King Solomon and the ring: the legend behind the Goetia

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

The Goetia opens its catalog with a claim: these are the 72 spirits “which King Solomon commanded into a Vessel of Brass.” Every part of that sentence rests on a long tradition. On this page I trace how Solomon, a king remembered for wisdom, became the master of demons, from the Bible to the Greek Testament of Solomon, the historian Josephus, the Islamic tradition of Sulayman and the jinn, and the seal of Solomon.

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A word of care first. Solomon is a sacred figure in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The legends on this page belong to those traditions, and believers read them in many ways. For centuries, Christian writers also used “Jewish magic” as a slur, and some grimoires borrowed Hebrew names and Solomon’s reputation to look exotic. I treat the Solomonic tradition as shared history, not as a mysterious “Jewish secret,” and I ask you to do the same.

Solomon in the Bible

Historical In the Hebrew Bible, Solomon is the son of David and Bathsheba and the third king of Israel, traditionally dated to the tenth century BCE. The books of Kings and Chronicles describe his reign: the building of the Temple in Jerusalem, his wealth and trade, his many wives, and his turn late in life toward the worship of other gods. Historians debate how much of this reflects events, since archaeology for the period is limited and contested.

The key passage for later magic is 1 Kings 4:29 to 34. It says God gave Solomon “wisdom and understanding exceeding much,” and that “he spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall: he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes.” There is nothing about demons here. But a king who knew the nature of every living thing seemed, to later readers, like a king who might know the secrets of spirits too.

Wisdom and the Talmud

Historical The Wisdom of Solomon is a Greek book written in Egypt, probably in the first century BCE. In it, Solomon lists the knowledge God gave him, including “the violence of winds, and the reasonings of men: the diversities of plants and the virtues of roots” (Wisdom 7:20, King James Version). The Greek word behind “winds” is pneumata, which can mean winds or spirits, and some modern translations, such as the NRSV, render the phrase “the powers of spirits.” Later readers took it that way. This is the first clear step toward Solomon the exorcist.

Rabbinic literature tells further stories. In the Babylonian Talmud (Gittin 68a to 68b), Solomon sends his officer Benaiah with a chain and a ring engraved with the divine name to capture Ashmedai, king of demons. Solomon needs the demon to help find the shamir, a creature able to cut stone for the Temple. Ashmedai later tricks Solomon and takes his throne for a time. It is a wonder tale and a lesson about pride. The name Ashmedai is linked to Asmodeus in the book of Tobit, and through him to Asmoday, spirit 32 of the Goetia.

The Testament of Solomon

Historical The most important ancient source for the Goetia’s picture of Solomon is the Testament of Solomon. It is a Greek text, by a Christian or a Jewish author with later Christian editing, dated by scholars anywhere from the first to the fifth century CE. Most of its manuscripts are from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. F. C. Conybeare published an English translation in 1898, now in the public domain.

The story begins with a demon named Ornias tormenting a young workman on the Temple. Solomon prays, and the archangel Michael brings him a ring with an engraved seal, a gift from God. With it Solomon binds Ornias, then summons one demon after another. Each must give its name, its star or zodiac sign, its harmful work and the angel or name that defeats it. Then Solomon sets each to work on the Temple: cutting stone, carrying loads, making ropes.

Several features lead straight to the Goetia:

• A catalog of named demons. Each appears, states its name and powers, and is given a task.
• The ring and the seal. Solomon’s power comes from a ring given by God, not from his own strength.
• Name and counter-name. Each demon has an angel or divine name that thwarts it.
• Appearance and office. Demons appear in strange forms, animal, human or both, and describe what they do.
• Decans and stars. A long section lists 36 spirits linked to the 36 decans of the zodiac, each causing an illness. This is the clearest ancient link between demons and the decans, a link the Golden Dawn later revived for the Goetia.

None of the Testament’s demons is identical to a Goetic spirit. Asmodeus appears in both, but the details differ. The Testament is not a source of the 72. It is the ancestor of the form: a king, a ring, a list and a binding.

Josephus and the exorcist Eleazar

Historical The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, writing in Greek in the 90s CE, gives a remarkable early witness. In his Jewish Antiquities (8.2.5), he says God gave Solomon skill in expelling demons, and that Solomon composed incantations and forms of exorcism still in use. Then he reports what he says he saw himself.

A man named Eleazar freed people possessed by demons in front of the future emperor Vespasian, his sons and his officers. Eleazar put a ring under the possessed man’s nose. The ring held a root of a kind Solomon had prescribed. As the man smelled it, Eleazar drew the demon out through his nostrils and commanded it never to return, speaking Solomon’s name. To prove the demon had gone, he set a basin of water a little way off and ordered the demon to overturn it as it left.

This is ancient evidence of belief, not of the event. It shows that by the first century CE, Solomon was known as the author of exorcisms, that rings and roots were part of the practice, and that an exorcist could command a spirit by the king’s name. The ring, the command and the visible proof of obedience are all there.

Sulayman and the jinn

Historical Solomon is also a prophet in Islam, where he is called Sulayman. The Quran mentions him most fully in Surah 27 (The Ants), Surah 34 (Sheba) and Surah 38 (Sad). God made the wind serve him and taught him the speech of birds, and by God’s permission some of the jinn worked for him, building and diving. In Surah 34, verse 14, the jinn go on laboring after his death, not knowing he has died, until a creature of the earth gnaws through the staff he leans on and he falls.

The jinn are not demons in the Christian sense. In Islamic teaching they are created beings made from smokeless fire, with free will, who can be believers or unbelievers, good or bad, like humans. Many Muslims today regard deliberate contact with jinn as dangerous and forbidden. I mention this tradition because it is part of Solomon’s story, and because later Western writers, including Mathers, compared the Goetia’s brass vessel to tales of jinn shut in bottles. It is not part of the Goetia.

The Arabian Nights tale of “The Fisherman and the Jinni,” which Mathers mentions in a note, tells of a jinni sealed by Sulayman in a brass vessel and thrown into the sea. It is a folk tale, not scripture, and it shows how far the image traveled.

The seal of Solomon

Historical The ring of Solomon came to be known for its engraving, the seal of Solomon. Sources disagree about what it showed. In medieval Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, it was often drawn as a six-pointed star, the hexagram, and sometimes as a five-pointed star, the pentagram. Some accounts say it bore the divine name. The six-pointed star later became known in Jewish tradition as the Magen David, the shield of David, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a symbol of Jewish identity. Its use as a magical seal is older than that meaning and separate from it.

Later tradition The Goetia gives the magician a “Hexagram of Solomon” to wear on the skirt of a white robe, a “Pentagram of Solomon” for the breast, a ring or disc of Solomon to hold before the face, and a “Secret Seal of Solomon,” said to be the one with which he sealed the brass vessel. Their designs come from the seventeenth-century manuscripts, not from ancient Israel.

Solomon in medieval Christian magic

Historical By the Middle Ages, Solomon’s name was attached to a whole shelf of magical books, among them the Almandal, the Ars Notoria and a Book of the Four Rings. William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris in the thirteenth century, called the rings, seals and “nine candles” of Solomon idolatry, and the Speculum astronomiae lists a book on the four rings among forbidden works. The repeated condemnations show that the books circulated.

Solomon appealed to Christian magicians for a reason. He was a biblical king praised for God-given wisdom. If Solomon had commanded demons, then commanding them by God’s power could be presented as a holy act. The Church did not accept this. It taught that Solomon’s later idolatry was a warning, and medieval writers argued at length about whether he was saved.

What it adds up to

By the end of antiquity, a picture had formed. Solomon was wise in the nature of all things. God had given him power over spirits, often through a ring or seal. He could bind them, learn their names and offices, and set them to work. That picture was shared, in different forms, by Jews, Christians and Muslims.

The Goetia takes it and adds a medieval Christian theology of fallen angels and a Renaissance taste for catalogs. The result is a book that claims Solomon’s authority but was written well over two thousand years after his time. Knowing this does not make the Goetia worthless. It makes it a late link in a long chain.

When modern sellers claim that their seals or rituals come “from Solomon’s own ring,” they are making a claim no historian can support. Respect the legends as legends, and respect the faiths that hold Solomon sacred. To follow the chain forward, read the history of the Goetia and Weyer and Scot, or return to the Goetia hub.