Practice · Tools · Key of Solomon
Solomonic sword
A newly prepared, inscribed sword used for protection in the book's operations and, in the circle chapter, for marking boundaries.
What the source describes
Chapter VIII gives the sword its own consecration after the knives, stylus, lance, staff, and wand. Its prayer asks that it serve as strength and defence against visible and invisible adversaries. Chapter IX also permits a sword to mark the circumference and further rings. Some witnesses add three separately named swords for assistants, showing that 'the sword' is not one perfectly stable object across the textual family.
Historical setting
The Key of Solomon survives as a family of manuscripts rather than one authorial master copy. Instrument names, drawings, preparation details and even which tools appear can differ between witnesses, so this page follows the cited edition and records its variants.
Common uses
It can mark the measured circle and its outer boundaries, and the consecration frames it as a protective instrument in the operations. In the source's choreography, those jobs concern boundary, authority, and defence rather than physical combat.
Form, materials and reconstruction
The main sword is new, cleaned, and polished on the day of Mercury at the first or fifteenth hour. Divine names are written on both sides; it is then sprinkled, censed, prayed over, and wrapped in silk. The exact final name and the assistant-sword inscriptions vary considerably among witnesses, and some later editors printed Hebrew forms not supported by every manuscript drawing.
Element: No fixed element
This source does not assign this particular instrument a fixed element. Its materials or effects should not be turned into an elemental correspondence without a named source.
Sources and variations
Aub. 24, Add. 10862, Sloane 1307, and the Zecorbeni material do not give an identical inventory or lettering. This is the Key's sword, not automatically the Golden Dawn Magic Sword, the Air Dagger, or Crowley's analytic Sword.
Primary account used here
Key of Solomon, Book II, Book II, chapters VIII–IX ↗
Further references
- Key of Solomon: introduction and contents ↗Editorial history and an overview of the manuscript-based edition.
- Hebrew Key of Solomon ↗A different witness with its own section on magical instruments and requisites.