Confession as Sacrament and Strategy
A Historical and Magical Analysis of Penitence in the Greater Key of Solomon
The ritual of confession - conceived not only as theological utterance but as a perilous performative act - holds a darkly luminous place in the ceremonial protocols of early modern magic, nowhere more starkly than in the Clavicula Salomonis, or Greater Key of Solomon. There, amid bloodless invocations and names of dreadful power, the magician is first compelled to strip bare the soul—to enter into a sacred theatre of guilt, fear, and longing. As I finish writing my own introduction to the sacraments for the Church of Light and Shadow, I figured I’d write this article which delves into the sacramental, psychological, and social machinery of this confessional act, revealing it as far more than a prelude: it is the crucible in which the operator’s moral authority, ritual purity, and lawful access to divine power are forged. Set against the backdrop of Christian and Jewish penitential traditions, and drawn through the golden thread of Neoplatonic cosmology, we examine the penitential rubric of the Key not as moralistic baggage, but as a transgressive sacrament—at once purgation and passport, enabling the magician to enter sacred space with a conscience scalded clean by the fire of holy dread.
In the grimoire known as the Greater Key of Solomon—likely compiled between the 14th and 17th centuries and surviving in a variety of manuscript and printed forms—the operator is instructed to perform a rite of confession prior to engaging with angelic intelligences or commanding spirits. Far from a marginal piety, this penitential act is placed among the central operations, preceding even the consecration of tools or the drawing of sigils. In the Key of Solomon and later Crowleyan and some post-Crowleyan Thelemic liturgies, the confession is a first-person address to God, incorporating biblical and liturgical language, and culminating in a plea for forgiveness and purification.
This act of confession must be understood as both sacrament and strategy: it functions not only to render the operator ritually clean and ethically worthy, but also to reassert ecclesiastical structures within a magical framework. It signals the operator’s submission to divine justice even as they prepare to engage in acts of extraordinary agency. This article will explore the sources, functions, and implications of such confession, tracing its roots through Jewish and Christian traditions and placing it within the socio-political and religious contexts of early modern Europe.
In Jewish tradition, confession (viddui) is an essential component of teshuvah, or repentance, as codified in rabbinic sources like Mishnah Yoma and Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah. The confessional formula was recited aloud, often in communal liturgical settings such as Yom Kippur, and always emphasized the necessity of verbal acknowledgment of sin before God. The Talmudic tradition, while avoiding institutional mediation (no human priest absolves sin), emphasizes divine forgiveness following sincere self-judgment and contrition.
In magical texts influenced by or imitating Judaic formulae, especially in Kabbalistic or Christian Hebraist contexts, this model of confession functions to establish right relation (derekh eretz) between human and divine intelligences. In the Key of Solomon, this appears transmuted into an operant act of moral purification with clear roots in viddui theology.
By the time of the Clavicula Salomonis’ late medieval composition, confession had been institutionalized in Catholic Europe as one of the seven sacraments, formalized at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 CE, which mandated annual confession. The rite involved auricular confession to a priest, acts of contrition, penance, and priestly absolution. This model emphasized intermediated reconciliation with God through ecclesiastical structures, aligning sin not only with moral failure but with social and juridical disorder.
The Solomon grimoire’s confessional prayer—while not involving a priest—clearly echoes this ecclesiastical model. The operator’s invocation of divine mercy, articulation of specific sins, and request for spiritual purification mirrors sacramental confession. It thus functions as a ritual of self-legitimation, permitting the magician to speak and act as one whose conscience has been cleared and whose soul has been made fit to wield divine names.
The version of the Confession found in the Greater Key of Solomon (e.g. as translated by S.L. MacGregor Mathers or Joseph Peterson) presents a highly structured act of self-abasement. It begins with a direct address to God, acknowledges divine omnipotence and justice, and proceeds through a list of transgressions. The language is formulaic but affectively charged:
“O Lord God of mercy, who desirest not the death of a sinner but rather that he should be converted and live: Turn unto me, a miserable sinner, who have grievously offended Thy Divine Majesty…”
This liturgy is drawn from the Psalms (particularly Psalms 51 and 32), the Book of Common Prayer, and the penitential practices of monastic traditions. The language of mercy, contrition, and unworthiness is not only devotional but strategic—it establishes the operator’s right relationship with divine order before presuming to command spirits.
Importantly, the confession is not a private meditation but a ritual act preceding and enabling a public (or at least performative) role. It implies that the magician, like a priest, must be ritually and ethically prepared to mediate between worlds. This reflects a broader early modern concern with the legitimacy of power—whether ecclesial, political, or magical.
In the early modern context (ca. 1500–1700), confession operated within overlapping systems of religious discipline, legal accountability, and psychological self-regulation. Michel Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, identifies confession as a technology of selfhood: a means by which subjects internalize norms and participate in systems of surveillance.
In magical systems like the Key of Solomon, this dynamic is inverted yet preserved. The operator internalizes divine law, but not to become passive—rather, to become ritually empowered. Confession is not only a relinquishing of guilt; it is a precondition for invocation, a ritual inoculation against demonic deception or failure.
Confession in the Key also maps onto contemporary concerns with moral purity and divine favor, themes heightened during the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. The emergence of printed grimoires in Protestant regions frequently retained Catholic penitential formulas—suggesting that ritual confession served a trans-confessional magical function, independent of ecclesial allegiance.
The ritual of confession in grimoires like the Key of Solomon performed several critical functions:
1. Psychological grounding: Confession served to calm the conscience and focus the will, establishing a moral interiority aligned with divine order.
2. Social legitimacy: By invoking familiar religious forms, the magician appeared less heretical or subversive and more like a devout (if heterodox) Christian.
3. Magical efficacy: Purity of heart was believed essential for angelic contact, and confession functioned as a spiritual hygiene.
4. Anthropological transformation: The operator, through confession, is transformed from profane to sacred, fit to speak divine names and enter sacred space.
In addition to Jewish teshuvah and Christian penitentia, the confessional impulse in the Key of Solomonresonates strongly with the Sufi practice of muhāsabah (self-examination) and tazkiyat al-nafs(purification of the soul). These practices, deeply embedded in Islamic spirituality from the classical period onward, reflect a broader universal principle in esoteric religions: that no soul may ascend, command, or draw near to the divine unless it has first undergone a disciplined reckoning with the self.
In the Sufi tradition, especially as expressed by figures such as Al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī (d. 857)—whose very name derives from the practice of self-reckoning—and Al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), confession is not necessarily verbalized to another person, but involves a radical interiorization of judgment. The soul is seen as a courtroom, with the intellect interrogating the passions and desires. The ultimate goal is to render the nafs (ego-self) docile, refined, and fit to receive divine illumination (nūr).
Like the confessional rite in the Clavicula Salomonis, the Sufi practitioner engages in ritual ablution, followed by formalized recitation, often of the Names of God, interspersed with personal prayers of regret, purification, and submission. In many Sufi manuals, such as those by Ibn ʿArabī and al-Qushayrī, the aspirant is taught to rehearse their faults mentally, feel contrition, and articulate intentional reform, in a process not unlike the magical operator’s invocation of divine mercy prior to summoning spirits.
A particularly vivid parallel occurs in the Ṣūfī practice of preparing for dhikr (remembrance)—the repetitive invocation of divine Names. Before entering this heightened state, aspirants are expected to be ritually pure, emotionally contrite, and spiritually humble. Without such a state, divine Names may be uttered, but not efficaciously realized.
In both the Key and Sufism, therefore, ritual confession is a theurgical filter—a purgative discipline that ensures the divine names pass through a vessel properly cleaned and rightly oriented.
The mystical theologies of both traditions also share Neoplatonic undercurrents, emphasizing proximity to the divine through moral similarity. In Sufism, the soul must be refined to mirror the Divine Attributes (al-Ṣifāt); likewise, in the Key of Solomon, the magician must “cleanse his soul” before presuming to wield the Ineffable Names of God. The ethical and cosmological dimensions are inseparable: the magician’s authority, like the mystic’s, is rooted in resemblance and submission not simply in knowledge, but in character.
As Al-Ghazālī states in Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn, “The key to all good is the purification of the heart; without it, knowledge becomes arrogance, worship becomes pride, and remembrance becomes hollow.”
This insight mirrors the logic of confession in magical texts: without purification, knowledge of divine names becomes blasphemy, not power.
The Key of Solomon thus reflects an esoteric logic that transcends confessional boundaries. Its confessional rite is not simply a derivative of Catholic practice—it is part of a wider mystical anthropology shared by Sufi adhkār, Kabbalistic viddui, and Christian oratio contritionis. The magician, like the mystic, approaches the divine not with presumption, but with trembling and humility, and only after ritualized self-cleansing may the doors of the invisible be lawfully opened.