The Lemegeton, the Lesser Key of Solomon and its five parts

The name Lemegeton, or Clavicula Salomonis Regis, refers to a collection of five treatises on ritual magic that circulated in England from the seventeenth century onwards. The name has no agreed explanation; in the English-speaking world the work is also known as the Lesser Key of Solomon, to distinguish it from the older Clavicula. Despite its attribution to the biblical king, it is a modern compilation, built by assembling material from different periods and origins.

The manuscripts

The Lemegeton is known almost exclusively through manuscripts now held at the British Library, particularly in the Sloane and Harley collections. The most frequently cited are Sloane 3825, Sloane 2731 and Harley 6483, English copies datable between the seventeenth and the early eighteenth century. The shape of the collection probably settled around the middle of the seventeenth century; there are no medieval witnesses of the compilation as such, although some of its parts have much older roots.

The collections of Hans Sloane, a physician and naturalist who died in 1753, passed to the British Museum at its foundation and form one of the richest sources of early modern magical manuscripts. It is thanks to this deposit that the Lemegeton, born as a text for the few, became accessible to scholars and, at the end of the nineteenth century, to London occultists.

The five parts

The first part, the Ars Goetia, is a catalogue of seventy-two spirits with their seals and their supposed functions. The second, the Theurgia-Goetia, describes aerial spirits arranged according to the points of the compass. The third, the Ars Paulina, is devoted to the angels of the hours and of the signs of the zodiac. The fourth, the Ars Almadel, takes its name from a wax tablet around which the practice it describes revolves. The fifth, the Ars Notoria, gathers prayers and figures for the acquisition of knowledge.

Not all manuscripts contain the five parts, and the order is not always the same. The Ars Notoria in particular is an independent medieval text with a tradition of its own, much older than the rest of the collection. The compilation thus resembles a small library, put together by a collector or copyist who wished to gather in a single volume the Solomonic texts available to him.

Sources and debts

Many components of the Lemegeton depend on printed works of the sixteenth century. The list of spirits in the Goetia follows the Pseudomonarchia daemonum, published by Johann Weyer in 1577 as an appendix to his treatise against witch hunting; the Theurgia-Goetia draws on the Steganographia of Abbot Johannes Trithemius, printed in 1606. The Ars Paulina reflects Renaissance angelology, while the Almadel and the Ars Notoria derive from medieval traditions.

In 1904 Aleister Crowley published Mathers's translation of the Goetia alone, and that edition helped to identify the Lemegeton with its first part. The other sections long remained little known, until complete transcriptions of the London manuscripts were published during the twentieth century, allowing a more rigorous comparison between the versions.

The Lemegeton is a typical example of how compilers of magical texts worked in the early modern period: they collected, translated and rearranged, attributing the whole to a prestigious authority. Studying it means following the paths of books between the Continent and England, between print and manuscript, between demonological polemic and antiquarian curiosity.