The Key of Solomon

Salomon, Florence, 1880, etc.

The British Museum has also among its treasures seven manuscripts MSS. in the Latin, French and Italian languages. They are Additional manuscripts Add. MSS. 10,862; Sloane manuscripts MSS. 1307 and 3091; Harleian manuscripts MSS. 3981; King's manuscripts MSS. 288; Landsdowne manuscripts MSS. 1202 and 1203. Of these Nos. 288 and 3981 are French translations of the Italian made from the Hebrew by Abraham Colorno; a copy (in Italian) is, according to Ben Jacob's bibliographical work The Treasury of Books original Hebrew: "Ozar Ha-Sepharim" (see the entry for The Wisdom of Solomon original Hebrew: "Chokmat Shlomo"), in the possession of Professor Steinschneider.

In 1889 Mr. S. Liddel Macgregor Mathers, author of the "Kabbalah Unveiled", by piecing together these various manuscripts MSS. contained in the British Museum, edited "The Key of Solomon the King (Clavicula Salomonis)".

A hurried survey of these very manuscripts MSS. might easily convince one that they are anything but Jewish in character, several of them containing illustrations which, in the eye of the Jewish Law The Halakha, which strictly forbids the creation of graven images or the artistic representation of the divine, would be regarded as blasphemous; the human face or more extended form appears in a circle with the words God Almighty original Hebrew: "El Shaddai" added, the face itself in several instances being even supplied with horns and the form with wings.