🏺The City of Brass, Jinn & Solomon’s Vessels🔮
Binding demons in leather, brass and water vessels in grimoires and 1,001 Nights (Arabian Nights)
“…in the old days in Damascus there was a caliph named ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (عَبْد الْمَلِك ٱبْن مَرْوَان). One day while he was sitting with the kings and sultans of his empire, they began to discuss tales of past people and came to the stories of our master Solomon, son of David, on both of whom be peace, which contained accounts of what Almighty God had granted to him by way of rule and authority over mankind, jinn, birds, beasts and so on. The caliph was told: ‘We have heard from our predecessors that Almighty God gave to our master Solomon what He gave to no one else, and Solomon advanced to a stage that no one else has reached, in that he would imprison jinn, marids and devils in brass bottles, which he would close up with lead, adding his seal.’”
-Thousand and One Nights, ‘The City of Brass’
Flying carpets, genies, magical swords, summoning spirits: these are some of the many themes found in the collection of medieval Islamic stories known as the Thousand and One Nights (Arabic: أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ, Alf Laylah wa-Laylah). But one of the most powerful items found at the heart of the Nights and the grimoires is the fabulous Brass Vessel that Solomon sealed spirits into. But why the metal of brass? How are these vessels used in spirit-summoning handbooks or ‘grimoires’? Grab your lantern, hop aboard the caravan and let’s travel deep into the history of the brass vessel and journey to The City of Brass itself as we read this key story from the Thousand and One Nights in its entirety. This video wouldn’t be possible without my lovely Glitch Bottle Patrons: thank you all so much for your incredible support. This exploration of Solomon, brass and the Thousand and One Nights is divided into seven parts.
I. Solomon’s Brass Vessel in the Grimoires
So aside from being fabulous, brassy and sassy, what are these vessels used for as described in the historical handbooks of Western ritual magicians, also known as the ‘grimoires’? Dr. Stephen Skinner in his Techniques of Solomonic Magic, shares that the main purpose of the brass vessel was similar to that of the floor Triangle of Art placed outside a magical circle, where it is:
One of the most popular handbooks of ritual magic from nearly 400 years ago, the Lesser Key of Solomon, contains this fantastic description of the brass vessel after listing all of the famous spirits in the first book of the Goetia:
Solomon sealed demons in a special container, whilst other people came along and disturbed the vessels, and the demons escaped. But to answer why brass was used, and why Solomon is associated with bottling up naughty spirits, we need to travel back 2,500 years and more, to the seas of the Mediterranean and ancient Israel and Judah. Indeed, the answer to ‘why brass?’ lies in three seemingly unrelated elements this video will explore: wind, water and leather. All three of these elements tie into the most legendary spirit-taming magician of all time: the figure of King Solomon.
II. Grumbling Leather: Biblical Necromancy & The Witch of Endor
Before magicians were invoking King Solomon’s authority and enclosing demons in brass vessels, the first material used to enclose spirits was likely leather bags. King Solomon was a Biblical King known for his unrivaled wisdom, building his fabolous Temple in Jerusalem, and the many legends surrounding him for spirit-taming and binding demons to do his will. But a few decades before Solomon took the throne 3,000 years ago, we find the first king of Israel, King Saul, naughtily breaking his own rules against raising spirits of the dead. Saul asked a necromancer, the Witch of Endor, to conjure the spirit of Samuel for information from beyond the grave before Saul fights a battle.
Indeed, it’s the Witch of Endor herself that gives us the biggest clue between spirit-raising and the container of the spirits. In her excellent tome The Long Life of Magical Objects: A Study in the Solomonic Tradition, Allegra Iafrate shares that
“The necromancer is described in the Hebrew text as “a woman with an ob,” and the word ob has posed several hermeneutical issues for later interpreters. Literally related to “hollow sound,” it can be variously translated. The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon lists four different meanings: “skin bottle” (Job 32:19), “necromancer” (Lev. 19:31, 20:6, 20:27; Deut. 18:1; 1 Sam. 28:3, 28:7–9; 2 Kgs. 23:24; Isa. 8:19, 19:3, 2 Chr. 33:6; 2 Kgs. 21:6), “ghost” (Isa. 29:4), and “necromancy” (1 Chr. 10:13). There seems to be a considerable semantic difference between the first meaning and the three later developments of the word, which are clearly interrelated. There is, however, a definite connection. The idea behind it is acoustic. The necromancer is someone capable of making spirits talk, and the voice they produce is a hollow sound, probably similar to that made by the wind when entering a leather skin. This explains why various biblical interpreters, in order to translate the periphrasis indicating the witch, have chosen “ventriloquist,” someone speaking from his belly, which in the Bible is equated to a wineskin (Job 32:19). When Isaiah speaks of necromancers the first time (Isa. 8:19), he insists on the muttering quality of their voice, and he reinforces the sonic dimension of their action in another passage, stating that it is similar to the voice of a ghost coming from the ground and whispering through the dust (Isa. 29:4). It is to be wondered whether such a strong link between the sound made by air in a leather bag (or blowing from the hollow cavities of the ground) and the voice of a spirit is intended only on a metaphorical level. It could in fact have originated in the ancient custom of imprisoning the wind in a sack.”
-Allegra Iafrate, The Long Life of Magical Objects, pg. 74
Leather bags have an association with spirit-taming, necromancy and the Bible. But wind-taming is also associated with being a powerful king in the ancient world, and we have a very famous example to show it.
III. Winds, Leather and Homer’s Odyssey
Our journey now takes us 2,700 years ago to the wispy, sapphire-flecked seas of the Mediterranean Sea in Homer’s Odyssey. The Odyssey details the adventures of the Greek hero Odysseus trying to get back to his home of Ithaca after the Greek victory in the Trojan War.
One of those journeys takes Odysseus to meet Aeolus, who was the king of the island of Aeolia, but might as well be styled ‘King of the Winds’. The island is surrounded by a wall of solid bronze (which will become important later). And Odysseus asks King Aeolus for help getting some wind in his sails to get back home:
Iafrate shares that spirit-taming methods (like we see in the Bible with raising shades of the dead) might have started out as wind-taming methods, and King Aeolus is an example of this:
Iafrate also cites scholarship analyzing Aeolus himself:
So the Odyssey shows us the connection between wind-taming, metalworking, and bronze walls with King Aeolus and the Bible shows us that leather bags are connected to raising spirits. But what about King Solomon himself? Well, in the first and second centuries of the common era, about 1,800 years ago, we have one of the first explicit mentions of King Solomon trapping demons in one of the earliest grimoires or books of magic, the Testament of Solomon.
IV. Demons of Water & Wind in the Testament of Solomon
The Testament of Solomon, as Joseph H. Peterson says on Esotericarchives.com is:
“…an Old Testament Pseudepigraphic catalog of demons summoned by King Solomon, and how they can be countered by invoking angels and other magical techniques. It is one of the oldest magical texts attributed to King Solomon, dating First to Third Century A.D.”
It is indeed one of the earliest grimoires and handbooks of demonology with lots of tried-and-true magical techniques used in ritual procedures. Author and magician David Rankine says in his vital compendium, the Grimoire Encyclopaedia that:
“The [Testament of Solomon] ToS tells the story of King Solomon’s construction of the Temple. One of his servants is being harassed by a vampire demon, and Solomon prays to God for help. God sends the archangel Michael who gives him a ring engraved with a pentagram, which gives him power over all demons. Solomon then summons the demon, and binds it, and forces it to call a number of other demons, each of who, he binds to help build the Temple and forces to name themselves and the way to deal with them.”
-David Rankine, the Grimoire Encyclopaedia, pg. 57
Also the erudite scholar Brian Johnson has a wonderful translation of a 15th century Byzantine manuscript entitled ‘The Testament of Solomon: Recension C’ if you’d like even more context to this rich area.
So, The Testament of Solomon details a magical ring, a register of spirits, the use of thwarting or binding angels and lots of other magical procedures we see in famous grimoires centuries later. But one huge, important and often overlooked connection here are the vessels or containers that Solomon bound the spirits into: here we have the leather bags seen in the Odyssey and the Biblical Witch of Endor returning in full force, employed under the magnanimous shadow of King Solomon himself. In addition to leather bags for wind-spirits, the Testament of Solomon also shares how the king used water-vessels to imprison water-demons! Let’s examine each in its turn:
Let's take a step back before getting to the Testament of Solomon itself and talk about water. When Solomon built his legendary temple, water was an inseparable element, soaking the entire purpose of this incredible structure. Iafrate relates:
"…according to Jewish tradition, the Temple of Jerusalem was founded on the tehom, the abyss that sealed the waters of primeval chaos and acted as a sort of sacred threshold over it. As such, it was the core of Sukkot celebrations as performed during the second Temple period. The Mishna indicated that during Sukkot the priests had to draw water with a golden pitcher for seven days and make a libation on the altar, probably as a rain and fertility ritual.”
-Allegra Iafrate, The Long Life of Magical Objects, pg. 76
The fact that Solomons Temple is effectively a giant version of the Brazen Vessel of the Goetia by constraining the abyss associated with spirits is a lovely avenue for future meditation.
Iafrate also shares that Jerusalem does indeed stand on hollowed-out ground and subterranean waters do indeed flow deep in the byzantine abysses below.
In the Testament of Solomon, the king himself binds a water demon who is harassing humans to a phiale or water vessel:
“And I glorified God. I commanded the spirit to be thrown into a phial along with ten jugs of sea-water of two measures each. And I sealed them round above the marbles and asphalt and pitch in the mouth of the vessel. And having sealed it with my ring, I ordered it to be deposited in the Temple of God. And I ordered another spirit to come before me.”
-Testament of Solomon, 69, EsotericArchives.com
So Solomon binds water demons to water vessels. What's incredible, Iafrate shares, is that we see this bottlish connection with King Solomon and the number seven in two near-contemporary sources of the Testament of Solomon.
The first comes from a second or third-century Gnostic text, the Testimony of Truth, found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, describing Solomon entrapping demons in “seven waterpots” and abandoned in the Temple of Jerusalem.
“Others have demons dwelling with them. . . . When [Solomon] had finished building, he imprisoned the demons in the temple. He placed them into seven waterpots. They remained a long time in the waterpots, abandoned there. When the Romans went up to Jerusalem, they discovered the waterpots, and immediately the demons ran out of the waterpots, as those who escape from prison.”
- Iafrate, pg. 171 (Pearson, “Gnostic Interpretation of the Old Testament,” 315).
By the way, people disturbing vessels and letting out demons. Doesn't that sound eerily similar to the Lemegton’s Goetia where the Babylonians dredged up vessels and let demons out?
The second key source comes from the 4th century Egyptian scholar Zosimos, who wrote among oldest known books of alchemy.
“The alchemist describes the making of seven special bottles—the same number as the planets—meant to act against demons, fashioned by Solomon from electrum and inscribed with a special formula. This tradition, as Zosimus specifies, came from Jerusalem, and the technical term used to describe them was originally Hebrew…all of this seems to imply a tradition of talismanic vessels used against demons, well established among the Jews or, perhaps more accurately, coming from Jerusalem.
-Allegra Iafrate, The Long Life of Magical Objects, pg. 48
Here again we see the connection between the abyss, Solomon, bottles and water. But what about the use of leather bags and spirit-or-wind taming we’ve seen with the Witch of Endor and the Odyssey? Well the Testament of Solomon says that:
“And after seven days, being reminded of the epistle of Adares, King of Arabia, I called my servant and said to him: "Order thy camel and take for thyself a leather flask, and take also this seal. And go away into Arabia to the place in which the evil spirit blows; and there take the flask, and the signet-ring in front of the mouth of the flask, and (hold them) towards the blast of the spirit. And when the flask is blown out, thou wilt understand that the demon is (in it). Then hastily tie up the mouth of the flask, and seal it securely with the seal-ring, and lay it carefully on the camel and bring it me hither. And if on the way it offer thee gold or silver or treasure in return for letting it go, see that thou be not persuaded. But arrange without using oath to release it. And then if it point out the places where are gold or silver, mark the places and seal them with this seal. And bring the demon to me. And now depart, and fare thee well."
--Testament of Solomon, 119, EsotericArchives.com
V. The Qurʾān, Solomon, Wind and Jinn
So, we've clearly established Solomon's use of leather and water vessels to imprison spirits. But the connection goes even deeper than that, because one other element is Solomon's control over the wind and his connection to brass and metal! Yes: wind control and metal, two of the themes we saw centuries before in the King Aeolus in the Odyssey, but expanded in Islam, and we need look no further than the Holy Qurʾān itself. In fact, in the following stunning passage in the Holy Qurʾān from chapter 34, Surah Saba’ (Arabic: سبأ, saba’), Iafrate relates how the ‘…jinn built for Solomon a fountain of liquid copper (“ʿayn al-qitr”), probably echoing the biblical reference to the “sea of molten brass”’. Here is the verse from the Holy Qurʾān, where Allah (SWT) Himself declares Solomon has mastery of the winds and jinn and an association of metal:
Also, in the 38th chapter of the Qurʾān, Surah Ṣād (Arabic: ص, Ṣād; "The Letter Sad"), we have Solomon being given mastery of the winds and the jinn, who are bound in chains in verses 36 to 39:
Both of those passages are recited by the wonderful Qari, Mishary bin Rashid Alafasy (Arabic: مشاري بن راشد العفاسي) from Kuwait, one of my favorite reciters of the Holy Qurʾān.
(By the way, if you’d like an excellent read on the power of wind-spirits in medieval Solomonic grimoires, check out the latest blog post by scholar and magician David Rankine, entitled ‘Return of the Winds’.)
VI. Ring, Seals and Metal: Let’s Get Down To Brass [Vessel] Tacks
Okay, but, Alex, this is all fine and dandy but what about the association between brass and Solomon and demons? I'm so glad you asked, fictional person who is compensating for my lack of clever transitions, because the answer lies not in the Holy Qurʾān explicitly itself, but in the scholarly commentaries on the Holy Qurʾān!
In Arabic, the word to describe commentaries on the Qurʾān is Tafsir (Arabic: تفسير), and Allegra Iafrate shares thee of these commentaries that detail the connection between the metal that Solomon's ring was made from and the metal that seals were made from which Solomon impressed his ring.
Now, please listeners, Iafrate has an entire chapter on Solomon's Ring and I am only giving the main points related to metals, but I would highly encourage you to pick up your own copy of her book in the links below. You will not regret it, she is an incredible scholar. Now, let's get on to Solomon and metal!
The first Quranic commentary comes from the 10th century, entitled the Baḥr al-ʿUlūm, بحر العلوم of Islamic scholar Abū al-Layth al-Samarqandī ( أبو الليث السمرقندي). In commenting on an episode in a reference to a passage in the Holy Qurʾān where Solomon delivers a letter to the queen of Sheba, the scholar Samarqandī:
The next Quranic commentary is from the 11th century by Sunni Muslim scholar Abū Isḥāḳ al-Thaʿlabī أبو اسحاق الثعلبي, with a similar but slightly different variation on the metal theme:
We’ve just heard from a 10th century commentary, an 11th century commentary and you guessed it, this same association between Solomon, spirit binding and metal is seen in a 12th century tafsir or Quranic commentary by Syrian Sunni scholar Ibn Asakir (Arabic: ابن عساكر)
Also here is a quick chart I put together on some of the different Arabic terms for metals used with Solomon's ring and the seals for his letters and vessels:
نحاس (Nuhās) = brass or copper (interchangeable)
قِطْر (Qitr) = copper or brass (interchangeable)
صفر (Sufr) = brass, copper, even gold
الحديد (Ḥadīd) = iron
VII. Thousand and One Nights ( أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ, Alf Laylah wa-Laylah)
Now this leads us to brass vessels and the fantastic, incredible collection of stories from the medieval Islamic world, known as Thousand and One Nights ( أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ, Alf Laylah wa-Laylah). These stories have Persian, Indian and Arabic roots, and have a long and fascinating history beyond the scope of this post. But, one of the many stories that brings together these themes of brass, Solomon, and jinn binding is found in the story, perfectly named, The City Of Brass. Iafrate shares:
“Nuhās, in turn, was also a metal associated with Solomon, as the pervasive overtones in ‘The City of Brass’ (Madīnat al-nuhās) demonstrate. The tale, collected in the Arabian Nights, concerns an expedition dedicated to recovering the vessels in which Solomon had sealed the jinn, defined in the text as “qamāqim min al-nuhās.” Are these qamāqim the last link of a translation chain that began with the magical electrum bottles described by Zosimus? Considering that the original, oral nucleus of the tale was particularly widespread in Maghreb and that Zosimus attests the presence of these bottles also in Egypt, such a hypothesis seems not unlikely.”
-Allegra Iafrate, The Long Life of Magical Objects, pg. 54
We will be traveling deep into The City of Brass itself in a bit, but we must pull the caravan over for a detour in the oasis of Arabic grammatical analysis. My dear listeners, I think I found a possible connection between the Arabic word for brass vessels, and the voices that spirits make when inside such containment devices! Iafrate's scholarship inspired me to do a deep dive into the word for vessels used in the City of Brass story, which are قَمَاقِم (qamāqim). And I think I found a possible connection on page 925 of Hans Wehr’s Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, where we find:
The word used for Solomon's brass vessels in the One Thousand and One Nights story ‘The City of Brass’ is indeed قَمَاقِم (qamāqim): bulgy, long-necked bottles. But, right above that entry, we find that the verb that shares the same root-letters for these vessels is قَمْقَمَ (qamqama): to grumble, to mutter, to complain.
To me, and this is only speculative, these grumbling, muttering vessels have such strong echoes to the grumbling leather flask used by the Biblical Witch of Endor, and the relationship between wind blowing in a flask with King Aeolus in the Odyssey, and, of course, this grumbling and muttering brass vessel might also reflect the muttering of an imprisoned spirit, all the way from the Testament of Solomon 1,800 years ago, to Solomonic magicians today, sealing spirits in Solomon's fabulous brass vessel in the Lemegeton's Goetia.
Wind! Water! Leather! Brass! Copper! Solomon! Demons! Binding! I hope all of these themes come together and entwine for you as they are for me, or as my favorite American poet Wallace Stevens says: ‘The circles quicken, and crystal colors come and flare.’ But, my wonderful and patient listeners, what about that City of Brass you heard at the beginning of this journey? What happened to the Caliph's party of adventurers trying to recover Solomon's fabled brass vessels containing imprisoned jinn within? Well get ready, hop aboard the Glitch Bottle caravan, grab a drink, as we go deep, right into the heart of the City of Brass itself.
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Now THIS is my kind of substack article. Amazing production, Alex! I'm only part-way through but am loving it so far.