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UNTITLED MAGIC BOOK - 4/11/2022

Added 2022-04-11 18:11:09 +0000 UTC

The medieval world saw the emergence of a new paradigm for magic. What was once only a loose conglomerate of legends and folk traditions was now a loose conglomerate of legends, folk traditions, and meticulously systemized knowledge. And like most important things in the medieval era, this new paradigm was born from catholic priestess getting into fights.

This was a scrappy era for the church. The latin-speaking Catholic church had spent most of its history sharing power in the roman empire with the greek-speaking orthodox church. The collapse of the eastern roman empire resulted in a Catholic church which suddenly no longer had to share power, and with a lovely buffer state between them and their increasingly rowdy neighbor: The Abbasid Caliphate. The tides of history had thrown them the ball, and by god were they going to run with it. (cut down, work into next paragraph)

The medieval world was inexorably dominated by the rising catholic church. Like any rising power, the catholic church had its share of enemies. Roger Bacon once wrote “Christendom had two major rivals: philosophy and magic.” It is here, in the church’s desire to defeat these rivals, that we can see the core, the engine driving the machine which transforms magic.

To understand medieval magic, we have to understand the core pieces on the Christian side of the board. The Priest, and the Scholar. The Priest is fairly simple. The Church looked out on a Europe increasingly isolated by unmaintained roman roads and irrigation, and saw a world dreadfully lacking in christendom. Barbarian kings looked out on a Europe severely lacking in cool roman goods, and found conversion to be a quick fix for their problems. Where a centurion conquers with a sword, a priest conquers with a litany, and sometimes also a sword. The Scholar, however, wields a subler tool: a new form of critical organic method called Scholasticism, and sometimes also a sword.

Magic changed because knowledge itself changed. Generally, if an ancient thinker wanted some knowledge, they would take their bucket down to one of two wells: The well of Tradition (things people have been doing or saying for a long time) or the well of  Legendary Teachers, (Socrates said so.) This was a bit inconvenient for Catholicism, as tradition often did not match up with the bible, and Socrates was a pagan with the gall to die 322 years before the birth of christ. While problems with traditional wisdom could be solved with a declaration of heresy or the careful application of a sword to the neck, philosophy proved a bit trickier. This is where Scholasticism comes in.

Scholasticism is a method of learning characterized by:

To summarize, Scholasticism is a specifically catholic method of analyzing a text, finding contradictions, and resolving those contradictions logically. It can be thought of as a method for the church to organize and stitch together bodies of knowledge. Most importantly for our purposes, it is a method of analysis that involves priests getting into detailed and well written philosophical slap fights about magic.

First into the ring is St. Augustine, who sets the pace with the one-two combo of On the City of God and On the Divination of Demons. Here he summarizes much of the classical conception of magic set down by writers like Iamblicus and Porphyry, but most notably, he rejects the classical distinction of Goetia, (evil magic) and Theurgia (good or divine magic.) Augustine argues that they differ in name only, that both are “Entangled in the rites of demons who masquerade as good angels.” To Augustine, all magic is simply the actions of demons. Demons who are conscious beings with ethereal bodies similar to fine smoke that allows them to move at incredible speeds and enter the bodies of the possessed. Additionally, he also introduces the idea that lesser demons can be bullied into submission via the control of a more powerful demon, an idea that continued through solomonic magic, and is to this day broadly held by modern occultists. All of this raises an important question: Why are demons doing any of this?

St. Augustine believes that magic itself is a trap for humanity, that demons are attempting to delude humans into believing they have more power than they actually do. To St. Augustine,  demons are simply playing along until the opportune moment to drop their spiritual snare.

Following quick at St. Augustine’s heels is Isadore of Seville, whose text The Etymologies served as a central informational text in the middle ages. His proposed origin of magic is confident and strangely specific: Magic was invented by Zoroaster, and expanded by Democritus. He mirrors Augsutine’s scorn for magicians, writing “this foolery of the magic arts held sway

over the entire world for many centuries through the instruction of the evil angels.” Given that, he divides practitioners of magic into several subtypes that give us an interesting snapshot of the type of people who practiced non-church-sanctioned magic at the time.

Isidore’s Taxonomy of Magicians:

As for how exactly all of this was accomplished, Isidore holds the party line, explaining that all magic was the result of a “pestilential alliance between humans and demons.” A position that would be repeated by church founders, essentially establishing it as the de facto church position.

Isidore paints quite the cast of magical characters, but the question remains: who was actually practicing magic during the middle ages? Turns out a lot of catholic priests were practitioners of the arcane. This may seem surprising, given everything we’ve been talking about so far, but I am sure even the most devout catholic can recognize that though the church may condemn something, it is also made of people, and may have a history of condemning with one hand while practicing with another.

John of Salisbury provides our evidence in the form of his text Policraticus, a work of political theory. John details an experience he had with a teacher, another catholic priest, who taught him to perform a fingernail-based form of divination called Onychomancy. John says that he was unable to see anything, but that his fellow student was able to see “certain airy figures.” This is important for two reasons: One, it is eyewitness evidence of catholic priests practicing magic, a practice so common that modern scholarship has deemed it worthy of the delightful term “The Clerical Necromantic Underground.” Two, it seems to imply that there was a common understanding of what magic was. Additionally, things that fall into the category of magic for us are not necessarily classified as magic for John. After an entire chapter discussing magic and its tricks, John moves on to Omens. From ants bringing grains of wheat to the infant midas to indicate that he would one day be wealthy, to six swans flying overhead to announce the return of Aneas’s fleet, these signs were seemingly considered a strange if mundane element of the world, and entirely permissible within christendom.

(find that citation about how John felt magic was worthy of study, which was controversial. Build up his engagement with magic to the point where it seems like he considers it permissible, then drop the bomb that he was a whole ass archbishop.)

The ambiguity around astrology set up by Isadore would eventually become a large source of controversy around later church writers with an occult bent, and when it comes to church writers with controversial opinions on the occult, Michael Scot sits at the top of the pyramid.

As “Science Advisor and Court Astrologer” read: “court wizard” to Fredrick II, Scot enjoyed significant resources in his pursuit of the occult, writing about everything from divination, to alchemy, to astrology, to the occult in general. The tone of his writing differs significantly, taking on a tone akin to “Demonology is highly highly forbidden by the church, but here is a list of demons and how to summon them, you know, for research purposes.” Scot’s tone was notably unsubtle, even for the time, and while his works would later be censured by the likes of Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon, his boldness is indicative of a shift in towards acknowledgement if not acceptance of magic.

This is the fight that characterizes magic in the middle ages, this internal struggle within the church of just what to do with all these wizards, that forms the gears and cogs of medieval magic. That said, It is important to remember that magic was not solely owned by people with the resources to write books, no the medieval world was a complex tapestry of people and ideas for the Catholic Church to get into fights with. For while the court wizards of history were busy systemizing magic, the folk practitioners and itinerant mystics of Europe were busy with good-old straightforward salt-of-the-earth no-nonsense heresy.

By the 13th century, Christianity had become the dominant religion of europe, but dominant does not necessarily mean “ideologically stable.” Quietism, Autotheism, and Antinomianism were all on the rise, and all arguably a prelude to the coming protestant reformation. Metaphysical frameworks are a lot like songs: when they get popular, people start to remix them. Of the innumerable MC’s to rock the tables of christendom in the 13th century, few did so with more underappreciated skill than the Beguines. Often called the Grey Sisters, the Beguines were a group of christain women who took self-imposed vows of piety, chastity, and community service. They would generally live communally in cities where they would work odd jobs as transcribers and nurses. They quickly became known for their effective and charismatic preaching, and for providing free education to children.

Beguine occult works were often literary, taking the form of divinely inspired poetry. Hadewijch of Antwerp wrote in the style of the courtly love poem, a popular form for the time, in which Hadewijch describes the process through which one achieves oneness with divinity via the metaphor of divine pining. However, Hadewijch cleverly inverts the common tropes, with herself taking the role of the pining noble or knight, and god or jesus taking the role of the beloved. The effect is a radical feminization of the divine that frames the authors transcendental experiences through erotic, and often homoerotic, language. Reactions from the rest of Christendom could be described as “mixed.” For while some communities welcomed the Beguines as examples of righteous and pious women, others saw them shunned, imprisoned, and even executed.

[we should talk about st guinefort here]

There are two ways that the medieval relationship to magic could end: Christendom could subtly develop a framework that allows magic to exist under purview of the church, syncretizing as it did for so many other cultures and beliefs, or the protestant reformers could criticize the church for being “magical” prompting a bloody centuries long crackdown on deviation from explicit canon.

–

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa Von Nettleshiem  is a difficult man to categorize, the story of his life and work is atypical even for magical authors. He graduated from the university of cologne at the age of 16 and became a mercenary, traveling europe as a captain in the army of maximilian I. After seven years of military service he settled in Burgundy under the patronage of both Margaret of Austria, governor of Franche-Comté, and Antoine de Vergy, archbishop of Besançon and chancellor of the University of Dole. With the political powerhouse of both a Hapsburg and an archbishop behind him, Agrippa took to his theological study with a renegade’s bravado. In what was likely a bid to impress Margaret, he wrote a text called  De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminae sexus or “On the Nobility and Excellence of the Feminine Sex” a work which utilized elements of hebrew theology and Cabalistic mysticism to prove that women were the inherently superior sex. He was eventually given a doctorate, while at the same time being denounced as a “Judaizing heretic” by Franciscan prior Jean Catilinet, and forced to flee Dole. Once safely in England, Agrippa replied "I am a Christian, but I do not dislike Jewish Rabbis," a dangerously radical position to hold for the time.

His work, the Three Books of Occult Philosophy, serves as both a compendium of magical knowledge and as a metaphysical framework unifies disparate magical beliefs into a single comprehensive system. The scope of topics Agrippa attempted to unify was broad, including topics from the nature of the Christian god, to herbal medicine, to Persian folk magic, to Jewish mysticism. To call his ambitions bold would be an understatement. Agrippa spent his life hounded by accusations of pro-Semitism (a crime that was, for the time, punishable by death) and witchcraft, charges that would eventually lead to his torture and execution at the hands of the Inquisition.

Despite this, The Three Books of Occult Philosophy would go on to become a defining work of Western magic. The book is influential, above all, because of its clarity and scope.. Like the Monas Heiroglyphica, the text is written in the style of a geometric proof, but rather than attempt to reconstruct all of reality from geometry alone, Agrippa’s first book begins with a definition of scope, explaining that everything exists in one of three planes: Material, Celestial, and Intellectual, and that magicians can gain power through the manipulation of the forces therin. Agrippa is engrossed with the mysterious, but has no interest in being mysterious himself. His language is direct, comprehensible, and charmingly self-aware.

*get a fun example here

*In my opinion, an essential element of discussing the occult is maintaining that element of wonder. A good magician can explain a concept in dense mystical language, but a great magician can do it while sounding like a textbook.

Additionally, Agrippa gives us his own definition of magic:

“Magick is a faculty of wonderfull vertue, full of most high mysteries, containing the most profound Contemplation of most secret things, together with the nature, power, quality, substance, and vertues thereof, as also the knowledge of whole nature, and it doth instruct us concerning the differing, and agreement of things amongst themselves, whence it produceth its wonderfull effects, by uniting the vertues of things through the application of them one to the other, and to their inferior sutable subjects, joyning and knitting them together thoroughly by the powers, and vertues of the superior Bodies.”

When Agrippa says “vertue” he means it in the sense of “an attribute or quality.” For Agrippa, magic is a force like gravity, but it is also the web of relationships between objects, and the manipulation of those bonds. Agrippa divides the world into three planes, the Natural Plane at the bottom, Celestial Plane in the middle, and Intellectual Plane at the top. Each plane governs what happens on the plane below it. Each plane has a corresponding form of magic: natural magic, celestial magic, and ritual magic.

Natural Magic: As Agrippa describes it, natural magic is the manipulation of the magical properties of the physical world. All things contain magical virtue, though some contain specific forms of magic in higher concentrations, with the types of magical effects broadly categorized under the seven planetary metals.

Aside: Agrippa’s Taxonomy of Magical Energies:

The goal of the natural magician is to identify and manipulate these energies through various forms of physical change. If a magician wishes to make a magical ring, Agrippa recommends combining a precious stone, a metal, and an herb, all of the same type of virtue. If the magician wishes for solar virtue, they would make a ring of gold set with hyacinth and peridot, the idea being that three separate objects of similar virtue form a more effective channel for solar energy.

Celestial Magic: Celestial magic concerns the principles, forces, and numinous ideas of the world. Numbers, letters, ratios, and the night sky, all have their own set of magical correspondences which can be manipulated by a magician. To a modern mind, there is no relationship between numbers, letters, ratios, and the night sky, but to the medieval mind there was. The motions of the stars and the planets had a direct link to events here on earth.To some, the stars caused events to happen, to others, the stars merely reflected them. To some, the sky was the clockwork of the world, the divine machinery which moved the fates of men. To others, it was akin to the surface of a great dark lake, a mirror, upon which the world was reflected. To a medieval, the night sky could be measured to learn about the changing world in the same way that soil pH can be measured to learn about a flowers growth.

Agrippa describes the celestial world as a sort of medium between the physical and the divine. There are four cardinal directions, four seasons, but also four archangels, and four letters in the Hebrew name of God. To Agrippa, something that can measure both the physical and the divine must contain incredible power.

Practically all forms of Western divination fall within what Agrippa defines as celestial magic. From Astrology to palmistry, any form of magic involving the reading of signs and shapes falls under the umbrella of celestial magic. It also contains practices like sacred geometry, numerology, and astrology.

Ceremonial Magic: Ceremonial magic is interaction with the divine through the medium of ritual. While popular media tends to depict the magicians of history as either Pagan madmen or brooding satanists, the reality is that practically all magicians were practicing Catholics, and Agrippa was especially devout. Ceremonial magic centers around religion, which Agrippa considers an essential element of magic. Agrippa was not the only magician stressing Christian religious aspects for magic, but he was notable for being the only magician who attempted to place both Pagan magic and Christian miracles into the same metaphysical framework. It is here in the third book that Agrippa joins most closely with Christian theology. Agrippa explores the mechanics of the divine, providing a theoretical peek under the hood of church rituals like consecration and prayer. Agrippa also creates the text’s central heresy: the idea that Pagan magic, and church ritual are “homousian,” made of the same stuff, except for a single key element, the presence of God.

If natural magic is the physical manipulation of magic, and celestial magic is the mathematical manipulation of magic, ceremonial magic is the divine manipulation of magic. Within Agrippa’s metaphysical framework, all magic stems from God and permeates all things, but some magic is inherently “closer” to God. And while anyone could manipulate magic if they had the right knowledge, to do so morally and effectively required an active devotion to God.

In 1535, Agrippa was tortured and killed by the inquisition. The legend goes that on the moment of his death, his beloved pet dog, Monsieur, cast itself into a nearby river.

Magic has a way of defying definition. In this same sense, it has a tendency to defy standard historical narratives. The line between the medieval and renaissance world is already blurry, but this is doubly truefor magical history. Magic exists out of step with the rest of history, and the paradigm shifts happening in magic are not necessarily the same shifts happening in the rest of western history and culture.

Think of medieval magic as a camping cooler full of organs: There is no system to it, just a big plastic container full of ice and livers and hearts and whatnot. The archetypal example is the Greek Magical Papyri. One rite might bind a spirit, another might tell the future, another might create a magical amulet, but the organs are not connected to each other, they do not exist as a complete system. *include an example of systemized magic*

Think of renaissance magic as Frankenstein's monster. The organs exist in a system, a big meaty container full of blood and livers and hearts that all form a greater whole. In the context of magical history, Dr Frankenstien is Catholic Scholasticism.

*(maybe talk about magic and cryptography here? Did cryptography contribute to the systemization of magic?)

A systemized practice asks “how does magic work?” There are stones with magical properties, spirits who can be summoned, futures that can be told, but what is the common thread between them? If these things all fall under the umbrella of “magic,” then how does magic actually work? What are its mechanics? To attempt to answer that question is to systemize magic.

*potential example

One of the first men to attempt to systemize magic was John Dee. A man worthy of a book on his own, he was an extraordinarily well-educated man, an astronomer, astrologer, teacher, occultist, alchemist, spy, angelic translator, wife-swapper, and court wizard to queen Elizabeth I, there was quite possibly no man in history more deserving of the term “renaissance man.”

His occult writings are diverse, but his text the Monas Hieroglyphica is one of the earliest attempts at systemizing all of magic into a comprehensible body of knowledge. The Monas dense even for the standards of occult texts, pulling from dozens of bodies of knowledge both occult and mundane. It is an attempt to unify several of the main occult fields of Dee’s time, combining Astrology-Astronomy, Christian neoplatonism, and alchemy into a single system represented by the titular symbol, the Monas Hieroglyph, which Dee posits as a representation of the fundamental structure of the universe.

Reactions to the Monas Hieroglyphica were mixed. Some of Dee’s contemporaries would decry it as nonsense (find the quote from that one guy who roasted it), but at the same time the Monas Hieroglyph would go on to become an emblem for the Hermetic tradition as a whole.

While Dees' successDees success at systemizing magic is debatable, he is emblematic of the next great era for magic: The rise of the Poet-Mystic.

***ASIDE: WHATS UP WITH ALL THE HEBREW?

Nominalism vs Realism

The remarkable proliferation of Hebrew in non-Jewish magic has its origin in a hot topic of theological debate for the medieval Christian world. What they discussed lay at the heart of Western magic and philosophy then and now: what is the relationship between a thing and its name?

Common knowledge has changed. Nowadays, we are nominalists. When we say the word “dog” we know that the word “dog” is just a series of noises we use to represent the animal, the word has no real effect on the furry creature known as a dog. This was not always the case. The vast majority of medieval thinkers were realists. They believed that “dog” meant “the furry animal with four legs that barks” in the same sense that one plus one equals two.

For a moment, we must put ourselves in some jingly little medieval shoes.

This debate had widespread consequences for the nature of reality. We know humans exist, but does the category “human” exist? If it does, how is it defined? What is it made of? If it doesn't, how can we be humans?

Practically, if everything in the universe has a True Name, that brings up the problem of how there are many languages on earth. If dogs have a True Name, how do we know which word is the true one? This becomes a real problem if you’ve ever tried to engage in one of the Catholic churches favorite pastimes: translating the bible. If God wants to talk about a dog, what language does she speak?

Given that the Christian Bible is based on the Jewish Bible, the consensus that most realists reached was that God probably spoke some form of modified or primordial Hebrew.

This was an imperfect solution for the church for several reasons. First, the Catholic church’s view of Judaism as a whole was that Judaism was obsolete, and that Catholicism is here to supersede and replace Judaism. Anything Jewish the Catholic Church could not appropriate was seen as wrong, dangerous, or blasphemous.

The other reason that there is so much Hebrew in this era of occult history was the Alhambra Decree. On March 31st of 1492 the joint Catholic monarchs of Spain violently expelled all practicing Jewish people from the territories of Castille and Aragon. Of the estimated 300,000 Jewish Spaniards, more than 200,000 were forced into conversion, with anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 resisting conversion to face expulsion. [3]

Every Spanish Rabbi was faced with an impossible choice. On one hand, they could risk everything to resist conversion in the face of what was in no short terms a genocide. On the other hand, they could convert, they could keep their family, their property, and their flock, at the cost of their identity as a culture.

This led to a population of Rabbis who converted to become Priests. Suddenly, Jewish theology and knowledge of the Hebrew language was significantly more accessible to Christendom. Books of Jewish theology and mysticism were translated, both as part of the ongoing pillaging of Jewish culture, and as an effort to preserve what could be preserved.

*Possible other avenues of cultural exchange?*

*tie in the above to nominalism*

It is here that we find the distinction between Jewish Kabbalah, and Christian Cabbala.

*religions effect on the nature of reality was radically different, be prepared to put yourself in some odd shoes

***

ASIDE: A SIMPLIFIED GUIDE TO EARLY RENAISSANCE ALCHEMICAL THEORY

The medieval world was generally divided into three categories: Animals, Minerals, and Vegetables.

People had a solid handle on where vegetables came from. Plants come from seeds. You put them in the earth, give them plenty of air and sunlight, they produce more seeds and eventually they die.

Animals were a bit more complicated. Animals had to have sex. Medieval scholars didn’t know exactly how it worked, but they knew that animals could have sex and give birth. Additionally, it was thought that animals could be “generated,“ literally constructed via recipe like a cake. Many medieval magical texts contain what are essentially crafting recipes for rats or frogs.

Metals though, metals were tricky. Nobody could really figure out where exactly metals came from. They were under the earth, that much was understood, but exactly how and why deposits of ore formed was the center of intense debate among medieval alchemists. There were essentially three main theories:

First, let us establish that Alchemists were working from the Aristotelian view of the world. The world was made of four elements: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. These elements interacted through four causes: Material, Formal, Efficient, and Final.

Sulfur-Mercury Theory: This is the “traditional“ alchemical position pioneered by (the likely legendary) Jabir Ibn-Hayyan, but eventually reached Europe through the 1144 translation of the Book of the Composition of Alchemy. The theory itself posits that when sulfur and mercury are trapped beneath the earth and combined, metals are produced. Which metal is produced is based on the ratio of sulfur to mercury. The more balanced the ratio, the closer the metal would be to gold. This was the generally accepted theory among alchemists for most of the medieval era, but it is important to remember that every alchemist had their own spin on how metal generation worked.

Sulfur-Mercury-Salt Theory: The radical, upstart theory of wild mavericks like Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus, who developed the theory in his text 1530 text, the Opus paramirum. Paracelcus conceptualizes sulfur and mercury not simply as physical substances, but as metaphysical essences necessary to all chemical change. The theory considers all change, not only the creation of metals, to have three components: A sulfur (the combustible element, the fuel which prompts change), a mercury (the thing which is changed), and a salt (the ash, the detritus given off by the change.)

Mercury Alone Theory: The fringe position, though one notably held by John Dee. This theory posits that all metals were simply the result of mercury trapped in the earth and subjected to various forces which “cooked“ it into the metals we know today. Dee specifically believed that it was stellar rays which “cooked” the metals, and that the ore produced was determined by astrology. This theory is also related to the “metallic seed“ theory of metals, which conceptualizes mercury as the seedbed into which tiny yet indestructible “seeds“ of metal can be planted, eventually transforming the mercury into the desired metal. This theory was actually tested and conclusively disproved by Sir Issac Newton, who dissolved metals in powerful acid and distilled the mixture to see if any “metallic seeds“ were left behind.

***

*we gotta talk about witchraft at some point

*We are gonna talk about neoplatonism soon, so we gotta talk about porphyry and iambalcus

*We’ve got to go back and beef up the section on solomonic magic

*I’m enjoying the direction of exploring what exactly magic is

***Consider ending chapter with Dee, then get into Early Modern/Baroque

*we should use the dee / Agrippa conversation as an opportunity to talk about magical alphabets

2] Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, The Western Esoteric Traditions', 2008, ISBN 0195320999, p. 55

[3] Gerber, Jane (1994). The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience. New York: The Free Press. pp. 1–144. ISBN 978-0029115749.

–

RENAISSANCE MAGIC

Magic is systemized now, so what? Whats the next step?

*we gotta talk about the rosicrucians

*Christian Rosenkreuz

*The rise of the secret society and the Poet Mystic

*Jakob Bohme

*Newton

*William Blake

*magic makes a shift from the clerical to the Volitional, the romantic arguably brought on by humanism

*previously, knowledge was divine, it was revealed to mortals by the divine. Now you can get knowledge on your own with humanism.

*exposure to other cultures

*some start to see the church as moribund and controlling, seek something personal and

revitalizing

*magic is hibernating

*more baroque than enlightenment

*maybe start with sendivogius

*start with solomonic magic

*use agrippa as a bookend, and Dee as the transition to the Baroque period

*baroque moods:

*solomonic magic

*Cyranides? Maybe?

*Greek Magical Papyri

*Chaldean Oracles

Key of Solomon: http://www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/ksol.htm

Heptameron: http://www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/heptamer.htm

*Marsilio Ficino

*Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

SOLOMONIC MAGIC

When it comes to magic, there are few figures in history more influential than the legendary King Solomon. Solomonic magic provided a unified approach to containing and dealing with spirits

but magic loves a legend like a virus loves a cruise ship, and stories of King Solomon and his magic would become a demon-summoning bedrock of western magic.

King Solomon’s popularity is in part due to his prevalence throughout the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament, the Islamic Quran, as well as innumerable apocryphal texts.

By most accounts, King Solomon was the son of King David and monarch of the Kingdom of Israel known for his wisdom and wealth. Solomon was equal parts pious king and transgressive hedonist. Though kings of Israel were prohibited from taking wives, Solomon took more than 700, along with 300 concubines. The Hebrew Bible

The broad strokes of Solomon’s popularity in magical history can be attributed to the Talmudic story of Solomon and Ashmedai, in which Solomon uses a magical signet ring or seal to command the demon Ashmedai to build the first temple at Jerusalem (Gittin 68a-b). Lore around King Solomon came to define many things that are now staples of western magic.

The medieval eradawned on a world infested with demons. Malicious spirits were quite literally everywhere. Even the Babylonian Talmud says “If the eye were given the permission to see, no creature would be able to withstand the abundance and ubiquity of the demons.” The idea that an average person, with the right wisdom, could conjure and command demons was enticing to the educated and curious clergy.

The idea of summoning and binding entities to the caster’s will was not unique to Jewish literature. The story of solomon and Ashmedai was likely itself influence by Hellenic ideas around the control of spirits, but literature around Solomon provided a vital fertilizer for the garden of Greco-Judiac magic: context. Those engaging in spirit summoning now had a narrative to follow, a mythological framework to work from.

Solomon was a figure of opposites, associated with both magical and non-magical wisdom. “Solomon’s wisdom was greater than that of all the men of the East, greater than all the wisdom of Egypt.” (1 Kings 4:30) He was a botanist, a profession associated with the proto-alchemical “spagyric” wisdom that was itself a staple of Israelite demonology.  He was pious, but also sought wisdom beyond orthodox sources. This idea of a man straddling the orthodox and the heterodox, the exoteric and the esoteric, would set a precedent for medieval approaches to magic.

Solomon is also a major source for the idea of magical jewelry. Solomon’s legendary ring, the titular Seal of Solomon, was the axel upon which the entire school of Solomonic magic turned. The symbol upon it was considered to be of critical importance to Solomon’s control of the demons. While descriptions of the actual symbol on the ring vary wildly, the first mention of the sigil comes from Jewish historian Josephus around the 1st century,

Those with an interest in magic have likely heard of the text The Lesser Key of Solomon. While the text itself was published sometime around the 14th or 15th century, the information contained within is significantly older.

ASIDE: A DEMON BY ANY OTHER NAME

*talk about Daemons vs Demons vs Sheydim vs Djinn

NOTES ON THE LESSER KEY

Ars Almadel


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Kudalyn's Creations

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