Seals and Pentacles: the Figures of the Key of Solomon

If there is one graphic element the public immediately associates with grimoires, it is the seal: a figure made of lines, circles, letters and signs which in tradition represented an entity, a planet or a divine name. In manuscripts these signs often fill whole pages and are the most recognisable part of the book. Their history shows how the visual language of magic took shape slowly, passing from one text to another and from one language to another.

The Seal of God and the medieval books

One of the oldest and most complex seals is the Sigillum Dei described in the Liber iuratus, the so-called Sworn Book attributed to one Honorius of Thebes and datable to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. It is a large circular figure with a heptagon, stars and divine names arranged in rings. In the sixteenth century the Englishman John Dee developed his own version of it, engraved on wax discs that are now kept in the British Museum in London together with other objects associated with him.

The pentacles of the Key

The Clavicula Salomonis, or Key of Solomon, is the most frequently copied grimoire of the early modern period. Versions exist in Latin, Italian, French and English, with many differences between one manuscript and another, and older Greek sources linked to the same name are also known. Among its most famous parts are the pentacles, circular figures adorned with Hebrew letters, biblical verses and geometric designs, arranged according to the seven planets of tradition.

Scribes treated these figures with particular care, because tradition held that any error altered their value. Yet when the manuscripts are compared, the pentacles can be seen to change constantly: Hebrew letters distorted by copyists who did not know the language, circles added, verses moved. Scholars use precisely these variants to reconstruct how the text was transmitted and reworked in the different regions of Europe.

Magic squares and the signatures of spirits

A decisive step came with Cornelius Agrippa's De occulta philosophia, published in complete form in 1533. In the second book Agrippa presented the magic squares of the planets, tables of numbers arranged so that every row and every column gives the same sum, and beside each he placed seals and characters which, according to a widespread interpretation, derive from tracing the figures. This link between number and figure gave seals a mathematical aura that fascinated generations of readers.

Later, in the seventeenth-century manuscripts of the Goetia, the first part of the Lemegeton or Lesser Key, the seals of seventy-two spirits appeared, each with its own design. The list of spirits depended largely on the Pseudomonarchia daemonum, which the physician Johann Weyer had published in 1577 as an appendix to his work against the persecution of witches, precisely to show how groundless such beliefs were.

Seen today, seals are first of all a chapter in the history of drawing and writing. They combine different alphabets, geometry and devotion, and they preserve traces of the scribes, translators and readers who modified them over time. Studying them does not mean using them, but understanding how an image could acquire, in the eyes of contemporaries, the authority of a name.