Seal of Solomon

The boy was the best paid child on the Temple site and the thinnest one there. He had double wages and double rations because the king was fond of him, and every evening after the masons went home something came out of the dusk, took half his pay and half his bread, then held his right hand and sucked the thumb until he could feel his own life going out through it. When Solomon finally asked him why he was wasting away, the answer sent the king into the sanctuary to pray day and night. What came back was not an army. It was a piece of jewellery.

The archangel Michael brought it down from the Lord Sabaoth: a little ring with a seal made of an engraved stone. The instruction that came with it was short. Lock up all the demons of the earth, male and female, and with their help build Jerusalem. The king did not test it himself. He gave it to the boy, told him to wait for his usual hour, and to throw the ring at the demon’s chest.

It came at the usual hour, like a burning fire, to take the pay. The ring struck and held. The demon Ornias stood in the stone dust with a king’s seal on his breastbone, offering the child all the gold of the earth to take it off him again, while the child ran to fetch Solomon. The whole logic of the object is in that scene. It does not kill and it does not burn. It marks, and whatever it marks belongs to the man whose name is on it.

Once Ornias was branded he was handed the ring himself and sent to fetch the prince of the demons, and Beelzeboul arrived on a shout of flame and stayed. After that the Testament of Solomon reads like an inventory. Demon after demon is dragged in, questioned about its trade and about the angel that thwarts it, then sealed and put to work cutting stone or hauling water. One is caught in the Arabian desert in a leather flask, blown into it by its own breath through the mouth of the ring and carried back to Jerusalem on a camel, where the flask stands up on the Temple floor and walks.

The oldest Jewish telling knows nothing about stars and gives the ring a different job. In the Babylonian Talmud Solomon needs the shamir, the stone-splitting creature that lets the Temple be built without a tool of iron, and only Ashmedai, king of the demons, knows where it is kept. Ashmedai lives on a mountain in a pit of water that he covers with a rock and closes with his own seal, checking the seal each day before he drinks. Solomon sends Benayahu son of Jehoiada up the mountain with fleeces of wool, skins of wine, a chain engraved with the Name of God and a ring engraved with the Name of God. Benayahu drains the water, floods the pit with wine, and waits in a tree until the demon king breaks his own rule against drinking, and sleeps. Nobody in that account says where Solomon got the ring. It is simply in his hand when the story opens.

The capture holds all the way to the Temple’s completion, and then Solomon asks the wrong question. He wants to know what makes demons greater than the ministering angels. Ashmedai offers to show him: take off the chain, hand over the ring. Solomon does both. The demon swallows it, sets one wing in heaven and one on the earth, and throws the king four hundred parasangs. Solomon spent what followed going door to door saying that he had been king over Israel in Jerusalem, while the thing on his throne visited the queens in socks so that nobody could look at its feet. The Sanhedrin worked it out from the socks. They brought Solomon the ring and the chain, and Ashmedai left the room at the sight of him. It did not settle anything. The king slept afterwards behind sixty armed men because of fear in the nights, and two rabbis of the Talmud could not agree whether he ever truly got the throne back.

The Qur’an gives the episode a single line: We certainly tried Solomon and placed on his throne a body, then he returned. There is no ring in it. Commentators and storytellers supplied one, and their version has the Talmud’s shape with the furniture moved. The rebel Sakhr takes on Solomon’s likeness, gets the ring from the woman keeping it while the king is out, and rules for forty days while the real Sulayman walks the country as a beggar. When the demon at last throws the ring into the sea a fish swallows it, a fisherman lands the fish, and the ring comes back to the king at dinner. Arabic writers made its engraving the greatest of the names of God, and gave the object the name it still carries, khatam Sulayman.

By the time of the Thousand Nights and a Night the seal has stopped being a ring at all and become a stamp in lead. A fisherman brings up a cucumber-shaped jar of yellow copper on the fourth and last cast he allows himself in a day, its mouth made fast with a leaden cap stamped with the seal ring of Sulayman son of David. He works the lead loose with a knife because the brass alone is worth ten dinars. The smoke that boils out stands up as an Ifrit with a head like a dome, legs like masts and eyes like two lamps, who has lain in that jar for eighteen hundred years counting out his promises: riches to whoever freed him in the first century, the hoards of the earth in the second, three wishes in the fourth, and after that, death to the man who came too late. The fisherman gets him back in by asking how he ever fitted, then claps the lead on the mouth. The seal holds. It is the only thing in the story that does.

Gershom Scholem, working through the medieval amulet literature, found that the picture people mean by the name is younger than the name, and the name younger than the ring. For a long stretch of the Middle Ages both the five-pointed and the six-pointed star were called the Seal of Solomon and no distinction was made between them. The term appears to have started with Arabic writers, who applied it to a whole series of seven signs rather than to one, and its narrowing to the pentagram only hardens around the seventeenth century. The six-pointed figure’s separate career as a Jewish emblem is a later story that runs through the flags and seals of Prague. The earliest description of the engraving in any text is the one in the Testament, where Michael’s ring is said to bear a pentalpha, a five-pointed star, and even that sentence is missing from one of the surviving manuscripts.

The name travelled further than the shape did. In Arabic magic the set of seven signs kept the title, while the star on its own, five points or six, went onto countless amulets as khatam Sulayman. In the Malay world and the southern Philippines the title landed on a design with no stars in it whatever: two overlapping squares with eight looped corners, a figure already ancient in that part of the world, which became the cincin Sulaiman. It was cut into the seals of the sultans of Ternate, drawn into Maranao charms to make a man vanish from sight or turn a weapon aside, and copied into a west Sumatran notebook under the promise that whoever wears it will never lack for fortune.

What the ring does is narrow and it is absolute. It compels a spirit to come when it is called, it fixes a mark the spirit cannot lift, and it closes a vessel that nothing inside can open. It confers nothing else. Solomon’s wisdom is his own in every version; the ring supplies labour and obedience, and no source credits it with a thought.

Its weakness is the same in all of them, which is unusual for an object with this much geography behind it. It comes off. A ring can be handed to a demon out of idle curiosity or left with a servant while the king steps away, and both great traditions lose it in exactly that fashion, by the owner’s own act, to something wearing his face or simply waiting for him to get bored. It guards against nothing its wearer wants. In the Testament the end arrives with no demon involved at all: Solomon wants a Jebusaean woman, she wants five locusts crushed in the name of Moloch, and he crushes them, and the Spirit of God goes out of him while every demon on earth is still sealed and still working. He wrote the book, he says, so that whoever finds it might attend to the last things and not the first.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Seal of Solomon?

The Seal of Solomon is the signet ring attributed to King Solomon, set with an engraved stone and used to command demons and jinn. In the Testament of Solomon the archangel Michael delivers it to Solomon so that he can compel the demons to build the Temple at Jerusalem. In the Babylonian Talmud it is engraved with a name of God and paired with a chain bearing the same name.

What did the Seal of Solomon do?

The Seal of Solomon summoned spirits, branded them so they could not free themselves, and sealed them inside containers they could not open from within. It gave its wearer command over demons and jinn but granted nothing else, no strength and no wisdom. In the Thousand Nights and a Night a single stamp of it in a lead cap held an Ifrit inside a copper jar for eighteen hundred years.

Is the Seal of Solomon a five-pointed or a six-pointed star?

Both, historically. Gershom Scholem showed that through much of the Middle Ages the five-pointed and six-pointed stars were both called the Seal of Solomon with no distinction between them, and that the term itself seems to have begun with Arabic writers, who used it for a set of seven signs. The narrowing of the name to the pentagram only settles around the seventeenth century, and the oldest text to describe the engraving, the Testament of Solomon, calls it a pentalpha, a five-pointed star.

How did Solomon lose the Seal of Solomon?

He gave it away himself in both major traditions. In the Talmud he asks the demon king Ashmedai to prove his power, removes the chain and hands over the ring, and Ashmedai swallows it and hurls Solomon four hundred parasangs from his throne. In Islamic tellings the rebel Sakhr takes Solomon’s likeness, obtains the ring from the woman keeping it, and rules for forty days before throwing it into the sea, where a fish swallows it and a fisherman brings it back.

Which traditions know the Seal of Solomon?

Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition all carry it, and it spread well beyond them. The Babylonian Talmud and the Greek Testament of Solomon are the earliest substantial accounts; medieval Arabic writers named it khatam Sulayman and made its engraving the greatest name of God. In the Malay world and the southern Philippines the name attached to a wholly different amulet, the eight-looped cincin Sulaiman, used on sultans’ seals and on charms for invisibility and invulnerability.

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Asmodeus, Beelzebub, Onoskelis, Michael, Shedim, Hoopoe, Lilith, Golem, Ark of the Covenant, Djinn, Ifrit, Marid, Shaitan, Iblis, Solomonari