“Thou shalt suspend in some way by a machine immediately above the [earth] a lamp, whose oil should be mingled with the fat of a man who has died in the month of July, and the wick being made from the cloth wherein he has been buried … fortify the workmen with a girdle of the skin of a goat newly slain, whereon shall be written with the blood of the dead man from whom thou shalt have taken the fat these characters…”
“’Prince of Princes, Existence of Existences, have mercy upon me, and cast Thine eyes upon Thy servant who invokes Thee most devoutedly, and supplicates Thee by Thy Holy and tremendous Name Tetragrammaton to be propitious, and to order Thine Angels and Spirits to take up abode in this place … I, the Servant of God, most humbly entreat ye. Amen.’”
Two very different statements. The second is a prayer, the speaker clearly imploring God and his Angels to commune in discourse with them, humbly requesting an audience. The former statement is haunting, inviting an image of witchcraft and dark magic to the mind. Wicked ingredients, fat and blood of a man who died at a very specific time, and the flayed skin of a goat needed to complete what seems like a most unholy ritual. They could not be much further apart in purpose.
Except, not only are these two statements taken from the very same magical ritual in the same book, but they appear on the very same page as one another—page 58—in S. Liddel MacGregor Mathers’s translation of The Key of Solomon the King (Clavicula Salomonis), published by Weiser Books in 2006. I name the edition in full because, all throughout my reading, I became very aware of the fact that this work, mainly the scholarship of MacGregor Mathers in it, is incredibly subpar. It’s very badly researched, badly compiled, badly composed, and for all that, it has been received in ways that honestly defy my expectations and disappoint me.
Scholarship and research is what I want to focus on today, because without good scholarship, bad things can happen to the real world. This book is unfortunately a good example, because as I will attempt to show, Mathers’s work is inexcusably bad, and yet the following it has garnered is strangely steadfast. It is a prime example of why, without good, holistic, independent and methodical scholarship, and without significant effort on the consumer’s part, misinformation and so-called conspiracy theories will continue to find their niches in the gullible.
In short, Mathers was not a good scholar because his intentions, and his application of research methods, were unclear throughout this undertaking. He does not make it evident, but truly he was attempting to make a how-to guide to practical Western magic. Instead, he purports to have been creating a good, objective translation of a much older Hebrew text.
Though, the end result shows, he didn’t really know how to do that. If he did, he should have done his best to simply compile all of his material, with absolutely no motive involved.
Unfortunately, many of his biases and undetailed scholarship have slipped in the cracks.
For instance, Mathers’s “clarifying” footnotes have a nasty habit of admitting his shaky understanding of the material itself, such as on page 32, footnote 1: “Sometimes, but as I think erroneously, written Bas-Dathea. I imagine the word to mean ‘Lord of Life.’” Let’s get one thing straight: if you are attempting to make a direct translation of a text so as to clearly convey the meaning the original author intended, nobody cares what you, the translator, “thinks” or “imagines.” If you need to clarify something, never use your opinion as the magnifying glass; and if you aren’t entirely sure of the meaning of a word… well, perhaps you shouldn’t be translating the text in the first place.
This is far from an isolated instance. Many other footnotes betray a spotty understanding of the source material, using phrases like “I chose the name that seemed right,” and “I took the liberty of changing…” Generally, there is simply an unprofessional attitude that is detectable throughout the work, with these and other offending statements. On page 38, he says this: “The Mystic Alphabet … is formed from the positions of the stars in the heavens, by drawing imaginary lines from one star to another…” Imaginary lines. This may be nitpicking, but I haven’t used the term “Imaginary” in any serious context since I left middle school. Now, I can use dressed-down, unprofessional language like that in these essays, because by no means do I claim that these are academic—these are personal blog posts and personal podcasts with almost zero reach. But for Mathers, he was conducting this research at the British Museum, and was trusted to produce a functional, extended translation of a historical Hebrew work. There’s no excuse for lapses in writing style like that.
Mathers also likes to flex how much work he actually did do on this translation. On page 78, he writes: “The restoration of the Hebrew letters in the body of the Pentacles has been a work of immense difficulty, and has extended over several years.” Buddy, nobody cares how much work you did. If you really expended that much effort, it should be evident in the quality of your finished translation. The one place where I can solidly say that Mathers actually made a good decision is on page 75, when he says: “…two other names which I cannot decipher, and have, therefore, given them as they stand.” This is the method he should have been working with the entire time he was translating. Just making things clear, and as unrestrained by his own gaze as possible, wrapped up in a book cover, printed, here-you-go, good luck. All this other personal stuff does not matter to the person who wants to read Solomon. Instead, we get a book that is very clearly Mathers. Unfortunately, this has caused some bad unintended consequences when it comes to the actual Key of Solomon and its following.
As Mathers’s translation is now the definitive one, his bias has created a lot of confusion surrounding the history of the Key of Solomon text. The thing is, there is no way that this book is definitely written by the actual King Solomon, yet Mathers, for reasons unknown, completely dismisses this, and maintains the belief that it was throughout. “In a breathtaking display of credulity [Mathers] writes in the preface to the Key that he sees ‘no reason to doubt the tradition which assigns the authorship of the Key to King Solomon,’ even though none of the texts on which he draws are earlier than the late 16th century”[1]. There are older manuscripts of this text… but not by much. The oldest one I can find is a “Latin text that was in the library of the Duke Filippo Maria in Pavia in 1426."[2]. That’s 15th century, for those counting.
Once again, this does not completely disprove that these texts aren’t further translations of a true work written by the hands of King Solomon, but there are further discrepancies. For instance, certain animals are referred to as ingredients for these rituals, like Stags on page 54, that are not native to Israel or Sinai, where Solomon’s palace is supposed to have once stood. Incidentally, I wrote a note on that page (54) that reads: “Can’t be from Solomon. It’s like someone mixed in a bunch of witchcraft by accident. They spilled a bunch of papers, a stack of the original manuscripts and an old witch’s book, and then rifled them together.”
Furthermore, there is a strange issue that I can’t find a definitive answer for, regarding the very first, and most important, element of the actual magical practice displayed in the book. The correct timing is necessary for the desired magical effect to work when practicing these rituals, and so a detailed table of days and hours is given right on page 7. The 24 hours between midnight to midnight are displayed, and the days and planets that rule each hour are listed. It makes sense in context, but looking a little closer, it is possible that King Solomon never used the 24-hour day, because he lived for before it was made into common practice. According to both ancient.eu and my copy of the Bible, Solomon died around the year 930 BCE. It appears that Babylonians and Egyptians both incorporated daily “hours” around that time (read about it in this fascinating little article here[3]), but the hours may (or may not) have been divided into 24 equal hours throughout the day, instead the length of the hours being adjusted daily based on the yearly solar and lunar periods. The Greek figure Hipparchus apparently was among the first to propose 24 equal hours, and yet this happened around 130 BCE[4]. This makes the tables seem awkward, and potentially completely anachronistic. When things happen so long ago, it’s just very difficult to tell without having access to academic databases. The main reason I wanted to incorporate this here is again as an example to show that nothing should be taken at face value. Here we see the most important aspect of this magical “guidebook” being thrown into question, and rightly so, while the supposed scholar of the original work seemed to look at it without any care for what was real and what was not.
To really punctuate this idea that Mathers’s scholarship is just bad, I want to focus on another place where it fails to exercise care for the Key’s supposed origins. What really remains is the fact that, regardless of who wrote the text, it was written and translated from Hebrew, but worked on by a man whose historical and literary lenses were entirely based on Greek models. The difference between Greek and Jewish thought, to those who aren’t aware, is massive. It is one that has only been explored with any merit in recent times, such as French-Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida, who stated: “We live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek, which is perhaps the unity of what is called history”[5]. As Mathers worked on his translation, he came from the perspective of a Victorian Londoner, during the Neo-Classical era full of those enraptured with Greek thought, antisemitic in many ways. Whether or not he was, it is pretty clear that he didn’t care for the Jewishness of this text, and instead force-shaped it into a “crucial text of Western ritual magic”[6]. For the record, this “difference” is one that I am simply aware of, but that is where my limit extends to. I want to do more research on this, and revisit it when I feel more comfortable.
Mathers’s translation reminds me of something Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote: “In the early days of the [Christian] faith any person who got hold of a Greek manuscript and fancied that he had some ability in the two languages went ahead and translated it”[7]. Mathers appears to me to have been this type of person. Now, why does it matter that he was? Well, it matters because Mathers has credibility. His scholarship was taken very seriously, if only in presentation. R A Gilbert, who wrote the foreword, says “[Mathers] utterly lacked the critical faculty”[8]. His translation, as I’ve shown, is rife with factual oversights and his own embellishments, which should throw any supposed “magical” properties of this material into doubt. And yet, if you search the name of this text or of Mathers on Google or YouTube, you’ll find hundreds, thousands of people who take this text incredibly seriously. For whatever reason, perhaps because of the lingering trust in spiritualism of the past, or maybe the draw to mindlessly push back against rationality of the present, there are thousands of people alive today who appear to take Mathers’s book as a mystifying, archaic law code, and live their lives by it.
I am quite the skeptic, I’ll own up to that. But I can’t stress enough that this is exactly how conspiracy theories start. Someone with the barest amount of credibility takes some historical material, compiles it in a way that incorporates a bias, reads selectively into certain elements, ignores others, represents parts incorrectly, and then presents their finished product with a misleading note that says something like, “I’m not telling you what to think, just here’s the stuff, do with it what you want.” Then, people with further less knowledge about the subject, and with absolutely no methodology, do exactly that, and the effect snowballs. Pretty soon, we see the mudflood[9], or of course flat-earthers, and, more annoyingly, mixes of both and all.
This is why method is so important. Not just being able to consume material, but knowing how to consume that material makes for good critical thinking. In general, it’s necessary to approach the material as an ends that will force you to shape your viewpoint to fit it, not the other way around. The material is not there to support you, whether or not you believe something contrary to what it says. You must instead work around it. Thinking and working like this… it’s hard work. But it is the only thing that can really help keep us from the brink of misinformation. May this text be an example of why it’s so important to be wary.
As for The Key of Solomon text itself, it’s not all bad news. For an example of much better scholarship being performed on this text, check out this free online version: http://www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/ksol.htm It is actually in-progress, so if you continue to check back periodically, you could potentially be watching the finished product shift its way into a complete work of scholarly interest. The authors take Mathers’s previous translation with a lot of incredulity in their introduction. And, along the side of the text, they include Mathers’s old footnotes for reference, but they have added dozens of their own, with hyperlinks to their sources for easy perusal.
Stay vigilant, and don’t forget to work hard.
Austin
[1] R. A. Gilbert, in the Foreword to the Key, vii [2] Jean-Patrice Boudet, "Magic at Court" in Sophie Page, Catherine Rider, et al., The Routledge History of Medieval Magic, London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, p. 339 [3] https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/11/15/3364432.htm [4] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-time-division-days-hours-minutes/#:~:text=Hipparchus%2C%20whose%20work%20primarily%20took,varying%20hours%20for%20many%20centuries. [5] Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, Second Edition, p. 162 [6] Key Foreword p. v [7] Saint Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Teaching. Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, p. 160. [8] Key Foreword p. vii [9] https://www.mudfloodconspiracy.com/