European learned magic has passed through a number of distinct phases of development. It is suggested here that there were five of these. The first was the ancient, which provided most of the materials for those coming later: the consecrated circle within which some magicians worked, the importance attached to cardinal points of the compass, the concepts of elements (fire, water, air, and earth) and of elemental spirits, a belief in the existence of angels and demons, and use of ritual tools, amulets, spells, and invocations, the notion of spiritual correspondences within the natural world, the use of sacred geometry such as pentagrams and triangles, and the drawing of spirits or deities into human bodies, to fuse temporarily with the owners’ spirit or to occupy their forms.
The second was the medieval phase, which really began as an aspect of the twelfth-century Renaissance. It placed a new emphasis upon the importance of complex set rituals to gain power over spirits, collected in handbooks (‘grimoires’) which inspired something of the awe of sacred texts, and usually involving a combination of the circle, the quarters, tools, signs, and invocations. The detail of actions was all-important, with little concern shown for the quality of the practitioner… The third phase was the early modern one, which retained this medieval magic but drew upon the ancient hermetic texts to put new emphasis upon the figure of the person who worked it, the magus. He was seen as an individual who needed to be both spiritually mature and unusually learned, and thus the mental preparation of the operator of magic was now held to be as important as the operation itself…
The fourth phase was the Enlightenment one, in which the magi and grimoires were eclipsed by the proliferation of secret societies… Finally, there is the modern phase.
— Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft