I've been looking for a way to connect the goes of ancient Greece to the goetia most people involved in occultism think of (the Ars Goetia/Lesser Key of Solomon). I know Jake Stratton-Kent has written on this, but I find that his work didn't do much to elaborate on the musical and funerary origins of goos/goes. Goos/goes comes from a word meaning wailing or weeping, so the connection should be self-evident, but I never see anyone talking about it.
The best book I've found on the subject is Dangerous Voices: Women's Laments and Greek Literature by Gail Holst-Warhaft. She traces the history of the funeral lament from ancient to modern times, spending a lot of time exploring the suppression of the lament. After the war with Persia, Greek government began to center its power in the polis rather than in powerful family groups. One way of doing this was passing laws to suppress funeral traditions that focused on family ties, replacing them with theater traditions that moved the emotional center to the polis.
That doesn't mean that lamentation disappeared; in fact, Holst-Warhaft describes the tradition as ongoing, for example in Mani. But lamentation was marginalized and otherized; its association with women meant that it had to be de-powered for the patriarchal polis.
That's because it was (is) powerful. Modern laments may call on the living to enact revenge for the sake of the dead one and their mourners; ancient laments called directly on the spirits of the dead. Holst-Warhaft writes:
âGoos is the magic incantation that can traverse the shadowy realm between. In this sense its magic is linked to that of Orpheus, charming his way by means of music to the underworld. Goos, goeteia, thelgeinâlament, charm, to charm âwords that seem distant in mood begin to converge. Nor is this something peculiar to Greece. In Egypt, where âlamentationsâ were a major feature of religious ceremony, music was thought to have an influence on people through a power called hekaâ or hike which was similar to a spell. Similarly the Latin cantus and carmen are, of course, related to âenchantingâ and âcharmâ. The word âtragedyâ itselfâtraghodiaâis a compound which includes the word âsongâ, and has become the general term for song in modern Greek...the words of a lament are cries in themselves, pure expressions of feelings that defy articulation in the language of everyday speech or of literature...The goos stirs up, or troubles, the emotions of the living and the dead, drawing them out of their inertia.â
(119-120)
The later goetia has an entirely different feel to it, relying on very specific instructions (like protective amulets made from virgin parchment, drawn on with a particular ink, written with a particular pen, all which have to be made/procured while reciting prayers or incantations). But the fundamental idea of summoning a spirit being to work your will is the same, even though the methods are entirely different.
An essay by Sarah Iles Johnston helps to elaborate on this a little. It's called "The Testament of Solomon from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance," collected in the book The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period. It's a pretty short article, but she explains that The Testament of Solomon (an obvious influence on the later Ars Goetia/Lesser Key of Solomon) "is a well mixed bricolage" (p. 39) of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Jewish, and Christian beliefs with parallels in the magical papyri. Johnston mentions that:
âThe rituals that the papyri record are several centuries older than the papyrus texts themselves, and have probably evolved from far earlier ritual techniques for manipulating the souls of the dead.â (p. 42)
I know that a lot of the content of the later goetia (like the parchment/ink/pen requirements mentioned above) have equivalents in the PGM. But I don't know what the connection is between the PGM and traditions of lament. More research needed
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