The Key of Knowledge (British Library Add. MS 36674)

The Key of Knowledge is one of the earliest surviving English renderings of the Clavicula Salomonis, preserved in British Library Additional Manuscript 36674, a sixteenth-century collection of magical material. Its translator is unknown, but the language and hand place it in the Elizabethan period, roughly contemporary with John Dee and with the magical miscellanies of English cunning men. The text represents a different branch of the Key from the French manuscripts Mathers later used. It is organised in two books. The first contains prayers, a general confession, conjurations, and instructions for the experiments, including those for recovering stolen goods, for invisibility and for love. The second deals with the preparation of the operator and the equipment of the art: garments, the knife, the circle, water and hyssop, pen and ink, wax and images, and tables of planetary hours and colours. Because it predates the eighteenth-century French copies by about two centuries, the Key of Knowledge is important for reconstructing the older Latin text behind the English tradition, and it sheds light on how Solomonic ritual was adapted for English readers before the Civil War. Joseph Peterson transcribed it from microfilm and has revised his edition several times, comparing it with other early witnesses. It is useful alongside Sloane 3847, the other major sixteenth-century English Key, and alongside the Book of Oberon, which shows the kind of practical compendium in which such material circulated.

What it contains

• Prayers and a general confession for the operator
• Conjurations and the order of the work
• Experiments for theft, invisibility and love
• Making of pentacles
• Garments, knife, circle, water and hyssop
• Pen, ink, wax, images and planetary hours and colours