A 17th-century magician once copied a single conjuration from one manuscript into another, changing only the spirits’ names. He did not realize he was creating a different book. The Lesser Key of Solomon (the Lemegeton) is a practical manual for summoning 72 specific spirits. The Greater Key (the Clavicula Salomonis) is a ritual system for building the magician’s own authority through purification, tools, and divine names. One calls. The other prepares.
The confusion between these two grimoires is older than most of their surviving manuscripts. They share a name, a legendary author, and a handful of overlapping techniques. But they belong to different worlds of practice, separated by roughly two centuries of magical development.
What Is the Lesser Key of Solomon?
The Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (the Lesser Key) is a 17th-century compilation of five shorter books, bound together as a single grimoire. Its core is the Ars Goetia, which lists 72 spirits: their names, seals, ranks, and the specific uses they serve. The magician does not bargain with these spirits. He commands them through divine authority, using the seals as keys.
The other four books expand the system. The Ars Theurgia Goetia governs spirits of the hours and directions. The Ars Paulina deals with the planetary hours and the angels of the zodiac. The Ars Almadel provides a wax tablet for contacting celestial intelligences. The Ars Notoria is the odd one out: a set of prayers and symbols meant to grant knowledge and memory, not spirit control.
The earliest complete manuscript of the Lemegeton dates to 1641, held at the British Library as Sloane MS 3825. But the Ars Notoria circulated separately as early as the 13th century. The Goetia drew from earlier conjuring manuals like the Heptameron (1496) and Johannes Trithemius’s Steganographia (c. 1500). The compiler who assembled the five books into one did not invent the spirits. He collected them.
What Is the Greater Key of Solomon?
The Clavicula Salomonis (the Greater Key) is older and more systematic. Its earliest surviving manuscripts date to the late 15th and early 16th centuries, with the most complete version being the 1572 Italian manuscript held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (MS 2342). The Greater Key claims to have been written by King Solomon himself, a claim no serious historian accepts, but one that gave the book its authority.
The Greater Key is not a spirit list. It is a ritual framework. It opens with the preparation of the magician: fasting, confession, bathing, and the construction of ritual tools (the knife, the wand, the pentacle, the robe). It describes how to draw the circle, how to purify the space, and how to invoke divine names. The actual conjurations come later, and they are generic. The magician calls upon “spirits of the air” or “spirits of Saturn” without naming them individually.
The Greater Key’s most distinctive feature is its elaborate system of planetary hours, colors, and materials. Each operation must be performed at the correct hour of the correct day, using the correct metal and the correct ink. The magician’s authority comes from alignment with celestial order, not from a list of names.
Where the Two Books Split: Purpose and Audience
The difference is not academic. It changes how you use each book.
The Lesser Key assumes you already have authority. It does not teach you how to purify yourself or construct a wand. It gives you a name, a seal, and a command. You draw the seal, speak the conjuration, and the spirit appears. The book is for the magician who wants results, not preparation.
The Greater Key assumes you have no authority. It spends half its pages on what you must do before you speak a single word of conjuration. You cannot skip the purification. You cannot substitute materials. The book is for the magician who wants to become worthy of the operation.
This difference reflects their historical contexts. The Greater Key emerged from the Renaissance magical revival, when figures like Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola were recovering Hermetic and Neoplatonic texts. The magician was a philosopher-priest who ascended through purity and knowledge. The Lesser Key emerged from the 17th-century decline of that ideal, when grimoires became practical handbooks for a literate but not necessarily learned clientele.
The Spirits: Named vs. Ranked
The Lesser Key names every spirit it works with. The Ars Goetia lists 72, each with a specific function. Bael teaches invisibility. Agares restores runaways. Vassago declares past and future. The magician chooses the spirit that matches his need, draws the seal, and performs the conjuration.
The Greater Key does not name spirits. It ranks them by planet and element. The spirits of Saturn are black-clad and dangerous. The spirits of Jupiter are crowned and merciful. The magician does not call a specific spirit. He calls a class of spirits and expects the appropriate one to appear.
This difference matters for practice. The Lesser Key gives you a direct line to a specific entity. The Greater Key gives you a system for contacting whatever spirit governs the current hour and planet. One is precise. The other is flexible.
The Tools: What Each Book Requires
The Greater Key is obsessive about tools. It describes the knife with the white handle (for summoning) and the knife with the black handle (for sacrifice and threat). It describes the wand of almond or hazel wood, cut at a specific planetary hour. It describes the pentacle of Solomon, drawn on virgin parchment with specific inks. It describes the robe of white linen, the crown, the ring, and the girdle.
The Lesser Key requires almost none of this. The Ars Goetia demands only the seal of the spirit, drawn on parchment or engraved on metal. The circle is described but not elaborated. The conjuration is spoken, not sung. The magician does not need a knife or a wand. He needs the name and the seal.
This is not a simplification. It is a different theory of magic. The Greater Key believes that the magician’s tools are extensions of his will, consecrated through ritual. The Lesser Key believes that the spirit’s seal is the tool. The rest is theater.
The Circle: Geometry vs. Authority
The Greater Key’s circle is a complex diagram. It contains the names of God, the names of angels, the names of the hours, and the names of the elements. The magician stands inside it, protected by divine names on all sides. The circle is a fortress.
The Lesser Key’s circle is simpler. It is a circle with a triangle outside it. The spirit appears in the triangle. The magician stands in the circle. The triangle is the spirit’s prison, not its stage. The circle is the magician’s boundary, not his fortress.
This difference reveals a deeper shift. The Greater Key’s circle protects the magician from the spirit. The Lesser Key’s triangle contains the spirit for the magician. One is defensive. The other is controlling.
Historical Figures Who Shaped Both Books
The Greater Key’s influence runs through Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533), which systematized the planetary hours and correspondences that the Greater Key used. Agrippa never claimed to be Solomon, but his work gave the Greater Key its intellectual framework.
The Lesser Key’s most famous editor was Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, who translated the Ars Goetia for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late 19th century. Mathers added the Enochian invocations and the preliminary invocation of the Bornless One, which are not in the original manuscript. His version became the standard for modern occultists.
Aleister Crowley edited and published Mathers’s translation in 1904 as The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King. Crowley added an essay and a new conjuration. His version remains the most widely available.
Common Misconceptions
The Lesser Key is not a single book. It is five books bound together. The Ars Goetia is the most famous, but the Ars Notoria has no spirits at all.
The Greater Key is not by Solomon. No serious scholar believes this. The attribution is a literary device that gave the book authority in an era that valued ancient sources.
The two books do not contradict each other. They address different levels of practice. A magician might use the Greater Key to prepare and the Lesser Key to execute. Many Golden Dawn practitioners did exactly this.
The spirits of the Goetia are not demons in the Christian sense. The grimoire treats them as fallen angels who can be commanded through divine authority. The magician does not worship them. He commands them.
FAQ
Can you use the Lesser Key without the Greater Key? Yes. The Lesser Key does not require the Greater Key’s purification or tools. But many practitioners find the Greater Key’s preparation improves their results.
Which book is more dangerous? Neither is dangerous in the sense of physical harm. Both require psychological stability and clear intent. The Goetia spirits are often described as difficult to dismiss, which is why the Lesser Key includes a license to depart.
Are the spirits in both books the same? No. The Greater Key works with unnamed planetary spirits. The Lesser Key works with 72 named spirits unique to the Ars Goetia.
Which book should a beginner use? Neither. Both assume familiarity with ritual magic, divine names, and protective techniques. A beginner should start with a modern guide to ritual magic before attempting either grimoire.
Closing
The Lesser Key and the Greater Key are not rivals. They are two halves of a broken tradition, each preserving what the other lost. The Lesser Key gives you the names. The Greater Key gives you the method. Together, they form a complete system that has shaped Western ceremonial magic for four centuries. For more on the tools and techniques these grimoires use, see our guide to ritual magic tools. If you want to understand the spirits themselves, the glossary of Goetic spirits is the next step. And for the full context of Solomonic magic, our hub on ceremonial grimoires covers the tradition from the Key to the Ars Notoria.