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 would have to say that as a grimoire it works out well enough. The layout is relatively easy to deal with. However the manner in which the conjurations are written are less then pleasing. Leaving holes and gaps in the conjuration such to the like where the author intentionally leaves key parts out. More time then is having to track down the Arabic translations, as it is not a clear distinction of which names, words and various summons are supposed to maintain their origin dialect, and which ones the author has made English.Much to the grimoire tradition these passages do some justice as to the origin of certain conjurations and exorcisms, it takes the reader some time to piece together the usable bits of information out of this work. Addressing to the same potency of some works contained there-in it hints at other paths then just the Allah singularity. However if you wanted to have a how to make use of the Koran in the most effective ways possible against the natural spirits I suppose this work is alright to do that.I give it 3 stars as it will likely sit on my shelf for it lacks the finished information which it promises in its sales Description. It would have earned 4 if the work was complete, 5 if the translation in the text was clearly distinct from the Arabic and English versions, offering both up to the reader. If you want a project to tinker with, rebuilding, and rewriting like the Necronomicon of Simon, then this is the sort of book for you. Its expensive for what it is, at least the cover holds up well to dust.

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.