Solomonic grimoires

A grimoire is a manual of magic: instructions for making the tools, drawing the circle, choosing the hour, and calling the spirit by name. The Solomonic grimoires are the family of these books that claim King Solomon as their author, and for six centuries they have been the working end of Western esotericism, the part that actually does something.

They descend from a legend. The Bible's Solomon is wise and builds the Temple. By the first century CE he had become something more: the Wisdom of Solomon credits him with knowledge of spirits, Josephus says he wrote incantations that were still in use, and the Testament of Solomon, a Greek text from the early Christian era, tells how the archangel Michael gave him a ring with which he compelled the demons to build the Temple for him. In that book the spirits are catalogued by name, function, star and the angel that thwarts them. Every later grimoire is an expansion of that catalogue. The demons themselves are the Enochic ones, the wandering spirits of the giants, which is why this tradition carries the Torah and Enoch root as well as the three shown here.

The books reached Latin Christendom in the thirteenth century, alongside the Arabic astral magic of the Picatrix, and were condemned almost at once: William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris, was warning against Solomonic books around 1230, and Alfonso X had the Liber Razielis compiled in 1259. The Key of Solomon, the most famous of them, survives from the fifteenth century in Greek, Latin and Italian, with planetary pentacles, hours, tools and conjurations by the names of God. The Lemegeton, or Lesser Key, was assembled in seventeenth-century England; its first book, the Goetia, lists seventy-two demons with their seals and offices, the dark mirror of the seventy-two angels. The Book of Abramelin, a different tradition, describes a six-month retreat to gain the knowledge and conversation of one's Holy Guardian Angel.

The technique is Hermetic and Neoplatonic: work the correspondences, choose the planetary hour, use the right metal and the right name, and the spirit answers because the cosmos is built that way. The authority is Kabbalistic: the divine names, the angels, the Hebrew letters on the pentacles. And the posture is command. Solomon compels. The magician stands in the circle, the spirit in the triangle, and the names of God are the leverage.

This is the tradition the Golden Dawn drew on directly. Mathers edited the Key of Solomon in 1889, Abramelin in 1898 and the Goetia in 1904, and the Order's ritual is grimoire method rationalised and set on the Tree. From there it runs through Crowley into all twentieth-century ceremonial magic.

You can recognise this root by its furniture: circles and triangles, seals and sigils, planetary hours, spirits with names and offices, the sword and the wand, the idea that a being can be bound by a name. It is a rich and ancient practice. It is also the point on the map where Solomon changed from the king who built a house for God into the king who made spirits build it for him, and where petition became command. Which of those two Solomons your school follows tells you a good deal about where it stands.