The oldest manuscripts of the Lemegeton give Botis no face. They give a sigil, a rank, and a few lines of description, and they stop there. Botis is the 17th spirit of the Ars Goetia, a president of hell who appears first as a viper and later as a horned man with a sword. Artists have spent four centuries deciding what that actually looks like.
From the pen-and-ink sigils of the 1600s to the engravings of the 1800s, this is how Botis, the 17th spirit of the Ars Goetia, has been pictured and why it matters.
In the Ars Goetia, the first book of The Lesser Key of Solomon, Botis is listed as a president under the Great King of the East. The text describes an ugly serpent, and then a human form with great teeth, two horns, and a sharp sword. His declared offices are to tell of things past, present, and future, and to make friends and foes agree. He commands 60 legions of spirits.
Where the portrait began: a text without an image
That text is the whole source. What follows is how it became an image.
The Lesser Key of Solomon was compiled in England around the 1640s, drawing on earlier lists. Johann Weyer had already published Botis in his Pseudomonarchia Daemonum in 1563, where he also appears as a president. In the manuscripts of the Lemegeton, such as Sloane MS 273 at the British Library, the spirit’s name, rank, and sigil are written in ink, but no portrait exists. The sigil was the image, and for practitioners it was enough. Both works belong to the wider tradition of the vertical hub.
The drawings we recognise today came later, from the printing presses of the 19th century. The 1863 edition of Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, illustrated by Louis Le Breton, gave the seventy-two spirits their first mass-produced faces, and the Goetia of Mathers and Crowley followed in 1904 with its own line plates. For readers of those books, the serpent acquired a snout, a crown, or a human torso, and the vague words of the grimoire hardened into a character.
That mattered because a face changes a relationship. When a spirit has a portrait, the practitioner is no longer working with a description. They are working with a personality, and the art tells them how to stand and what to expect.
What the serpent, the sword, and the horns mean
That personality is built from three symbols, each with a weight of its own. The serpent comes first, and it is the oldest.
A viper is not a dragon. It is low, close to the ground, silent, and decisive. In the Mediterranean world where these spirits were catalogued, the serpent was both the enemy of saints and the guardian of temples, and the artists who drew Botis as a pure serpent were invoking that double nature. The sword changes the reading. A serpent that carries a sword is a serpent that judges, and the grimoire says Botis tells of past, present, and future, so the sword becomes the blade of truth.
The horns complete the picture. In the Christian imagery of the grimoire they mark him as demonic, but in older iconography horns were worn by gods and kings. The horned man with the sword is a figure of authority, not of chaos. For the people who used these images, the meaning was practical: if Botis reconciles, then the sword is not for cutting but for separating what must be separated and binding what must be bound.
How the image is used in practice
The art of Botis is not only on paper. It is drawn, worn, and set on altars.
In the working tradition of the Goetia, the sigil of Botis is inscribed on virgin parchment with a steel pen, and sometimes on a brass lamella. The exact drawing is copied from a manuscript, because the sigil is treated as a signature rather than a portrait. When the spirit is invoked, the operator holds the image in the left hand and speaks the conjuration from the text. The description of the serpent and the horned man serves as a recognition aid, so the operator can identify the spirit when it appears.
Modern practitioners have adapted the same habit, drawing or printing their own versions of Botis and placing them in a triangle of art. In a work of reconciliation, two candles are often set on either side of the image, one for each party, and left to burn together. The two flames are the parties, and their eventual meeting is the reconciliation. The grammar of seals, including the sigils of the Goetia, is explained in our glossary of related symbols.
How Botis compares with other spirits of the Goetia
Botis is not the only spirit with a serpent’s body, but he is the only one who keeps the sword. Agares, the second spirit, rides a crocodile and speaks all languages; his image is animal and mobile. Bael, the first, wears three heads and sets the pattern for therianthropy. Botis, by contrast, is a pure serpent or a horned man, and that restraint made him easier to draw and easier to remember.
In the Sloane manuscript the sigil is sparse, with a single curve. In later engravings he gained a crown, which is an interpretation, not a fact. We will say plainly: the crowned snake you see in many modern illustrated guides is a Victorian invention. The text never gives him a crown, and the horned man carries a sword, not a sceptre.
What people get wrong about Botis
Three errors repeat in popular discussions of Botis. First, that he is purely evil. The grimoire in which he appears treats all these spirits as demons, but his office is truthful speech and reconciliation, and the Christian framing does not erase the function. Second, that the sigil is a portrait of the spirit. It is a seal, a token of authority, and the manuscripts do not explain its meaning. Third, that the illustrations in modern books are medieval. Most descend from de Plancy and Crowley, and they say more about the 19th century than about the 17th.
The consequence of these errors is a flattened character. If you think Botis is a demon of spite, you will not ask the questions he is said to answer.
FAQ
Does Botis really appear as a snake? The Ars Goetia says he appears as an ugly serpent, and that is the only physical description in the text; artists have followed it for centuries.
Is Botis a demon? He is called a demon in the grimoire, but his office is to tell truth and to reconcile enemies, which is closer to a judge or a herald than to a devil.
How many legions does Botis command? The text gives him 60 legions, a number that places him among the more heavily staffed presidents of the Goetia.
Why does the sigil of Botis have no picture? Because the sigil is not an illustration; it is a seal to be drawn on parchment or metal, and the manuscripts reserve images for spirits that have a fixed form, which Botis does not.
Botis is one image in a gallery of seventy-two, and each portrait carries its own history. If you want to see how the sigils and texts fit together, our guide to the Ars Goetia is the next step, and the gallery of demons continues in the vertical hub. The serpent waits for the eyes that were ready to see him.