into the Golden Dawn, and from there into Liber 777 and today's websites. What's actually documented in that chain is thin; the rest is reasonable hypothesis. I'd genuinely like to know if anyone can tighten it or break it.

Why two calculators give you different demons. When I looked at a few of them, they tend to quietly merge incompatible systems (a 10° decan with a 5° quinary they diverge by the second spirit), don't cite their real source, and sometimes attribute the whole thing "to the Lemegeton," which is false: the Lemegeton doesn't distribute the 72 by decan or by date at all. And "72 = 2 × 36" is just arithmetic, not a demonstrated tradition.

The thing I built. Instead of a "your true demon" calculator, I made an explorer that keeps each system separate and shows its rule, its source, and how certain it is. You put in a day and month and see what each system assigns with the real sigil, the documented office from the Lemegeton, and a note on its limits. For the Lenain part I hand transcribed the Arsenal Ms 2495 table (18th c., attrib. Blaise de Vigenère) and vectorized the 72 angelic characters; where one source wasn't enough, I left it open rather than fill the gap.

If you feel like poking at it, I'd really appreciate it especially if you catch an error, disagree with a sourcing call, or your own practice / UPG points somewhere else:

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What I'm actually hoping to hear from you:

Do the assignments line up with what you've worked with in practice?
Is there an older source for "demon by date" that I've missed? I could only document angels-by-date, not demons.
Anything I'm overstating, or getting flat-out wrong?

Thanks for reading. This started as personal curiosity and kind of took over my weekends. Feel free to tear it apart.

 

[Faria]

Do the assignments line up with what you've worked with in practice?

My opinion: " Your birth demon" concept is BS new age crapola. The actual demonology is hard for non-nerds to process, but everybody is familiar with birthday-related correspondences. It creates a sense of possession (no pun intended!) where the spirit becomes MY spirit, as if it means something for that individual. The #1 thing these birthday demon lists do is help otherwise completely ignorant people choose which demon seal to buy online, and in that regard you are just as well off with picking one at random. A lot of modern type occultism is marketed as "You can feel special about yourself," and this is just another example of it. The decan/quinance correspondence is completely irrelevant to the spirits, their lore, their traditional applications in practice. The birthday demon thing is just a way to bait people who are too lazy or stupid to bother with anything less superficial.

 

[kvzlx]

My opinion: " Your birth demon" concept is BS new age crapola. The actual demonology is hard for non-nerds to process, but everybody is familiar with birthday-related correspondences. It creates a sense of possession (no pun intended!) where the spirit becomes MY spirit, as if it means something for that individual. The #1 thing these birthday demon lists do is help otherwise completely ignorant people choose which demon seal to buy online, and in that regard you are just as well off with picking one at random. A lot of modern type occultism is marketed as "You can feel special about yourself," and this is just another example of it. The decan/quinance correspondence is completely irrelevant to the spirits, their lore, their traditional applications in practice. The birthday demon thing is just a way to bait people who are too lazy or stupid to bother with anything less superficial.

You said it better than I did. That is exactly why I built it as an "explorer" that keeps the systems apart and flags documented versus modern invention, not a "your true demon" calculator. And you nailed the real function of those lists: a shopping aid for deciding which seal to buy, dressed up as something personal.

One small thing to add, which cuts in your favour: the decan mapping was not random in origin. Mathers and the Golden Dawn fit the 72 onto the 36 decans on purpose, for their Tarot structure. That just makes it a 20th century filing system, not anything from the spirit's own lore or how it was worked. So a birthday still tells you nothing about the spirit. Appreciate the straight take.