Clavicula Salomonis in St. Gallen VSG 334

Manuscript 334 of the Vadianische Sammlung in the Kantonsbibliothek of St. Gallen, Switzerland, is a small parchment codex of 145 pages written by a single scribe in a late Gothic bastarda script. Its nineteenth-century cataloguer dated it to the fifteenth century, but it quotes the 1533 printed edition of Agrippa's De occulta philosophia, so it must be later; current estimates place it between 1533 and the 1560s. That still makes it one of the earliest complete Latin witnesses to the Key of Solomon. The codex is a carefully planned magical anthology. It opens with the Lucidarium attributed to Peter of Abano, a set of ritual instructions closely related to the printed Heptameron, followed by Semiphoras texts of sacred names attributed to Moses and Adam, the Clavicula Salomonis itself, and a group of experiments at the end. The Clavicula portion frequently agrees with Ghent manuscript 1021B, another early Latin witness, and helps to show what the Key looked like before the French recensions of the eighteenth century. Some words are written in a simple cipher, a common protective habit in magical manuscripts. Joseph Peterson made the digitised manuscript available with a transcription and used it as the base text for his 2021 edition of the Lucidarium. For students of the Key, VSG 334 is a reminder that the Latin tradition was already well developed in the mid-sixteenth century and closely linked with pseudo-Abano ritual.

What it contains

• Lucidarium attributed to Peter of Abano
• Semiphoras of Moses and Adam (sacred name sequences)
• Clavicula Salomonis in Latin
• Ritual instructions for circle, instruments and conjurations
• Concluding collection of experiments
• Passages in simple cipher