In Goethe's Faust I, the scene in which a poodle transforms into the devil Mephistopheles comes with a reference to a book. For such a half-hellish crew, the verse runs, "The Key of Solomon will do." Goethe felt no need to explain the title.
The Key of Solomon, or Clavicula Salomonis, is often called the most copied magic book in Europe. Nobody has counted every copy, so the superlative cannot be proved. Owen Davies, a historian of magic, calls it the "granddaddy of grimoires" and writes that by the 15th century hundreds of copies of Solomonic magic books were in the hands of Western scientists and clergymen. What the evidence does show is a handbook copied, translated and rearranged in Latin, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, French and English for more than five centuries, with no two copies quite agreeing.
A book found in a tomb
Solomon, the Key's introduction says, wrote it for his son Rehoboam and ordered it buried with him. Long afterward, Babylonian philosophers repairing the king's tomb found it and could not read it, until one of them, Iohé Grevis, proposed asking God for understanding. An angel then let him read it on condition that he keep it from the wicked.
None of this is history. The Key is pseudepigraphical, written by unknown authors and credited to a famous one. The choice of Solomon was not random, though. Rabbinic legend, as the Jewish Encyclopedia lays out, said he built the Temple with the help of angels and demons. In one story his minister Benaiah captured Asmodeus, chief of the demons, who revealed where to find the shamir, a worm whose touch could split stone. Davies notes that books under Solomon's name were already circulating in the eastern Mediterranean in the first centuries AD. A king who had commanded demons was the obvious author for a manual on commanding spirits.
How old it really is
The scholar Joseph Peterson, who maintains a corrected edition, has gathered the manuscript evidence. The earliest known reference comes from Peter of Abano's Lucidator, written between 1303 and 1310. The oldest physical fragment is two leaves in the chapter library at Trent, dated 1380 to 1410 and identified by Matteo Cova in a study published in 2021. An Italian manuscript in the French national library is dated 1446, and seems to have been translated from a Latin copy held in the library of Duke Filippo Maria at Pavia in 1426. The oldest Latin manuscript Peterson lists dates to the late 15th century.
There is also a 15th-century Greek text in the British Library, Harley MS 5596, known as the Magical Treatise of Solomon, whose contents are very close to the Clavicula. The scholar Robert Mathiesen believed the Greek was the original. The usual estimate places the Key in 14th or 15th-century Italy, and most surviving copies were made much later, in the late 16th to 18th centuries. One of the oldest is an English translation of 1572, titled The Clavicle of Solomon, revealed by Ptolomy the Grecian.
What the book asks of a magician
The Key is divided into two books. The first contains conjurations, invocations and curses to summon and bind spirits, with operations for finding stolen goods, becoming invisible, and winning favor and love. The second covers the purifications the operator must undergo, his clothing, the making of his instruments, and the animals to be sacrificed to the spirits.
What surprises modern readers is the piety. Every operation is performed, at least on paper, through the power of God, and the operator must confess his sins before beginning. Materials must be gathered in the prescribed way at the right astrological hour, marked with the right symbols, and blessed with their own words. Unlike the later Lesser Key of Solomon, it says nothing of the 72 spirits Solomon supposedly shut in a bronze vessel.
Ms. Codex 1673 at the University of Pennsylvania, a Latin manuscript written between 1750 and 1799, runs to 121 leaves. It gives instructions for conjuring spirits, enchanting a piece of fruit with a love charm, extracting a bat's blood, and preparing ink and parchment, along with 43 pen and ink pentacles pasted onto red or yellow washed pages.
The Hebrew question
That copy's title page says it was translated from Hebrew by Abraham Colorni, and the claim is a puzzle of its own. Colorni, a Jewish engineer of Mantua active between 1578 and 1598, produced Italian and Latin versions of a Hebrew Mafteah Shelomoh around 1580, at the request of the Duke of Mantua. The historian Jütte has suggested Colorni may have composed the work himself, so that the Hebrew would be a translation of his Latin rather than the reverse. Jütte also thinks the question cannot be settled conclusively.
The surviving Hebrew texts complicate things further. A British Library manuscript was dated to the 16th century by its first editor in 1912 and is now thought to come from the 17th or 18th. A second, copied in Amsterdam in a Sephardic cursive script, was published by Hermann Gollancz in 1903. The usual view treats the Hebrew Key as a late Jewish adaptation of a Latin or Italian original. In a 2026 article in the Harvard Theological Review, Gal Sofer describes a newly discovered Hebrew Clavicula that, he argues, pushes Hebrew versions back before the late 17th century.
The copyists' fingerprints
Because the Key spread by hand, every copyist left marks on it. Peterson calls the pentacles the biggest puzzle in the tradition: their order varies widely between manuscripts, the oldest copies tie only some of them to the planets, and later scribes tried to assign the rest. The Greek manuscripts seem to require a single knife, while later versions multiply the blades. Some of that is plain error. Where the Latin calls for a quill knife, an Italian translator glossed it as a small pruning hook, and the English translation turned it into a "scimitar AND sickle." The magician's wand, prominent in most copies, is missing from the Greek, Hebrew and English ones.
The Penn manuscript belonged to Charles Rainsford, a British army officer, Fellow of the Royal Society and alchemist, who left it to the second Duke of Northumberland. It stayed at Alnwick Castle from 1809 until 2014, when it was sold at Sotheby's in London. Its folio 6 had been torn out, and the text on it is lost.
From London to mail order
The best-known English version is the 1889 edition by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, the London occultist who was a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. George Redway issued it in a limited run of 500 numbered copies. Peterson shows that Mathers worked almost entirely from 18th-century French manuscripts descended from Colorni, and that he drew heavily on a separate French text that does not belong to the Key at all. The scimitar was his.
A. E. Waite dismissed the result as "the work of an uncritical hand" and accused Mathers of cutting the darker material. Peterson finds the charge overstated: Mathers removed little, chiefly three chapters of love magic and one on destroying enemies.
The Key's last transformation was commercial. In 1914 L. W. de Laurence reissued Mathers's text as The Greater Key of Solomon, with additions of his own. Among them were lines such as "after burning one-half teaspoonful of Temple Incense," followed by information on how to order the incense.