Defining the Key of Solomon
4:57 PM PDT, July 18, 2008
In recent times I have become aware that there is a lot of confusion about the Key of Solomon. I have had numerous enquiries from people asking the same questions again and again, so I decided to clarify matters and attempt to dispel the fog of confusion that seems to surround the Key of Solomon. The Key of Solomon is not a single book or manuscript. Although many people assume it is because they see the Mathers edition, this is simply not the case. Mathers cherry-picked sections from seven different manuscripts of the Key of Solomon, five of which were in French, one in Latin and one in Italian. This edition has been reprinted many times, but no other manuscript has ever been published as a book (although electronic versions of several Key of Solomon manuscripts are available on Joseph Peterson’s excellent website www.esotericarchives.com). The Veritable Key of Solomon contains two complete Key of Solomon manuscripts, translated from their original French into English. Stephen and I chose these two particular manuscripts because of the breadth of material they contained and also the sheer quantity of glorious colour images of the pentacles, which is far greater than found in the earlier Mathers edition. To date we have located 122 different Key of Solomon manuscripts, of which nearly half are in French, followed in number of manuscripts by Latin, Italian, German and English. There are also a few bilingual manuscripts which combine Latin with another language such as Dutch or Italian, or combine English and Italian, and even one Czech manuscript. The search was not helped by the tendency for libraries to label any work which mentions Solomon as being a Key of Solomon! This mislabelling has led to several works remaining effectively hidden for some years, though we have now made them more publicly available again, such as the material in our first book The Practical Angel Magic of Dr John Dee’s Enochian Tables. Additionally people often seem to confuse the Lemegeton, sometimes known as the Lesser Key of Solomon, with the Key of Solomon. Some people refer to the Key of Solomon as the Greater Key of Solomon, repeating the term used by L.W. de Laurence for the title of his pirated edition of Mathers work in 1916. The Lemegeton, which contains the five books of the Goetia, Theurgia-Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel and Ars Notoria, is a completely different text to the Key of Solomon, and should NOT in any way be considered the same book or a derivative thereof.
Initial post:
Jul 18, 2008 8:43 PM PDT
Maestro Nestor says:
122 different keys of Solomon sure is a lot and I also agree that it is important for people to understand that for several reasons. One of the reasons is what you talked of in your last blog about how important these documents must have been for magicians during those times. It will help people to better understand how those magicians might have thought. There are even traces of solomonic magic in old Northern European grimoires. Interesting to see solomonic seals mixed with names of the northen gods such as Odin and Tor.
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Bio
David Rankine is an author, researcher, Qabalist and magician who lives & works in Monmouthshire (Wales) with his partner, Sorita D'Este and baby son. David has been writing and contributing articles to a variety of publications and has given talks, lectures and workshops since the early 1980's.
His personal passions include the Qabalah, Medieval & Renaissance Magick, Heka (Egyptian Magick), Thelema and Witchcraft. David also has a thing for Crystals and their use in magick since men emerged from the caves wearing their first bits of occult jewellery, but stresses "Sadly this subject has been largely hijacked by people with their heads in the clouds, which is fine as long as you have your feet on the earth, which is where the crystals are! (Well apart from meteorites, but that's another story altogether!)". In the 1980's and 1990's he edited the magazines "Evohe!" and "Dragon's Brew". Additionally he has also contributed articles to many other magazines like Chaos International, Nuit-Isis, Talking Stick Magazine, Pagan Dawn, Withcraft & Wicca (CoA), Enhancing Your Mind Body Spirit (D'Agostini) and the Watkins Review. David has something of an obsession with numbers, which he blames on the Qabalah, though he is happy to report he has not sunk to the level of doing Gematria on bus numbers or car number plates. During a period of excessive numerical study he came up with a system of Gematria for the English alphabet based on the prime numbers and known as Prime Qabalah. Details of this system can be found in his book "Becoming Magick" and at his website www.ritualmagick.co.uk. Since 2003 he has been working with occult legend Stephen Skinner on the corpus of Renaissance grimoire material, making rare and previously unknown or inaccessible material available to the magickal community. This has resulted in the "Source Works of Ceremonial Magic" published by Golden Hoard Press. So far three books in the series have been released, these are: * Volume I - The Practical Angel Magic of Dr. John Dee's Enochian Tables * Volume II - Keys to the Gateway of Magic * Volume III - The Goetia of Dr Rudd * Volume IV - The Veritable Key of Solomon |
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