The Key of Solomon the King

Context

The precise context of the original composition of The Key of Solomon the King cannot be recovered, since the author is unknown. The document claims to be by King Solomon, the son of David, but this an example of pseudepigraphy, the legitimatization of a religious or magical book by linking it to a culture hero of the distant past. Solomon, famous for his wisdom, was highly suitable for this purpose. Magical books circulating within Christian communities were attributed to Solomon as early as The Testament of Solomon in the first to third centuries, linked to myths about his use of demons and magic to build the original Jewish Temple. The tradition flourished in the late Byzantine Empire with such books as the fourteenth-century Magical Treatise of Solomon, the probable inspiration for The Key of Solomon. When Byzantine scholars fled the Turks in the years before the fall of Constantinople in 1453, they brought magical books to Italy along with the vast treasury of classical Greek literature.

Magic claimed to be ancient wisdom that knew how to control the physical universe. Respected sources such as the Bible and works of the Greek philosophers agreed that magic is a real force in the world. The Renaissance humanists who revived ancient learning were not in a position to question their authorities on this point. What if Solomon really did build the Temple using spirits, and what if that feat could be repeated at will using rituals like those in The Key of Solomon? Or, less fantastically, what if the elements of the world were connected by occult sympathies and the forces of nature and the bodies of human beings could be controlled by knowledge of those sympathies (perhaps through talismanic or spiritual magic, such as is described in The Key of Solomon)? Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a member of the Platonic Academy in Florence, went so far as to say that magic is the operative part of natural science—technology, in other words. On the other hand, could Christianity, Judaism, and Islam be united in a single religion based on magic and the new revelations it might make possible?

The Key of Solomon was composed in about 1525 in this expectant atmosphere, which persisted through the so-called Rosicrucian Enlightenment of the early seventeenth century. But such hopes were never to be fulfilled in the development of science, though occult ideas certainly played their parts in activating the imagination of early scientists like Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle to make some of their discoveries. But, in general, magic was quickly forgotten by Western culture as the world was found to operate on different principles. The Key of Solomon was nevertheless quickly and widely circulated among magicians and translated into the vernacular languages, including English (by 1550) and modern Hebrew.