Bune

Interpretation — Solomonic Tradition (Mathers/Crowley, 1904)

In Mathers' edition, Bune holds the catalog's twenty-sixth position and is described with the title of Duke, commanding a number of legions of spirits according to the text. He is listed with attributes that include changing the burial place of the dead, causing spirits to gather upon their sepulchres, granting riches and wisdom to the text's described interlocutor, and speaking in a clear and articulate manner.

Interpretation — Dr. Rudd's Tradition (manuscript, c. 1650)

The manuscript attributed to Thomas Rudd, predating Mathers' edition by roughly two and a half centuries, documents a related but distinct version of the catalog — in it, each of the 72 spirits is paired with a corresponding angel drawn from the Kabbalistic Shem HaMephorash system (72 divine names), a restraining/governing structural element absent from Mathers' edition. The precise identification of the angel corresponding to Bune in Rudd's documentary practice is discussed in Joseph Peterson's research on the Rudd manuscripts, which systematized this angel-spirit pairing across the whole catalog.

Interpretation — Luciferian Tradition (modern interpretation)

In the modern Luciferian reading, associated chiefly with Michael W. Ford and works such as The Luciferian Goetia, the Ars Goetia's spirits are read not as external entities subordinate to a higher divine authority but as archetypal masks for the practitioner's internal processes, to be explored in the pursuit of self-knowledge. Under this lens, Bune's triple head — dog, griffin, and man — is read as a symbol of integrating instinct, ambition, and reason into a single consciousness, and his association with sepulchres and spirits gathered over the dead is reinterpreted as the practitioner's symbolic confrontation with what must be laid to rest or transformed within, on the way toward the riches and wisdom the text itself attributes to him.