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Grimoires

The Key of Solomon

The Clavicula Salomonis: it is not the Lemegeton, it has no 72 demons, and its 44 pentacles are younger than they look.

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What it is

The Clavicula Salomonis — "Solomon's little key," in English The Key of Solomon or, popularly, the Greater Key — is the most influential grimoire in the Western magical tradition and the text that defines the genre. It is not a catalogue of demons: it is an operations manual. It teaches how to prepare the operator and the working space, how to make and consecrate instruments, how to choose the astrological moment, how to trace the circle and, above all, how to construct the planetary pentacles, its characteristic graphic contribution.

Its frame is avowedly pious: everything is performed nominally through the power of God, and the practitioner — called the "exorcist" — must confess his sins, fast, purify himself with water and hyssop, and pray. That devotional structure is not ornament: it allowed the text to circulate for centuries among clerics, physicians and notaries who did not consider themselves devil-worshippers. Richard Kieckhefer describes this milieu as a "clerical underworld": men with Latin training and access to the liturgy who adapted the Church's ritual apparatus to their own ends.

The scholarly consensus on dating has been firm from A. E. Waite to Owen Davies: there is no basis for attributing to the text, in its present form, an antiquity greater than the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. The attribution to Solomon is legendary tradition, a device of authority inherited from Jewish and Byzantine pseudepigraphic literature. The Hebrew of the manuscripts is, in Waite's words, corrupted by "two centuries of careless and ignorant transcription," which rules out a continuous Hebrew original.

Structure: Book I and Book II

The version canonized by Mathers is divided into two books totalling some 62 chapters, with a clear division of function.

Book I — theory, prayer and operations. It opens with the divine love that must precede knowledge; it proceeds to the days, hours and virtues of the planets (the doctrine of planetary hours that governs the whole system), the confession of the exorcist, and a graduated series of ever more potent conjurations. Then comes the chapter on the medals or pentacles and the manner of constructing them, and a catalogue of "experiments": recovering stolen goods, becoming invisible, preventing a hunter from taking game, the magical garters, the carpet for questioning intelligences, seizing a treasure guarded by spirits, obtaining favour and love, mockery and deceit. It culminates in the complete series of sacred pentacles, its visual core.

Book II — material preparation. The practical apparatus: times and conduct, fasting and continence, ablutions, vestments, the sacrifice and blood, the making of the instruments (knives with white and black handles, sword, sickle, bodkin, wand, staff, needle), virgin parchment and inks, wax candles, perfumes and fumigations, the tracing and blessing of the circle, water and hyssop, and the astrological images.

The division into two books is a feature of a textual family, not a universal property: Mathers insisted that "the Key proper comprises only two books," and excluded the material he had considered as a "third book."

Differences from the Lemegeton, point by point

The two texts share a Latin name and a legendary patron, and nothing else of substance. The confusion is modern and largely attributable to the label "Lesser Key," coined by Waite.

• Object. The Clavicula is a manual of generic ritual technique; the Lemegeton, a taxonomy of named spirits. The unit of content in the one is the operation; in the other, the entity.
• Demonic catalogue. The Clavicula has no list of 72 demons, no noble hierarchies, no tally of legions, no tale of the Babylonian brazen vessel. The Lemegeton is organized around exactly that.
• Sigils. The Clavicula gives no seals of individual entities, but rather planetary pentacles: figures bound to a heavenly body and to a function, not to a spirit with a proper name.
• Composition. The Clavicula is a unitary work in two books with divergent manuscript families; the Lemegeton, an anthology of five works of independent origin (Ars Goetia, Theurgia-Goetia, Pauline Art, Almadel, Ars Notoria).
• Language and date. The Clavicula has a tradition in Greek, Latin, Italian, French, English and Hebrew, with late medieval roots; the Lemegeton is a seventeenth-century English compilation.
• Tone and dependence. The Clavicula maintains a devotional-liturgical register; the Goetia coerces demons with threats. No filiation has been demonstrated: the Lemegeton's sources are others (Weyer via Scot, Trithemius, the Heptameron).

Textual history: from Byzantium to Italy

The best-established line begins in the Greek world. The Hygromanteia, or Magical Treatise of Solomon, is a Byzantine corpus preserved in fragments from the fifteenth century onward, the most frequently cited of which is British Library, Harley MS 5596, transcribed by Armand Delatte in Anecdota Atheniensia (1927). It contains talismans, magical swords, divining vessels, wax figures, angelic conjurations, planetary prayers and plant-planet correspondences. There is active scholarly disagreement about its origin: Pablo Torijano places it in the early Byzantine period, with material that might go back to the first centuries of our era; Ioannis Marathakis, in Venetian Crete of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Marathakis and Stephen Skinner published the standard modern translation in 2011. What is consensus is its function as a bridge between the magic of late antiquity and the European grimoires, favoured by the migration of Greek scholars to Italy after the fall of Constantinople (1453).

On the Latin side, Peter of Abano (c. 1250–1316) already mentions a Clavicula Salomonis in his Lucidator dubitabilium astronomiae (1303–10): the title was circulating before any surviving manuscript. The oldest partial Latin witness is the Trento (86°) manuscript, c. 1380–1410, identified by Matteo Cova; the oldest complete Latin text is Coxe 25, from the end of the fifteenth century, and Italian scholarship points to a Florentine codex (Laurenziana, Plut. 89 sup. 38) of 1494. In England it is documented from the mid-sixteenth century by BL Add. MS 36674 and Sloane MS 3847 (1572, The Clavicle of Solomon); there are also Latin witnesses (Add. MS 10862; Bodleian, Michael MS 276), Italian ones (Sloane MS 1307) and a substantial French series from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Hebrew question. A Sefer Mafteaḥ Shelomoh exists: BL, Oriental MSS 6360 and 14759 (seventeenth–eighteenth centuries), plus an Amsterdam copy in solitreo script that Hermann Gollancz published in 1903 and in facsimile in 1914. The consensus is that it is not the original, but a late Jewish adaptation of a Latin or Italian text. In the opposite direction, Abraham Colorno (c. 1530–c. 1598), a Jewish engineer from Mantua, rendered Solomonic material into Italian and Latin around 1580 at the commission of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga; whether he translated or composed is debated. His recension dominates the eighteenth-century French versions and is the indirect basis of Mathers.

Manuscript families. Skinner and Rankine, in The Veritable Key of Solomon, distinguish four: Rabbi Solomon (some 20 chapters), Abraham Colorno (two books of some 17 chapters), Universal Treatise (four books) and Abognazar (more than 30 unnumbered chapters, perhaps compiled from the other three). Their key observation: "the chapters present in the manuscripts of one family almost never appear in another." There is, then, no single text of the Clavicula.

The 44 planetary pentacles

This is the most widely reproduced material in the grimoire and, because it comes from an 1889 edition, public domain. Mathers's canonical arrangement distributes 44 figures among the seven classical planets: Saturn 7, Jupiter 7, Mars 7, Sun 7, Venus 5, Mercury 5, Moon 6.

Each pentacle is a disc — ideally of virgin parchment or of the planet's metal, made on its day and hour — with three layers: a geometric or symbolic figure, a ring of divine and angelic names in Hebrew, and a biblical verse, almost always from the Psalms, chosen for semantic congruence with the function. The logic of the angelic names derives from Renaissance practical Kabbalah: one takes the Hebrew name of the planet and suffixes a theophoric ending to it. From Tzedeq (Jupiter) come Tzedeqiah and Parasiel; from Shemesh (Sun), Shemeshiel. To these are added standard divine names — IHVH, Adonai, El, Elohim, Eheieh (AHIH), El Shaddai, Iah — and archangels such as Metatron. Some inscriptions are in magical alphabets rather than square Hebrew: Malachim ("the writing of the angels") and Transitus Fluvii ("passing of the river"), both disseminated by Agrippa.

The functions follow the planetary temperament: Saturn commands spirits, binds, curses and touches matters of death; Jupiter, wealth, honours, protection and visions; Mars, victory, courage, healing and mastery over hostile spirits; Sun, divine authority, invisibility and deliverance; Venus, love and desire; Mercury, knowledge, the opening of locks and extraordinary operations; Moon, prophetic dreams, travel, weather and counter-magic.

Examples from the Mathers edition: the second of Jupiter (glory, honours, riches) bears AHIH, AB and IHVH with Psalm 112:3, "wealth and riches shall be in his house"; the sixth of Mars protects in battle with the phrase Elohim qeber ("God hath protected") in the Malachim alphabet and Psalm 37:15; the seventh of Mars — made with bat's blood on virgin parchment — produces hail and storm with the names El and Yiai and Psalm 105:32–33; the first of the Sun shows the face of Metatron with El Shaddai, and the second restrains the pride of the solar spirits by means of Shemeshiel, Paimoniah, Rekhodiah and Malkhiel.

A philological caution is in order: the series of 44 is neither original nor stable. Joseph H. Peterson notes that the order varies drastically from manuscript to manuscript, and that it was late versions that reorganized them by planetary association; Italian scholarship documents manuscripts with as few as 3 pentacles and others with more than 100. The number 44 and its distribution are, strictly speaking, an editorial artefact of the French recension that Mathers canonized, not a datum of the medieval text.

Mathers's translation (1889) and its critics

Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers published The Key of Solomon the King (Clavicula Salomonis) in 1889, with help from William Wynn Westcott for the Hebrew. He declared that he had worked from seven codices in the British Museum: Add. MSS 10862 (Latin), Sloane 1307 (Italian) and five French ones — Sloane 3091, Harley 3981, King's 288, Lansdowne 1202 and 1203. Peterson qualifies this, noting that in practice he followed almost exclusively the eighteenth-century French manuscripts of the Colorno family (King's 288, Harley 3981, Sloane 3091), which were more legible than the rest. Mathers acknowledged that the Hebrew of the pentacles was "vilely scribbled to the point of being undecipherable" and reconstructed it: the plates in circulation today are, in part, Victorian restoration. He declared that he had removed "one or two experiments which partake largely of black magic," and advised against blood: "prayer, the pentacle and the perfumes, rightly used, are enough."

The criticisms come in three waves. A. E. Waite (1898) called it "the work of an uncritical hand" and reproached him for excising passages as late interpolations while retaining the blood sacrifice, which he himself condemned. Peterson, a century later, defends him: "Mathers suppressed very little" — three experiments of love magic and a chapter on operations of hatred — and the edition, despite lacking a critical apparatus, "has stood the test of time." Skinner and Rankine formulate the most substantive objection: Mathers synthesized a working edition out of seven manuscripts, much as the grimoire copyists themselves did, and produced a text that corresponds to no real manuscript family; by ignoring the Italian Sloane 1307 he left out an entire body of esperimenti d'amore. To this is added the underlying problem: his witnesses are late and French, three or four centuries removed from the late medieval material.

Its diffusion was nonetheless total, and for the same reason as the Lemegeton's: the first accessible English version, in the public domain and reprinted without control. L. W. de Laurence pirated it in 1914 as The Greater Key of Solomon, with advertising for his mail-order incense business.

Ecclesiastical condemnation and clandestine circulation

Solomonic magic was persecuted long before there was an Index. William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris (1228–1249), denounced these texts for their "most execrable consecrations and detestable invocations"; in the 1350s Pope Innocent VI ordered a "Book of Solomon" burned, and the Ars notoria and necromancy received recurrent university and episcopal condemnations throughout the fourteenth century, including that of the Paris Faculty of Theology in 1398.

With the printing press and the Counter-Reformation, repression became institutionalized. The Pauline Index librorum prohibitorum of 1559 and the Tridentine one of 1564 generically prohibited books of magic, divination, geomancy and necromancy — a category under which the Clavicula fell without being listed by title; that same year the Inquisitor General Fernando de Valdés y Salas included grimoires in the Spanish index. The consequence was paradoxical, and Owen Davies documents it well: prohibition did not eliminate the text, it pushed it back into manuscript, and the Clavicula continued to be copied by hand two centuries after printing had made everything else cheap. In Venice it was copied in pocket formats — octavo or sextodecimo — so that it could be concealed; in 1636 the Venetian inquisitors examined the manuscript of Francesco Viola, a Neapolitan tailor, of some 75 folios. The trials reveal a mixed readership: artisans, minor clerics, treasure hunters. That clandestinity explains the divergence among manuscript families and the progressive corruption of the Hebrew.

Related texts

• Heptameron (attributed to Peter of Abano). The attribution is spurious according to Lynn Thorndike, although the historical Abano knew and cited the Clavicula. Printed in 1559 (Marburg, Andreas Kolbe) together with the pseudo-Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy; Carlos Gilly proposes that Jacques Gohory reorganized the material around 1565. From the Clavicula it takes the exorcisms, the blessings, the nine-foot circle and the nine-day preparation, rearranged by days of the week.
• Grimorium Verum. It claims to be by "Alibeck the Egyptian," Memphis, 1517; Waite demonstrated that "the work belongs to the middle of the eighteenth century, and Memphis is Rome." Mathers went so far as to incorporate a version of it as a "third book" of the Keys before excluding it.
• Grand Grimoire. French, c. mid-eighteenth century, printed in the nineteenth; it introduces Lucifuge Rofocale and the explicit pact. Popular literature, not learned manuscript tradition.
• Sworn Book of Honorius / Liber Iuratus Honorii. Thirteenth–fourteenth centuries, with a legendary frame of a council of master magicians; it shares with the Clavicula the devotional rhetoric and the beatific vision as goal.
• Picatrix (Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm). Arabic, tenth–eleventh centuries, translated into Latin around 1256 in the circle of Alfonso X. The matrix of the astral magic of talismans that underlies the pentacles.
• De occulta philosophia libri tres by Agrippa. Drafted around 1510, printed in 1531–33. It is not an operative grimoire but the theoretical synthesis that legitimized the planetary model, the magic squares, the intelligences of the heavenly bodies, and the Malachim and Transitus Fluvii alphabets that the Clavicula employs.

Consensus versus tradition

Scholarly consensus: the text is not earlier than the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries; the attribution to Solomon is pseudepigraphic; the Hygromanteia is the link between late antiquity and the European grimoire; the surviving Hebrew versions are late back-translations; there are manuscript families irreducible to one another; the series of 44 pentacles ordered by planet is a late rationalization consolidated by Mathers; the Clavicula and the Lemegeton are distinct works with no demonstrated filiation.

Tradition or legendary attribution: Solomonic authorship; the lost Hebrew original; the antiquity of the pentacle figures as they are reproduced today; the 1517 dating of the Grimorium Verum.

Points in dispute: the date and place of the Hygromanteia (Torijano against Marathakis); whether Colorno translated or composed; and the value of Mathers's edition, defended by Peterson and questioned as an artificial synthesis by Skinner and Rankine.

WarningHistorical and artistic content. We do not recommend performing any ritual, invocation or practice involving these entities. This is outreach about texts from the 15th to the 20th century, not an operative guide.