The Key of Solomon the King (Mathers edition)

Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, later a founder and chief of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, published his English Key of Solomon the King with George Redway in London in 1889. It became the version of the Clavicula known to almost every English-speaking occultist for the following century. Mathers did not translate a single manuscript. He collated several British Library copies, relying chiefly on a family of French manuscripts (King's 288, Harley 3981 and Sloane 3091) that descend from the Latin translation associated with the Mantuan engineer Abraham Colorni, and drew additional material from Lansdowne 1202 (attributed to Armadel), Lansdowne 1203 (attributed to Abognazar) and the Latin Add. 10862. The result is a composite in two books, with an introduction, many redrawn pentacles and a set of ritual instruments. Mathers made modest omissions, chiefly some love operations and a chapter on harming enemies, and he presented the text in a Victorian occult framework that stressed its Hebrew and Kabbalistic credentials. Later critics, beginning with A. E. Waite, faulted the edition's lack of critical apparatus and its silent harmonising of variant readings. Joseph Peterson's online edition reproduces the 1889 text with notes identifying what Mathers left out and how his sources relate. The book remains valuable both as a readable digest of one important manuscript family and as a historical document of the Golden Dawn's reception of Solomonic magic, but it should not be mistaken for the original form of the Key.

What it contains

• Mathers' preface discussing the manuscripts he consulted
• Book One: prayers, conjurations and operations of the art
• Planetary pentacles redrawn from the French manuscripts
• Book Two: purification, garments and ritual instruments
• Construction of the circle, incense, ink and parchment
• Notes on Hebrew divine names and their interpretation