The Clavicula Salomonis: the history of a book without an original
A history of the Clavicula Salomonis: its legendary attribution, sixteenth-century manuscripts, the Inquisition, French copies and Mathers's 1889 edition.
The Clavicula Salomonis, the “Little Key of Solomon”, is one of the most famous books of European magic, and yet no original text exists. What exists instead is a constellation of manuscripts in Latin, Italian, French, English, German and Hebrew, copied between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, which differ in order, content and illustrations. Its history is that of a living book, rewritten and adapted by every copyist.
Origins: a legendary attribution
The book presents itself as the work of King Solomon, who is said to have entrusted it to his son Rehoboam. This is a fictitious attribution, common in medieval magical literature, where the king's name guaranteed prestige and antiquity. Scholars connect the Clavicula with Byzantine Greek texts such as the so-called Hygromanteia of Solomon, preserved in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts, which contains related and often overlapping material.
Magical texts attributed to Solomon were already circulating in Europe in the thirteenth century. William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris, mentions them with contempt in the first half of the century, and the Speculum astronomiae lists several among the books of necromancy to be condemned. We do not know, however, whether this was the Clavicula in the form we know, because the titles cited are vague and the contents of such books kept changing.
Manuscripts, inquisitors and collectors
The clearest evidence of the Clavicula comes from sixteenth-century Italy. In the trials of the Holy Office in Venice and other cities, confiscated copies of this book often appear; it circulated among priests, physicians, soldiers and treasure hunters. The records show how sought-after it was and how risky it was to own. Many surviving manuscripts date from this very period or from the following century.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Clavicula enjoyed great success in France, where numerous copies, sometimes richly illustrated, were produced for collectors and the curious. An important share of these codices is now held at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal in Paris. In the same period Hebrew versions also circulated, which some presented as the original but which in all likelihood derive from Italian or Latin models.
The edition that fixed the text
The most widespread version today is the English one published in London in 1889 by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers under the title The Key of Solomon the King. Mathers compared several manuscripts in the British Museum, selecting and arranging the material to his own taste. The result is a partly artificial text, which corresponds exactly to no manuscript but which has shaped the image of the book for more than a century.
Alongside the Clavicula a family of related texts developed, such as the Lemegeton or Lesser Key, a collection of treatises compiled in the seventeenth century. The catalogue of spirits it contains has a close relative in the Pseudomonarchia daemonum, which Johann Weyer published in 1577 as an appendix to his De praestigiis daemonum, precisely to show readers how flimsy such lists were.
Reconstructing the history of the Clavicula means entering the world of copyists, inquisitors and collectors. More than a book, it is a tradition that each age adapted to its own fears and curiosities. Critical editions and studies of the manuscripts, developed especially in recent decades, now make it possible to distinguish the layers of the text and to restore it to its historical dimension, far from sensational readings.