Ask a room of people what the Key of Solomon contains, and a good number will describe seventy-two bound spirits, each with a name, a rank, and a seal. They are thinking of a different book.
Two works travel under Solomon's name. The one most people picture is the Lesser Key, the Lemegeton, and its opening section, the Goetia, is the catalogue of seventy-two spirits that has filled paperback occult shelves for decades. The book S. L. MacGregor Mathers translated and published in 1889 is the other one. It is the Greater Key, the Clavicula Salomonis, and its concern is angelic.
The Greater Key is a manual of invocation, consecration, and talismanic work drawn from a family of Latin and French manuscripts. Its instructions are procedural and exact. Which planetary day and hour to choose. How to prepare the circle. How to consecrate a sword, a wand, a lamen, and the other implements before any of them are used. The voice throughout is one of obedience to divine names rather than command over spirits, which is the quiet line that separates this book from its better-known cousin.
The heart of the book is its pentacles. Mathers' edition lays out forty-four of them, sorted by planet, each a circular seal carrying Hebrew inscriptions, scriptural verses, and divine names, with a stated purpose attached. Some are for protection, some for vision, some for opening what is shut. In the 1889 first edition these were printed on tinted plates, the so-called blue pages, and our reproduction keeps them exactly as they appeared, color and all. They are among the most copied images in the Western magical record, and most people have seen one without knowing where it came from. It came from here.
That reach is not an accident. Mathers was a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and his translation arrived just as that order was taking shape. The pentacles, the divine names, and the careful Qabalistic structure of the text fed directly into the system the Golden Dawn built, and from there into most of what modern Western ceremonial magic became. One Victorian translation, sitting at the head of a long line.
Our edition reproduces the complete 1889 Mathers text across 157 pages, with the original typography preserved and a clickable contents added so the book is usable as well as faithful. Alongside it we include an original sixty-six page companion, written in plain modern language, that walks through the manuscript history, Mathers and his editorial methods, the Golden Dawn connection, and the pentacles with the names worked into them. The old book tells you what to do. The companion tells you what you are looking at.
With gratitude,
Osda Life