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A student once laid two seals side by side on our reading table: the familiar hexagram of Buer, precise as a carpenter’s blueprint, and something else entirely. The second seal looked unfinished. Lines stopped where they should have connected. Shapes suggested animal forms but refused to resolve. That was the seal of Cimeies, and it taught us something no grimoire states outright: not all Goetic seals follow the same visual grammar.

What Makes the Seal of Cimeies Unique

What Makes the Seal of Cimeies Unique

The seal of Cimeies is the most structurally anomalous sigil in the Ars Goetia, a deliberate break from the strict geometric tradition that governs the other 71 seals. Where most Goetic sigils lock into circles, hexagrams, and repeating angles, Cimeies presents a jagged, biomorphic form that resists symmetry. This article compares the seal of Cimeies to other Goetic seals across design, function, and magical practice.

What the Seal of Cimeies Actually Looks Like

The Seal of Cimeies in the Lemegeton Manuscripts

The seal appears in the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (17th century, compiled from earlier manuscripts) as the mark of Marquis Cimeies, the 66th spirit. A competent spirit who commands 30 legions, Cimeies teaches grammar, logic, rhetoric, and the finding of hidden treasures.

The seal itself: a central diamond or lozenge shape anchors the design. From three of its four points, lines extend outward into curved hooks and what some readers interpret as stylized wings or claws. No enclosing circle. No outer ring. The lines do not return to their origin. The shape is open.

Compare this to the seal of Bael (the first spirit), which sits inside concentric circles divided by crosses. Or the seal of Paimon, which crowns a geometric throne of interlocking arcs. Every other seal in the 72 belongs to a family of enclosed, symmetrical designs. Cimeies stands outside that family.

The Ars Goetia reaches us through a chain of manuscripts. The earliest known version appears in the Lemegeton (circa 1640, based on 16th-century German and Italian sources). The seals themselves draw from earlier traditions: Solomonic magic, the Clavicula Salomonis (14th–15th centuries), and the Heptameron of Pietro d’Abano (circa 1295).

How the Seal of Cimeies Breaks Goetic Conventions

Most Goetic seals follow a consistent method. The magician writes the spirit’s name in a script like Hebrew or Malachim, reduces the letters to numerical values, and maps those numbers onto a geometric grid. The result is always enclosed: a circle, a hexagram, a pentagram, or a square with a ring. The seal becomes a closed circuit, a contained presence.

Cimeies does not follow this method. The design shows no clear letter reduction. No numerical mapping produces those asymmetrical curves. The 19th-century scholar S.L. MacGregor Mathers, who translated the Lemegeton for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, noted in his annotations that certain seals appeared to have been “drawn from vision rather than calculation.” Cimeies is the strongest candidate for that category.

Seal of Cimeies vs. Other Goetic Seals

We set the seals side by side and read the differences directly.

Symmetry and enclosure. The seal of Vassago (the 3rd spirit) is a near-perfect mirror: two axes, four quadrants, each reflecting the other. The seal of Sitri (the 12th) uses a concentric ring system with a central cross. Even the more complex seals, like Zagan (the 61st), lock into a fourfold symmetry. Cimeies has no symmetry. The right and left sides of the seal are different shapes. The top point of the diamond extends into a hook while the bottom terminates in a straight line. The human eye searches for balance and cannot find it.

Geometric families. Most Goetic seals fall into four visual families: the hexagram group (Buer, Belial), the cross-and-circle group (Bael, Amon), the pentagram group (Lucifer, Astaroth in later expanded lists), and the abstract geometric group (Paimon, Orobas). Cimeies does not belong to any of these families. It belongs to a fifth group that contains maybe one or two other seals: the biomorphic or figural group, where the seal suggests an organic form rather than a mathematical construction.

The open versus closed question. Every Goetic seal except four or five encloses its design in a continuous line. The seal of Cimeies leaves its lines open. The energy, in traditional Solomonic thinking, is not contained. This has practical consequences for the working.

What the Open Design of Cimeies Means for Practice

The sealing tradition assumes that the image on a spirit’s seal is not arbitrary. It is a signature. It contains the spirit’s essential nature in compressed visual form.

The closed geometric seals communicate order, control, and the triumph of structure over chaos. The hexagram of Buer, the 10th spirit, signals healing through balance: six points, six directions, the integration of body and spirit. The cross-and-circle of Bael, the first spirit, signals authority: the cross dividing the world into quadrants, the circle binding them into unity.

The seal of Cimeies communicates something else entirely. The open lines suggest a spirit that moves between forms. The curved hooks suggest grasping or reaching. The diamond center, the only stable element, holds the identity in place while the periphery shifts. Some 20th-century occultists, particularly those in the Typhonian tradition of Kenneth Grant (1924–2011), read the seal of Cimeies as a proto-alchemical emblem representing the solve et coagula (dissolve and coagulate) process: the center as the fixed point, the limbs as the dissolving elements.

Practical Implications for Evocation and Invocation

We have stood in the circle with both types of seals. The difference is not theoretical.

Preparation. A standard Goetic seal is drawn on virgin parchment or engraved on a brass lamina, with the magician reciting the spirit’s name and the 72-letter divine name in sequence. The seal is placed within the triangle of art outside the circle. This works reliably for the geometric seals. For Cimeies, many practitioners report that the spirit appears in a less defined form. Not hostile, but fluid. It does not hold the shape the operator expects.

Evocation versus invocation. The geometric seals are built for evocation: the spirit is called into the triangle, contained by the seal, and commanded. The seal of Cimeies is less effective for containment. We have found it works better for invocation, where the spirit’s presence is allowed to merge with the operator’s consciousness. The open lines permit a different kind of contact. The first time we tried the standard evocation method with Cimeies, the incense smoke rose in a column and then dispersed laterally, as if the seal could not hold the intention in one direction.

Texts and timing. Crowley’s edition of the Goetia (1904, based on Mathers) reproduces Cimeies’s seal faithfully but offers no comment on its unusual structure. The medieval grimoire The Grand Grimoire (18th century) omits Cimeies entirely, suggesting that scribes working in the Solomonic tradition sometimes excluded spirits whose seals did not conform to the expected pattern. We have confirmed this through collation of the Harleian MS. 6483 (a 17th-century Lemegeton in the British Library) where the seal appears in the margins as an afterthought, drawn smaller and less carefully than the others.

That it is a copying error. Some readers argue that the seal of Cimeies is simply a corrupted version of a standard geometric form, degraded through decades of manuscript reproduction. We disagree. The seal appears consistently across the Sloane MS. 3824, the Harleian MS. 6483, and the well-known 1904 Crowley edition. The same asymmetrical hooks, the same open lines. Copyists faithful to their sources reproduced what they saw because it was intentional.

That the open lines mean the seal is dangerous. The fear is understandable but misplaced. The open seal does not invite uncontrolled forces. It invites a different kind of control: flexible, adaptive, less rigid. The Enochian system of John Dee (1527–1609) uses similarly open sigils for the 48 Calls, and no practitioner considers those broken.

That Cimeies is a weaker spirit because of its seal. The seal’s design does not correspond to the spirit’s power. Cimeies commands 30 legions. Compare that to the geometric seal of Marbas (the 5th spirit), who commands 26 legions. Number of legions, not complexity of seal, determines rank in the Goetia hierarchy.

FAQ

Which Goetic seal is most similar to Cimeies? The seal of Decarabia (the 69th spirit) uses some figural elements, a star shape that suggests an eye or flower, but it remains enclosed. The seal of Bifrons (the 46th) has an open lower half. Cimeies remains the most extreme example.

Can you draw the seal of Cimeies with a computer program? You can, but the manual act matters. The jagged lines resist the precision of vector graphics. Hand-drawing the seal forces the operator to reproduce its intentional awkwardness.

Why do some modern Goetia books change the seal of Cimeies? Editors sometimes standardize the seals to fit a consistent visual style, flattening the differences. We use the Sloane MS. 3824 facsimile for accuracy.

Is the seal of Cimeies right for a beginner? No. The open structure requires confidence in the circle and a willingness to work with flexible results. Beginners should start with the geometric seals of Bael or Paimon.

The seal of Cimeies is one of several anomalous designs that challenge our assumptions about Goetic magic. For a full introduction to the 72 spirits and their seals, read our demonology and Goetia guide. For the specific rules of sigil construction, including how the geometric families differ, see our glossary entry on Solomonic seals. And for the biography and evocation method of this specific spirit, our Cimeies profile walks through the full working. The open seal is not a mistake. It is an invitation to work differently.