The Second Pentacle of Saturn
This Pentacle is of great value against adversities; and of especial use in repressing the pride of the Spirits.
The Key of Solomon is the best known of the Renaissance grimoires, surviving in dozens of manuscripts in Latin, French, Italian and Hebrew. Mathers made his 1889 edition from seven manuscripts in the British Museum, and it is his plates that every later reproduction of these pentacles descends from.
The Key of Solomon the King (Clavicula Salomonis), translated and edited by S. Liddell MacGregor Mathers (London: George Redway, 1889). The text and the pentacles are in the public domain.
The pentacle is traced from the plate in the De Laurence edition of 1914 (Chicago: De Laurence, Scott & Co.), which reprints Mathers' plates at a larger size, and checked line for line against the 1889 printing.
Mathers' note: This is the celebrated SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS, the most perfect existing form of double acrostic, as far as the arrangement of the letters is concerned; it is repeatedly mentioned in the records of medizeval Magic; and, save to very few, its derivation from the present Pentacle has been unknown. It will be seen at a glance that it is a square of five, giving twenty-five letters, which, added to the unity, gives twenty-six, the numerical value of IHVH. The Hebrew versicle surrounding it is taken from Psalm lxxii. 8, “His dominion shall be also from the one sea to the other, and from the flood unto the world’s end.” This passage consists also of exactly twenty- five letters, and its total numerical value (considering the final letters with increased numbers), added to that of the Name Elohim, is exactly equal to the total numerical value of the twenty-five letters in the Square.