The Key of Solomon the King

About the Author

Magical books began to be composed in Latin as interpretations rather than translations of Greek originals. The Key of Solomon is a magical book, along with many other similar treatises, including The Lesser Key of Solomon the King (in Latin, Clavicula Salomonis regis or Lemegeton clavicula Salomonis), that were composed during the Italian Renaissance based on Greek grimoires brought by scholars from the Byzantine Empire. The authorship of The Key of Solomon as an element within this tradition is completely unknown. It was certainly someone with a humanistic education (trained in Greek). Probably most of the men (and there is no evidence that women participated in scholarly magic) who wrote magical books of this kind in sixteenth-century Italy were priests, whether in monastic life or teaching at universities.

The real importance of The Key of Solomon, however, came after it was forgotten by the world at large and then recalled to the mind of the occultist movement by the 1889 edition of S. L. Mathers. His published text became a foundational document of modern occultism. Mathers’s choices in handling the unwieldy manuscript tradition, as well as his own transformations of the text, put his stamp on the well-known modern form of the book. Relatively little is known about Mathers’s life, and it has not received a detailed scholarly study.

Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers was born in 1854 as the son of a London clerk and advanced himself through membership in Masonic lodges and occultist societies. He made his mark as the cofounder and leader of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and occupied himself with editing obscure occultist literature (including The Key of Solomon) that even today is generally of interest to historians only in connection with its role in the occultist revival. Mathers seems to have lived largely from the patronage of his wealthy benefactors within the movement. Mathers gave himself the name MacGregor as well as the title Comte de Glenstrae as part of an elaborate fantasy deriving his ancestry from the Scottish nobility. (He purportedly was informed of this identity by spirits whom he “channeled”—perhaps coining the use of that term.) The Scottish connection was important because of his identity as a Freemason, as was the association of the grimoires he translated with Solomon, the mythical founder of Freemasonry. He died during the influenza epidemic of 1918, despite his claims to have partaken of the alchemical elixir of immortality.