The shelfmarks name objects, not one stable text
The British Library catalogues Sloane MS 2731 as a French “Clavicle of Solomon” under a 1572 date. The short record establishes a shelfmark, language, and catalogued date, but it does not supply a table of contents or demonstrate that this copy has the same chapters as a later printed Key. Sloane 2731 therefore anchors one historical object while leaving its precise relationship to other branches open.
Lansdowne MS 1203 is a mid-eighteenth-century manuscript in Latin and French whose title advertises a Hebrew-to-Latin translation by a rabbi called Abognazar. Its polished calligraphy and colored figures give the copy a coherent visual identity, yet its translation story remains part of the manuscript’s self-presentation. More revealing than that legend is the order of the surviving text: one continuous book without chapter divisions.
Mathers’s Sloane witnesses belong to different editorial roles
Mathers did not list Sloane 2731 among the seven codices behind his 1889 edition. He named Sloane 3091 and Sloane 1307. In his account, Sloane 3091 stands beside Harley 3981 and King’s 288 as a French group with nearly the same matter and wording, although he criticized its transcription. Sloane 1307 is an Italian compilation that mixes Key material with other goetic matter. “A Sloane manuscript” is therefore not a textual category: each shelfmark performs a different role.
The stable spine of Mathers’s edition came mainly from the related French witnesses and the concise Lansdowne 1202, supplemented by Additional 10862 and other copies. His printed chapters combine readings across that group. The result is a two-book editorial synthesis: Book I orders times, operations, circles, conjurations, and pentacles; Book II supplies purification, clothing, places, tools, inks, incense, water, and other material prerequisites.
Lansdowne 1203 uses a different textual machine
The Lansdowne 1203 sequence begins with a preliminary discourse and introduction, then moves through planetary hours, colors, and an inventory of instruments. It proceeds tool by tool: sword, dagger, penknife, burin, ink bottle, cup, quills, burner, fire, incense, two staffs, place, garment, victim, and ritual book. Only after that long preparation does it turn to the nature of spirits, divine names, individual experiments, rings for binding spirits, lunar mansions, and pentacles.
That order makes preparation the main road into the operations. Mathers’s arrangement reverses the reader’s experience. His Book I begins with devotional and celestial timing, describes operations, and repeatedly sends the reader forward to Book II for bodily purity, instruments, and materials. Lansdowne 1203 accumulates equipment before its run of experiments; Mathers distributes dependencies between an operational book and a preparatory book. The difference is architectural, not a shifted chapter number. It also changes how a figure is interpreted: a pentacle at the end of the Lansdowne sequence arrives after an extended instrument workshop, while Mathers introduces pentacles inside Book I and makes their manufacture depend on later chapters in Book II.
Worked comparison: consecrating the ritual book
In Lansdowne 1203, consecration of the ritual book follows the garment and victim and precedes the discourse on spirits. The book becomes the final prepared object among knives, ink, fire, incense, staffs, clothing, place, and bodily materials. Its position carries the manuscript from manufacturing equipment into address to the invisible hierarchy.
Mathers relocates comparable material to Book II, chapter XXI. There it requires a small book containing prayers, angelic names, seals, and characters, then directs the reader back to a prayer already printed in Book I, chapter XIV. That backward reference exposes the logic of his synthesis: the ritual book is materially prepared in the second book but filled with verbal and graphic components established in the first. A similar operation now performs a different structural job.
What the comparison changes
Mathers acknowledged that Lansdowne 1203 was one book without chapters, yet used extracts from it inside a chaptered synthesis whose core witnesses followed another arrangement. A passage labeled “from the Key of Solomon” in his print can therefore preserve French Colorno wording, a concise Lansdowne 1202 reading, an Additional 10862 prologue, or a selected Lansdowne 1203 insertion. The smooth English sequence hides those seams unless the source notes are followed.
Add MS 39666 sharpens the point because its catalogue says its French text does not correspond to the other listed French and Latin versions. The manuscript family preserves rival ways of ordering and expanding the work, while Mathers creates one usable nineteenth-century route through them. That difference reaches beyond bibliography. Order determines whether an object is learned as a prerequisite, encountered as part of an operation, or collected as a final appendix, so moving a passage alters the logic by which a reader connects tools, prayers, spirits, and figures. The Lemegeton remains a separate five-part compilation: shared attribution to Solomon does not make its spirit catalogues another witness to this Clavicula sequence.