Lesser Key of Solomon: The Five Books of the Lemegeton Explained

Quick answer: The Lesser Key of Solomon, also called the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, is a seventeenth-century English grimoire compiled from older sources and divided into five books: the Ars Goetia, Ars Theurgia-Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel and Ars Notoria. The first book, with its catalog of seventy-two spirits and their seals, is by far the most famous, but the other four describe angels of the hours, aerial spirits and prayers for learning. This guide explains all five and their origins.

Related guides: Ars Goetia names, offices and sigils, full list of the 72 demons, Goetia ranks and hierarchy, manuscript and printed Goetia editions, the Greater Key of Solomon, Bael and Paimon, Goetia kings.

What the Lesser Key of Solomon is

The Lesser Key of Solomon is a grimoire, a handbook of spirit magic, that survives in English manuscripts of the seventeenth century. Its Latin title, Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, means “Lemegeton, the Little Key of Solomon”, and the strange word Lemegeton has never been satisfactorily explained. The word “lesser” distinguishes it from the Key of Solomon, or Clavicula Salomonis, an older and separate text sometimes called the Greater Key, which is covered in the article on the Greater Key of Solomon.

Despite its name, the book has nothing to do with the historical Solomon. Attributing magical texts to the king was a medieval convention that borrowed his reputation, found in the Bible, the Qur’an and the pseudepigraphal Testament of Solomon, for wisdom and authority over spirits. The Lemegeton’s compiler gathered five earlier works, some medieval and some from the sixteenth century, and presented them as a single Solomonic book.

The compilation claims to teach the names, ranks and seals of spirits, the angels governing hours and directions, and prayers for knowledge. This site describes that content as history and does not provide instructions. The reason the Lesser Key is so widely known today is its first book, the Ars Goetia, whose seventy-two spirits and their sigils have spread into fiction, games and popular occultism far beyond the original text.

The five books of the Lemegeton

Each of the five books was originally a separate work, and the manuscripts preserve differences in style that reflect their varied origins.

Ars Goetia

The first and longest book lists seventy-two spirits, each with a rank such as king, duke, prince, marquis, count or earl, knight or president, a description of appearance, the offices it is said to perform, the number of legions it commands and a seal. It also contains the legend that Solomon sealed the spirits in a brass vessel and that the Babylonians released them.

Ars Theurgia-Goetia

The second book describes thirty-one aerial spirits arranged by compass direction, each with dukes and servants under them. The text calls them partly good and partly evil and gives seals for each chief spirit.

Ars Paulina

The third book has two parts: the angels of the twenty-four hours of the day and night, and the angels of the three hundred and sixty degrees of the zodiac, assigned according to the operator’s birth sign.

Ars Almadel

The fourth book describes a wax tablet, the Almadel, and the angels of four “altitudes” or choras, each associated with a season and a set of attributes.

Ars Notoria

The fifth book is a collection of prayers and “notae”, or figures, said to grant memory, eloquence and understanding of the liberal arts. It is the oldest material in the collection and reads more like devotional literature than like a spirit catalog.

Where the Lesser Key's sources come from

The Ars Goetia’s spirit list has a traceable ancestry. In 1577 the Dutch physician Johann Weyer published Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, “False Monarchy of Demons”, as an appendix to his work against witch trials, listing sixty-nine spirits with ranks and offices but no seals. Reginald Scot translated it into English in The Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584. The Goetia compiler added spirits, reorganized the order, and supplied the seals that Weyer deliberately omitted. The full roster appears in the full list of the 72 demons.

The Ars Theurgia-Goetia draws on the Steganographia of the abbot Johannes Trithemius, written around 1499 and printed in 1606. Trithemius’s work was partly a treatise on cryptography disguised as spirit conjuration, and the Lemegeton’s compiler took its lists of aerial spirits at face value. The Ars Paulina reworks medieval hour-angel texts and uses tables from Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, printed in 1533, which fixes its final form after that date.

The Ars Almadel and the Ars Notoria are medieval. The Almadel is attested in Latin by the fifteenth century and may rest on Arabic antecedents, while the Ars Notoria circulated widely among students and clerics from the thirteenth century, attracting condemnation from theologians such as Thomas Aquinas. Scholars of medieval magic regard the Notoria as the best documented of the five books, with dozens of surviving Latin copies that predate the English Lemegeton by three or four centuries.

Manuscripts, editions and how the text reached readers

The Lemegeton is known from a handful of seventeenth-century English manuscripts, several of them in the British Library’s Sloane and Harley collections. The copies differ in spelling, in the order of material, in the drawing of seals and in whether all five books are present. One manuscript dated 1641 is often cited as among the earliest complete witnesses, and the title Lemegeton appears in some but not all of them. There is no original manuscript, only a family of copies made within a few decades of each other.

In 1904 Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers’s translation of the Ars Goetia was published under Aleister Crowley’s editorship as The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King. That edition included only the first book, added Crowley’s preliminary invocation, and became the Goetia that most twentieth-century readers knew. The other four books remained obscure until modern editors returned to the manuscripts.

Joseph H. Peterson’s 2001 edition, The Lesser Key of Solomon: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, presented all five books with manuscript variants and source notes, and it is the standard reference today. Comparing Peterson’s text with the Mathers and Crowley Goetia shows how much a printed edition can shape a tradition: an entire book was treated as a single list of demons for a century because of one editorial choice. The differences between manuscript and print are examined in manuscript and printed Goetia editions.

How the Lesser Key of Solomon relates to other Solomonic texts

The Lemegeton belongs to a long line of books claiming Solomon’s authority over spirits. The earliest is the Testament of Solomon, a Greek narrative composed somewhere between the first and fifth centuries CE, in which the king questions demons one by one using a ring given by the archangel Michael. Its catalog of demons, each with a name, a harm and an angel who thwarts it, is a distant ancestor of the Goetia’s format, though almost none of the names carry over.

Islamic tradition independently preserved the idea of Solomon commanding jinn, drawing on the Qur’an, where Surah An-Naml 27:38–40 describes an ifrit of the jinn offering to bring the Queen of Sheba’s throne. Arabic occult literature developed its own lists of jinn kings and servants, which have more in common with the Southeast Asian khodam tradition than with the Lemegeton. The European Key of Solomon, the Greater Key, is a different text again: a manual of preparations, pentacles and planetary timing rather than a catalog of named spirits.

Within the Lemegeton itself the five books disagree about what kind of beings they describe. The Goetia’s spirits are called evil and must be constrained; the Theurgia-Goetia’s are mixed; the Paulina and Almadel deal with angels; and the Notoria addresses God directly. The compiler’s decision to bind them together under one Solomonic title is what created the impression of a single coherent system. The kings who open the Goetia’s roster, Bael and Paimon, have their own article on this site.

Common misunderstandings about the Lemegeton

The popularity of the Goetia has produced a set of errors that attach to the whole Lesser Key.

• Solomon wrote it. The book is a seventeenth-century English compilation of medieval and sixteenth-century sources. The attribution is a convention of the genre.
• The Lesser Key and the Goetia are the same book. The Ars Goetia is one of five books. The Mathers and Crowley edition printed only that book and set the misunderstanding in motion.
• The Lesser Key is a medieval text. Parts of it, especially the Ars Notoria, are medieval, but the Goetia’s list depends on Weyer’s 1577 book, and the compilation as a whole is later.
• The seals are ancient. Weyer’s list had no seals. The sigils first appear in the seventeenth-century manuscripts and vary from copy to copy.
• The spirits are all demons in the Christian sense. The text itself describes a range from evil spirits to angels, and the number seventy-two is likely a symbolic figure that echoes the seventy-two names of God in Kabbalistic tradition.

None of these corrections diminish the book’s historical interest. They simply place it where it belongs: in the world of early modern English manuscript magic, drawing on continental and medieval sources.

Why the Lesser Key of Solomon is searched today and how to read it

Few grimoires have had the afterlife of the Lemegeton. Its seventy-two spirits appear in anime and manga, in role-playing games, in horror films and in the character lists of mobile games, usually in forms that keep the names and seals while ignoring the text. Musicians have borrowed the sigils for album art. Modern occult communities treat the Goetia as a core text, and online forums discuss its spirits daily. All of that traffic leads back to a book that most people have never read in full.

A sensible reading order begins with a reliable edition of the whole Lemegeton, so that the Ars Goetia is seen in the company of the four books that follow it. Reading the Ars Notoria’s prayers next to the Goetia’s spirit catalog makes clear that the compiler was collecting a library, not writing a manual. Peterson’s edition with its source notes is the usual recommendation; the Mathers and Crowley Goetia is worth reading as a historical document of 1904 rather than as a window on the manuscripts.

It also helps to keep three questions in mind: which earlier text each book comes from, which manuscript a given edition follows, and what the editor added. Those questions are the difference between studying the Lesser Key of Solomon and simply repeating what a game or a website says about it. The structure of ranks and offices within the Goetia, which is the next thing most readers want to understand, is set out in Ars Goetia names, offices and sigils and in the overview of Goetia ranks and hierarchy.

Disclaimer

This article describes the Lesser Key of Solomon as a historical text for educational purposes. Beliefs about spirits and angels in the Lemegeton are reported, not endorsed, and the site provides no ritual instructions and makes no claims about any effect of the practices the book describes.