What we now call "the Goetia" did not arrive whole and at once: it was assembled over more than two thousand years, copy by copy and language by language. This is the documented chain, with dates and a link to each piece. It is not a clean A→B pipeline but a braided river (the image is J.-P. Boudet's): branches that split and rejoin.

1. 3rd c. BCBook of Enoch — the Watchers, angels who came down to earth and "fell": the oldest substratum from which the tradition will later draw its demons.
2. 2nd c. BCBook of Tobit — Asmodeus, driven off by the smoke of the fish: one of the few goetic demons with a biblical biography.
3. c. 3rd c. (with earlier materials)Testament of Solomon — the king binds the demons with his ring and questions them one by one: one of the first catalogues of spirits with a name and an office, a mould for much of what follows.
4. 14th c. · †1327Cecco d'Ascoli — an early witness to the mirror-oracle motif (Floron), told as a Christian warning.
5. 15th–16th c.Livre des Esperitz — one of the first true goetic catalogues: the ranks (king, duke, marquis…) are already here. Transcribed in the Library and compared in the Livre↔Liber collation.
6. 15th c.Munich Handbook · Clm 849 — not a goetic catalogue but a practical manual of clerical necromancy: circles, conjurations and mirrors. It shows the kind of ritual the tradition draws on. In the Library.
7. 1508Antipalus Maleficiorum · Trithemius — Abbot Johannes Trithemius catalogues the magical and necromantic books then in circulation (over a hundred, with their opening lines), so they could be recognised and countered: a bibliographic witness to which grimoires existed in 1508.
8. 16th c.Liber Officiorum Spirituum · Folger V.b.26 — the textual brother of the Livre: two witnesses to the same lost source. The name warps from copy to copy; the office survives and gives the spirit away. In the Library.
9. 1577Pseudomonarchia Daemonum · Johann Weyer — 69 spirits, still without seals. Weyer was no practitioner but a sceptic who declared he had left parts out to make the system unusable; perhaps for that reason his branch does not carry the Three Chiefs (an inference, not something he states). In the Library.
10. 1584Discoverie of Witchcraft · Reginald Scot — Weyer's list crosses into English and spreads.
11. 17th c.Lemegeton · Ars Goetia — 72 spirits, now with a seal: this is where the seals of this goetic list are fixed, the ones everyone now associates with the Goetia. The work this site is built on: what the Ars Goetia is and the catalogue of the 72.
12. 18th c.Grimorium Verum — the other stream, the popular southern one: the 18 spirits of Syrach and the Three Chiefs. A separate textual family, not "the 72 with extras": see the two streams.
13. 1904 · modernMathers & Crowley — the base edition almost everyone uses today. They add what is not ancient: the Preliminary Invocation ("Bornless"), taken from the Greek Magical Papyri, and the Enochian translations. Detailed in the Methodology.
14. 20th–21st c. · UPGDemonolatry and modern gnosis — the "enns" and much of what is now believed "traditional" are born here, with no historical source. We record them, but marked as modern.

→ See: The two streams · Livre↔Liber collation · Methodology · Library

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