Overview
The Lesser Key of Solomon, usually called the Lemegeton in manuscript and editorial scholarship, is an anonymous seventeenth-century English compilation assembled from older magical materials. It is not one book composed at a single moment and it was not written by the biblical Solomon. In its ideal five-part form it contains Ars Goetia, Ars Theurgia-Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel or Almandal, and Ars Notoria. The sections combine catalogues of spirits, angelic and celestial hierarchies, astrological organisation and prayers associated historically with knowledge and memory. They share a S…
Historical Origins
The attribution to Solomon is pseudepigraphic. It draws authority from the long-lived image of Solomon as a uniquely wise king able to command spirits through a seal, ring or divine names. Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions all contributed to that legendary background, but the surviving Lemegeton is an early-modern English compilation rather than an ancient Israelite text. Its components reveal extensive use of earlier printed and manuscript sources. The Goetia’s spirit list is downstream of material printed by Johann Weyer and known in English through Reginald Scot, while also belonging to the wider Liber Officiorum Spirituum tradition. The Theurgia-Goetia adapts Steganographia. The Paulina uses celestial and astrological compilations. The Almadel and Notoria reach back into medieval ritual-magic traditions that circulated independently before their inclusion in the Lemegeton. Direct catalogue evidence creates unresolved dating problems. The current British Library record for Sloane MS 3648 identifies a Lesser Key or Lemegeton but gives the date 1572, while modern editors frequently describe the witness or substantial layers as seventeenth-century and often around 1655. Similar inherited dates appear in catalogue records for Sloane 2731 and 3825. These may refer to exemplars, copied textual dates or old catalogue traditions rather than the physical manuscript itself. Related English spirit-invocation material was already circulating before the mature compilation. Folger MS V.b.26, dated approximately 1577–1583, is an eclectic English and Latin magical anthology with traces of Goetic and Solomonic material. It is a precursor or related source-context witness, not a complete Lemegeton. The 1904 Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King by Mathers and Crowley transformed modern reception. It selected only the first book, regularised material and added Crowley’s introduction and ritual interpretation. L. W. de Laurence later repackaged this textual stream commercially. Modern editions by Joseph H. Peterson and by Stephen Skinner and David Rankine expose different manuscript variants and recensions rather than proving one definitive form.