The Key of Solomon the King

Impact

The impact of the original composition and eventual publication of The Key of Solomon the King was limited to a small network of magicians who were increasingly ignored by the modern world around them. In fact, only a single copy of the seventeenth-century publication of the Latin version of the text survives, now held by the University of Wisconsin at Madison. But the impact of Mathers’s edition of The Key of Solomon has been foundational for the modern occultist movement. It is not going too far to say that Mathers’s publishing output, together with that of his colleague and rival in the Golden Dawn, A. E. Waite, and his errant disciple, Aleister Crowley, is the backbone of modern occultism. The grimoires that they either edited or composed have promoted a new book-based magical tradition, quite different from the oral and manuscript traditions of earlier magicians. The most successful participant in this movement has been Gerald Gardner, the founder of the new and growing religion of Wicca. The rituals he devised for Wicca were principally based on his reading of The Key of Solomon. Mathers’s Key of Solomon is also the basis of the work of many groups and individuals that practice more traditional ceremonial magic, such as the followers of Enochian magic and Chaos Magic. Mathers’s work also lives on in a number of Rosicrucian orders of a spiritual or religious character, more than a magical character, such as Crowley’s Thelema, and a dozen or so groups that still use some version of the Golden Dawn name.

In the nineteenth century a post-Romantic reaction set in against the industrial society and rationalist system of thought that had been created by the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the ascendency of capitalism and democracy. There was little cohesion to the reaction against modernity because it often meant that individuals turned their backs on society or else organized innumerable small groups. One frequent theme, though, was the embrace of magic as the antithesis of modernity and the turning to occult lodges and esoteric schools. Mathers was originally a Mason and a member of Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, which tried to replace modern Western culture by importing into nineteenth-century London an ersatz version of ancient Indian spirituality. It appealed to authority as an alternative to scientific rationalism and empiricism, submitting itself to secret masters who supposedly lived in the Himalayas and with whom Blavatsky was in psychic communication. Blavatsky associated esotericism with the most progressive political causes of the day, such as feminism and the end of British rule in India, and combined them with occult teachings like vegetarianism and antivivisection to produce a social movement that is now frequently described as the New Age.

Mathers and a few others (including women) broke away from the Theosophical Society in 1888 because they preferred the Western esoteric tradition (the past) over Indian lore (the exotic). They founded their own esoteric group: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. (Mathers was soon channeling his own secret masters.) Their practice consisted of various rituals devised by Mathers, based on his researches into older forms of magic, most important, The Key of Solomon. Mathers and his followers were trying to feed a spiritual hunger that they could not satisfy with modernity. This was the common ground between Mathers and his most famous disciple, the Nobel Prize–winning Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The work of the order consisted of a series of initiations into various grades, based on the study of esoteric texts and a university-style examinations system, capped by emotionally powerful ceremonies of Mathers’s invention. The revival of a forgotten book like The Key of Solomon enabled the retreat from modernity into a private world of spiritual discipline that erased the common concerns of the everyday world.

Mathers’s publications of grimoires also established a canon, with The Key of Solomon the King as it most prestigious volume, that is honored within modern occultism. In many circles, those books and those books alone are considered the bearer of occult tradition. The Key of Solomon the King in particular carries tremendous prestige and is preferred nearly as scripture over the wide range of far older and, by the usual logic of occultism, therefore potentially more authoritative magical handbooks that scholars have been busy publishing and translating into English, such as the Greek Magical Papyri (the first to the fifth centuries CE), the Babylonian series Maql– (ca. 1000 BCE), the Egyptian Pyramid Texts (ca. 2500 BCE) or early Christian grimoires attributed to Solomon or the Virgin Mary. The existence of this manufactured canon, as much as methodological differences, creates a sharp cultural divide between practitioners and scholars of magic. The canon also imprints Mathers’s approach to magic as a spiritual discipline similar to mysticism, rather than a practical art, on much modern occultism. He understood the spirits invoked in magic as somehow representing the higher self of the magician. The rituals of The Key of Solomon that he transformed into the initiations of the Golden Dawn were for him a kind of psychological exploration that can be compared to psychoanalysis and other modern schools of psychology developed at the same time as the Golden Dawn. Thanks to Mathers, modern magic is practiced as a tool of psychological inner development rather than a series of practical rituals meant to mediate the magician’s encounter with the social world.