Catalogue · Texts & Manuscripts
Solomonic Magic & the Grimoires · grimoire
Key of Solomon
Clavicula Salomonis · Clavicule de Salomon · Mafteah Shelomoh · Clavicola di Salomone
- Attribution
- Pseudepigraphically attributed to King Solomon; anonymous compilers, probably late medieval Italy
- Date
- Core text probably 14th–15th century; most manuscripts 16th–18th century
- Language
- Latin and Italian (later French, English, German, Hebrew versions)
- Manuscripts & printings
- London, British Library, Sloane MS 3847 (English, 1572); London, British Library, Add. MS 36674 (English, 16th century); London, British Library, Add. MS 10862 (Latin); London, British Library, King's MS 288, Harley MS 3981, Sloane MS 3091 (French, used by Mathers); London, British Library, Lansdowne MSS 1202 and 1203 (French, 18th century); St. Gallen, Kantonsbibliothek, Vadianische Sammlung MS 334 (Latin, c. 1533–1566); Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Aubrey 24 (Latin and English, 1674)
The Key of Solomon is the most widely copied ritual-magic handbook of early modern Europe and the model against which most later grimoires defined themselves. Despite its claim to be a testament of King Solomon to his son Rehoboam, it is a Christian-era compilation. Its closest relative is the Greek Magical Treatise of Solomon (Hygromanteia), known from fifteenth-century manuscripts, and most scholars place the formation of the Latin and Italian Clavicula in late medieval or Renaissance Italy. There is no single authoritative text: hundreds of manuscripts survive in Latin, Italian, French, English, German, Dutch and Hebrew, and they differ widely in arrangement and content. The typical version falls into two books. The first covers prayers, confessions, conjurations of spirits, and the making of planetary pentacles, together with operations for invisibility, love, finding stolen goods and similar ends. The second covers the operator's purification and fasting, garments, consecrated knives and wands, the magic circle, ink, parchment, incense, and the planetary hours. The work was repeatedly banned and appears frequently in Inquisition records, especially in Venice, which shows how widely it circulated among clergy, physicians and cunning folk. S. L. MacGregor Mathers' English edition of 1889, compiled from several British Library manuscripts, made it a foundational text of the Golden Dawn and of modern ceremonial magic. Today the Key is studied as a tradition of related texts rather than a single book, and editors increasingly publish individual manuscript families instead of composite texts.
What it contains
- Framing legend of Solomon's book hidden in his tomb and later recovered
- Prayers, confession and conjurations for calling and binding spirits
- Operations for invisibility, love, discovery of theft and other ends
- Planetary pentacles with their divine names and scriptural verses
- Purification, fasting, bathing and ritual garments of the operator
- Consecration of knives, wand, circle, ink, parchment and incense
- Tables of planetary days and hours for timing operations
Recent scholarship
Federico Barbierato's study of magic books before the Venetian Inquisition appeared in English in 2025, and in 2026 Gal Sofer published a sixteenth-century Hebrew Clavicula leaf that challenges the view that Hebrew versions only arose in the late seventeenth century. Joseph Peterson continues to publish individual manuscripts (VSG 334, Aubrey 24) as free transcriptions.