Key of Solomon: what it is and who really wrote it

The Key of Solomon is a grimoire, a book of ceremonial magic, that presents itself as the work of King Solomon, written for his son Rehoboam. Its Latin title, Clavicula Salomonis, means "little key": clavicula is the diminutive of clavis, and the book calls itself the key that opens every magical art. It teaches how to conjure spirits with prayers, circles and "pentacles", medals bearing Hebrew names, for tasks as specific as recovering a stolen object or winning someone's favour. Its oldest copies date from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and by 1564 it was already on the Church's Index of Forbidden Books.¹⁶⁹ The previous article closed the section on memory; this one opens a new section, on grimoires. We do not read them to use them, but to date them: who wrote them, when, and in what words.

What is in the Key of Solomon?

The best-known version is the one S. L. MacGregor Mathers published in English in 1889, from seven manuscripts in the British Museum. It is divided into two books.¹

The first is the book of "experiments". It begins with the love of God that must come before everything, goes on to the days and hours of each planet, the confession the operator makes, and a ladder of conjurations, each one "stronger" than the last. Then come the errands: the experiment for things stolen, the experiment of invisibility, the one for seeking favour and love, how to take a treasure guarded by spirits, how to stop a hunter from killing any game, and even a pair of magic garters of stag's skin for travelling without fatigue.¹ The list says a lot about who used it: not kings, but people with small, concrete problems.

The second book is about equipment. How to fast and bathe, what to wear, how to make the knife, the sword and the wand, how to trace the circle, which perfumes to burn, how to prepare the ink, the pen and the "virgin" parchment, and which sacrifices to offer the spirits, some of them with animal blood. In the preface, Mathers warns against the use of blood and says that "one or two experiments" of black magic were left out.¹ We copy no recipe here: what interests us is the book as a document.

The story the book tells about itself

The Key carries its own origin story. In the introduction of the oldest Latin manuscript Mathers used, Solomon writes it for his son: "Treasure up, O my son Roboam! the wisdom of my words." An angel had given Solomon knowledge of all creatures, and Solomon locked it into a work holding "the secret of secrets", so that "like as a key openeth a treasure-house", this key would open the magical arts.¹

Solomon orders it kept in an ivory casket and buried with him. Long afterwards, some "Babylonian Philosophers" repairing the tomb find the casket, but understand nothing. One of them, Iohé Grevis, prays in tears; an angel appears, and the text becomes clear, on one condition: that it never reach unworthy hands.¹ Another manuscript, in French, tells a different version: a rabbi called Abognazar translated it into Latin and took it to Arles, in Provence, where it passed to the archbishop "after the destruction of the Jews in that city".¹

These are origin legends, and both do the same job: they explain why a book by Solomon suddenly turns up in Europe a thousand years later.

Who wrote the Key of Solomon?

Solomon did not write it. What is old is Solomon's reputation as a master of demons, and the two things should be kept apart.

The reputation is in Flavius Josephus, in the first century. In the Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus says God granted Solomon the learning of "the art used against demons", that Solomon composed incantations against illness and left formulas of exorcism. Then comes a testimony: Josephus saw a Jew named Eleazar free possessed people in front of Vespasian, his sons and his soldiers. Eleazar held to the person's nose a ring with, under its seal, one of the roots Solomon had pointed out, drew the demon out through the nostrils and, as proof, ordered it to overturn a cup of water set nearby on its way out.² Josephus speaks of incantations and of a ring, not of a book called the Key.

Then came the Testament of Solomon, a Greek text in which the archangel Michael gives the king a little ring with an engraved stone. With it, Solomon summons the demons one by one, asks each one's name and sets them to building the Temple. The first is Ornias, who came at night to take half of a boy's wages and suck his thumb.³ Chester McCown, who edited it in 1922, dated it to the early third century, and in that same century Origen was already writing that "demons are usually adjured with adjurations written by Solomon".⁴

Between that ancient Solomon and the Key lie more than a thousand years with no trace of the book. According to Wikipedia, the text probably took shape in Latin or Italian in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and it is related to a Greek treatise of Solomonic magic whose oldest copy is from the fifteenth century.⁹ The manuscripts agree. Of the seven Mathers gathered, the oldest dates from the end of the sixteenth century and is titled "The Key of Solomon, translated from the Hebrew language into the Latin"; the others are from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹ Mathers noticed something odd: in all of them, the Hebrew suffers "execrable mangling", the work of copyists who could not read it.¹

Was there a Hebrew original?

The French manuscripts say the Key was "translated from the Hebrew Language into Italian by Abraham Colorno, by the order of his most Serene Highness of Mantua".¹ Abramo Colorni was real: a Jewish engineer and polymath from Mantua, who according to Wikipedia produced that version around 1580, at the duke's request. The historian Daniel Jütte suspects Colorni may have composed it, and that the Hebrew "original" might in fact be a translation of Colorni's Latin or Italian.⁹

In 1903 a Hebrew manuscript of the Mafteaḥ Shelomoh, the "Key of Solomon", came to light. Hermann Gollancz found it among his late father's books and published it in facsimile in 1914. Gollancz calls it a copy of an older one, "over 200 years old". The verdict is careful: some prayers are in pure Hebrew, but "some parts, in fact, read as translations from some Western source, or adaptations from Arabic sources".⁵ Gollancz also quotes a Jewish chronicler, Gedaliah ibn Yahya, who spoke of writings of conjurations by Solomon "called the Key of Solomon"; according to Wikipedia, that chronicle was printed in Venice in 1587.⁵⁹ Today the Hebrew text is not thought to be the original, but a late Jewish adaptation of a Latin or Italian text.⁹

So, the short answer: the Key was written by anonymous authors of the Italian Renaissance, from Greek, Arabic and Jewish materials, and put under Solomon's name. It is the same thing we saw with Hermes Trismegistus: a book gains authority when a very old sage signs it.

Banned since 1564

The firmest proof that the Key was circulating in the sixteenth century is found not in the grimoires but in their enemies. The Index of Forbidden Books issued by Pius IV in 1564, after the Council of Trent, names it in its list of books without an author: Clauicula Salomonis. The Spanish Index of the Inquisitor General Gaspar de Quiroga, printed in Madrid in 1583, repeats it in the same words.⁶ Nobody bans a book that does not exist: by 1564 the Key was well enough known to be hunted.

Greater and Lesser Key: not the same book

Anyone searching for the Key soon runs into the Lesser Key of Solomon, or Lemegeton, with its 72 demons and their seals. It is another book. Mathers says so in the preface: the Lemegeton "is not the same as the present book". The preface also warns against two other books circulating under Solomon's name, the Grimorium Verum and an Italian "reduced Key", "full of evil magic".¹ According to Wikipedia, the Lemegeton was compiled in the seventeenth century, and the Key does not mention its 72 spirits.⁹ In the Key, by contrast, everything is asked in the name of God: every operation is preceded by confession and prayer.

From manuscript to print

For centuries the Key lived in handwritten copies, and even so it found its way into literature. Goethe puts it in Faust's mouth in 1808, as the black dog begins to transform: "For such a half-breed out of hell, the Key of Solomon serves well."⁷ In Lima, Ricardo Palma mocks "the demonographers, who keep turning over the Clavicles of Solomon, a book they read by the glow of a carbuncle".⁸

The first complete printed edition was Mathers's, its preface dated London, October 1888. Before it, Mathers says, there was only a "curtailed and incomplete" French copy from the seventeenth century. And the preface defends the author the book gives itself: "I see no reason to doubt the tradition which assigns the authorship of the 'Key' to King Solomon", because Josephus mentions Solomon's magical works.¹ But Josephus, as we have seen, speaks of incantations, not of this book. In 1914 the American publisher L. W. de Laurence reprinted Mathers's version, according to Wikipedia, with new instructions to burn the publisher's own incense, sold by mail order.⁹

From the king to the manuscript

This piece goes through the texts that speak of Solomon and his key, in order. Each one gives the original sentence, in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German, Spanish or English, with a translation.

What I could not read

I read Mathers's edition: the preface, the introduction and the titles of every chapter.¹ I read the Josephus passage in Greek,² the introduction and first chapters of the Testament in Conybeare's translation (1898),³ and McCown's pages on the date and on Origen.⁴ I read Gollancz's introduction, but not the Hebrew manuscript, which is in a cursive script I cannot read.⁵ I looked at the pages of the two Indexes.⁶ I did not read any manuscript of the Key, nor the fifteenth-century Greek treatise, nor Gedaliah ibn Yahya's chronicle, nor the work of Jütte or Mathiesen. What I say about the date of the text, the Greek treatise, Colorni, the Hebrew manuscripts, the Lemegeton and De Laurence comes from Wikipedia.⁹ Translations from Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German and Spanish are mine.

What we do with this

The Key of Solomon exists: there are many manuscripts, an Index that bans it and a printed edition still on sale. What does not exist is King Solomon's book. What we take from it works for any text that claims to be ancient: the date a book gives itself is not enough; look for the oldest copy and for who named it first. For the Key, that is the Renaissance. In the Observatory we do the same with what we measure: we only claim what can be dated.