Grand Key of Solomon the King: Ancient Handbook of Angel Magic and Djinn Summoning

Be very, very careful about your dealings with the evocation in this book. I was stuck on medhold in San Diego and my boredom was leading me to things like summoning djinn and telekinesis and God someone even shipped me a star ruby sapphire with a male and female djinn attached to it. What a crazy year 2010 was. I remember these playful beings manifesting the weirdest faces in the clouds, appearing as raccoons, stepping out of portals on base, manifesting as ufos. Haha it was the freaking scariest time of my life. I of course have learned better to fully study the inner and outer workings of my eclectic practice before diving in. These creatures like to taunt you into doing things or isolate you as the culprit of something they have done out of not necessarily malice, but a place of harmless fun in their eyes. I thought all this $hyt was in my head that I was hearing and seeing until a high ranking officer asked me if I had been seeing weird $hyt running around. They had me fearing I was going to be shot for causing an earthquake. Lmao I 😭 can't with these beings. I've long since decided to stick to dragons, fae and my beloved enochian angel magick. Don't do it until you are qualified.

At first I was not impressed,but when I was thinking about it I had some inspiration I plan to use it with my veritable key of Solomon it think I will have a truly interesting experiment

I happened to buy this book at the same time as The Book of Oberon: A Sourcebook of Elizabethan Magic , which was similarly priced -- and yet, the production values between the two were quite different. Next to Oberon, Grand Key looked very cheap with its tacky cover art, plastic binding, giant typeface and strangely chosen pixelated "aged" effect on the pages. If one were to "judge a book by its cover" I'd have expected it to cost less than half what I paid. I can't really say anything about whether the magic in this book "works" or not and I don't really intend to try it, I just bought it in order to study the Arabic variants on the Goetic/Solomonic tradition versus the European texts. You can see things like versions of planetary seals that have common characteristics to the versions from The Magus and others, there's a version of the Almadel, and so forth. The translation seems sound enough, I didn't see anything that stuck out as bizarre with it. All in all I am happy with the book.

Let me begin by saying that there is value to this book merely because of the fact that it IS a translation of the Arabic Solomonic work Al-Ajnas by Berechiah. In that respect, it's very interesting and groundbreaking to now have translations being made from what is a vast trove of Arabic occult material whose elements, such as the Picatrix, inspired so much of our Western occult tradition. This, after all, is why I was eager to buy it. It does fulfill this in that it includes Arabic names of all the familiar (and some unfamiliar) Solomonic angelic and demonic hierarchy and is very much apparently an accurate translation of a never before seen work in English. With that said, however, I must express my extreme disappointment as to the tackiness of how it was presented, which suggests a sense of slight regard for the material and the tradition at hand. The pages of the book are printed with the downright cheesiest "weathered" pattern, full of pixellation and so much black smear, which serves to make the black and white pages look like cheap newsprint. It's like when you make a treasure map as a kid with plain typing paper and then take a cigarette lighter to burn the edges to make it look "old". All of this not only reduces the aesthetic appeal of the book, but also its academic and even spiritual appeal, as its effect smacks of the mass produced paperback Simon Necronomicon, and serves to class it at that level. When compared with similarly priced hardcover editions of other classic Solomonic works, such as those by Skinner and Peterson, this book really pales as an investment. If you're interested in seeing this as an example of Arabic occultism in the Solomonic tradition, it's far more worth it to find pdf or etext versions of Ajnas online than to invest in a physical version with this kind of appearance.

As a practicing Sorcerer for 20+ years, I am a grimoire nut & enjoy Sorcery in the Solomonic tradition even though I do not buy into the whole Judeo-Xian mythos. With that said I have often got results using Solomonic Sorcery whether it was with QBL Tree of Life Spirits OR the Spirits listed in the Lemegeton's Goetia. With that said, I happened to interview Ninevah on my website & was excited about the forthcoming book, "Deadly Names" which I have & will write a review on at a later date. When I ordered that book from Ninevah's site, I saw this & ordered it as well. I was quite surprised at what appears to be more of a system that is spoken/incanted rather than talismanic/seal oriented like the Sloane manuals. Rouhaniat Magic (re: Arabic Magic) relies more on spoken word repetition for result than the use of talismans like say the Goetia or Key of Solomon uses. Often you will summon a Djinn by repeating its name say 10,000 times which seems like a ridiculous amount but it can (& does) go quite quickly once you're into it & using some sort of method of counting like say a rosary. I found the invocation on pages 28 for binding tongues to be useful. I had a client who told me she was being mercilessly tortured by some idiot at her place of work & asked me to do something for her. I decided to use this invocation for a period of seven days & I repeated it 7 times each day. She reported back to me that the woman's mean comments began to subside to the point after a couple of weeks, the woman left her completely alone. While it's not a immediate solution, it did work. Why it may have taken so long to work is possibly because I did not work my way through the system & get properly initiated into it. Rhouhaniat is a results oriented system but that given, I do believe this book holds a lot more for the Solomonic tradition than most feel. One of the annoying things is that it constantly uses 'Peace Be Upon Him' when the notes mention some historical holy figure like Moses, Solomon, Mohammed & the like but that's what many Rouhaniat practitioners did in ancient times. It's an Arabic thing of respect. Remember this is a manual that was translated from ancient Aramaic. The back cover explains that this is a book that is based on the works of Asaph ben Berechiah who allegedly was the vizier to the real King Solomon - at least according to Islamic folklore. While I'm not interested in the mythology of Islam, Judaism or Xianity, I find the Magic of these systems fascinating. "Here's something forbidden!" Such magic was/is forbidden in Islamic culture then & now & many have died for their practicing this very sort of Magic. The book DOES have seals listed though they tend to be like the seals in the Key of Solomon - covering groups of Spirits rather than individual ones such as the Goetia has. It appears to be a complete system in & of itself. It differs from the Western Solomonic material in that it does not list equipment to be used which is presumably found in other Rouhaniat sources yet to be translated. For the practitioner like myself, I am confident to summon the Djinn using my own equipment. You may wish to delve into an understanding of Rouhaniat before you start to work with this manual. Also, Djinns are notorious for being difficult to summon & control. They're hot tempered & angry a lot of the time. Thus is this a manual for the faint of heart? I would not recommend it for Novices but would not have a problem with someone who is an intermediate level student well versed in the Solomonic systems of the past to work with it, safely & get results. Overall I gave it four out of five stars simply because it is a complex system but the book does not offer liner or end/foot-notes to help explain things.