Invoking Sitri in Magic: Powers, Correspondences & Dangers
Sitri is one of the more immediately striking figures in the Ars Goetia — and not just because of his appearance. He is the 12th of the 72 spirits, a Prince commanding 60 legions of demons, and his domain cuts straight to the most primal currents of human experience: desire, lust, passion, and the hidden vulnerabilities of those around you. If you are working with the Goetic spirits and you are drawn to workings of love, attraction, or erotic influence, Sitri is one of the most potent names you can invoke. But he is also one of the least forgiving if you come to him without focus. This article will introduce you to who Sitri is, what he can do, how to align your practice with his energies, and what you genuinely need to watch out for when calling his name.
Who Is Sitri? Powers, Rank, and Nature
Sitri appears as the 12th spirit in the Ars Goetia, which forms the first section of the 17th-century grimoire The Lesser Key of Solomon. His name is also spelled Bitru or Sytry in some manuscript variants — these are the same spirit. He holds the rank of Prince, which in Goetic hierarchy places him among the commanding nobility of the demonic order, below Kings but above Dukes and Earls in terms of the particular kind of authority they wield. He rules 60 legions of inferior spirits, which gives you a sense of the scale of his reach.
His traditional powers, as described in the Goetia, are narrow but extraordinarily potent. Sitri inflames humans with desire — specifically, he causes men and women to lust after one another. He can compel a person to reveal themselves naked, meaning he strips away inhibition and secrecy, exposing people's hidden desires and private selves. In practical magical terms, this translates into workings of attraction, seduction, erotic obsession, and the drawing-out of someone's concealed feelings or intentions. He is not a spirit of romantic love in the soft, sentimental sense. His territory is raw desire, physical passion, and the kind of wanting that overrides reason.
His described appearance is one of the more unusual in the Goetia. He manifests first as a leopard-headed figure with the wings of a griffin — a hybrid form combining predatory animal power with the aerial dominance of a mythological beast. When commanded by the magician, he takes on a beautiful human form. This shift in appearance is meaningful. The initial animal form reflects his untamed, instinct-driven nature. The shift to beauty on command is a direct parallel to what he does in his workings: he reveals the attractive, desirable aspect of things when focused will is applied. Your will is the command that brings his power into a usable shape.
Sitri does not have a large web of named affiliations with other Goetic spirits in the traditional texts, but his domain overlaps meaningfully with spirits like Sallos, who governs love between men and women, and Asmodeus, who rules over lust and is one of the more powerful demonic kings. Sitri operates with more precision than Asmodeus — his focus is tighter, his invocation more contained. He is not a spirit of chaotic destruction or grand ambition. His limitations are in fact part of what makes him approachable: he is specific, he responds to clear intention, and his traditional descriptions do not include the kind of deceptive or harmful trickery attributed to some other Goetic princes.
Sitri's Magical Correspondences
Correspondences are the symbolic language of magic. When you align your working environment — your tools, timing, colors, and materials — with the energy of the spirit or force you are invoking, you are not following arbitrary rules. You are building a resonant field that focuses your intention more precisely and signals to your own subconscious exactly what kind of power you are calling forward. Think of correspondences as tuning forks. The more of them you use in alignment, the cleaner and stronger the signal you send.
Here are Sitri's core correspondences as understood in traditional and modern practice:
- Element: Fire — Sitri's domain of lust, passion, and consuming desire is quintessentially fiery. Fire represents will, transformation, drive, and the force that burns through resistance.
- Direction: South — the directional home of fire in Western ceremonial and Wiccan frameworks, associated with passion, heat, and active force.
- Planet: Venus — Sitri's influence over desire, attraction, and the erotic aligns him with Venus, the planet governing love, beauty, pleasure, and magnetic pull between people.
- Number: 12 (his position among the 72 spirits) and 60 (the number of legions he commands) — use these in your workings as structural numbers, such as timing, repetition, or arrangement of components on your altar.
- Colors: Deep red, crimson, scarlet, and copper tones — colors of passion, physical desire, heat, and Venusian beauty.
- Metals: Copper (Venusian metal, associated with attraction and magnetism) and gold (solar warmth and radiance that amplifies desire).
- Incense and Herbs: Rose, jasmine, damiana, cinnamon, patchouli, and musk — all traditional materials used in workings of lust, attraction, and erotic influence. Damiana in particular has long been used in passion and desire workings.
- Stones and Crystals: Red jasper, carnelian, garnet, and rose quartz — stones associated with desire, physical vitality, passion, and attraction.
- Sigil: Sitri's unique sigil from the Ars Goetia — used as the focal point of any invocation or petition working. Draw or print it clearly and place it at the center of your working space.
- Day: Friday — Venus's day in traditional planetary magic, the strongest day for any working aligned with attraction, love, desire, or interpersonal influence.
- Time: The planetary hour of Venus on a Friday amplifies the resonance significantly. Evening hours are also traditional for desire workings, when the day's distractions have faded and intention can run deeper.
When you are building a working with Sitri, you do not need to use every correspondence here. A red candle, his sigil, and jasmine incense on a Friday evening is a coherent, resonant setup. More is not always more in magic. What matters is that every element you include is chosen consciously and placed with intention. Sitri responds to clarity. The more precisely you know what you want and the more clearly your working environment reflects that desire, the more effectively his energy can move through your working.
One area worth understanding clearly is the range of his practical applications. Sitri's power is not limited to drawing a single specific person. His domain covers the full spectrum of erotic and desire-based workings: drawing attraction to yourself generally, increasing someone's awareness of you, intensifying existing passion in a relationship, compelling the revelation of hidden feelings, and workings intended to break down emotional or physical inhibition. This is potent, wide-ranging territory. The key is entering that territory with precision — knowing what you want before you begin, not during.
The Specific Dangers of Working With Sitri
Every spirit in the Goetia carries its own particular risks, and Sitri's dangers are not the same as the risks you would face with a spirit of wrath or destruction. He does not threaten physical harm in the way that some of the more volatile Goetic kings are described as doing. His dangers are subtler and, for that reason, easier to miss until they have already taken root in your life.
The most significant risk specific to Sitri is the rebound of uncontrolled desire. When you invoke a spirit whose entire domain is inflaming passion and stripping away inhibition, you are working with forces that do not stay neatly inside your intended target. If your own desires are unfocused, ambivalent, or charged with unresolved longing — which is true for most people much of the time — Sitri's energy can amplify your own internal state just as readily as it acts outward. Practitioners have reported intensified obsessive thinking, difficulty letting go of the person or situation they worked on, and the development of a consuming fixation that becomes harder to manage than the original problem they wanted to solve.
The second specific danger is his power of revelation. Sitri does not just expose others — he exposes. If you invoke him and there are things about your own desires that you have not fully examined, you may find them surfacing in ways you were not prepared for. This can mean sudden clarity about what you actually want, which sounds positive but can be deeply disorienting if what you discover contradicts your conscious self-image or your current relationship situation. Do not invoke Sitri if you are not prepared to look at yourself honestly.
Third, and practically important: Sitri's workings tend to run hot and fast once they begin, which makes them difficult to redirect or withdraw. Unlike some spirits who respond well to the magician returning to adjust or cancel a working, desire-based workings generally take on momentum of their own once activated. Before you invoke him, be specific and be certain. A vague or half-formed desire sent through Sitri's energy can produce results that technically fulfill the letter of what you asked for while creating a situation you did not want. This is not a reason to avoid him — it is a reason to be as clear as you would be before any powerful working.
Sitri in Historical Context
Sitri's documented history runs through the Solomonic grimoire tradition, which crystallized primarily in medieval and early modern Europe but drew on much older currents of Jewish, Christian, Arabic, and classical demonological thought. The Ars Goetia itself, as the first book of the Lemegeton or Lesser Key of Solomon, was compiled in the 17th century — but the spirits it catalogues appear in earlier manuscript traditions going back several centuries further. Sitri appears in the 16th-century grimoire Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, compiled by Johann Weyer in 1577, where he is described in terms nearly identical to the later Goetia entry.
Weyer's work is significant because it represents one of the earliest systematic catalogues of demonic hierarchy in print. Weyer himself was a physician and a skeptic of witchcraft persecution — his goal in documenting these spirits was partly to demystify them — but the magical tradition he was drawing from was already well-established. The fact that Sitri appears consistently across multiple manuscript traditions with the same basic attributes suggests he represents a coherent and persistent current within Western demonological magic, not a later invention.
The figure of a desire-granting spirit who inflames lust and reveals hidden things has much older roots than the Solomonic tradition. Similar figures appear in ancient Near Eastern magical texts — spirits or divine forces invoked specifically to bind the affections of another person or to make someone irresistible in the eyes of another. Love and lust magic is among the oldest documented forms of magical practice across nearly every culture. Sitri, in this sense, is the Solomonic tradition's formalization of a human magical impulse that predates Christianity, predates the grimoire tradition, and appears in clay tablets, papyrus manuscripts, and folk practices across thousands of years of recorded history. When you invoke his name, you are connecting with something genuinely ancient in human magical practice.
In modern practice, Sitri has become one of the more frequently worked Goetic spirits, particularly in traditions influenced by the chaos magic revival and contemporary Goetic practice popularized through works like S. Connolly's writings on demonolatry, E.A. Koetting's ceremonial approach, and the broader resurgence of interest in Solomonic magic. He is considered accessible — responsive to invocation without requiring the elaborate ceremonial infrastructure described in older grimoires — while still carrying genuine power. That accessibility, combined with the immediate and recognizable nature of his domain, makes him a natural entry point for practitioners beginning to explore Goetic work seriously.