Goetia
title: Goetia: The Work of the Spirits
Goetia is the art of the chthonic: binding, bargaining with, and draining the spirits beneath the world — daimones, the dead, the old hungry things. You do not wait for an answer; you take one. Its works are grim and seductive: a curse tablet slipped under a threshold, a bound daimon that opens any lock, a dead man's shade compelled to speak what it saw.
Speed and its price
What takes a theurgist a day of purification and prayer, you do in the hour of the binding. No fasting, no waiting on the god's schedule. That speed is the seduction — and the price is a ledger that compounds. Every binding is a small debt, every price is a small thread, and the threads never untie themselves. The discipline of goetia is not power; it is bookkeeping.
Miasma does not poison your work — it feeds it. Each point of miasma adds +1 to your bindings, up to +5, because spirits find you kin. Beyond that it stops helping and starts attracting things you did not summon.
Binding a spirit
Binding a daimon (a katadesmos) is a contest: your d20 + Charisma + Preparation + Grade + Miasma vs. the daimon's Resistance — minor 12, notable 16, great 20+. Your odds improve with leverage:
| Leverage | Bonus |
|---|---|
| Its true name | +2 |
| Its weakness honored (running water, the pure name) | +2 to +4 |
| Its price paid in advance | +2 (and it cannot cry foul later) |
| Correct binding conditions (place, hour, knot) | +2 |
Leverage is everything. A goetist who binds without leverage is gambling; a goetist who binds with true name, price, and hour is performing a contract.
Prices
Every daimon has a price — the thing it wants, the thing it eats, the thing it was made for. Pay it in advance and the binding holds clean. Fail the binding and it takes its price anyway — and it chooses how. That is the rule the whole school rests on: the spirits always collect. The only question is whether you chose the payment or they did.
Katadesmoi and terms
A bound spirit is bound to a task for a term: a number of uses, a span, or "until the task is done." When the term ends, the spirit is free — and it remembers the binder. Rebinding is the contest again, and the spirit remembers the first time. This is why no binding is permanent and why every goetist sleeps with one eye open: the things you have bound are patient, and their patience outlasts your vigilance.
The spirit ledger
Spirits keep no ladders — they keep books. Every relationship with a daimon is a balance:
- Services rendered to you (+) — the spirit owes you. This is what makes a katadesmos feel permanent while it lasts.
- Prices paid and promises owed (−) — you owe the spirit. It holds a claim, and a claim can be called at any time, in the spirit's own way. Interest compounds: an unpaid claim grows a little each season.
A daimon holding a big claim is a patron of sorts — it protects what it is owed. That is the mirror of divine favor, except the daimon remembers everything and does not forgive. This is why goetists die owing more than they can pay: not because the spirits are cruel, but because they are accountants.
The shadow
Goetia is not evil — it is the power the poor and desperate reach for when the temples will not help: the widow who binds a shade to find her son's murderer, the slave who curses the master's house. The same craft is also how tyrants keep their thrones. The school does not judge; you do. But everyone — priests, spirits, the gods themselves — will judge what you bind, and the judgment has teeth.
The daimon called Kothos is said to answer any binder who speaks its name correctly at the crossroads on the third night of the dark moon. Its price is always the same, and no one who has paid it will say what it was. That is the whole school in one story: the door is open, the price is real, and the ledger never closes.