How old are the Goetic demons?

The count

The list turns out to have a small ancient core and a large early-modern body. Of the 72 spirits the Ars Goetia lists, 4 are named in any text older than the early-modern grimoire tradition. The remaining 68 — 94% of the list — first appear in this corpus in the sixteenth century or later, overwhelmingly in Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia of 1577, from which the Goetia derives.

That is not two independent witnesses to seventy-two ancient spirits. It is one list, copied and extended, with a handful of genuinely old names embedded in it — and those 4 are the ones everybody already knows: Astaroth, Asmoday, Bael, Belial. Each is a name the earlier literature already carried — a Canaanite goddess, a Persian demon of wrath, a Semitic storm-god title, a biblical byword for worthlessness — and all of them are attested before the common era.

When is each name first attested?

Shares are of the 72 spirits whose earliest attesting text carries a date. The Ars Goetia itself is dated 17th c.; ed. 1904.

The ten oldest names on the list

What the count does and does not show

Method

Every attestation in the corpus is one named text saying something about one figure. The cut at 1500 is the boundary of the early-modern grimoire tradition: Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia and the Ars Goetia are one lineage rather than two witnesses, so counting a spirit as attested because both list it would double the evidence without adding any. For each spirit the Ars Goetia lists, this page takes every other text on the site that names the same figure and reports the earliest one carrying a date. Identifications between a Goetic spirit and an older deity are the attributed relations already recorded on the profiles — this study makes no identification of its own, and every row links to the profile where the chain can be checked. The full weighting method is documented separately.