THE TESTAMENT OF SOLOMON: The Ancient Texts of King Solomon's Ring, the Demons He Bound, and the Secrets of the Temple: Complete Text with Commentary
About this ebook
Near the end of his life, King Solomon set down a secret: how a ring given to him by the archangel Michael allowed him to summon, question, and command the demons of the ancient world — and how the wisest king who ever lived still lost everything in the end.
Written in Solomon’s own voice, the Testament of Solomon is one of the strangest and most influential texts to survive from antiquity. It is the earliest full account of the Seal of Solomon, the original source behind the later grimoire tradition of the Key of Solomon and the Ars Goetia, and a firsthand parade of named demons — Ornias, Beelzeboul, Asmodeus, Onoskelis, Obyzouth, and the thirty-six spirits of the zodiac — each interrogated, catalogued, and bound.
Most editions on the market are little more than a bare reprint of Frederick Conybeare’s 1898 translation, handed to the reader with no context at all. This edition is different.
What makes this edition definitive:
● The complete, unabridged 1898 Conybeare translation — the same landmark text nearly every edition reprints, reproduced here in full.
● Eighteen chapters of original commentary that explain what you are reading, episode by episode, in plain modern language.
● The full story of the manuscripts — from Fleck’s 1837 Greek edition through McCown’s fourteen-manuscript critical edition to modern scholarship.
● Every demon decoded — a complete catalog of names, forms, powers, star-signs, thwarting angels, and methods of exorcism.
● The real history of the Seal of Solomon — how the five-pointed pentalpha became the six-pointed hexagram and the Star of David.
● The roots of Western magic — how the Testament shaped the medieval Key of Solomon and the seventeenth-century Lesser Key of Solomon, the Goetia.
● The wider ancient world — every episode set beside the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, Josephus, the Talmud, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Greek Magical Papyri.
Here you will meet Asmodeus, the demon of the Book of Tobit who destroys marriages; Obyzouth, the strangler of newborns known elsewhere as Lilith; the headless demon; the Wingdragon; and Enepsigos, who foretells the fall of Solomon’s own kingdom. And you will follow the tragic ending the whole book builds toward — the master of every spirit brought down not by any demon, but by desire.
Written for three kinds of reader:
the newcomer curious about ancient demonology and biblical apocrypha; the student of the occult and the Western esoteric tradition tracing the Goetia back to its source; and the serious reader who wants honest scholarship that shows where the evidence is clear and where it is genuinely disputed — never dumbed down, never sensationalized.
The Testament of Solomon has waited more than a century for an edition that finally makes it readable. This is that edition.
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About the author
Thornbridge Press is an independent publisher devoted to bringing the primary texts of the ancient, esoteric, and religious world to modern readers in editions that are at once faithful and genuinely readable. The press specializes in recovering important historical works — sacred, apocryphal, magical, and philosophical — that have too often reached the public either locked behind academic jargon or stripped of the context needed to understand them at all.
Every Thornbridge Press edition is built on a single principle: reproduce the original source faithfully and in full, then surround it with clear, honest commentary that explains where the text came from, what it meant to the people who wrote and read it, and why it still matters today. The press draws on the best available scholarship while writing for the curious general reader — treating each work as a serious historical and literary artifact, never sensationalizing it, never dumbing it down, and always distinguishing plainly between what a text says, what scholars debate, and where the evidence runs out.
The result is a growing library of definitive, accessible editions for scholars, students, seekers, and anyone who has ever wanted to read the ancient sources for themselves.
