The Lesser Key of Solomon Explained

The Lemegeton Claviculi Salomonis — the “Lesser Key of Solomon” — is the most influential and most quoted of all European grimoires, and the most often misunderstood. It is a five-part compilation, probably assembled in England between the 1640s and the 1680s, drawing on earlier continental sources such as Johann Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1563) and the Heptameron attributed to Pietro d’Abano. The earliest complete manuscript is British Library Sloane 2731, dated c. 1700, though fragments in other manuscripts suggest an earlier date of circulation. The Lemegeton is the work most often meant when English-speaking magicians speak of “the Key of Solomon,” and its first book, the Ars Goetia, is the single most famous section in the entire Western magical tradition. The Goetia is treated separately in the article on the Goetia and the infernal tradition; the present article is about the Lemegeton as a whole, and the broader history is in the article on ritual and ceremonial magic.

The Solomonic legend

The Lemegeton takes its authority from the biblical King Solomon, who is conventionally dated to the tenth century BCE (c. 970–931 by the standard biblical chronology) and credited with the building of the First Temple. The Testament of Solomon, a Jewish-Christian text generally dated to the first five centuries CE, recasts the king as an exorcist: demons are bound before him, forced to work on the Temple, and released. The medieval imagination extended this into a tradition in which Solomon knew the secret names of all spirits and wrote down the methods in a book hidden in the temple’s foundations. The “Key of Solomon” as a title appears in several medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, sometimes as the Clavicula Salomonis and sometimes as the Liber Salomonis. The texts bearing this title are a family of related works, of which the Lemegeton is the most elaborate. The full Clavicula Salomonis — the “Greater Key” — survives in several Italian manuscripts, including Harley MS 3981 in the British Library (fifteenth century, Italian) and in the sixteenth-century printed tradition that begins with the 1559 Italian edition sometimes attributed to the printer Leonardo Veneto. The Lemegeton is a digest of Solomonic material in a five-part structure, and it became the standard printed form of the tradition from the seventeenth century onward (Peterson 2001, xi–xx; Sklar 2011, 1–14).

The structure of the Lemegeton

The Lemegeton is organised into five artes, each with its own method, its own class of spirits, and its own intention. In the principal manuscripts, including Sloane 2731, the order is the same: the Ars Goetia comes first, the Ars Notoria last. (In some related manuscripts, particularly continental ones, the Ars Notoria precedes the Ars Goetia; the order is not uniform, and the standard English-language interpretation that the order reflects increasing difficulty is a later, popular reading.)

The Ars Goetia

The Ars Goetia is the first and most famous book. It catalogues seventy-two demons, each with a name, a rank within the sevenfold hierarchy of the text (King, Duke, Prince, Marquis, Count, Knight, or President), a number of legions, a special power, and a seal. The operation, described in detail in the article on the Goetia and the infernal tradition, requires a consecrated magician, a circle, a triangle of manifestation, an astrologically appropriate day and hour, and a long sequence of prayers. The spirit, constrained by divine names, is compelled to appear in the triangle and to perform the requested service. The seventy-two demons include Bael (a King ruling in the East), Agares (a Duke riding a crocodile), Vassago (a Prince of good nature, who discovers things hidden and recovers things lost), Asmodeus (a powerful King with three heads), and Astaroth (a great and powerful Duke). Mathers’s 1904 Equinox edition is the standard English translation, and Peterson’s 2001 edition is the indispensable modern critical text.

The Ars Theurgia-Goetia

The second book, the Ars Theurgia-Goetia, catalogues thirty-six spirits in four groups of nine, each group associated with a cardinal direction and a season (some editions list thirty rather than thirty-six; the count varies across manuscripts). The spirits are described as a mix of good and evil, and the text is more cautious than the Ars Goetia: the operator is instructed to summon only at the appropriate time and to dismiss the spirit carefully. The Theurgia-Goetia marks a transition from the constrained infernal spirit of the Goetia to a more cooperative angelic spirit. The book is the least well-studied of the five and deserves more scholarly attention than it has received; the modern edition is in Peterson (2001).

The Ars Paulina

The third book, the Ars Paulina, is dedicated to the operation of the angels of the hours, the days, and the signs of the zodiac. The Pauline Art operates through 360 “governing spirits” or “Olympic spirits” of the hours, days, and signs, plus the 28 lunar mansions. Each angel is associated with a specific day, hour, or sign, and the operation involves the construction of a talisman on the appropriate day, in the appropriate hour, with the seal of the angel inscribed in the proper astrological configuration. The Pauline Art is essentially an astrological magic working with the planetary hours of the foundations of astrology, and it is the most rigorously calendrical of the five books. The Society of the Inner Light, founded in 1924 by Dion Fortune (pen name of Violet Mary Firth), made the Pauline Art the central practice of its working curriculum, and the modern edition is in Peterson (2001).

The Ars Almadel

The fourth book, the Ars Almadel, is shorter and simpler. It deals with the four “altars” of the cardinal directions, and the angels who minister at each. The operation constructs four small wax tablets, inscribed with the appropriate names. The operator then prays at each tablet in turn, calling on the angels of the altars to descend and to make the operator’s petitions known. The Ars Almadel is the most contemplative of the five books and is sometimes used as a preliminary to higher operations. The most interesting modern edition is in Skinner (2011).

The Ars Notoria

The fifth and last book, the Ars Notoria, is the most unusual. It is a collection of prayers, each addressed to one or more of the divine names, and each conferring a specific kind of knowledge: the liberal arts, the natural sciences, the mechanical arts, the virtues, and a “perfect memory.” It is not a conjuration of spirits; it is a form of prayer, repeated over days or weeks, in which the operator is illuminated directly by God. The text traces back to a medieval grimoire of the twelfth or thirteenth century (some scholars have proposed earlier recensions, but the first clearly identifiable Latin recension is from the 1230s), and it was repeatedly condemned by the church as mechanical and mercenary. The condemnations are part of the documentary record: the Ars Notoria was placed on the Index of prohibited books, and a number of university theologians wrote formal censures against it. Mathers included a translation in his edition of the Lemegeton; Skinner has written the most useful modern introduction (Skinner 2011; see also Sklar 2011, ch. 4).

How the Lemegeton was used

In its original form, the Lemegeton was a working manual. A copy of the manuscript was the operator’s working text, and the manuscript itself was consecrated: opened only at the appointed hour, kept in a clean cloth. The text assumes that the operator has been instructed by a master, ritually purified, and equipped with the rest of the Solomonic apparatus: the circle, the triangle, the planetary hours, the elemental weapons, and the seals.

The Lemegeton was not a public document. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it circulated in manuscript among small groups of English and Scottish occultists, including Rosicrucian and Masonic circles. The first printed English edition of the Goetia appeared in 1898 in Chicago (L. W. de Laurence & Co.); Mathers’s translation and edition of the Goetia was published in 1904 as the first issue of The Equinox (Vol. I, No. 1, March 1904), with a fuller standalone Mathers edition appearing in 1909 and several printings thereafter; Joseph Peterson and Stephen Skinner have made the full Lemegeton available in modern critical editions (Peterson 2001; Skinner 2011). The textual history is now well mapped, and the older claim that the Lemegeton descends from an authentic Solomonic source is no longer seriously defended by any scholar, although it was sometimes asserted in the nineteenth century by occultist writers.

The modern reception, beginning with the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, recast the text as part of a wider esoteric synthesis. The Golden Dawn treated the Goetia as one of the practical instruments of ceremonial magic; Thelema treated it as a focus for contact with the chthonic current. The two readings, though different in theology, agree on the seriousness of the work.

What the Lemegeton claims to do

The five books claim to give the operator a complete magical technology: the power to command infernal spirits (Goetia), to consult the spirits of the cardinal directions (Theurgia-Goetia), to make talismans with the angels of the hours and signs (Paulina), to petition the angels of the altars (Almadel), and to acquire the liberal arts and a perfect memory (Notoria). The operations are graded: the Goetia is the most dangerous and the most operatively powerful; the Notoria is the safest and the most devotional. The grading is the Lemegeton’s own, and it is a sober assessment: the Ars Goetia opens with the most elaborate warnings of any of the books, and the Ars Notoria opens with prayers that any Christian could have uttered in church.

Survival into modern practice

The Lemegeton is the most-copied of all European grimoires. Modern editions include the Mathers translation of the Goetia, Peterson’s complete Lemegeton, and Skinner’s working editions. Practising ceremonial magicians continue to work with the Goetia, the Theurgia-Goetia, and the Pauline Art; the Ars Almadel and the Ars Notoria are less often performed but are still studied. The Lemegeton remains the central document of the Western Solomonic tradition. Its five-book structure, its elaborate apparatus, and its clear distinction between good and evil spirits have made it a model for every later grimoire. The article on ritual and ceremonial magic places it in the larger history of Western ceremonial magic; the article on sigils, circles, and practical magic covers the working apparatus it assumes.

Sources and further reading

The indispensable modern critical edition of the Lemegeton is Joseph H. Peterson, ed. and trans., The Lesser Key of Solomon: Lemegeton Claviculi Salomonis (York Beach: Weiser, 2001), with a thorough introduction to the manuscript tradition, the textual history, and the principal English recensions. Stephen Skinner, The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King (Ibis Press, 2011), is the best working edition of the first book, with notes on practice. On the Ars Notoria, see the standard study by Robert Mathiesen, “A Medieval Group of Populist Texts,” and the more recent treatment in David Sklar, Secrets of the Magickal Grimoires (Llewellyn, 2011). On the textual history of the Clavicula Salomonis and the Harley manuscript, see the introduction to Peterson (2001) and the older work of Montague Summers, The Geography of Witchcraft (1927; rpt. University Books, 1956). The standard account of the Lemegeton’s place in the history of Western magic is Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Oxford University Press, 2003), and the indispensable context for the medieval period is Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), and P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, The Occult in Medieval Europe 500–1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). On the modern reception, see Francis King, Modern Ritual Magic: The Rise of Western Occultism (Dorset Press, 1989), and the essays in Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), and Kocku von Stuckrad, Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge (London: Equinox, 2010). For the Renaissance Kabbalistic background, see the work of Brian Copenhaver and Moshe Idel, the latter’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives (Yale University Press, 1988) being the standard short introduction. For Mathers and the Equinox edition, the necessary reference is The Equinox: The Official Organ of the A∴A∴, Volume I, Numbers 1–10 (1909–1913), reissued by various publishers, and the standard biography of Mathers is the older but still useful work by R. A. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn Companion (Aquarian Press, 1986). On the Pauline Art in the Society of the Inner Light, see the order’s own published manuals, and the critical discussion in the academic literature on Dion Fortune (the pen name of Violet Mary Firth, 1890–1946), whose novels and ritual writings are essential for understanding the practical twentieth-century reception of the Lemegeton.