The God-Slot Problem: How Can Non-Christians Power the Solomonic System?

[akenu]

Muslim exegesis on the Solomonic binding of djinn is 8th century. Testament of Solomon is 1st century and Josephus also reports witnessing an exorcism where a demon is bound and commanded with a ring with a pentacle on it in the first century. Which means the tradition was already established by the 1st century. Story of Solomon goes to the Babylonian Exile which is Iron Age and we have Bronze Age mesopotamian exorcism rituals in which demons are bound under the authority of corresponding Sumerian entities utilizing holy water and magic circles.

So what is ancient and where do we draw the line in the sand on what constitutes Solomonic? People say "13th century" because thats where we can date the Hygromenteia which gives fully developed magic circle binding rituals. But the testament of solomon utilizes astrological timing with the ring of solomon and angelic heirarchies which places the tradition itself at the 1st century. If it is specifically ritual and magic centered around the story of Solomon we can extend it to the Iron Age as there is a developed exorcism tradition in tandem with this mythos, but if Solomonic magic is specifically the utilization of binding demons in heirarchies while commanding them and we throw the tied in mythology out just the ritual technology that goes all the way back to the bronze age.

I mean this stuff goes all the way back to the beginning.

Ancient is considered from around 3500BC to around 500AD (rounding a lot). The pentagram first appeared in ancient Mesopotamia around 3500BC (rounding a lot). Is the pentagram Solomonic? I mean, if you define Solomonic as "warding away bad spirits", I am sure we would find some cave painting that could be associated with the practice. That sure isn't Solomonic, right?

 

[baobaoking]

I tend to agree with you. Ialso tend to think of Trinity as a modulation of the Mystery (the Numinous, God. the One, the Tao, the whatever ) into more human-space by human needs, wishes, and prayers.

This is a concept that precedes him but Frater Acher he has done a great job here visualizing this:

"Think of a giant water damn wall. Behind this wall resides a massive amount of power in potential. Over millennials of evolution smart humans managed to build valves into this massive wall, which now allow us to open and close these individually. Thus humans learned to leverage the water pressure behind the wall through specific power access points which in return have become controllable and can be harnessed to accomplish all kinds of man-made plans. Depending on which valve is opened and for how long we get a certain kind of pressure and quality of water. And with that we can work in whatever kind it pleases us."

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I was not raised particularly religious, by engage with the Catholic magical systems just fine. I feel it's important to consider that it's not required for your intellect to 100% taken over by all this. It will work even if you don't totally mind-fuck yourself into accepting as these "impossible and dumb" things. Ultimately they are mysteries, not dry "facts." This approach keeps our kerplunky accountant's brain - the left hemisphere - from meddling too much, if we consider these sacred ideas and off limits to its grubby survival-focused little rodent fingers.

Monotheism and the recognition of a supreme overarching divine principle also long predate Abrahamic tribal frameworks. Solomonic grimoire magic is fundamentally an extension of Catholic sacramental technology.

And Catholicism is actually Hellenic, not Abrahamic, and was built upon a Paleolithic-to-Neolithic trajectory across Eurasia that points toward a deep-seated recognition of a High God - often an distant overarching sky father or cosmic order (what Wilhelm Schmidt called Urmonotheismus), surrounded by a court of lesser spirits, ancestors, and localized numina. (a word originating from ancient Roman religion, a numen was not a fully fleshed-out human-like god with an elaborate mythology and backstory. These sit on the Catholic God's Divine Council, accompanied by divinitized humans, principalities, powers, archangels, etc. Now all this metaphor (and mythic poetry) but I also feel it's the closest description of what going on, in my personal opinion.

Paul using the stories of "YHVH" as a proxy stand-in for the Ancient Nameless God. He never made a reference to a human Jesus, whjo was always a vision of a cosmic god. This is historically and philosophically precise. When his Hellenized mind encountered the localized storm/warrior deity of the ancient Levant, he an others immediately translated that figure upward into the Platonic Theon - the Prime Mover, the Good, the Monad. Paul’s God in the Areopagus speech is explicitly agnostos theo - the Unknown God. Paul was culturally a Hellene.

The best book at this time for more on this is Book – PDF - 'From Paul to Mark - PaleoChristianity' by Laura Knight-Jadczyk (2021)

Also be sure to check out the late, great historian Russell Gmirkin.

Oh. The DNA of the Grimorium Verum (my man grim) has been traced back to 14th-century Italy, placing it at the center of late medieval scholasticism, clerics, scribes, and minor church orders were knee-deep in ritual innovation and medical astrology.

Grimoire magic is built on a universal cosmic hierarchy, and the top end is vastly more universal than a narrow tribal formulation, and anyone operating within that mythic framework can plug into it. It is quite alive, I have found, and you might find yourself learning far more about the fine points of Catholic and Neoplatonic history than you would ever expect otherwise. If that does not interest you, try the PGM as a ritual framework.

Have you ever played Cyberpunk 2077? This immediately made me think of the Blackwall and all the AIs scattered on the other side. Maybe some of them are like Claude—helpful, capable, and good at getting things done for us. Maybe some are like Gemini—a little goofy but lovable, and occasionally prone to causing trouble. And of course, some are dangerous enough that if you accidentally let them loose, they could ruin your life.

I find the parallel genuinely fascinating. I have to admire the imagination of the people at CDPR. Who knows—maybe some of them had read Frater Acher's piece too.

 

[MorganBlack]

Er. If th

This feels like flattening history to fit a narrative. A lot of development is missing, a few similarities are being made to do way too much work.

I didn't get the sense AbammonTheGreat is flattening everything into Solomonic magic, but is including Solomonic magic into the historical pratices of a specifically Western culturally-coded articulation ( from Greco-Roman to European to New World) , that are themselves part of a universal human practice of interacting with the spirit world.

In another thread I was writing about Tibetan Tantric Buddhism (Vajrayana) as a high-altitude hybrid system and a very useful macro-level framework because it swallowed and integrated multiple earlier streams, including, let's call it, the Laurasian / Gondwandian Shamanic Baseline. This older material is not "paganism - with all the 20th century constructs that word carries - it is "animism," and pre-1900 Western Magic is animistic.

(For more on our shared ancient mythic substrate, see Prof. Michael Witzel's The Origins of the World's Mythologies from Oxford University Press.)

This is the animist tradition of humanity, from an ancient time-depth, that we all share to a greater or lesser degree, coming out of Africa. AbammonTheGreat is speaking to this history , imho. Solomonic magic is very "shamanic" (yes , I know this word is problematic) but this point is often overlooked by people using popular conception of what "shamanic" looks like - having their head ussually occupied with either ew Age wiggwamsm buffalos and peace pipes (was was popular in 1970's Germany) , or Shambala-center Tibean wonder shamans. All good, but those are also totalizing images.

Tibetan Buddhism absorbed into its religious articulation the indigenous spirit-animism of Central and East Asia, as well as their raw and tempestuous terrestrial gods, territorial spirits, and elemental forces.

We have no issue with with Tantric Tibetan Buddhism (Vajrayana) being used as an authoritative framework, but we then we often bristle when people use Western systems - be it the Greco-Egyptian, Hellenic, Roman, or Catholic articulations in the same way. If you go back far enough - and really not that far in the total scheme of things - and we are all thes ame people coming out of Africa, telling the same stories, and shaping our reallationship to the spirt world with them, all based on human needs and dreams. See Prof. Michael Witzel again.

I think it's people wanting something super exotic feeling that maginalizes the Western Magic tradition. My son live in Portland and for years the kids there have pestered me to teach them brujeria, which they as want someting that feels far far away from their Protestant upbringing. I get it. Sometimes you just need more distance from your parents.

Post automatically merged: Jul 30, 2026

Adding James Foster here.

I feel the main fracture point in all this is how we are conditioned to think about Western Mysticism and Western Sorcery (diabolism / goetia).

I get it, I hated this "Christian crap" too when I was a teenager, and looked to Buddhism and Zen.

Now people also want to jettison the spirituality and reframe the sorcery as "pagan witchcraft" - which it maybe is in there from the PGM by way of Byzantium, but not much else. What we can see of local "witchcraft" traditions, what was there was rolled over into Folk Catholic continental diabolism with juts a few dollaps added of what were prbbably local folk-heroes elevated as cultural demi-gods.

From a Chaos Magic perspective, I support this, but to me it look like only reinventing the wheelm but then trying to change all the supply lines and get major car manufacturers to use it.

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"You can trace a coherent line of thought and practice from Byzantium down through the sacramental Christianity of the Latin West: a map of spiritual transformation drawn from patristic theology, Hermetic philosophy, and the ecstatic vision of the mystics. It was carried in writings, prayers, scholarship, architecture, and initiatory practice: in the octagonal baptismal fonts of Ambrose, which encode an eightfold theology of regeneration; in the celestial hierarchies of Dionysius, which supply a framework for theurgic ascent; in the Corpus Hermeticum preserved by Byzantine monks; in Pletho carrying that synthesis west to Florence; in Ficino fusing Hermetic praxis with Catholic sacramental theology. Real texts. Real practices. Real transformation, across many centuries."

 

[cygnusv]

Thank you for making this post and raising these questions, I personally deal with them a lot ever since I started studying the Solomonic texts, even though I do not subscribe to Abrahamic faiths.

First, regarding how to deal with doing rituals that do not subscribe to my belief system, I generally do it in the same way you do, what you called your fifth option. However, following the PGM and others I need to think more about how, in the same way Abrahamic faiths appropriated much of the names-language-deities-systems for their own benefit, I can totally do the same thing in reverse. Names like Adonai are easily adapted to my belief in Adonis, and are related. But still, I think there is much more space to act. I do not think lineages are as clear-cut separated since there was much borrowing and adaptation. We can see lineages as different systems (languages) between each other, but the way they were built was never in an isolated bubble (not to get into a very long polemic here, but the way Taoism and Chinese Buddhism have changed and came to us to this present day, they owe each other a lot, even though they are different traditions (教)). And seeing the way magic from late antiquity, the PGM itself and many "syncretic" traditions (afro-caribbean for example) mix, I would consider some degree of flexibility. Still, I do not feel comfortable just breaking all boundaries out of respect, and I do not believe there is no clear-cut answer to this, but goes more according to your own experience. Reverence, humility and respect are very important for me when doing this.

Anyway, there are books that show just how flexible the Solomonic legacy is. I am reading Stellas Daemonum by David Crowhurst, which does a great job at tracing back many of these demons on their original context and reframing them in a polytheistic - non-dualistic framework where the planetary magic is at the centre. Again you can see how we only got the tip of the iceberg in terms of knowledge that came to us and how these Abrahamic traditions got a lot from around them and re-framed it under their own worldview. Which was never static and was not even monotheistic to begin with. The clearest example being the fact that Solomon himself was not monotheistic at all: he worshipped other gods and was much condemned by others later because of this.

Furthermore, recent research, particularly the one of Dr Gal Sofer, shows how a lot of the Solomonic manuals have no cohesion between them as a tradition and just invoked the name Solomon to get credibility, in ways that was normal in the past (with Hermes, Zoroaster, etc). The Solomonic treaties do not seem to be a cohesive corpus at all but people would adapt the knowledge under that frame. This was very normal in Renaissance Europe for example, where original ideas from original people were not as important as someone's commentary on Plato, in which they had to frame their own views under that previous framework because that is what people wanted to read (Dr Ada Palmer talks about that her book on the Renaissance). There is so much about historical context that we do not bear in mind and that really reframes how we see these texts, how they build their authority and, most importantly, how much they show a sort of flexibility and freedom that we should learn from as well. Our own concepts or "tradition" and its authority derive a lot from modernity. One can easily get lost in these discussions, but I think the point again comes from how comfortable do you feel or not when adapting things. It is just like the example you discussed above about Nats: so much has been shaped about politics too, whether actual politics or religious institutions becoming stronger (because of politics) and creating a unified standard. But how they did that...well that was much more flexibility than we might think and serving their own interest a lot rather than following wisdom and tradition. Those things come to us today and, in our obsession for tradition, authenticity and "purity", we barely get to question them.

Regarding your question about 72, I actually read it this morning in Stellas Daemonum. He mentions it could have a close relation to the decans (36*2) and also " (...) the Lemegeton’s final count of seventy-two spirits reflects a decanate mystery, though it is more likely to have been chosen to reflect the Arabic and Talmudic traditions surrounding the legends of Solomon, which in turn have a possible basis in the seventy-two five-day weeks of the Egyptian Solar year or the seventy-two daemonic conspirators led by Set and an Ethiopian Queen who slew Osiris and scattered his body parts throughout Egypt." Hope it helps.

Your points are all very interesting and as someone who has studied so much (yet never enough) about religion in China, it is very interesting to see how modern practitioners are connecting to Western Esotericism and their perspectives on it (I was surprised when last year I got to buy cheap Solomonic seal necklaces on Shopee, which I wouldn't have expected to find haha). I think that we should remain quite open (agnostic?) about the information we have from the past, instead of taking it for granted as a unified truth, while still acting with respect and reverence. I do not really know how much spirits and deities care about man-made constructions and polemics, maybe many of these rituals are more like bridges and we need to find the best bridge that works for us, while the deities will be at the otherside regardless. At the end of the day, only we can know what works better for each one of us.

 

[jzatopa]

Buy some of Dr. Jerry Alan Johnson books and work through them, use the Tao if you ego cannot submit to The All, Aka God.