What people call «the Goetia» is not one river but two overlapping streams we usually collapse into one. The list of 72 is late; many of its spirits are far older.
On one side is the northern literary stream: the line of the spirit-catalogues that runs from the Livre des Esperitz and the Liber Officiorum Spirituum (15th–16th c.) to Weyer's Pseudomonarchia (1577), then to Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), and at last to the Lemegeton (mid-17th c.) and the Mathers & Crowley edition (1904). This is the one this site maps. On the other, the southern folk stream: the clerical-popular magic of the Mediterranean (Italy, Spain, southern France, Greece) that flows into the Grimorium Verum (18th c.), with a different scaffolding —the Three Chiefs, Lucifer, Beelzebub and Astaroth, through the go-between Scirlin— and an art of the pact. They share part of the cast of spirits, but their framework differs.
The most telling detail is what became of the Three Chiefs. In the Livre des Esperitz they are still spirits 1, 2 and 3 —Lucifer, Beelzebub and Satan— before the four kings, with Lucifer also up in the header. In the Liber Officiorum (the Folger English copy) they survive only as an aside: «there be 3 devills in the art of Nigromancy: Lucifer, Beelzebub, Satan»… and the text moves straight on to the kings and the office-list. You can watch the flattening happen from one witness to the next. And there is a culprit with a name: Weyer was not a practitioner but a skeptic who stated he left parts out to make the system unworkable. So the literary branch drops the Three Chiefs and much of the apparatus —not by accident of transmission, but by a hostile editor. The southern stream, by contrast, kept them.
We can say this because we transcribed the witnesses ourselves, not because a handbook repeats it. Reading the Livre des Esperitz and the Liber Officiorum Spirituum side by side, a «braided river» appears (the image is J.-P. Boudet's): they share some 35 spirits —names almost always mangled: Beal/Baall, Agarat/Acharos, Barbas/Barbates, Forcas/Forcase, Oze/Ose…— next to a handful that show up in only one. Not a clean A→B pipe, but two branches of one older trunk. In our editions each correspondence is marked, and on every entry we anchor the demon to its oldest documented form.
See also the Methodology, the Bibliography and the Library of texts.
grimorium.lat · Documentary library of ritual magic, demonology and historical grimoires