Greater and Lesser Keys - The Key of Solomon and the Lemegeton

This was originally written as a blog entry by David Rankine on ritualmagick.co.uk 23.07.08

In recent times I have become aware that there is a lot of confusion about the Key of Solomon. I have had numerous enquiries from people asking the same questions again and again, so I decided to clarify matters and attempt to dispel the fog of confusion that seems to surround the Key of Solomon.

The Key of Solomon is not a single book or manuscript. Although many people assume it is because they see the Mathers edition, this is simply not the case. Mathers cherry-picked sections from seven different manuscripts of the Key of Solomon, five of which were in French, one in Latin and one in Italian. This edition has been reprinted many times, but no other manuscript has ever been published as a book (although electronic versions of several Key of Solomon manuscripts are available on Joseph Peterson’s excellent website www.esotericarchives.com).

The Veritable Key of Solomon contains two complete Key of Solomon manuscripts, translated from their original French into English. Stephen and I chose these two particular manuscripts because of the breadth of material they contained and also the sheer quantity of glorious colour images of the pentacles, which is far greater than found in the earlier Mathers edition.

To date we have located 122 different Key of Solomon manuscripts, of which nearly half are in French, followed in number of manuscripts by Latin, Italian, German and English. There are also a few bilingual manuscripts which combine Latin with another language such as Dutch or Italian, or combine English and Italian, and even one Czech manuscript.

The search was not helped by the tendency for libraries to label any work which mentions Solomon as being a Key of Solomon! This mislabelling has led to several works remaining effectively hidden for some years, though we have now made them more publicly available again, such as the material in our first book The Practical Angel Magic of Dr John Dee’s Enochian Tables.

Additionally people often seem to confuse the Lemegeton, sometimes known as the Lesser Key of Solomon, with the Key of Solomon. Some people refer to the Key of Solomon as the Greater Key of Solomon, repeating the term used by L.W. de Laurence for the title of his pirated edition of Mathers work in 1916. The Lemegeton, which contains the five books of the Goetia, Theurgia-Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel and Ars Notoria, is a completely different text to the Key of Solomon, and should NOT in any way be considered the same book or a derivative thereof.