What Is a Grimoire? The Key of Solomon and the Goetia

Solomon never wrote a book of magic. Over two thousand years, his biblical name for wisdom grew into a legend of a king who commanded demons, and that legend attracted a whole literature of manuals written in his name.

A book of spells

A grimoire is a handbook of ritual magic: instructions for choosing the right days and hours, preparing tools and robes, drawing circles and seals, and calling up spirits by name. The word comes from the French grammaire, “grammar,” which in the Middle Ages meant any book of Latin learning; to people who could not read Latin, such books were mysterious, and the word came to mean a book of spells. Grimoires were copied mostly in Latin, Italian, French and English manuscripts from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, and many claim a famous ancient author: Moses, Enoch, Pope Honorius, and above all King Solomon.

Why Solomon?

The Bible credits Solomon with exceptional, God-given wisdom: three thousand proverbs, a thousand and five songs, and knowledge of trees, beasts, birds and fish. It says nothing about spirits.

By the first century AD, Jewish tradition had added more. Josephus writes that God also taught Solomon how to drive out demons, that he left behind incantations for healing, and that Josephus himself watched a Jew named Eleazar cast out a demon in front of the emperor Vespasian using a ring and a root “prescribed by Solomon” (Antiquities 8.45–49). The Testament of Solomon, a Greek narrative written in the early Christian centuries and carried on this site's Old Testament Pseudepigrapha shelf, tells how Solomon used a ring from the archangel Michael to bind demons, question them, and set them to work building the Temple. It is a story about Solomon, not a manual. The grimoires came later and turned the legend into instructions.

The Key of Solomon

The Key of Solomon (Latin Clavicula Salomonis) is the most famous Solomonic grimoire. Its surviving manuscripts date from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, and a Greek forerunner, the so-called Magical Treatise of Solomon (Hygromanteia), is known from Byzantine copies. The Key sets out the planetary days and hours for each kind of operation, the pentacles (talismanic designs) of the seven planets, the purification of the operator, the making of the knife, wand, parchment and incense, and the conjurations and dismissals of spirits. S. L. MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, edited and translated it from several British Museum manuscripts in 1889; that is the English text carried here.

The Lesser Key and the Goetia

The Lesser Key of Solomon, or Lemegeton, is a seventeenth-century English compilation in five parts, of which the first, the Goetia (from the Greek goēteia, “sorcery”), is the best known. It is a catalogue of seventy-two spirits that Solomon is said to have bound in a brass vessel, each with its rank, the legions it commands, the form it takes and its seal. Much of the list follows the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, a catalogue of sixty-nine demons printed in 1577 by the Dutch physician Johann Weyer, who published it to expose such books, not to promote them. Mathers translated the Goetia; after the two men fell out, Aleister Crowley published that translation in 1904 with his own additions, and in 1916 the Chicago publisher L. W. de Laurence reissued it without permission. The text on this site is that Mathers–Crowley translation.

What the Bible says about this

The Law of Moses forbids exactly the practices the grimoires teach, and the early church treated them the same way: when the gospel took hold in Ephesus, those who had practised magic brought their books and burned them in public.

On this site

The library carries Books I and II of the Key of Solomon and the Goetia on its Ceremonial Magic Grimoires shelf, as primary sources for the history of Western esotericism, the way the History shelf carries Josephus. They are not scripture in any church or tradition, and nothing here is offered as a devotional resource or a manual to be used. The seals, pentacles and circles in the printed editions are not reproduced. Grimoires are a separate tradition from Kabbalah, though writers such as Mathers worked in both.