Bathin's Depiction in Art and Literature

A 17th century engraver sat at his desk in Amsterdam, working from a manuscript that had crossed Europe in a merchant’s saddlebag. He had never seen a demon, never performed a summoning. But he had instructions: a man riding a pale serpent, carrying a viper. So he drew it. That image of Bathin became the template for centuries of occult illustration, copied, altered and misremembered until the original almost vanished. Bathin is a Goetic duke who appears as a strong man with a serpent’s tail, mounted on a pale horse or a dragon, and who knows the virtues of herbs, gems and the movement of the earth.

Bathin’s depiction in art and literature is a record of how a single textual description mutated through the hands of printers, translators and occultists from 1600 to the present. Understanding that record means tracing three documents, four engravers and a handful of literary references that most modern accounts compress into a single footnote.

Where Did the First Image of Bathin Come From?

The earliest known description of Bathin appears in the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1577), compiled by the Dutch physician and occultist Johann Weyer. Weyer was a student of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and a vocal critic of witch trials. His list of seventy-two spirits was meant to expose what he considered demonic delusion, but it became the canonical source for Goetic demonology anyway.

Weyer wrote that Bathin appears “in the shape of a strong man with a serpent’s tail, sitting upon a pale horse.” That is the entire description. No color for the serpent, no detail about the man’s face or clothing, no mention of weapons or tools. It takes one sentence.

Reginald Scot reproduced Weyer’s list in English in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), with minor translation shifts. Scot was even more skeptical than Weyer, but his book kept the material alive for generations of occultists who ignored the author’s warnings. Scot’s Bathin is the same figure: strong man, serpent tail, pale horse.

The decisive transformation happened when an anonymous compiler assembled the grimoire now called the Lemegeton or the Lesser Key of Solomon, probably in the mid-17th century. That version added two details: the horse became a “pale colored horse” and the spirit carries a viper in his hand. The Lemegeton also gave Bathin the title of “Duke” and specified that he commands thirty legions of spirits.

Who Drew Bathin and What Did They Actually Show?

The Lemegeton circulated in manuscript. No two copies matched exactly. When it finally reached print in the early 20th century, the illustrations had already been filtered through two centuries of interpolations.

Louis Le Breton drew the first widely published Bathin for the 1863 edition of Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal. Le Breton was a French painter who worked on medical and natural history illustrations. His Bathin is a muscular man with bat wings, a serpentine lower body and a reptilian face, seated on a dragon with scaled flanks and an open jaw. He holds something in his right hand, possibly the viper, but the engraving is dark and the object is ambiguous.

Le Breton’s image is the one most reproduced online. It is also the least faithful to the original text. The dragon is not a pale horse. The wings are not mentioned in Weyer or the Lemegeton. The reptilian face contradicts the “strong man” description. But it is dramatic, and drama sells grimoires.

Mathers’ edition of The Goetia (1904) used a different source. S.L. MacGregor Mathers, a co-founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, translated and published the Lemegeton with seals and instructions. His Bathin illustration is simpler: a man in what looks like medieval armor, holding a staff or rod, with a coiled serpent at his feet. No horse. No viper in hand. Mathers was working from manuscripts held in the British Library, and his engraver followed those sources rather than Le Breton’s theatrical style.

A third tradition comes from Frederick Hockley (1808-1885), a London occultist who copied and illustrated Goetic manuscripts from the 17th century. Hockley’s Bathin is a standing figure with a human torso and a serpent’s tail, no horse, carrying a snake. His drawings were never published in his lifetime but became influential when Aleister Crowley and others accessed his manuscript collections.

What Did the Literary Tradition Add?

Bathin appears in few literary works outside the grimoire tradition, but those appearances carry weight.

Francis Barrett included Bathin in The Magus (1801), a compendium of occult philosophy that revived interest in ceremonial magic after a century of neglect. Barrett’s Bathin is purely textual, repeating the Lemegeton description without new illustration. But The Magus was read by Blake, by the Romantic poets, and by early members of the Golden Dawn. It kept Bathin available to an audience that had no access to the manuscript tradition.

In the 20th century, Bathin surfaces in Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian interpretations. Grant (1924-2011), a British occultist and disciple of Crowley, treated the Goetic spirits as gateways to what he called “the tunnel sets” of the subconscious. His Bathin is not a demon with a serpent tail but a current of energy associated with chthonic wisdom and the discovery of hidden knowledge. Grant’s work moved Bathin from literal demonology into the realm of psychological and astrological symbolism.

More recently, Jake Stratton-Kent (2021) argued in The False Monarchy that Bathin’s association with the virtue of herbs and gems prefigures the Fairy Faith and the pre-Christian underworld deities of the British Isles. Stratton-Kent read the Goetic spirits not as demons but as fragments of a suppressed pagan pantheon. His Bathin is a psychopomp, a guide through the mineral and vegetable realms.

Why Does Bathin Hold a Viper and Ride a Pale Horse?

The viper and the pale horse are the two symbols that distinguish Bathin from the other Goetic dukes. Neither is random.

The viper in Goetic symbolism indicates knowledge of poisons and their antidotes. Bathin’s office includes “the virtues of herbs and precious stones.” The viper is both a threat and a medicine. In classical pharmacy, viper flesh was used in theriac, the universal antidote. A spirit who carries a viper holds the power of both poison and cure. That is why the grimoire specifies that Bathin can “transport men suddenly from one country to another” and that he knows the healing properties of stones and plants. The viper is the emblem of that dual knowledge.

The pale horse echoes the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse in Revelation 6:8, where Death rides a pale horse and Hades follows. Bathin’s pale horse is a death symbol, but in the Goetic context it means something narrower. Pale horses in medieval bestiaries were associated with the underworld and with the revelation of hidden things. A spirit who rides a pale horse can cross the boundary between the living and the dead, which is why some practitioners summon Bathin to recover lost objects or buried treasures.

The combination of viper and pale horse makes Bathin a spirit of the threshold. He moves between worlds, carries knowledge that can kill or heal, and knows what lies underground. That is why the grimoire text is consistent across manuscripts about the two identifying marks, even when the artists could not agree on how to depict them.

How Has Bathin Been Confused with Other Spirits?

Modern occult literature often conflates Bathin with Bathym or Marbas, two spirits with similar names and overlapping functions. The confusion dates to Weyer’s original Latin, where the spelling varies between manuscripts. Some copies read “Bathin,” others “Bathym.” Early translators sometimes treated them as the same entity.

Bathin is distinct from Marbas. Marbas appears as a great lion and answers questions about hidden things, mechanical arts and the properties of herbs. Bathin appears as a man with a serpent’s tail and specializes in the virtues of stones, plants and sudden travel. They share the herbology but not the form or the mode of transport.

Another source of confusion: Bathin’s seal in the Goetia contains a symbol that resembles the astrological glyph for Saturn. Some modern demonolaters have assigned Bathin to the Saturnine sphere. The association is not in the original grimoires. It comes from 19th century ceremonialists who mapped the spirits onto planetary hierarchies that Weyer never used.

What Do Practitioners Actually Do with Bathin’s Image?

The image of Bathin serves a practical function in ritual, not just an ornamental one. The seal must be drawn correctly for the spirit to appear. That requirement means that every depiction of Bathin is also a test of textual fidelity.

Working grimoires from the 17th and 18th centuries show signs of use: wax spills on the pages, marginal notes correcting the seal, finger smudges near the description of the viper. These manuscripts treat the image as a tool, not an illustration. The drawing of Bathin riding his pale horse is part of the ritual apparatus. If the horse faces the wrong direction or the viper is missing, the summoning fails.

Contemporary practitioners of the Goetic tradition maintain that same attention to detail. The image must match the textual description, not the baroque engravings of Le Breton. A modern grimoire keeper will check three manuscript sources before drawing Bathin’s seal, precisely because the illustrations in popular editions are known to be unreliable.

FAQ

Is Bathin the same as Bathym? No. The spelling variation comes from different manuscript traditions, but they refer to the same spirit. Bathym is a scribal variant, not a separate entity.

Can Bathin be summoned for herbal knowledge? The grimoire credits Bathin with knowledge of herbs and gems. His viper emblem reinforces that association. Summoners who work with plant magic or lapidary traditions sometimes call on him.

Why is Bathin described as a duke? The Goetia assigns noble titles to spirits based on a hierarchy that predates Christianity. A duke commands fewer legions than a king but more than a count. Bathin’s thirty legions place him in the middle rank.

Does Bathin appear in popular media? Rarely. Bathin appears in the video game Persona 5 as a fusionable persona, and in some mobile gacha games that draw from the Ars Goetia. These depictions emphasize the serpent tail and the pale horse, not the viper or the herbal knowledge.

Bathin’s Depiction Is a Record of Transmission

The image of Bathin that circulates on social media and in Pinterest boards is mostly Le Breton’s 1863 engraving: a winged reptile-faced duke on a dragon. That image is historically inaccurate but culturally dominant. It represents what happens when a textual tradition passes through a visual intermediary who had never seen a grimoire.

The older image, the one that matters for practice, is simpler: a strong man with a serpent’s tail, mounted on a pale horse, carrying a viper. That image survived in manuscripts that never reached a printing press until Mathers and Hockley transcribed them. It is the image the grimoire requires.

The lesson for anyone working with the Goetic spirits is plain. The art you find first may not be the art you need. Check the source. Read Weyer. Compare the manuscripts. The viper and the pale horse are not decorative. They are the spirit’s signature.

For more on the seventy-two spirits and their seals, see our demonology and Goetia hub. The Bathin seal and its variations are documented in our glossary. And for a deeper look at how the Lemegeton was assembled, read our guide to the Lesser Key of Solomon. The image matters. The text matters more.