Mafteah Shelomoh (Hebrew Key of Solomon, Gollancz manuscript)

Mafteah Shelomoh, the Key of Solomon, is the Hebrew form of the Clavicula. The best-known copy was found by the London rabbi and Hebraist Hermann Gollancz among the books of his father, Samuel Marcus Gollancz. He described it in a brochure of 1903 and published a full collotype facsimile with Oxford University Press in 1914; the manuscript is now at Harvard. It appears to have been copied around 1700, and its appendices contain non-Jewish elements alongside Kabbalistic divine names. The contents correspond closely to the Latin and Italian Key: prayers and conjurations, preparatory periods of purification with ablutions and psalms, the role of companions in the work, vessels and incense, charms, and many symbols and figures. For a long time some readers treated the Hebrew text as the original from which the Latin descended, an idea that suited the work's Solomonic claims. Scholarship from Mathiesen onward has shown the reverse: the Hebrew versions are adaptations of the Christian Latin or Italian text, probably prepared in the circle of Italian Jews who were involved in the translation and trade of magical books. A second Hebrew copy in the British Library (Or. 14759) and a fragment in Or. 6360 support this conclusion. Gollancz's facsimile was reissued in 2008 with a foreword by Stephen Skinner. The Hebrew Key is important evidence of Jewish–Christian exchange in early modern magic.

What it contains

• Prayers, invocations and conjurations
• Nine-day preparation with ablutions and recitation of psalms
• Companions of the operator (three, five, seven or nine)
• Ritual vessels, incense and instruments
• Charms and practical operations
• Magical symbols and figures