The Key of Solomon (Clavicula Salomonis) is the archetypal Renaissance grimoire, a manual of ceremonial magic teaching the drawing of magic circles, the consecration of tools, and the pentacles, or planetary talismans, used to command spirits, with heavy emphasis on purification, prayer and precise ritual. Its attribution to King Solomon, whom Jewish, Christian and Islamic legend credited with power over spirits, is entirely legendary; the wisest king of scripture is a convenient authority, not the author.
The surviving Latin, Italian and French manuscripts are mostly late-medieval and Renaissance (fifteenth to eighteenth century), but they draw on much older Solomonic material, including the Greek Hygromanteia of the Byzantine world and traditions reaching back to the late-antique Testament of Solomon. The historian of magic Owen Davies places it at the centre of the grimoire tradition, and the widely used English text is the 1889 edition of S. L. MacGregor Mathers, who worked from a set of British Library manuscripts and, in the manner of his time, tidied and Christianised what he found. It should be read as a living, edited compilation rather than a single ancient book.