Quick Answer
The Key of Solomon is a Renaissance grimoire of ceremonial procedure, falsely attributed to King Solomon, whose oldest manuscript fragment dates to around 1380 to 1410. The standard English text is Mathers's 1889 edition, which harmonises several manuscripts and omits material.
Key Takeaways
- Three layers of mediation: a Renaissance text, attributed to an Iron Age king, edited by a Victorian occultist. Every layer changed it.
- The false attribution was doing theological work: Solomon commanded spirits by divine sanction, so his name places the operator inside God's order rather than against it.
- Not the same book as the Lesser Key: that is the seventeenth century Lemegeton containing the Goetia, and the two are confused constantly.
- Mathers left chapters out: editions exist specifically to restore them, which makes the standard English text a curated selection rather than a transcription.
- Rudolf Steiner connection: the grimoire assumes correct technique produces results, while a developmental path assumes the practitioner must be changed before anything can be perceived at all.
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What the Book Actually Is
The Clavicula Salomonis, the Key of Solomon, is a grimoire: a practical handbook for ceremonial magical operations. It is not a book of theory, not a philosophy, and not a scripture. It reads like a manual, because that is what it was written to be.
Its concerns are procedural throughout. How to make and consecrate the implements. How to construct and protect the circle. How to draw the pentacles associated with each planet. Which hours and which days suit which purpose. What the operator must do to themselves beforehand, which turns out to be a great deal.
Before anything else, one clarification, because this is the single most common error with these texts. The Key of Solomon and the Lesser Key of Solomon are different books. The Lesser Key, or Lemegeton, is a later compilation from the seventeenth century, and its most famous part is the Goetia with its catalogue of seventy two spirits. People buy one meaning the other constantly, including from booksellers who ought to know better.
Why review a grimoire on a site like this
Because a great deal of contemporary practice descends from this text without acknowledging it, and because the honest history is more interesting than the legend. The consecrated tool, the cast circle, the planetary hour and the drawn sigil all come down to modern practitioners through this line. Knowing where they came from, and how much was decided by a Victorian editor working from imperfect manuscripts, changes how much weight any particular instruction should carry.
One further point about the confusion between the two books, since it has practical consequences. The Lesser Key is the one people usually want when they say Key of Solomon, because the Goetia and its seventy two named spirits is the material that has entered popular culture through games, films and music. The Clavicula contains no such catalogue. A reader who buys this book expecting demon names and hierarchies will find instead a long treatise on how to make a knife properly, and will generally conclude the book is dull. It is not dull; it is answering a different question, which is not what to summon but how to be in a fit state to attempt anything at all.
When It Was Really Written
The attribution to Solomon is not a matter of scholarly dispute. The manuscript evidence is clear and it is not close.
The oldest known fragment is a partial manuscript of two leaves, held in the chapter library at Trento, dated to somewhere between 1380 and 1410. An Italian manuscript of 1446 survives, and appears to derive from a Latin text recorded in the library of Duke Filippo Maria in Pavia in 1426. The broader consensus places the composition of the text in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, in the Italian Renaissance.
Solomon, if the biblical chronology is taken at face value, reigned in the tenth century before the common era. The gap between the putative author and the earliest evidence of the text is roughly two thousand three hundred years.
This is entirely normal for the genre, and it is worth stating plainly rather than tactfully. Grimoires are overwhelmingly pseudepigraphic: attributed to Moses, to Solomon, to Honorius, to Abramelin, to figures whose authority the actual authors wanted. A reader encountering this material should assume the attribution is false unless there is evidence otherwise, and there almost never is.
Why Solomon
Dismissing the attribution as a lie stops the inquiry too early. The more useful question is why this particular name, and the answer is specific.
Solomon in Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition is the king who commanded spirits, and crucially, who did so with divine permission. The legend has him building the Temple with the compelled labour of bound spirits, under authority granted by God. He is not a sorcerer defying heaven. He is an agent of it.
That distinction is doing everything. A manual of ritual operations circulating in fifteenth century Christian Europe was, on its face, an extremely dangerous object for its owner. Attributing it to Solomon reframes the whole enterprise: the operator is not trafficking with forbidden powers but exercising an authority that scripture itself records as legitimate, over creatures that are part of the created order and subject to it.
The attribution as a theological argument
Read this way, the name on the cover is the book's opening move in an argument about legitimacy, made before a single instruction appears. The heavy Christian devotional apparatus inside the text, the prayers, the psalms, the constant appeals to divine names, is the same argument continued. This is a book working hard to establish that what it describes is permitted. Whatever one thinks of the operations, the anxiety is genuine and it tells you a great deal about who was writing and what they were risking.
The Mathers Problem
Almost everyone reading the Key of Solomon in English is reading S. L. MacGregor Mathers, and his editorial hand is heavier than most readers realise.
Mathers published his edition in 1889, working from manuscripts in the British Museum. He was a founding figure of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which means the standard English text of the foundational Western grimoire was prepared by a man actively building a magical order that would use it. That is not a neutral position.
He worked from several manuscripts that differ from one another, and he harmonised them into a single coherent text. He also omitted material, some of which he judged spurious and some of which he appears simply to have disliked. Editions exist today advertising themselves specifically as restoring the chapters Mathers left out.
None of this makes his edition worthless. Producing a usable text from divergent manuscripts requires exactly the decisions he made, and his scholarship was serious by the standards available to him. It does mean the book most people call the Key of Solomon is a Victorian occultist's reconstruction of a Renaissance compilation attributed to an Iron Age king.
Three layers, each doing something
This is the same pattern that shapes almost every esoteric text a modern reader encounters, and it is worth naming because it recurs. There is the actual origin, usually later and more ordinary than claimed. There is the attribution, which is making an argument about authority. And there is the modern edition, prepared by someone with their own commitments. Our reading is that recognising all three layers makes the material more interesting rather than less, because you stop asking whether it is authentic and start asking what each layer was for. The same exercise applied to Tagore's Gitanjali produces the same shape in a completely different tradition.
What Is Inside
The contents are more mundane than the reputation and more demanding than the summaries suggest.
A large part concerns tools. The knife, the sickle, the wand, the staff, the parchment, the ink, each with specifications for material, timing of manufacture and consecration. The instructions are exacting: certain things must be made at particular planetary hours, from virgin materials, with prayers said over them.
Another substantial part is the pentacles, the drawn figures associated with each planet, each with a stated purpose and a specified method of construction. These are the images most people recognise from the book even when they have never read it.
Then the operational material: how the circle is drawn and what it is for, how to time an operation, what to say, what to do if things do not proceed as expected.
What strikes a modern reader is how much of it is preparation and how little is result. The overwhelming majority of the text concerns getting ready.
The Pentacles
The drawn figures are the most recognisable thing in the book, reproduced endlessly on jewellery and in decks by people with no idea where they come from, and they repay a closer look because their construction says a great deal about how the tradition thought.
Each pentacle belongs to a planet and carries a stated purpose, and each is built from the same small set of components: a geometric figure, divine names in Hebrew characters, and a verse of scripture, usually from the Psalms, chosen because its sense matches the operation. A pentacle of Saturn for a matter of binding will carry a psalm about restraint. A pentacle of Venus will carry one about favour.
What that construction reveals is that these are not arbitrary symbols with assigned meanings. They are arguments in visual form. The scriptural verse establishes that God has already acted in the manner the operation requires, the divine name invokes the specific aspect of divinity responsible for that domain, and the geometry organises the whole into a single object. The pentacle is a compressed claim that what is being asked for is consistent with how the world is already ordered.
The construction requirements are exacting: correct planetary hour, virgin parchment, prepared ink, sometimes specific colours, and the whole made in a single sitting. Mathers reproduced these figures carefully and later editions have copied his engravings, which means the pentacles in circulation today descend from his drawings rather than directly from any manuscript.
What this means for the versions in circulation
Anyone who has bought a Solomonic pentacle as an object, or seen one in a tattoo or on a pendant, is looking at a copy of a copy of Mathers's 1889 engraving of one manuscript's version of a figure whose earlier forms varied. The Hebrew is frequently garbled in modern reproductions, sometimes badly enough to be meaningless, because it has been copied by people who could not read it. That is worth knowing before treating any particular rendering as authoritative.
The Preparation Nobody Mentions
The requirements laid on the operator are extensive and they are the part usually skipped in popular accounts.
Fasting, sometimes for extended periods. Ritual bathing. Abstinence. Confession and prayer. Clean garments made specifically for the purpose. Periods of days spent in preparation before any operation is attempted. The text is emphatic that an operator who has not done these things should not proceed, and that failure is attributed to inadequate preparation rather than to faulty technique.
This complicates the usual contrast between magic as technique and mysticism as transformation. The Key of Solomon is unambiguously a technical manual, and it also demands that the operator be substantially altered before the technique is used. The purity requirements are framed as safety measures rather than as the point of the work, and they occupy a great deal of the book regardless.
A practical caution
The preparatory regime described in this text involves extended fasting, sleep disruption, isolation and prolonged ritual concentration. Whatever one believes about spirits, that combination reliably destabilises people, and the historical record contains many who did not come out of it well. Anyone experimenting with this material should keep eating, keep sleeping, keep other people in their life, and treat any lasting change in their sense of what is real as a reason to speak to a doctor. This article is educational and is not a recommendation to attempt any of these operations.
Technique or Development
Setting this text beside the developmental tradition sharpens both, and the contrast is genuine rather than manufactured.
The grimoire assumes a world in which correct procedure produces a result. The spirits exist, they are subject to divine order, the names and figures have real efficacy, and an operator who does everything correctly will obtain what the operation is for. The operator's own condition matters for their safety and for their fitness to proceed, and it is not what the work is aimed at.
Rudolf Steiner's account of spiritual development runs the other way entirely. There, nothing external is produced. The whole work is the transformation of the practitioner's own capacities, over years, through exercises that have no outward effect whatever. What changes is what the person can perceive, and there is no procedure that shortcuts it.
Steiner was, incidentally, contemporary with the Golden Dawn revival that produced the Mathers edition, and was thoroughly unimpressed by ceremonial approaches that promised results without requiring the long development first. He regarded the pursuit of powers ahead of the capacity to handle them as actively dangerous, which is a criticism the grimoire tradition partly anticipates with its own purity requirements.
Readers who want the developmental path in detail will find it in How to Know Higher Worlds and Steiner's six exercises.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want to know where contemporary practice came from. The circle, the consecrated tool, the planetary hour and the drawn sigil descend to modern practitioners through this line, and most people using them have never seen the source.
Read it as a historical document of how educated Europeans in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries understood the arrangement of the world. On that level it is genuinely valuable and not replaceable by summaries.
Do not read it as a course. The text assumes context it never supplies, uses terms whose sense was obvious to its original readers and is not obvious now, and carries inconsistencies from its manuscript history. People who approach it as a set of followable instructions generally find the instructions incomplete.
Our position: an important source document wearing a false name, in an edition shaped by a man with his own project. Read it for the history and the lineage, hold the attribution as an argument rather than a fact, and notice that even this most technical of traditions spends most of its pages on what the operator has to become before beginning.
For the text it is most often confused with, see The Lesser Key of Solomon and the Goetia. The intellectual framework these books assume is set out in Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, and the wider genre in what a grimoire actually is. Mathers's own order is covered in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
A source document, not a course.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. We recommend books we have read and think are worth your time, and we say plainly when we think parts of them are weak.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Key of Solomon?
A grimoire, meaning a practical handbook of ceremonial magic, attributed to King Solomon and dating in fact to the Italian Renaissance. It contains instructions for preparing and consecrating tools, drawing pentacles, timing operations by planetary hour, and conducting invocations, together with extensive requirements for the operator's purity and prayer.
Did Solomon actually write it?
No. The oldest known manuscript fragment dates to somewhere between 1380 and 1410, and an Italian manuscript of 1446 appears to derive from a Latin text held in the library of Duke Filippo Maria in Pavia in 1426. The text is a product of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, roughly two thousand years after the king it names.
What is the difference between the Key of Solomon and the Lesser Key?
They are separate books that are constantly confused. The Key of Solomon, or Clavicula Salomonis, is the older Renaissance text covering general ceremonial procedure and the making of pentacles. The Lesser Key, or Lemegeton, is a later seventeenth century compilation whose best known section, the Goetia, catalogues seventy two spirits. Buying one when you meant the other is the commonest error with these texts.
Who was Mathers and why does his edition matter?
S. L. MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, produced the standard English edition in 1889 from manuscripts in the British Museum. Nearly all subsequent Western ceremonial magic runs through his version, which makes his editorial decisions unusually consequential for a translator.
Did Mathers leave material out?
Yes, and editions exist specifically advertising the chapters he omitted. He worked from a selection of manuscripts, harmonised differences between them, and excluded material he considered spurious or objectionable. The result is a coherent book that is also a Victorian occultist's curated presentation rather than a straight transcription of any single source.
Why was the book attributed to Solomon?
For authority and, more importantly, for permission. Solomon in tradition commanded spirits by divine sanction rather than in defiance of it. Placing a manual of ritual under his name frames the operator as working within God's ordering of creation rather than against it, which is a theological licence rather than a marketing decision.
What does the Key of Solomon actually contain?
Practical procedure. How to prepare and consecrate the knife, the wand, the parchment and the circle; how to draw the pentacles associated with each planet; which hours and days suit which operation; and how to conduct the invocation. Around all of it sits a substantial apparatus of fasting, prayer, ablution and abstinence required of the operator beforehand.
Is the Key of Solomon dangerous to use?
The historical operators certainly thought so, which is why the preparatory requirements are so heavy. As a practical matter the greater risks for a modern reader are psychological rather than infernal: sustained ritual work in isolation, on little sleep and less food, can destabilise people. Anyone experimenting should keep ordinary life intact and speak to a professional if their sense of reality starts to shift.
Is this a magic system you can just follow?
Not straightforwardly. The text assumes a working context it never explains, uses terms whose meaning was obvious to a fifteenth century reader and is not obvious now, and contains internal inconsistencies from its manuscript history. It is a source document rather than a course, and people who treat it as a set of instructions generally discover that the instructions are incomplete.
How does the grimoire tradition differ from a developmental path?
In where the change is supposed to happen. A grimoire assumes correct procedure produces a result, with the operator's purity as a precondition for safety rather than the point of the work. A developmental path in the sense Rudolf Steiner meant assumes the practitioner must be transformed before they can perceive anything at all, and produces no external effects to speak of. Technique against development, and the Key sits firmly on the technique side while quietly demanding a great deal of the operator.
Why is it worth reading if the attribution is false?
Because it is a real document of how educated Europeans in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries thought the world was arranged, and because nearly all later Western ceremonial magic descends from it. Reading it tells you where the circle, the consecrated tool and the planetary hour came from, and those are still in use by people who have never heard of this book.
What should I read alongside it?
The Lesser Key of Solomon for the related and distinct text people confuse it with. Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy for the intellectual framework the grimoires assume. For a scholarly rather than practitioner account of where this material came from, the academic literature on medieval and Renaissance ritual magic.
Most of it is preparation
The striking thing about the most technical book in the Western tradition is how little of it concerns results. Page after page on what the operator must do to themselves first. Whatever you make of the spirits, that proportion is worth noticing.
Sources & References
- Mathers, S. L. MacGregor, editor and translator. (1889). The Key of Solomon the King (Clavicula Salomonis). George Redway.
- Clavicula Salomonis, manuscript 86½, Biblioteca capitolare di Trento, c. 1380-1410.
- Clavicula Salomonis, BNF Ital. 1524, 1446.
- Esoteric Archives. The Key of Solomon (Clavicula Salomonis). esotericarchives.com.
- Wellcome Collection. Mathers's Key of Solomon the King, catalogue record. wellcomecollection.org.
- Agrippa, H. C. (1533). Three Books of Occult Philosophy.
- Steiner, R. (1904). How to Know Higher Worlds (GA 10). Rudolf Steiner Press.
- The Lesser Key of Solomon (Lemegeton), seventeenth century compilation.