Every craft that human hands have mastered, he already knew.
The Spirit
Vapula — also written Naphula — is the sixtieth spirit of the Ars Goetia and a Great Duke of the infernal hierarchy. He appears in the received texts as a lion furnished with the wings of a gryphon, a hybrid emblem that binds the sovereignty of the beast to the aerial swiftness of the raptor. The combination is fitting for a spirit whose gift is intellectual rather than martial: the lion for mastery, the wings for the reach of a mind that passes freely over every field of human endeavour.
His name occupies an uncertain place in the manuscript tradition, sometimes conflated with other entries, but the character assigned to him is consistent. He is a teacher of arts, and the grimoire treats him as one of the more benign and useful of the seventy-two, closer to a tutor than to a tempter.
Office
The Ars Goetia holds that Vapula makes men wonderful in all handicrafts, professions, and sciences, and instructs them in philosophy. His province is competence itself — the accumulated skill of the trades and the disciplines — so that the one who commands him is said to become expert in whatever craft or study he chooses to pursue. He is invoked, in the older reading, less for power over others than for a swift and thorough mastery of learning.
Attributes
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| Number | 60 |
| Rank | Duke |
| Legions | 36 |
| Appearance | A lion with the wings of a gryphon |