What Solomon
Knew
Before the disciplines fractured,
one man held the whole map.
The syllabus
“He gave me unerring knowledge of what exists: to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements; the beginning and end and middle of times; the alternations of the solstices and the changes of the seasons; the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars; the natures of animals and the tempers of wild beasts; the powers of spirits and the reasonings of men; the varieties of plants and the virtues of roots. I learned both what is secret and what is manifest.”
Wisdom of Solomon 7:17–21 · Written ~1st century BCE · Greek composition, Alexandrian Jewish authorship
That is not a prayer. That is a curriculum.
Nine domains of knowledge, laid out in a specific order. Not random. Descending — from the largest scale to the smallest, from the cosmos to the root. One system. The modern reader sees nine separate disciplines. The ancient reader saw one.
Root to star
Cosmology → Chronology → Astronomy → Zoology → The invisible layer → Psychology → Botany → Pharmacology.
The stars govern the seasons. The seasons govern the plants. The plants govern health. The invisible forces have names. Knowing the name gives you the remedy. One map.
Why it was one
Cosmology and pharmacology are connected because the elements that constitute the world also constitute the body. The stars that govern the seasons also govern the timing of planting, which determines which plants are available, which determines which medicines can be made.
The spirits that cause disease are thwarted by angels whose names encode the remedy. The animals whose natures Solomon knew also provided the materials — liver of fish, gall of catfish — that the Testament prescribes as cures.
This is not mysticism. It is systems thinking before the term existed.
Every traditional knowledge system on earth — Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Amazigh herbal medicine, Gnawa trance healing — operates on this same assumption: the body and the cosmos are mirrors of each other. What happens in the sky affects what grows in the ground, which affects what happens in the body, which affects what happens in the mind. One system.
Demons as diagnoses
The Testament of Solomon (1st–3rd century CE) reads like a diagnostic manual encoded in mythological language. Each demon is a condition. Each angel is a remedy. Solomon asks every demon the same three questions:
What is your name?
What do you do?
What thwarts you?
Name. Symptoms. Cure. The structure of every diagnostic encounter in the history of medicine.
Knowledge is not power over demons. Knowledge is the demon, transformed into a builder.
In the Testament, the demons build the Temple. Understanding the forces of illness and disorder allows you to construct something sacred from them.
What Josephus witnessed
In 93 CE, about 900 years after Solomon supposedly lived, the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus describes a working Solomonic practice in his Antiquities of the Jews (8.42–49):
A Jewish exorcist named Eleazar performs before the Roman Emperor Vespasian and his court. He places a ring containing a Solomonic root under the nose of a possessed man. He recites incantations attributed to Solomon. The demon exits through the man's nostrils. To prove the demon has truly departed, Eleazar commands it to overturn a basin of water as it leaves. The basin overturns.
What is happening here, stripped of the supernatural frame?
A practitioner is using a volatile botanical substance (administered nasally), combined with verbal technique (incantation as guided suggestion), in a structured ritual (the ring, the basin, the audience), to treat what we might now call a psychiatric episode. The "proof" — the overturned basin — functions as a psychological anchor for both patient and audience, confirming that the treatment worked.
The root is real. The ring is real. The technique has a structure. The practitioner belongs to a lineage that traces its methods to Solomon. Whether you call it exorcism or early psychiatry depends entirely on your framework. The practice existed. Josephus saw it.
How one map became many pieces
What was lost
The question is not whether Solomon existed, or whether he personally possessed all this knowledge, or whether the Testament is historically accurate. The question is what the tradition describes.
It describes a unified knowledge system where the structure of the cosmos and the structure of the body are reflections of each other. Where the stars govern the seasons, which govern the plants, which govern health. Where invisible forces have names, natures, and remedies. Where knowing the name of the force gives you authority over it. Where every disease is a demon — meaning, a diagnosable condition with specific symptoms and a specific counter-agent.
This system existed, in various forms, across every ancient civilisation. The Egyptians had it. The Babylonians had it. The Greeks fragmented it into separate disciplines and called the fragments philosophy, medicine, astronomy, and natural history. The Islamic Golden Age partially reunified it. Then the Enlightenment fragmented it again, permanently.
Solomon — real or mythologised — stands at the junction point. The last figure in the Western tradition credited with holding the entire map. After him, the map gets cut into pieces and distributed to specialists who can read their own piece but cannot see the whole.
The nine domains of the Wisdom of Solomon are not a relic. They are a reminder of what a complete knowledge system looks like — before the disciplines forgot they were one.
Jerusalem at the crossroads of three continents
Wisdom of Solomon 7:17–21. Deuterocanonical/Apocrypha, ~1st century BCE. Alexandrian Jewish composition.
1 Kings 3–4. Hebrew Bible. Solomon's judgment, botanical and zoological knowledge.
Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 8.42–49 (93 CE). Solomon's incantations, herbal, Eleazar's exorcism before Vespasian.
Testament of Solomon (1st–3rd century CE). Pseudepigraphic demon catalogue. Conybeare translation (1898).
Book of Tobit 6:2–8, 8:2–3. Fish liver and gall as remedy against Asmodeus.
Lecouteux, Claude (2022). King Solomon the Magus: Master of the Djinns. Inner Traditions.
Talmud, Tractate Gittin 68a–b. Solomon, Asmodeus, and the ring.
Quran 27:15–44, 34:12–14. Sulayman's knowledge of animal language, wind, metals.
Continue Reading
The Queen Who Did Not Kneel
Bilqis visits Solomon. The geopolitics behind the riddles.
The Son Who Took the Fire
Menelik I carries the Ark south. The dynasty begins.
The Coffee Covenant
Ethiopia's Kaffa forests — where the plant the world runs on was born.
The Spice Routes
The trade networks Solomon's kingdom sat at the centre of.
Trans-Saharan Trade Routes
Gold, salt, and knowledge across the desert.
© Dancing with Lions