The Testament of Solomon
It’s been a while since we’ve had an Adult Educational Form apart from Pub Theology or family Confirmation Class. So today I want to tell you a story. It’s not very long, but proves itself surprisingly impactful. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it’s one of the most important books you’ve likely never heard of. And its title is The Testament of Solomon.
The Testament of Solomon is part of Pseudepigrapha, a loose collection of literature that spans two- to three-hundred years both before and after Jesus. They are not part of the Bible. They are not even part of the Apocrypha, those Greek books of the Old Testament that made it into Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, but generally not into Jewish or Protestant Bibles.
“Pseudepigrapha” means false name or false signature. They are attributed to biblical characters who lived centuries or even millennia before the book itself. We might be tempted to call Pseudepigrapha “fan fiction,” though a more charitable approach would be to consider them midrash. Midrash is a tradition of Jewish biblical interpretation which pays close attention to the silences in the text, holes in the stories just begging to be filled in. It’s a way of inhabiting, exploring, and teasing out the text.
What was Sarah’s reaction when she learned that Abraham had almost sacrificed their son Isaac? We don’t know; the Bible doesn’t say. So you write a midrash about that, using one’s own sanctified imagination to expand the biblical story. What was Jesus’ childhood like? Where did He learn the things that He learned? Again, we don’t know. There’s only one story about His adolescence, and it’s relatively brief. But people want to know, so there’s a midrash about that. Several, actually.
These are not lost gospels or suppressed traditions, but dramatic and hopefully faithful adaptations—like taking one brief book and expanding it into three rather long movies. You have to add a bunch of stuff. You have to come up with new details. And maybe, if your version, your midrash, your retelling of the tale, proves particularly popular, it might end up as part of the lore, influencing subsequent tellings down the line. This happens all the time in cinema and television. When it happens around the Bible, we call it midrash—such as the Pseudepigrapha.
The two most important and influential works of Pseudepigrapha would likely be the books of Jubilees and of Enoch. There’s actually one old church that does include those two within its Bible. And those we could surely cover some other time. But number three would certainly be The Testament of Solomon.
Now, dating the Testament is notoriously difficult. Scholars peg it anywhere from the first century to the High Middle Ages. What is clear is that, in the form in which we have it, it’s an obviously Christian work. Yet there are elements of it which may be much older. Jesus at one point appears to reference the traditions recorded in The Testament of Solomon.
The story itself is pretty simple. Supposedly written by King Solomon as a final confession on his deathbed, the Testament tells of the time when the great Temple in Jerusalem was first being constructed. And Solomon notices that the child of one his architects, a boy he seems to favor, continues to waste sickly away despite the king granting him double rations. When asked about this, the boy says it’s because a demon visits him in the night and drains his life away by sucking on his thumb.
Understandably disturbed by this, Solomon prays about it, and God sends to him the archangel Michael, who presents Solomon with a signet ring, made of stone, and inscribed with a pentagram—a five-pointed star within a circle. This ring allows Solomon to command and control the demons. So he gives the kid the ring, the kid throws it at the demon, and the demon is literally stamped with the Seal of Solomon, so that it must obey the king.
Solomon then commands this demon to round up and present to him all the other demons lurking about, and as each one comes before the king, he or she has to tell him their name, what evil deeds they do, and which specific angel can stop them. Solomon then either punishes, imprisons, or sets each demon to work, laboring to complete the Temple. That’s how he could build such a magnificent structure: God gave him command over spirits to supplement his workforce.
Now, when you and I speak of demons, we generally mean fallen angels. And there are certainly a few of those in the Testament. But there are also demons which claim to be the ghosts of fallen giants, or angel-human hybrids, or even creatures closer to what we might consider the fae. They fear iron, for instance. And that’s because classically the term “daemon” covered a fair amount of ground. There were humans on earth and gods in the heavens—what we would call angels—but what about the middle sky, the realms of air and fire? A demon was something between an angel and a man, semi-divine, quasi-immortal, halfway to heaven.
Because of The Testament of Solomon—and other works that retell and expand upon the story—the pentacle became the preëminent symbol of Western magical practice. The five-pointed star in a circle has rather an old pedigree. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras used it to illustrate the importance of the “nothingness” that defined the elements by separating them from each another. Christians took it as a symbol of the five wounds of Christ, and an inverted pentacle—the star pointing downward—indicated the Incarnation, God becoming Man.
Sorcerers of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment would draw the pentacle upon the ground and stand within it, in order to safely summon spirits. They defended this practice by saying that it wasn’t black magic; demons were not summoned for eldritch pacts; but that they were using the truths imparted by God through the archangel Michael to subject evil spirits to humankind’s will.
The notion that every evil plaguing humanity, from headaches to shipwrecks, was caused by a specific demon, and could be countered by invoking a specific angel, proved astonishingly popular as well. Stubbed toe? There’s an angel for that. If you knew his name, and the name of the demon who caused your toe to stub, you could have the angel fix it. As you can imagine, entire tomes were written containing the names of demons and angels as a sort of magical first aid—tomes inspired by the Testament, which was the first to do so.
Eventually the Church hierarchy got sick of the whole shebang, telling people to put away their grimoires—telephone books for angels and demons—and not to assign any names to the angels other than those specifically referenced in Scripture. Thus we have Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and, depending on your tradition, Uriel as well. Other angels, such as Raziel or Azrael or Phanuel, while undeniably popular, nonetheless officially were left out in the cold.
More recently, the pentacle has been adopted by Wiccans, a twentieth-century religion based on nineteenth-century scholarship, which claims for itself older, deeper, magical roots. Thus a Christian symbol supposedly asserts a pagan pedigree. Then in the 1960s the Church of Satan took the inverted pentacle, superimposed with a goat’s head, as their religion’s symbol. Both are understandable, given the pentacle’s associations with magic and goetia; i.e. the summoning of evil spirits.
Between the circle, the pentacle, the grimoires containing complex angelologies and demonologies, the Wiccans, the Satanists, fantasy literature, and everything in between, it is no exaggeration to claim that The Testament of Solomon is the foundation, or at least the nucleation point, for all of subsequent Western magical practice. Yet its influence is not limited to the West.
Muslims possesses similar tales of Solomon’s magical prowess. Islam does not have demons in the sense that Christianity does; generally speaking, Islamic angels cannot fall. What they do have are jinni, or genies: magical creatures of “smokeless fire,” of a middling nature betwixt angels and men—in other words, faeries. Magic is not such a taboo subject when one summons up a genie instead of Satan. And they know all about Solomon’s heaven-sent ring. But in the Islamic legends, the star on that ring has six points, not five.
The six-pointed star—known as the Seal or Shield of Solomon, and later as the Star of David—can be found as a geometric design on synagogues going back millennia. But it didn’t become the preëminent symbol of Judaism and the Jewish people until the recent nineteenth century, and it’s because of The Testament of Solomon and later works inspired by it. The star is Solomon’s magical ring.
Okay, that’s enough for now. But hopefully this has been sufficient to have sparked a bit of interest and of insight.
In Jesus. Amen.
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