August 8, 2018 • 45 mins
Imagine that you could possess a genuine, real-life spellbook -- something that could enable you to summon and command otherworldly powers, to accrue riches and shed light on the dark mysteries of the heavens. People who believe such a thing is possible often point to the legendary Key of Solomon as proof that genuine grimoires exist. But what is this book, exactly? Tune in as the guys attempt to separate the fact from fiction surrounding the Key of Solomon.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M
(00:24):
welcome back to the show. My name is Noel as
a spirit conduit for Matt, who usually starts the show
but as a way on adventures and will return shortly.
They call me Ben. We are joined with our super producer, uh,
Paul the necromancer Decant. Most importantly, you are here, You
are you, and that makes this stuff they don't want
(00:46):
you to know. You know, Ben, I thought the Necronomicon
was real until you told me otherwise last time we
have that conversation. Right, this is going to be an
episode that those of you who enjoyed our Grimoise episode
will find uh particularly fascinating. I love that you mentioned
the Necronomicon at the top of the show, Nol, because
for everyone listening, if you're a fan of horror movies,
(01:09):
you're intimately familiar with that old trope of the Cursed
Book and Lovecraft's Necronomicon. Howard Philip Lovecraft, Uh he he
made this book. It's a perfect example of what we're
talking about because for years and years and years after
he admittedly wrote it in a work of fiction, as
(01:30):
a work of fiction mentioned to other fictional stories. People
liked it enough that they just started saying, let's all
agree that it's real. Yeah, I mean, I think my
thing is it just has become such a stand in
for like cursed books. Like you said, I almost thought
it was more of a word than a specific volume,
like calling something a necronomicon or a grimoire, you know,
(01:52):
that was what my brand did. Like how nowadays, instead
of saying search the Internet, we just say Google regardless
of which search or is he rocks for copy. That's
that's an interesting comparison. Now, the Necronomicon maybe the most
widely known fictional book of magic in the Western world,
but there are other ones too, you know. On a
(02:13):
lighter note, there's The spell Book in Disney's Focus Focus,
which I recently rewatched and stand by it is an
enjoyable movie, if not a film. Today, these books are
almost universally thought of as little more than clever bits
of fiction, maybe an extra detail added to flesh out
a fictional world. But as we explored in the previous
(02:37):
video and audio episodes on grim Wise, these books were
real things. They were physical, tangible books in the real world.
They were often mistakenly or purposefully misattributed to other authors.
There are multiple counterfeit versions, and numerous books took the
same name or something very much like it to increase
(02:58):
their occult street read. But the books themselves were real,
and in many many cases, various people throughout the centuries
would read these books and attempt the experiments or rituals
outlined in those tomes. Today's episode is about one of
the most famous grim Wise in existence, the book or
(03:21):
slash books known as The Key of Solomon. We're going
to delve into the fact and fiction surrounding this book
with one other huge question that we'll get to near
the end. What is this supposed to do and does
it actually work? So here are the facts. The Key
of Solomon is kind of it is this sort of
(03:43):
an umbrella term that is assigned to several different books.
And there's a legend that says the book was originally
created by the biblical king Solomon of mining mining fame. Yeah,
the mine king Solomon's mind, right, he had a seal,
he made a temple. Yeah, according to you'll hear it
being phrased as a uh something mentioned in just Judeo
(04:05):
Christian beliefs, but mention of King Solomon also occurs in
holy books of the Bahai and also in the Koran.
According to these legends, these stories, the man known as
King Solomon was the son of the famous Goliath slaying David,
who went on Solomon did went on to become the
ruler of Israel and approximately nine sixty seven b c. E.
(04:29):
And he was ruling this enormous kingdom that extended from
the Euphrates in the north to Egypt in the south.
And in the religious text he is presented as one
of the wisest men in the history of civilization. He's
kind of and this is not a one to one
comparison religious scholars in the audience, He's kind of a
(04:52):
Tony Stark. He's a genius inventor, he's a ladies man,
a super rich. He's super rich, exact and potentially practices
the dark arts. And God appeared to him in a
dream during the early days of his of his reign,
and he said, Solomon, you can have whatever you desire
(05:12):
because you act, you know how to worship me, and
you're honoring me in the ways and the methods. Uh
that your father David instructed you too. And when we
say this guy is clever, we're drawing on numerous anecdotes
and the most famous one, which I'm I think everybody
has heard. Whether or not you are religious, and whether
(05:33):
or not you're that familiar with Western religion, you've probably
heard the story of the baby right where uh, he
is a judge and these two women come to his
court and they have a baby, and both both of
these people say that is my child. I misspoke as well.
Solomon is not known for practicing any dark arts, but
(05:55):
there are things that he codified and committed to text
that were used as sort of a lexicon by others
that practiced said dark arts is that you know. And
I think the term dark art too, is something that
undergoes an evolution, because according to legend, he was practicing
some stuff, but later it would be called dark arts
(06:17):
right by church authorities. So you're spot on, spot on.
But back to these back to these women. These are
the days before DNA testing, obviously, so they say this
is my kid. This lady's line, and the other lady says, no,
this person's line. This is truly my child, and Solomon's
(06:39):
solution was to really double down on this. He said, okay,
you've both convinced me in your own way. Tell you what,
you just just cut the baby in half, be done
with it. And then one woman was prepared to accept
the decision, but the other one begged King Solomon, please,
(06:59):
it is my child, but give it to this other woman.
I don't want the baby to die. Classic trope and
sci Fi when you have clones, you know, and to
see which one or like the evil double or whatever,
to see which one is the real the real one
sort of, I don't know it was. Sci Fi draws
a lot from religion, that's true, earlier religion, so of
course we know how. We know how Solomon acted next
(07:23):
once he saw one lady giving up the baby to
spair it's life. Yeah, I guess what I'm getting at
with like that. If there's an evil twin, you can
usually tell in sci Fi who's the real one, because
the real one will take a bullet for his lady
love or something, while the evil one will, you know,
behave more less chivalrously right right, And in the case
(07:43):
of Solomon, he says, okay, well, you have proven to
me that you are the true mothers, so that's obviously
your child. Again. According to legend, people from surrounding nations
came to hear Solomon's wisdom. He composed three thousand prov herbs,
one thousand and five songs, He wrote the Song of Songs,
(08:04):
the Book of Proverbs, and other religious works. In the
Jewish tradition, he has thought to be the builder of
the First Temple in Jerusalem and the last ruler of
the Kingdom of Israel before it was divided into the
Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom of Judah. And in
the tradition concerning the Key of Solomon, or also in
(08:24):
the Lesser Key of Solomon, which will will have to
mention because it's fascinating, the king used his powers, including
a special seal and his magic ring to summon and
bind spirits. And it was these spirits that were his
workforce for the First Temple. So going back to dark arts,
you know, centuries later, summoning spirits and spirits of the
(08:49):
dead to literally do your dirty work or at least,
you know, the work that you don't feel like doing
because masonry breaking. Yeah, So this these are the uh
claims about this individual, and we can get into those
a little bit later. We want to set that up
and bracket it. But now we got to talk about
(09:09):
what's actually in this book, because the key of Solomon is,
as you said, noel an umbrella term for multiple different
translations for multiple I don't know, differing interpretations of the text.
The book itself is composed of an introduction and then
like two smaller books, and the introduction is a story
(09:34):
about how the book allegedly came to be. So in
the introduction to the book, readers get a story about
the creation of said text. Solomon writes the book for
his son Rio Bohm and tells his son to hide
the book in a sepul cor upon Solomon's dead. What's
a sepal car ban? That's like a kind of like
(09:55):
a it's like a yeah, yeah. It's like a two
uh small room usually built a stone or cut into rock,
where you put a dead body or a book, or
a dead body with a book. It's a bonus could
be clutching it. So what happens next, well next, and
by next I mean years and years later. Um. Babylonian
(10:18):
philosophers find the text while they're repairing Solomon's tomb, Solomon
himself his tomb. No one can understand the text, so
they pray to God for understanding, and so lo and behold,
an angel appears in grants one of the philosophers the
ability to read the text, after he swears that he
(10:39):
will keep it safe and hidden from the unworthy and
the wicked. This is obviously, of course, this is legend,
has it? Yes, legend has it? As this story goes, yeah,
this uh. This legend says that the philosopher accepts the
bargain and learns these ancient secrets, and then to keep
(11:03):
his word to these divine forces, this philosopher places a
spell on the book, or what they call conjuration, making
it so that even if you manage to read it,
if you are unworthy, unpious, you're unwise, you don't obey God,
or you don't fear God. You can do every single
ritual and here to the letter and it just won't work.
(11:27):
Which is very clever. Isn't it interesting to you how
the term philosopher used to mean much more of a
almost wizardly type, like I think even one of the
Harry Potter books in the in the British printing it's
called the Philosopher's stone, and then the u s it's
called the Sorcerer's stone. So they're kind of like a
one to one thing, and the philosopher's don't being alchemical exactly. Yeah,
(11:47):
but now when we think of philosophers, we just think
of high minded academics that, you know. Yeah, and either
way it could be either way it could apply because
it just means lover of wisdom that but you're absolutely right.
A lot of times people who were practicing what we
would think of as very esoteric rituals and belief systems
(12:08):
were considered philosophers. Right, So this is this is the intro.
And one thing that's incredibly clever about this introduction is
that it already bakes in a defense mechanism for people
who say the book is fake or it doesn't work.
It puts the blame for a lack of success in
(12:31):
these rituals, not on the book itself, not on the
nature of magic, but on the audience, the reader, the practitioner.
If you didn't manage to turn invisible, then it's not
because that's impossible. It's because you were unworthy, or you're unwise,
(12:51):
or you didn't fear God, which will come into play later.
But let's let's get into the actual substance of the book,
the text itself, the Key of Solomon. Should we take
a lot quickie break first, then fantastic idea we have returned.
(13:14):
As we said earlier, the book is divided into two sections.
In book one, you'll learn an astonishing amount of conjurations, curses,
invocations meant to summon and bind spirits. Now we mentioned
spirits before, let's outline let's clarify this a little bit.
(13:40):
Spirits in this sense could be the ghost of dead
human beings or other worldly creatures like angels or demons,
and in many cases, love of anthropologists will tell you
these and they're correct. Many of these things presented as
(14:01):
demons are built off of earlier what we would call
pagan myths or pagan gods, like the God of Lightning
by all who became by ale. And this is very
apparent in some books that which we get to in
(14:21):
a moment, and some books that came after The Key
of Solomon that actually named these demons. The first book,
in addition to these descriptions, contained spells, which are called
operations or experiments. Very mathematical sounding and they kill you
kind of dig in right, right. So the idea is
one one series of operations or experiments can turn the
(14:45):
practitioner invisible, or spells to make people like you or
fall in love with you, to help you find stolen
or lost items. So there's some practical stuff in there,
and that's just the first book. In book two, um,
he gets into detailing a lot of purification rituals that
(15:05):
a practitioner of philosophy must undertake, things like the kinds
of clothing they're supposed to wear. Um, the spell cast
or operator, you know, that was the earliest version of
that job, an operator, uh, And it was also called
an exorcist in different translation. So, like you say, Ben,
(15:26):
the translation can make a lot of difference in the
way we look at that particular activity or you know
role um, and it's different. You know, how what what
what how they should go about constructing the various tools
that they need to do the rituals, and what kinds
of animals should be sacrificed, along with exactly how to
go about sacrificing them. With one example here from chapter
(15:51):
fourteen of that book. It's on the chapter fourteen is
of the pen ink and colors, just to show you
how weird this gets, or how it's may seem weird
to us, now how specific it gets. All things employed
for writing, etcetera. In this art should be prepared in
the following manner. I'm gonna do a voice. Thou shalt
(16:15):
take a male gooseling from which thou shalt pluck the
third feather of the right wing, and didn't pluck it it,
thou shalt say, aberma, happily lie sami ted. Don't I
artabas si? Ever, I don't I banished from this pen
all deceit and narrow, so that it may be a
virtue and efficacy to write all that I desire. A
(16:35):
bed I deny is is Hebrew? Yeah, denies like a prayer,
I believe. Yeah, these are names in vacations. I just
remember it from choir from when I was a kid.
It's it's a very beautiful. Yes, I'm sorry, it's the
Hebrew name for God. That's that's what that is, um.
But then I'm sorry. The third feather on the right wing?
(16:55):
How does how to off one determine the third feather?
There are a lot of feathers on a wing, yeah, right,
do you count from the outside in or the inside out.
It's sort of like your grandma's recipes. You know, it's
like a pinch or it doesn't even give you like
actual measurements. It's a basic ratio, you know, so maybe
the third it doesn't matter just if you count. You know,
(17:16):
you use the honor system for plucking feathers. So the
important part here too, And it has further instructions for
what to do after plugging that quill, and how to
make it into a pen, what to do with the ink.
And one thing that's incredibly important about this is that
each of these physical acts are accompanied by this incantation
(17:38):
that one must recite. To simply pluck a feather from
anywhere on on the gosling is going to completely sink
the entire experiment. So everything you do has to be
attached to these pronunciations. I cannot get over the idea
(18:00):
of these as experiments. It totally goes hand in hand
with the kind of scientific nature of like alchemy and
all of that, and how it all is just kind
of like trial and error type stuff. I really like that.
And there's and just like modern day experiments, there's intense ritualization.
There's an effort to account for all the variables and
(18:22):
reduce possible intervening variables, right, which is strange because you know, now,
it's safe to say most modern day scientists would not
take kindly to being compared to sorcerers or wizards. I
think that's saki in the in the mouth. It's science. Yeah,
(18:44):
But there's there's an interesting parallel here. And while this
is all fascinating, it's safe to say that almost anyone
could sit down and make something like this up from
the whole cloth. We could. We could say, okay, if
you want to if you want to summon rainfall, then
(19:06):
here's what you do. And if we're making it up,
it doesn't matter really to us. If it works. We say,
you find a you find a stray cat, you make
it where this special head dress that you made out
of grass while you're saying these words and then boom yeah. Right,
And the question is is this any different or is
(19:28):
this just an older example? How real quote unquote real
is the actual key of Solomon. Here's where it gets crazy,
and this is strange. There are there are actually several
here's where it gets crazy moments. Here you're gonna say
every time. Now I think just wants sort of an umbrella.
Here's where it gets crazy. It's like a Key of
(19:49):
Solomon kind of thing. So, first, in virtually every translation,
this book appears to be uh what we call pseudo epigraphic,
so meaning falsely attributed to a legendary author, a book
like that what so for instance, um, this this happened
(20:12):
a lot in early Western religious developments. Three hundred, four hundred,
seven hundred years after something occurred or after someone was alive,
an enterprising uh scholar would write a book and say,
you know, this is the book that this guy wrote.
I know you've seen a lot of imitations, but except
(20:34):
no imitations, this is the real book of you know,
this disciple or this person, right from the Torah or something.
And experts estimate that the earliest versions of something like
the Key of Solomon weren't actually written until somewhere between
the fourteenth or fifteenth century. We have a quote from
(20:59):
a researcher named Arthur Edward Waite that says says essentially
that there's no ground for attributing the Kia Solomon in
his present form a higher antiquity than the fourteenth or
fifteenth century. A lot of people latch onto that present
form thing and say, well, maybe this version we understand
(21:19):
isn't true. But maybe those Babylonian philosophers really did find
some tattered scrolls by a skeleton, and those scrolls, uh
just decayed over time, and people just kept recopying the
story you're talking about, like in the Clutches of Solomon's
Dead Hands, right, they're saying in the in the in
the separate sep. Yeah, sorry, man, I'm having I'm having
(21:47):
a bit of a day, ben, Yeah. Yeah, Just I
can't pronounce words. I can't pronounce words. You know, I'll
never forget one time in elementary school I got a
I got a be because I did a report on
Carl Jung swinging a miss. I just didn't have many
people to speak with, you know, in our business, and
(22:10):
by that I mean the business that is pod. You're
gonna you're gonna be You're gonna have a few pronunciation
misses every now and then. It's just gonna happen. Yeah,
And you have to wonder what would happen if we
were practitioners of magic? What if mispronouncing a word totally
yielded a an undesirable or cataclysmic results. And furthermore, just
(22:33):
while we're on this subject, the act of making a
podcast is in many ways similar. There's a ritual, right
that we undergo as individuals, that we undergo as a group.
We're recording that you undergo as you listen, right, And
there's something that we're all doing together in a way.
(22:57):
We're making this strange working together. It is strange. And
also the ritualism of it all is why I get
so thrown every time Matt's not here, and we both
get so thrown and we look at each other because
we don't know how to start. It's true, it's true.
And when we say it's true, we mean it is
(23:18):
not just true for us right now, but it is
true for all time. You can go back to the
very beginning of our show and you can hear those
moments that we have just described. Those moments have something
called historocity. Historocity is something that comes up in the
(23:39):
search for the Key of Solomon as well. Historocity is
just the fun to say word that describes the historical
authenticity of a given person, place, event, or thing. I
love this word. Yeah, yeah, it's a great one because
(24:00):
when okay, So, if you've ever seen those specials on
the History Channel or National Geographic or something, wherein they
have documentary ands saying all right now we're journeying to
this mountain in Turkey to search for the real Noah's Ark.
Of course, their questing for historosity. They want to prove
(24:23):
the legends. One example of this that we returned to
time and time again would be the search for the
ancient city of Troy, which was for a long time
after it was lost, it was believed to be a
myth until someone found. Yeah, it's like we were talking
about finding Genghis Khan's burial side, any anything, or the
lost City of Atlanta's whatever, and it's all kind of
(24:44):
myth and and and hubbub until you actually do discover
something like that. Is that historosity there? Yes, yes, yes,
So multiple scholars even today as we record this, they've
examined the works describing King Solomon, and they've attempted to
square these texts with existing physical evidence or secular contemporary writing,
(25:07):
so non non religious community based, and the debate over
this stuff continues today. There are some scholars like this
Professor Israel Finkelstein, who argue that the story surrounding the
rule of King Solomon are not factually accurate, and he
and people who agree with him do not believe the
(25:30):
Biblical descriptions of anything should be taken literally. So like
they're saying, like Solomon was like a like a character,
kind of like a made up cartoon. Not they're not
quite going that far. Often they're saying that a lot
of this stuff attributed to him doesn't doesn't count because
there are people believe they've found the tomb of the
(25:55):
King of Israel, right, and you're on, You're absolutely correct,
though in that there are other scholars who totally say
there's a There's a guy named Philip Davis who says
Solomon himself is totally invented, just made up character, maybe
a maybe a literary device to explain the story of
(26:20):
Israel at the time, or various other political circumstances. And
then there are still other scholars who are completely on
the other side, like William Deever who believed that the
Biblical stories of Solomon and his kingdom are more or
less trustworthy. So even now in we have three camps
of people, we have a group of people saying yes, totally, absolutely,
(26:43):
mostly true. A group of people saying, well, something was true,
but it got exaggerated. And then we have a group
of people who are saying bunk, flim flam, malarkey and huey,
all of them, all of them. Yeah. So the search
for physical evidence that would be the real smoking gun, right.
The search for physical evidence continues, and in the Middle
(27:07):
East today, various people argue that they have found physical
evidence of things described in religious works. And then there's
another camp of people who argue that these ruins are
being purposely conflated with other ancient stories for one reason
or another. And one of the big accusations is that
these reasons are politically motivated to give one group or
(27:32):
another in the modern day a more quote unquote legitimate
claim to land. I see, but there's another piece of
physical evidence, several pieces that we haven't really talked about.
What we should at least mention, let's get to him.
After a word from our sponsor, we're back. The thing
(27:55):
about this physical evidence is that we are still producing
new physical evidence, new cultural iterations ultimately derived from the
Key of Solomon in the modern day. You know, we
mentioned there are other books that came later, like the
Testament of Solomon or the Lesser Key of Solomon, that's
(28:17):
the one with the seventy two demons and their properties named.
You know, that's where we can see the trace of
these pagan gods. Those works are still inspiring works in
the modern day. Yeah, Like I think we've talked about
maybe we haven't on this show. But um, the movie
Hereditary Um, which I think you and I both enjoyed,
(28:40):
enjoy is maybe a weird way of putting it. It's
a unpleasant film. I enjoyed it. Yeah, well be those
are your people man, all right, No, no, no, but yes,
it's a very expertly done kind of psychological horror show
with family drama kind of at its heart. But this
is slight spoilers. Slight spoiler uh barely abandoned all hope
(29:03):
of not being spoiled. Ye who listen here? Yes, but
we're not gonna do major was just the inclusion which
if you had your uh p's and queues of demonology down,
you would have noticed very early on in the movie
that there's a certain symbol that shows up, um that
is the symbol of one of the gods or not demons.
Rather in this this lesser Key of Solomon called Paymon,
(29:27):
and Paymon was one of the kind of dukes of
Hell I believe, or like one of Satan's. You know what,
a prince of Hell? What would you how would you
call him? Yeah, he's a often described as a great king,
but he's obedient to Lucifer, so he's he's not in
(29:48):
charge charge, but he commands many other many other spirits,
that's right. And he's depicted as having sort of a
feminine features, writing upon a camel, and he commands um
the ability to control people and summon other demons, and
(30:09):
also is a big fan of the arts, as it
turns out, and you'll see folks like the occultist Carol
Poke Runyan who will come up later, Carol Poke Runyan
who suggests that this name ultimately derives from a pre
existing pagan god. And he says this because some of
(30:34):
those manuscripts depict Payment as a woman riding a camel.
And this goes back to the overall claim that the
Lesser Key of Solomon and the Key of Solomon themselves
are actually rooted in pre existing Mesopotamian mythology. So again
(30:57):
we see the cultural evolution here and it continues today.
That's the thing. History is not so distant as people
would have you believe. The story Hereditary again, we'll we'll
end the spoilers after this. The story of Hereditary does
some excellent research into the foundations of what is perceived
(31:21):
as a demon today and once was not necessarily associated
with anything inherently bad, you know, and it's it's fast.
We have to wonder where the evolution is going to go.
But we said, there's there's another thing we run into
with the Key of Solomon when the big questions we're
talking about in this episode, does it actually work? Meaning
(31:49):
is there some sort of operation or experiment that you,
fellow listeners Paul and Nolan I could do that would
create a reproducible, predictable outcome. Multiple people maintain that this
is the case that experiments or operations outlined in the
book actually do work, just perhaps not the way you
(32:10):
might assume if you're thinking about magic is the sort
of thing we see in horror movies. According to this
guy who mentioned earlier, Poke Runyan, who's an author, a
cultural anthropologist, and we have to say, to be fair,
a complete magic practitioner himself, he is actually doing this stuff.
According to him, the Key of Solomon is more an
(32:34):
example of Western shamanism, and these operations, experiments and rituals
explained in the text are actually early forms of psychological
psychological experiments therapy even really, Yeah, that would never have
occurred to me. So it's almost more along the lines
of kind of like the mystics we talked about on
(32:56):
our other show, Ridiculous History, and the hermits of the
Ridge of the Cave of Kelpiusts, or the cults. It's
like a doomsday cult that was headed by a philosopher
slash astronomer who practiced some of these kind of end
times philosophies, but did seem to be kind of rallying
around ritual and this idea of the sort of mystic arts. Yeah,
(33:21):
and that's an excellent point because in that episode we
mentioned that in the modern age, or what appears to
be modern for us, we often have this harsh and
bright divide between what we see as the realm of
the esoteric and the mystic and the realm of the
rational and the scientific. But the truth of the matter is,
(33:42):
for most of human civilization, those two things were not
considered mutually exclusive. I believe. We used the example of
um Isaac Newton, who did some profoundly groundbreaking scientific work
but also believed in alchemy. You know, and this the
(34:03):
presence of mysticism in early philosophy, or the presence of
these ritualistic beliefs, does not mean that everything was automatically wrong.
And if we look at it from an anthropological perspective,
maybe they were making some psychological breakthrough, similar to that
episode we had about the inherent mysticism in the bi
(34:25):
cameral mind theory. Right, you're hearing a voice, and that
voice is driving your human train, and the voices you surprise, surprise,
that's going to be such a Shamalan twist, you know,
I almost wish, But then who are you? Right? Who
are we? What are we here to discuss? That's that's
(34:48):
what we're getting towards. Yeah, So from an anthropological perspective,
then does this sort of thing work or do operations
in here work? A wording to run you it's a
exploration of the underlying cognitive structure of the human mind,
which sort of functions in terms of symbol before it
(35:12):
functions in terms of language. I think we may have
mentioned on earlier episode, but the kul a problem with
Cormac McCarthy who wrote he wrote this article Nautilus about
the relationship between language and the original function of the
human mind, and the the inspiration for this is the
(35:39):
common or not infrequent occurrence where some scientists or some
great thinker is attempting to figure out a problem and
they racked their brains and they picture a gigantic chalkboard
and they just go crazy and throw everything everywhere, and
then they fall asleep and they get the answer in
a dream. But it's never word words, it's an a symbol. Interesting.
(36:03):
So the reason this is important is because with that,
with that emphasis on symbols, with that emphasis on these
visual aspects, these emotional states over what we call language,
Runyan traces a narrative starting from ancient mystery religions all
the way to more modern theorists like Carl Young who
(36:25):
believed in the concept of the great unconsciousness and arc types.
And this means to Runyan that the magic is working
because there's the inducement of trances and the use of
ritual that takes the mind to strange and new or
perhaps old and strange places. So several of the acts
described or the operations rather are in his mind actually uh,
(36:49):
means of self discovery and self hypnosis. But these symbols
are important, and that's before we I think we we
may be doing a disservice if we don't talk a
little more about those symbols. Because no, you pointed out
in early on in Hereditary Demonologist in the crowd, notice
(37:10):
that symbol, right, that's right. Yeah, a friend of ours
actually um who is a local practitioner of um witchcraft
and or Wickanism. And also I believes in the Atlanta
chapter of the Church of Satan um Hale. Uh recognized
it right off the bat and knew exactly where the
movie was going. So good on him. But then I
(37:33):
maybe being a dummy, but I would like a little
more clarification as to what separates the lesser key from
the you know, just the regular key, and why is
it lesser? Right? Yeah, So part of it comes from
the textual history. We mentioned that there were many, many
different books that were either translations of something pre existing,
(37:57):
or they were snatch from other grim noise, or they
were just slapped with the title of something that would
be familiar to the audience. To the crowd. So the
Lesser Key of Solomon is is based on another book,
(38:22):
or a couple of different books, one by a guy
named Johann Vayer Johan Wire called Dave Prestigious damonem And
it seems like the Lesser Key of Solomon was pulled
from this other book, not so much from the Key
(38:42):
of Solomon itself. So the big question is and it
and it does have a lot of the same ideas.
The big question is if it just got that title
because somebody decided to name it that it's there's no
known author for the book, and it appears like it
(39:03):
was pulled from several different sources, including Buyer. It was
compiled in the mid seventeenth century, mostly from things that
were a couple of centuries older, so it kind of
came after it, which is probably why it was called
the Lesser Key, not inferior quality, just so. And again,
like from the from the top of the show, we
(39:24):
said this idea of the Key of Solomon was an
umbrella term for several different translations, and um, yeah, I
can I can see that. That That makes sense. So we're
encountering we're encountering a couple of things. You're encountering possibilities
of literary hoaxes, which I don't know if we should
be too comfortable with, because the idea that it would
(39:46):
be a literary hoax implies that the authors may have
been cynical and may not have believed what they were writing,
and I don't think that was always the case at all.
We're also encountering the possibility of um deep psychological experimentation
in ancient days. Yeah, yeah, that's that's fascinating to me.
(40:08):
The idea that some of this uh sort of ritualism
and mysticism was kind of early forms of psychological healing
or control or I'm not like almost like you'd see
at a revival of some kind, you know. Interesting, yes,
and a good point, because what we do know is
that whether or not this text was based on some
(40:33):
earlier texts before the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, or whether
it was just made up in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries based on non written or orally transmitted traditions, the
fact of the matter is that people who practice this
stuff now may feel like they are practicing something that
is psychologically impactful to them. Right, So is magic like
(40:58):
beauty something in the in mind of the ballholder we're
we're of course not saying I mean, I don't know
about you know, I've never done some ritual to try
to appear invisible. Um, And we didn't warn Cama or anything. No, no, never, never.
The best way to be invisible in a place is
(41:20):
not to go there. You've definitely done that before. I
have done that. I'm notorious at the office for that.
But um, but we're not knocking this at all because
at heart, whether you feel this is fascinating folklore, whether
you feel this is a belief system that calls to you,
or whether you feel this is just something fascinating to
(41:43):
learn about, the truth is there's nothing wrong with there's
nothing wrong with practicing belief system of your own choice,
so long as and this is the most important part,
so long as you are not hurting anyone. And back
in the day, we had received a number of letters
(42:04):
and notes from your fellow listeners who had said that
they had had strange, inexplicable experiences with everything from Norwegia,
board too, incantations or something that they have found online
or in a library, or even just staring into a mirror,
which is an intensely meditative act. And by the way,
(42:28):
it's the it's one of the acts that or it's
one of the rituals that Poke Runyan himself practices. You
can find him online. He's he's got a very particular
way of speaking. And I think we've played some a
little bit off air, So I think it's very much
a a storyteller. But if you have had those sorts
(42:49):
of inexplicable experiences, or if you have attempted to operate
one of the experiments mentioned in the Key of Solomon,
or it's many translations, please do right to us. We
would like to hear your story. We would like And
that's whether or not you think something strange happened, or
whether you thought it was all a waste of time.
(43:11):
We don't. By the way, we don't think that automatically
means you are unworthy, unpious or don't fear God upious,
unpious said, unbiased, unbiased. That's different. That is different. That's
a great point. Either way. You can you can find
us on Instagram, you can find us on Twitter. You
can find us on Facebook, especially our community page. Here's
(43:32):
where it gets crazy, where you can uh. You can
see Noel and Matt and myself popping up in digital person.
You can invoke us. Yeah, we even have little avatars
that we use. That's not true, but we can get them.
We can get them, we can make them. Uh. We
have the rituals and we have the the ability to
successfully enact those operations mainly admin privileges. Yeah, mainly, that's
(43:54):
what they call them now exactly. So the times have changed,
The times have changed, but Wizard Dree in some form
or another continues. We would like to hear your experiences
with it. As always. Thank you so much for checking
out the episode, and thank you to Paul who we
did not run that nickname past so we might get
(44:14):
it at the end of this. But Nol, what what
do people do if if they don't want to find
us on Twitter, if you don't want to find us
on Instagram? If you say I would, um, I know
you have a phone number one three three s T
d W y t K. That's usually Matts Part two.
I see what you're doing here. You're trying to invoke
a bit of ritual your spot on Noel. Yes, we
(44:37):
always begin and end with a ritual, and you can
be part of the ritual. You can email us directly.
We are conspiracy and how stuff works dot com,
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M
(00:24):
welcome back to the show. My name is Noel as
a spirit conduit for Matt, who usually starts the show
but as a way on adventures and will return shortly.
They call me Ben. We are joined with our super producer, uh,
Paul the necromancer Decant. Most importantly, you are here, You
are you, and that makes this stuff they don't want
(00:46):
you to know. You know, Ben, I thought the Necronomicon
was real until you told me otherwise last time we
have that conversation. Right, this is going to be an
episode that those of you who enjoyed our Grimoise episode
will find uh particularly fascinating. I love that you mentioned
the Necronomicon at the top of the show, Nol, because
for everyone listening, if you're a fan of horror movies,
(01:09):
you're intimately familiar with that old trope of the Cursed
Book and Lovecraft's Necronomicon. Howard Philip Lovecraft, Uh he he
made this book. It's a perfect example of what we're
talking about because for years and years and years after
he admittedly wrote it in a work of fiction, as
(01:30):
a work of fiction mentioned to other fictional stories. People
liked it enough that they just started saying, let's all
agree that it's real. Yeah, I mean, I think my
thing is it just has become such a stand in
for like cursed books. Like you said, I almost thought
it was more of a word than a specific volume,
like calling something a necronomicon or a grimoire, you know,
(01:52):
that was what my brand did. Like how nowadays, instead
of saying search the Internet, we just say Google regardless
of which search or is he rocks for copy. That's
that's an interesting comparison. Now, the Necronomicon maybe the most
widely known fictional book of magic in the Western world,
but there are other ones too, you know. On a
(02:13):
lighter note, there's The spell Book in Disney's Focus Focus,
which I recently rewatched and stand by it is an
enjoyable movie, if not a film. Today, these books are
almost universally thought of as little more than clever bits
of fiction, maybe an extra detail added to flesh out
a fictional world. But as we explored in the previous
(02:37):
video and audio episodes on grim Wise, these books were
real things. They were physical, tangible books in the real world.
They were often mistakenly or purposefully misattributed to other authors.
There are multiple counterfeit versions, and numerous books took the
same name or something very much like it to increase
(02:58):
their occult street read. But the books themselves were real,
and in many many cases, various people throughout the centuries
would read these books and attempt the experiments or rituals
outlined in those tomes. Today's episode is about one of
the most famous grim Wise in existence, the book or
(03:21):
slash books known as The Key of Solomon. We're going
to delve into the fact and fiction surrounding this book
with one other huge question that we'll get to near
the end. What is this supposed to do and does
it actually work? So here are the facts. The Key
of Solomon is kind of it is this sort of
(03:43):
an umbrella term that is assigned to several different books.
And there's a legend that says the book was originally
created by the biblical king Solomon of mining mining fame. Yeah,
the mine king Solomon's mind, right, he had a seal,
he made a temple. Yeah, according to you'll hear it
being phrased as a uh something mentioned in just Judeo
(04:05):
Christian beliefs, but mention of King Solomon also occurs in
holy books of the Bahai and also in the Koran.
According to these legends, these stories, the man known as
King Solomon was the son of the famous Goliath slaying David,
who went on Solomon did went on to become the
ruler of Israel and approximately nine sixty seven b c. E.
(04:29):
And he was ruling this enormous kingdom that extended from
the Euphrates in the north to Egypt in the south.
And in the religious text he is presented as one
of the wisest men in the history of civilization. He's
kind of and this is not a one to one
comparison religious scholars in the audience, He's kind of a
(04:52):
Tony Stark. He's a genius inventor, he's a ladies man,
a super rich. He's super rich, exact and potentially practices
the dark arts. And God appeared to him in a
dream during the early days of his of his reign,
and he said, Solomon, you can have whatever you desire
(05:12):
because you act, you know how to worship me, and
you're honoring me in the ways and the methods. Uh
that your father David instructed you too. And when we
say this guy is clever, we're drawing on numerous anecdotes
and the most famous one, which I'm I think everybody
has heard. Whether or not you are religious, and whether
(05:33):
or not you're that familiar with Western religion, you've probably
heard the story of the baby right where uh, he
is a judge and these two women come to his
court and they have a baby, and both both of
these people say that is my child. I misspoke as well.
Solomon is not known for practicing any dark arts, but
(05:55):
there are things that he codified and committed to text
that were used as sort of a lexicon by others
that practiced said dark arts is that you know. And
I think the term dark art too, is something that
undergoes an evolution, because according to legend, he was practicing
some stuff, but later it would be called dark arts
(06:17):
right by church authorities. So you're spot on, spot on.
But back to these back to these women. These are
the days before DNA testing, obviously, so they say this
is my kid. This lady's line, and the other lady says, no,
this person's line. This is truly my child, and Solomon's
(06:39):
solution was to really double down on this. He said, okay,
you've both convinced me in your own way. Tell you what,
you just just cut the baby in half, be done
with it. And then one woman was prepared to accept
the decision, but the other one begged King Solomon, please,
(06:59):
it is my child, but give it to this other woman.
I don't want the baby to die. Classic trope and
sci Fi when you have clones, you know, and to
see which one or like the evil double or whatever,
to see which one is the real the real one
sort of, I don't know it was. Sci Fi draws
a lot from religion, that's true, earlier religion, so of
course we know how. We know how Solomon acted next
(07:23):
once he saw one lady giving up the baby to
spair it's life. Yeah, I guess what I'm getting at
with like that. If there's an evil twin, you can
usually tell in sci Fi who's the real one, because
the real one will take a bullet for his lady
love or something, while the evil one will, you know,
behave more less chivalrously right right, And in the case
(07:43):
of Solomon, he says, okay, well, you have proven to
me that you are the true mothers, so that's obviously
your child. Again. According to legend, people from surrounding nations
came to hear Solomon's wisdom. He composed three thousand prov herbs,
one thousand and five songs, He wrote the Song of Songs,
(08:04):
the Book of Proverbs, and other religious works. In the
Jewish tradition, he has thought to be the builder of
the First Temple in Jerusalem and the last ruler of
the Kingdom of Israel before it was divided into the
Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom of Judah. And in
the tradition concerning the Key of Solomon, or also in
(08:24):
the Lesser Key of Solomon, which will will have to
mention because it's fascinating, the king used his powers, including
a special seal and his magic ring to summon and
bind spirits. And it was these spirits that were his
workforce for the First Temple. So going back to dark arts,
you know, centuries later, summoning spirits and spirits of the
(08:49):
dead to literally do your dirty work or at least,
you know, the work that you don't feel like doing
because masonry breaking. Yeah, So this these are the uh
claims about this individual, and we can get into those
a little bit later. We want to set that up
and bracket it. But now we got to talk about
(09:09):
what's actually in this book, because the key of Solomon is,
as you said, noel an umbrella term for multiple different
translations for multiple I don't know, differing interpretations of the text.
The book itself is composed of an introduction and then
like two smaller books, and the introduction is a story
(09:34):
about how the book allegedly came to be. So in
the introduction to the book, readers get a story about
the creation of said text. Solomon writes the book for
his son Rio Bohm and tells his son to hide
the book in a sepul cor upon Solomon's dead. What's
a sepal car ban? That's like a kind of like
(09:55):
a it's like a yeah, yeah. It's like a two
uh small room usually built a stone or cut into rock,
where you put a dead body or a book, or
a dead body with a book. It's a bonus could
be clutching it. So what happens next, well next, and
by next I mean years and years later. Um. Babylonian
(10:18):
philosophers find the text while they're repairing Solomon's tomb, Solomon
himself his tomb. No one can understand the text, so
they pray to God for understanding, and so lo and behold,
an angel appears in grants one of the philosophers the
ability to read the text, after he swears that he
(10:39):
will keep it safe and hidden from the unworthy and
the wicked. This is obviously, of course, this is legend,
has it? Yes, legend has it? As this story goes, yeah,
this uh. This legend says that the philosopher accepts the
bargain and learns these ancient secrets, and then to keep
(11:03):
his word to these divine forces, this philosopher places a
spell on the book, or what they call conjuration, making
it so that even if you manage to read it,
if you are unworthy, unpious, you're unwise, you don't obey God,
or you don't fear God. You can do every single
ritual and here to the letter and it just won't work.
(11:27):
Which is very clever. Isn't it interesting to you how
the term philosopher used to mean much more of a
almost wizardly type, like I think even one of the
Harry Potter books in the in the British printing it's
called the Philosopher's stone, and then the u s it's
called the Sorcerer's stone. So they're kind of like a
one to one thing, and the philosopher's don't being alchemical exactly. Yeah,
(11:47):
but now when we think of philosophers, we just think
of high minded academics that, you know. Yeah, and either
way it could be either way it could apply because
it just means lover of wisdom that but you're absolutely right.
A lot of times people who were practicing what we
would think of as very esoteric rituals and belief systems
(12:08):
were considered philosophers. Right, So this is this is the intro.
And one thing that's incredibly clever about this introduction is
that it already bakes in a defense mechanism for people
who say the book is fake or it doesn't work.
It puts the blame for a lack of success in
(12:31):
these rituals, not on the book itself, not on the
nature of magic, but on the audience, the reader, the practitioner.
If you didn't manage to turn invisible, then it's not
because that's impossible. It's because you were unworthy, or you're unwise,
(12:51):
or you didn't fear God, which will come into play later.
But let's let's get into the actual substance of the book,
the text itself, the Key of Solomon. Should we take
a lot quickie break first, then fantastic idea we have returned.
(13:14):
As we said earlier, the book is divided into two sections.
In book one, you'll learn an astonishing amount of conjurations, curses,
invocations meant to summon and bind spirits. Now we mentioned
spirits before, let's outline let's clarify this a little bit.
(13:40):
Spirits in this sense could be the ghost of dead
human beings or other worldly creatures like angels or demons,
and in many cases, love of anthropologists will tell you
these and they're correct. Many of these things presented as
(14:01):
demons are built off of earlier what we would call
pagan myths or pagan gods, like the God of Lightning
by all who became by ale. And this is very
apparent in some books that which we get to in
(14:21):
a moment, and some books that came after The Key
of Solomon that actually named these demons. The first book,
in addition to these descriptions, contained spells, which are called
operations or experiments. Very mathematical sounding and they kill you
kind of dig in right, right. So the idea is
one one series of operations or experiments can turn the
(14:45):
practitioner invisible, or spells to make people like you or
fall in love with you, to help you find stolen
or lost items. So there's some practical stuff in there,
and that's just the first book. In book two, um,
he gets into detailing a lot of purification rituals that
(15:05):
a practitioner of philosophy must undertake, things like the kinds
of clothing they're supposed to wear. Um, the spell cast
or operator, you know, that was the earliest version of
that job, an operator, uh, And it was also called
an exorcist in different translation. So, like you say, Ben,
(15:26):
the translation can make a lot of difference in the
way we look at that particular activity or you know
role um, and it's different. You know, how what what
what how they should go about constructing the various tools
that they need to do the rituals, and what kinds
of animals should be sacrificed, along with exactly how to
go about sacrificing them. With one example here from chapter
(15:51):
fourteen of that book. It's on the chapter fourteen is
of the pen ink and colors, just to show you
how weird this gets, or how it's may seem weird
to us, now how specific it gets. All things employed
for writing, etcetera. In this art should be prepared in
the following manner. I'm gonna do a voice. Thou shalt
(16:15):
take a male gooseling from which thou shalt pluck the
third feather of the right wing, and didn't pluck it it,
thou shalt say, aberma, happily lie sami ted. Don't I
artabas si? Ever, I don't I banished from this pen
all deceit and narrow, so that it may be a
virtue and efficacy to write all that I desire. A
(16:35):
bed I deny is is Hebrew? Yeah, denies like a prayer,
I believe. Yeah, these are names in vacations. I just
remember it from choir from when I was a kid.
It's it's a very beautiful. Yes, I'm sorry, it's the
Hebrew name for God. That's that's what that is, um.
But then I'm sorry. The third feather on the right wing?
(16:55):
How does how to off one determine the third feather?
There are a lot of feathers on a wing, yeah, right,
do you count from the outside in or the inside out.
It's sort of like your grandma's recipes. You know, it's
like a pinch or it doesn't even give you like
actual measurements. It's a basic ratio, you know, so maybe
the third it doesn't matter just if you count. You know,
(17:16):
you use the honor system for plucking feathers. So the
important part here too, And it has further instructions for
what to do after plugging that quill, and how to
make it into a pen, what to do with the ink.
And one thing that's incredibly important about this is that
each of these physical acts are accompanied by this incantation
(17:38):
that one must recite. To simply pluck a feather from
anywhere on on the gosling is going to completely sink
the entire experiment. So everything you do has to be
attached to these pronunciations. I cannot get over the idea
(18:00):
of these as experiments. It totally goes hand in hand
with the kind of scientific nature of like alchemy and
all of that, and how it all is just kind
of like trial and error type stuff. I really like that.
And there's and just like modern day experiments, there's intense ritualization.
There's an effort to account for all the variables and
(18:22):
reduce possible intervening variables, right, which is strange because you know, now,
it's safe to say most modern day scientists would not
take kindly to being compared to sorcerers or wizards. I
think that's saki in the in the mouth. It's science. Yeah,
(18:44):
But there's there's an interesting parallel here. And while this
is all fascinating, it's safe to say that almost anyone
could sit down and make something like this up from
the whole cloth. We could. We could say, okay, if
you want to if you want to summon rainfall, then
(19:06):
here's what you do. And if we're making it up,
it doesn't matter really to us. If it works. We say,
you find a you find a stray cat, you make
it where this special head dress that you made out
of grass while you're saying these words and then boom yeah. Right,
And the question is is this any different or is
(19:28):
this just an older example? How real quote unquote real
is the actual key of Solomon. Here's where it gets crazy,
and this is strange. There are there are actually several
here's where it gets crazy moments. Here you're gonna say
every time. Now I think just wants sort of an umbrella.
Here's where it gets crazy. It's like a Key of
(19:49):
Solomon kind of thing. So, first, in virtually every translation,
this book appears to be uh what we call pseudo epigraphic,
so meaning falsely attributed to a legendary author, a book
like that what so for instance, um, this this happened
(20:12):
a lot in early Western religious developments. Three hundred, four hundred,
seven hundred years after something occurred or after someone was alive,
an enterprising uh scholar would write a book and say,
you know, this is the book that this guy wrote.
I know you've seen a lot of imitations, but except
(20:34):
no imitations, this is the real book of you know,
this disciple or this person, right from the Torah or something.
And experts estimate that the earliest versions of something like
the Key of Solomon weren't actually written until somewhere between
the fourteenth or fifteenth century. We have a quote from
(20:59):
a researcher named Arthur Edward Waite that says says essentially
that there's no ground for attributing the Kia Solomon in
his present form a higher antiquity than the fourteenth or
fifteenth century. A lot of people latch onto that present
form thing and say, well, maybe this version we understand
(21:19):
isn't true. But maybe those Babylonian philosophers really did find
some tattered scrolls by a skeleton, and those scrolls, uh
just decayed over time, and people just kept recopying the
story you're talking about, like in the Clutches of Solomon's
Dead Hands, right, they're saying in the in the in
the separate sep. Yeah, sorry, man, I'm having I'm having
(21:47):
a bit of a day, ben, Yeah. Yeah, Just I
can't pronounce words. I can't pronounce words. You know, I'll
never forget one time in elementary school I got a
I got a be because I did a report on
Carl Jung swinging a miss. I just didn't have many
people to speak with, you know, in our business, and
(22:10):
by that I mean the business that is pod. You're
gonna you're gonna be You're gonna have a few pronunciation
misses every now and then. It's just gonna happen. Yeah,
And you have to wonder what would happen if we
were practitioners of magic? What if mispronouncing a word totally
yielded a an undesirable or cataclysmic results. And furthermore, just
(22:33):
while we're on this subject, the act of making a
podcast is in many ways similar. There's a ritual, right
that we undergo as individuals, that we undergo as a group.
We're recording that you undergo as you listen, right, And
there's something that we're all doing together in a way.
(22:57):
We're making this strange working together. It is strange. And
also the ritualism of it all is why I get
so thrown every time Matt's not here, and we both
get so thrown and we look at each other because
we don't know how to start. It's true, it's true.
And when we say it's true, we mean it is
(23:18):
not just true for us right now, but it is
true for all time. You can go back to the
very beginning of our show and you can hear those
moments that we have just described. Those moments have something
called historocity. Historocity is something that comes up in the
(23:39):
search for the Key of Solomon as well. Historocity is
just the fun to say word that describes the historical
authenticity of a given person, place, event, or thing. I
love this word. Yeah, yeah, it's a great one because
(24:00):
when okay, So, if you've ever seen those specials on
the History Channel or National Geographic or something, wherein they
have documentary ands saying all right now we're journeying to
this mountain in Turkey to search for the real Noah's Ark.
Of course, their questing for historosity. They want to prove
(24:23):
the legends. One example of this that we returned to
time and time again would be the search for the
ancient city of Troy, which was for a long time
after it was lost, it was believed to be a
myth until someone found. Yeah, it's like we were talking
about finding Genghis Khan's burial side, any anything, or the
lost City of Atlanta's whatever, and it's all kind of
(24:44):
myth and and and hubbub until you actually do discover
something like that. Is that historosity there? Yes, yes, yes,
So multiple scholars even today as we record this, they've
examined the works describing King Solomon, and they've attempted to
square these texts with existing physical evidence or secular contemporary writing,
(25:07):
so non non religious community based, and the debate over
this stuff continues today. There are some scholars like this
Professor Israel Finkelstein, who argue that the story surrounding the
rule of King Solomon are not factually accurate, and he
and people who agree with him do not believe the
(25:30):
Biblical descriptions of anything should be taken literally. So like
they're saying, like Solomon was like a like a character,
kind of like a made up cartoon. Not they're not
quite going that far. Often they're saying that a lot
of this stuff attributed to him doesn't doesn't count because
there are people believe they've found the tomb of the
(25:55):
King of Israel, right, and you're on, You're absolutely correct,
though in that there are other scholars who totally say
there's a There's a guy named Philip Davis who says
Solomon himself is totally invented, just made up character, maybe
a maybe a literary device to explain the story of
(26:20):
Israel at the time, or various other political circumstances. And
then there are still other scholars who are completely on
the other side, like William Deever who believed that the
Biblical stories of Solomon and his kingdom are more or
less trustworthy. So even now in we have three camps
of people, we have a group of people saying yes, totally, absolutely,
(26:43):
mostly true. A group of people saying, well, something was true,
but it got exaggerated. And then we have a group
of people who are saying bunk, flim flam, malarkey and huey,
all of them, all of them. Yeah. So the search
for physical evidence that would be the real smoking gun, right.
The search for physical evidence continues, and in the Middle
(27:07):
East today, various people argue that they have found physical
evidence of things described in religious works. And then there's
another camp of people who argue that these ruins are
being purposely conflated with other ancient stories for one reason
or another. And one of the big accusations is that
these reasons are politically motivated to give one group or
(27:32):
another in the modern day a more quote unquote legitimate
claim to land. I see, but there's another piece of
physical evidence, several pieces that we haven't really talked about.
What we should at least mention, let's get to him.
After a word from our sponsor, we're back. The thing
(27:55):
about this physical evidence is that we are still producing
new physical evidence, new cultural iterations ultimately derived from the
Key of Solomon in the modern day. You know, we
mentioned there are other books that came later, like the
Testament of Solomon or the Lesser Key of Solomon, that's
(28:17):
the one with the seventy two demons and their properties named.
You know, that's where we can see the trace of
these pagan gods. Those works are still inspiring works in
the modern day. Yeah, Like I think we've talked about
maybe we haven't on this show. But um, the movie
Hereditary Um, which I think you and I both enjoyed,
(28:40):
enjoy is maybe a weird way of putting it. It's
a unpleasant film. I enjoyed it. Yeah, well be those
are your people man, all right, No, no, no, but yes,
it's a very expertly done kind of psychological horror show
with family drama kind of at its heart. But this
is slight spoilers. Slight spoiler uh barely abandoned all hope
(29:03):
of not being spoiled. Ye who listen here? Yes, but
we're not gonna do major was just the inclusion which
if you had your uh p's and queues of demonology down,
you would have noticed very early on in the movie
that there's a certain symbol that shows up, um that
is the symbol of one of the gods or not demons.
Rather in this this lesser Key of Solomon called Paymon,
(29:27):
and Paymon was one of the kind of dukes of
Hell I believe, or like one of Satan's. You know what,
a prince of Hell? What would you how would you
call him? Yeah, he's a often described as a great king,
but he's obedient to Lucifer, so he's he's not in
(29:48):
charge charge, but he commands many other many other spirits,
that's right. And he's depicted as having sort of a
feminine features, writing upon a camel, and he commands um
the ability to control people and summon other demons, and
(30:09):
also is a big fan of the arts, as it
turns out, and you'll see folks like the occultist Carol
Poke Runyan who will come up later, Carol Poke Runyan
who suggests that this name ultimately derives from a pre
existing pagan god. And he says this because some of
(30:34):
those manuscripts depict Payment as a woman riding a camel.
And this goes back to the overall claim that the
Lesser Key of Solomon and the Key of Solomon themselves
are actually rooted in pre existing Mesopotamian mythology. So again
(30:57):
we see the cultural evolution here and it continues today.
That's the thing. History is not so distant as people
would have you believe. The story Hereditary again, we'll we'll
end the spoilers after this. The story of Hereditary does
some excellent research into the foundations of what is perceived
(31:21):
as a demon today and once was not necessarily associated
with anything inherently bad, you know, and it's it's fast.
We have to wonder where the evolution is going to go.
But we said, there's there's another thing we run into
with the Key of Solomon when the big questions we're
talking about in this episode, does it actually work? Meaning
(31:49):
is there some sort of operation or experiment that you,
fellow listeners Paul and Nolan I could do that would
create a reproducible, predictable outcome. Multiple people maintain that this
is the case that experiments or operations outlined in the
book actually do work, just perhaps not the way you
(32:10):
might assume if you're thinking about magic is the sort
of thing we see in horror movies. According to this
guy who mentioned earlier, Poke Runyan, who's an author, a
cultural anthropologist, and we have to say, to be fair,
a complete magic practitioner himself, he is actually doing this stuff.
According to him, the Key of Solomon is more an
(32:34):
example of Western shamanism, and these operations, experiments and rituals
explained in the text are actually early forms of psychological
psychological experiments therapy even really, Yeah, that would never have
occurred to me. So it's almost more along the lines
of kind of like the mystics we talked about on
(32:56):
our other show, Ridiculous History, and the hermits of the
Ridge of the Cave of Kelpiusts, or the cults. It's
like a doomsday cult that was headed by a philosopher
slash astronomer who practiced some of these kind of end
times philosophies, but did seem to be kind of rallying
around ritual and this idea of the sort of mystic arts. Yeah,
(33:21):
and that's an excellent point because in that episode we
mentioned that in the modern age, or what appears to
be modern for us, we often have this harsh and
bright divide between what we see as the realm of
the esoteric and the mystic and the realm of the
rational and the scientific. But the truth of the matter is,
(33:42):
for most of human civilization, those two things were not
considered mutually exclusive. I believe. We used the example of
um Isaac Newton, who did some profoundly groundbreaking scientific work
but also believed in alchemy. You know, and this the
(34:03):
presence of mysticism in early philosophy, or the presence of
these ritualistic beliefs, does not mean that everything was automatically wrong.
And if we look at it from an anthropological perspective,
maybe they were making some psychological breakthrough, similar to that
episode we had about the inherent mysticism in the bi
(34:25):
cameral mind theory. Right, you're hearing a voice, and that
voice is driving your human train, and the voices you surprise, surprise,
that's going to be such a Shamalan twist, you know,
I almost wish, But then who are you? Right? Who
are we? What are we here to discuss? That's that's
(34:48):
what we're getting towards. Yeah, So from an anthropological perspective,
then does this sort of thing work or do operations
in here work? A wording to run you it's a
exploration of the underlying cognitive structure of the human mind,
which sort of functions in terms of symbol before it
(35:12):
functions in terms of language. I think we may have
mentioned on earlier episode, but the kul a problem with
Cormac McCarthy who wrote he wrote this article Nautilus about
the relationship between language and the original function of the
human mind, and the the inspiration for this is the
(35:39):
common or not infrequent occurrence where some scientists or some
great thinker is attempting to figure out a problem and
they racked their brains and they picture a gigantic chalkboard
and they just go crazy and throw everything everywhere, and
then they fall asleep and they get the answer in
a dream. But it's never word words, it's an a symbol. Interesting.
(36:03):
So the reason this is important is because with that,
with that emphasis on symbols, with that emphasis on these
visual aspects, these emotional states over what we call language,
Runyan traces a narrative starting from ancient mystery religions all
the way to more modern theorists like Carl Young who
(36:25):
believed in the concept of the great unconsciousness and arc types.
And this means to Runyan that the magic is working
because there's the inducement of trances and the use of
ritual that takes the mind to strange and new or
perhaps old and strange places. So several of the acts
described or the operations rather are in his mind actually uh,
(36:49):
means of self discovery and self hypnosis. But these symbols
are important, and that's before we I think we we
may be doing a disservice if we don't talk a
little more about those symbols. Because no, you pointed out
in early on in Hereditary Demonologist in the crowd, notice
(37:10):
that symbol, right, that's right. Yeah, a friend of ours
actually um who is a local practitioner of um witchcraft
and or Wickanism. And also I believes in the Atlanta
chapter of the Church of Satan um Hale. Uh recognized
it right off the bat and knew exactly where the
movie was going. So good on him. But then I
(37:33):
maybe being a dummy, but I would like a little
more clarification as to what separates the lesser key from
the you know, just the regular key, and why is
it lesser? Right? Yeah, So part of it comes from
the textual history. We mentioned that there were many, many
different books that were either translations of something pre existing,
(37:57):
or they were snatch from other grim noise, or they
were just slapped with the title of something that would
be familiar to the audience. To the crowd. So the
Lesser Key of Solomon is is based on another book,
(38:22):
or a couple of different books, one by a guy
named Johann Vayer Johan Wire called Dave Prestigious damonem And
it seems like the Lesser Key of Solomon was pulled
from this other book, not so much from the Key
(38:42):
of Solomon itself. So the big question is and it
and it does have a lot of the same ideas.
The big question is if it just got that title
because somebody decided to name it that it's there's no
known author for the book, and it appears like it
(39:03):
was pulled from several different sources, including Buyer. It was
compiled in the mid seventeenth century, mostly from things that
were a couple of centuries older, so it kind of
came after it, which is probably why it was called
the Lesser Key, not inferior quality, just so. And again,
like from the from the top of the show, we
(39:24):
said this idea of the Key of Solomon was an
umbrella term for several different translations, and um, yeah, I
can I can see that. That That makes sense. So we're
encountering we're encountering a couple of things. You're encountering possibilities
of literary hoaxes, which I don't know if we should
be too comfortable with, because the idea that it would
(39:46):
be a literary hoax implies that the authors may have
been cynical and may not have believed what they were writing,
and I don't think that was always the case at all.
We're also encountering the possibility of um deep psychological experimentation
in ancient days. Yeah, yeah, that's that's fascinating to me.
(40:08):
The idea that some of this uh sort of ritualism
and mysticism was kind of early forms of psychological healing
or control or I'm not like almost like you'd see
at a revival of some kind, you know. Interesting, yes,
and a good point, because what we do know is
that whether or not this text was based on some
(40:33):
earlier texts before the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, or whether
it was just made up in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries based on non written or orally transmitted traditions, the
fact of the matter is that people who practice this
stuff now may feel like they are practicing something that
is psychologically impactful to them. Right, So is magic like
(40:58):
beauty something in the in mind of the ballholder we're
we're of course not saying I mean, I don't know
about you know, I've never done some ritual to try
to appear invisible. Um, And we didn't warn Cama or anything. No, no, never, never.
The best way to be invisible in a place is
(41:20):
not to go there. You've definitely done that before. I
have done that. I'm notorious at the office for that.
But um, but we're not knocking this at all because
at heart, whether you feel this is fascinating folklore, whether
you feel this is a belief system that calls to you,
or whether you feel this is just something fascinating to
(41:43):
learn about, the truth is there's nothing wrong with there's
nothing wrong with practicing belief system of your own choice,
so long as and this is the most important part,
so long as you are not hurting anyone. And back
in the day, we had received a number of letters
(42:04):
and notes from your fellow listeners who had said that
they had had strange, inexplicable experiences with everything from Norwegia,
board too, incantations or something that they have found online
or in a library, or even just staring into a mirror,
which is an intensely meditative act. And by the way,
(42:28):
it's the it's one of the acts that or it's
one of the rituals that Poke Runyan himself practices. You
can find him online. He's he's got a very particular
way of speaking. And I think we've played some a
little bit off air, So I think it's very much
a a storyteller. But if you have had those sorts
(42:49):
of inexplicable experiences, or if you have attempted to operate
one of the experiments mentioned in the Key of Solomon,
or it's many translations, please do right to us. We
would like to hear your story. We would like And
that's whether or not you think something strange happened, or
whether you thought it was all a waste of time.
(43:11):
We don't. By the way, we don't think that automatically
means you are unworthy, unpious or don't fear God upious,
unpious said, unbiased, unbiased. That's different. That is different. That's
a great point. Either way. You can you can find
us on Instagram, you can find us on Twitter. You
can find us on Facebook, especially our community page. Here's
(43:32):
where it gets crazy, where you can uh. You can
see Noel and Matt and myself popping up in digital person.
You can invoke us. Yeah, we even have little avatars
that we use. That's not true, but we can get them.
We can get them, we can make them. Uh. We
have the rituals and we have the the ability to
successfully enact those operations mainly admin privileges. Yeah, mainly, that's
(43:54):
what they call them now exactly. So the times have changed,
The times have changed, but Wizard Dree in some form
or another continues. We would like to hear your experiences
with it. As always. Thank you so much for checking
out the episode, and thank you to Paul who we
did not run that nickname past so we might get
(44:14):
it at the end of this. But Nol, what what
do people do if if they don't want to find
us on Twitter, if you don't want to find us
on Instagram? If you say I would, um, I know
you have a phone number one three three s T
d W y t K. That's usually Matts Part two.
I see what you're doing here. You're trying to invoke
a bit of ritual your spot on Noel. Yes, we
(44:37):
always begin and end with a ritual, and you can
be part of the ritual. You can email us directly.
We are conspiracy and how stuff works dot com,
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!