ABSTRACT
While the origins of “Solomonic” magic may be found in the twelfth century, it is not until the thirteenth century that the dissemination of a certain number of texts or experiments on magic attributed to King Solomon is attested in the Latin West, in an essentially indirect fashion to begin with. The anonymous author of the Speculum astronomiae (c. 1260), long thought to be Albertus Magnus, is a privileged witness to the reception of these traditions that were distinct from the “common tradition” of Western magic. 1 By mentioning a series of libri Salomonis, for which he provides, with notable precision, titles and incipits, the author of the Speculum was effectively the first to define the boundaries of what we might consider a corpus of “Solomonic” texts. For the purposes of defending natural “astrological images” whose use could not, in his estimation, be outlawed in Christendom, he classed them (along with some others attributed to Mohammed) in that category of texts that featured “detestable images”, taking care to distinguish them – in a somewhat artificial manner – from those whose efficacy was based on “abominable images”, in other words on the principles of astral magic (perhaps based in astrolatry), attributed to Hermes, and which were still more dangerous in his view. 2 The author of the Speculum thus makes an inventory of five books of Solomon “which proceed with exorcism by the inscription of characters and through certain names”: the De quatuor annulis, attributed to four of the king’s disciples; the De novem candariis; the De tribus figuris spirituum; the De figura Almandal; and one final “little” book entitled De sigillis ad demoniacos. 3 He also mentions a “great book by Raziel which we call Liber institutionis”, 4 by which he is referring to the Hebraic tradition of the Liber Razielis, whose Solomonic attribution is attested both in its late antique template, the Liber Samayn, and in Latin manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. While he says nothing about the origin of these texts, nor about the ways in which they circulated in his time, his inventory remains a precious resource in more ways than one.
