Solomonic Magic in the Islamic Tradition: The Asif ibn Barkhiya Stream

The Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis — the “Lesser Key of Solomon” — is one of the most read magical texts in the English-speaking world. Its first book, the Goetia, with its list of seventy-two spirits and their seals, has become something close to a reference standard for Western ceremonial magic. Most readers who pick it up assume they are holding a European text; the name “Solomon” feels biblical, the seals feel medieval-European, and the whole apparatus reads as a product of early modern English manuscript culture.

This assumption is partially correct and substantially incomplete. The Solomonic magical tradition is ancient, multilingual, and deeply rooted in the Hebrew and Arabic sources that European practitioners largely received without acknowledgment. To understand where the Lemegeton actually comes from — and what it lost in its long journey from the Near East to seventeenth-century England — it helps to begin with a figure most Western occultists have never encountered: Asif ibn Barkhiya.

Who Was Asif ibn Barkhiya?

In the Quran, the figure of the Prophet Sulayman (Solomon) appears several times — as a king endowed with extraordinary divine gifts, including the ability to command the wind, understand the speech of animals and birds, and rule over the jinn (spirits). This sovereignty over jinn is central to the Quranic portrayal; Sulayman’s power derives from God’s grant of authority, and the jinn who serve him do so within a divinely sanctioned hierarchy.

In the Quranic account (Sura 27, Al-Naml, verse 40), when Sulayman desires to have the throne of the Queen of Sheba brought to him before her arrival, one who possesses “knowledge of the Book” accomplishes it in an instant, before Sulayman can even blink. The Arabic text identifies this figure obliquely — as “one who has knowledge of the Book” — but Islamic exegetical tradition almost unanimously identifies him as Asif ibn Barkhiya, Sulayman’s vizier and scribe.

The name connects to the biblical tradition: Asaph ben Berechiah appears in the Hebrew scriptures (1 Chronicles 6:39) as a Levite musician and seer appointed by King David — a figure associated with wisdom, music, and spiritual knowledge who carried over into accounts of Solomon’s court. In Jewish midrashic literature and medieval kabbalah, Asaph/Asif figures as a sage of extraordinary occult ability; in the Islamic tradition, he becomes the archetype of the human master — the one who, unlike the jinn themselves, has access to divine authority through the knowledge of the divine name.

The phrase “knowledge of the Book” (‘ilm min al-Kitab) is significant. Islamic interpreters generally understood this as knowledge of the divine names — the operative science by which spiritual realities can be moved by one who knows how to invoke them correctly. Asif ibn Barkhiya is, in this reading, the first human practitioner of the science that al-Buni would later systematize in the Shams al-Ma’arif: commanding spirits through divinely authorized knowledge rather than through transgressive pacts.

The Arabic Solomonic Corpus

The story of Sulayman and his command over jinn generated an enormous body of Arabic literature. This corpus has never been comprehensively catalogued, but it includes texts dealing with:

The Seal of Solomon (Khatam Sulayman)

The seal — typically represented as a six-pointed star formed by two interlocking triangles, though other geometric forms appear in different traditions — is the instrument of Sulayman’s authority over spirits. In the Arabic tradition, the seal is not merely a symbol; it is an operative device inscribed on rings, amulets, and talismans. The geometry of the seal encodes divine names and angelic authority; its correct use binds spirits to obedience.

The Kings of the Jinn

Arabic tradition organizes the jinn into a hierarchy of kings who rule different categories of spirits. These kings — often numbering seven, corresponding to the seven planets — each have names, attributes, and domains of authority. The Solomonic practitioner does not deal with jinn randomly but engages the appropriate king for the appropriate purpose, using the correct invocatory forms, at the appropriate planetary hour, with the seal as the instrument of authority. This hierarchical structure is one of the most consistent features across the Arabic Solomonic corpus.

The Divine Names as Keys

In the Arabic Solomonic framework, jinn are commanded not through the magician’s personal power but through the authority of divine names. The practitioner invokes God’s sovereignty over the spirits; the spirits obey because God compels them to obey, and the practitioner is the authorized channel of that compulsion. This is quite different from the pact-based model that appears in some European Solomonic texts, where the magician’s authority over spirits derives partly from personal power or threat.

Asif’s Science

Texts attributed to or associated with Asif ibn Barkhiya describe the specific operative knowledge he possessed — including methods for summoning and binding jinn kings, formulae for protective circles, and the correct names by which each class of spirit must be addressed. These texts circulated in manuscript form throughout the medieval Islamic world.

The Western Solomonic Cycle: Same Spirits, Different Wrapping

The Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis — compiled in its English form in the seventeenth century, drawing on earlier European Latin manuscripts — contains lists of spirits, their seals, their powers, and the methods for summoning and binding them. The Goetia alone names seventy-two spirits. The Theurgia-Goetia names additional aerial spirits. Other sections name angelic and olympian spirits.

Many of these spirits have names that are recognizably Semitic in origin — distorted through the long chain of translation and transcription, but traceable. The hierarchical structure — spirits organized by rank, power, and domain — parallels the Arabic jinn-king structure. The use of a seal or pentacle as the instrument of authority over spirits parallels the Khatam Sulayman. The instruction that spirits must be bound by divine names and compelled rather than merely invited parallels the Arabic operative logic.

The genealogy is not direct — the Western Solomonic texts reached Europe through Hebrew magical texts (Sefer ha-Razim, Harba de-Moshe, and later Kabbalistic works) that themselves drew on the same Near Eastern tradition — but the family resemblance is real and substantial. The Goetia and the Arabic Solomonic corpus are related documents in a long and largely shared tradition of spirit-magic that transcends the religious divisions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

This relationship has been noted by scholars of the Western esoteric tradition — Gideon Bohak’s work on Jewish magic, and Joshua Trachtenberg’s older study Jewish Magic and Superstition, both illuminate the Hebrew layer that mediated between the Arabic tradition and the European texts. The Wikipedia article on the Lemegeton (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lesser_Key_of_Solomon) provides a useful overview of the text’s structure and manuscript history.

What Gets Lost When You Only Read the European Texts

Reading the Goetia without any knowledge of the Arabic Solomonic tradition is a bit like reading a copy of a copy of a translated manuscript, without knowing that the original exists in a different language and says somewhat different things.

Several losses are particularly significant.

The Rationale for Authority

The Arabic tradition is explicit about why Sulaymanic magic works: God has granted authority over jinn to the Solomonic practitioner who correctly deploys the divine names. This is a coherent theological and operative framework. The European Solomonic texts sometimes retain this framework but often present it in a more obscured or vestigial form — the divine names are present, the conjurations invoke divine authority, but the underlying logic is less clearly stated.

The Hierarchy of Kings

The Arabic tradition’s organization of jinn into planetary kingdoms, each with its own king, attributes, and operative domain, is considerably more developed than what appears in the Goetia. The relationship between planetary timing and spirit-conjuration — which planetary hour to work in for which king — is central to Arabic practice in a way that is secondary or absent in most European Solomonic texts.

The Science of Invocatory Names

The specific names by which jinn kings are addressed in the Arabic tradition — including their “hidden names” (asma’ khafiyya) by which they are bound — often differ from the names in European texts, and the Arabic names are embedded in a richer etymological and operative context. To know the name is to know something about the spirit’s nature; the Arabic tradition is considerably more developed on this point.

The Kitab al-Ajnas and Sihr Muluk al-Jann: The Source Stream in English

John Friend Publishing has made available two texts that give English readers direct access to the Arabic Solomonic source-stream.

Kitab al-Ajnas: The Solomonic Grimoire of Asif ibn Barkhiya is attributed directly to Asif ibn Barkhiya himself — the first English translation of a text that sits at the center of the Arabic Solomonic tradition. This is the operative knowledge of Sulayman’s vizier: the specific science by which jinn kings are summoned, named, and commanded through divine authority.

Sihr Muluk al-Jann: The Complete Magic of the Jinn Kings works with the full hierarchy of jinn kings — their names, their domains, the invocatory forms for engaging each, and the operative framework that governs the entire system. This is the Solomonic tradition at full extension: not a single text attributed to a single figure, but a comprehensive working manual for the kings-of-jinn tradition.

Together, these two texts give Western readers something that has not been available before: the Arabic originals of the tradition that underlies — however distantly — the Lemegeton and the Goetia.

A Note on Terminology: Sihr, Ruhaniyat, and Operative Authority

It is worth clarifying what the Arabic tradition means by the operative categories it uses.

Sihr — operative magic — covers a broad range of practices and carries no uniformly negative connotation in the Arabic texts themselves, even though Islamic legal discourse frequently condemned certain forms of it. The practitioner’s authority matters enormously: magic performed through the invocation of divine names and within divinely sanctioned frameworks is categorically different from magic performed through transgressive pacts with spirits.

Ruhaniyat — spiritual powers or spirits, from ruh, “spirit” — refers to the beings that populate the Arabic occult universe: angels, jinn, planetary spirits, and the subtler forces associated with letters and divine names. The Solomonic tradition is one dimension of the broader science of ruhaniyat.

The khatam — seal — as instrument of authority, and the ‘azima — the firm oath or binding adjuration — as operative speech act, are the two primary tools of the Solomonic practitioner. Both are present in the texts translated by John Friend Publishing.

Further Reading

The Arabic Solomonic corpus is large, mostly unstudied in English, and increasingly accessible through translation. For those who want to go deeper — into the kings of jinn, the Solomonic seals, the operative science of divine names and binding adjurations — the John Friend Publishing catalog represents the primary current source of English translations from this tradition, with additional volumes in production.