KEY OF SOLOMON PENTACLES: WHAT THEY ACTUALLY ARE
The pentacles of the Key of Solomon are probably the most copied images in Western esotericism. They are printed on candles, tattooed, sold as pendants, and reproduced in a thousand posts by people who have never opened the book they come from. The book is short and specific about them, and almost none of what it says survives the journey.
What the text says a pentacle is
These Pentacles are usually made of the metal the most suitable to the nature of the Planet... They should be engraved with the instrument of Art in the days and hours proper to the Planet.Key of Solomon, Book I (Mathers ed., 1889, public domain)
And on the material:
The Matter of which the Pentacle is constructed should be Virgin, never having been used for any other purpose; or if it be metal it should be purified by fire.
Three conditions, then, before a single character is drawn: the right substance, never previously used for anything else, and the right moment. A pentacle is not an image in this scheme. It is an object made under constraints, and the image is only part of it.
The editor's own admission
But it is in the Pentacles that the Hebrew is worst, the letters being so vilely scribbled as to be actually undecipherable in some instances.S. L. MacGregor Mathers, editor's preface, 1889
This is Mathers, in 1889, describing the manuscripts he was working from. He spent years, by his own account, correcting the Hebrew back into legibility. He believed he had got it close.
It is worth knowing, because every pentacle you have ever seen descends from that reconstruction. The figures are not a transmission from antiquity arriving intact. They are a Victorian scholar's best reading of several disagreeing manuscripts, and he said so plainly in his preface. Anyone presenting them as unbroken tradition either has not read the preface or is counting on you not having read it.
Rite, instrument, honest gap
Rite
The Key directs that the pentacle be made of the metal proper to its planet or on virgin paper in that planet's colour; that the material be unused, or purified by fire if it is metal; and that it be engraved in the days and hours proper to the planet. Size is explicitly left to the operator.
Instrument
The timing condition is the one part of this that is fully computable. Planetary days and hours come out of sunrise and sunset at a given place on a given date, by arithmetic anyone can re-run. Whether a pentacle was made in its proper hour is therefore a checkable fact about the object.
The manuscript history is checkable too. Mathers names the British Museum manuscripts he collated, and they exist. The claim that these figures were reconstructed rather than copied is not scepticism - it is what the editor wrote in his own preface.
Honest gap
Whether a correctly made pentacle does anything is not addressed by any of this, and we make no claim about it. The arithmetic settles when it was made. It says nothing whatever about what follows.
There is a second gap, less often admitted: nobody can say with confidence how close Mathers's reconstruction is to whatever stood in the earliest manuscripts. He was careful and he was honest about the difficulty. That is not the same as certainty, and he did not pretend it was.
Questions the sources get asked
What is a pentacle in the Key of Solomon?
An object, not an image. The Key specifies the material - the metal proper to its planet, or unused virgin paper in the planet's colour - and requires that it be engraved in the days and hours proper to that planet. The figure is only one of the three conditions.
Are the Key of Solomon pentacles authentic?
They descend from S. L. MacGregor Mathers's 1889 reconstruction. In his own preface he records that the Hebrew in the manuscripts was, in his words, so vilely scribbled as to be undecipherable in places, and that correcting it took him several years.
Does a pentacle have to be metal?
No. The Key permits exorcised virgin paper written in the colour adopted for the planet. If metal is used, the text requires that it be purified by fire. Either way the material must never have been used for any other purpose.
The Solomonic Guide prints the pentacle the Key assigns your intent, the hours computed for your own coordinates, and the derivation behind every stroke.
The Solomonic Guide · $18.98