so, I've been looking through your tags and I was wondering if you know anything about Baal Kadmon? He's an author who wrote a big ol book on solomon's seals and a ritual to go with each of them to cleanse/charge/use them. when I read the post your reblogged on the seals, I'm still left relatively uncertain as to whether or not I am allowed to use the seals/if they will work for me (i'm not jewish)/if they work at all.
looks like we need to make an FAQ, because this keeps getting asked & answered in many ways!
i can’t speak to whether or not “Baal Kadmon” is Jewish in addition to clearly being a western occultist. i would bet money that he’s not, and has - like some historical western occultists, adopted a fake Jewish-sounding name (Baal Kadmon is nobody’s birth name, anyway) - though i could be wrong! but literally every single thing to do with “Solomonic” magic/seals is not Jewish.
whether or not they will “work” for you is very subjective - from a historical perspective, they are entirely made up by Christian occultists based on antisemitic tropes mixed with some mangled appropriation of actual Jewish mysticism. so if you’re looking for some kind of authentic cultural tradition dating any earlier than the middle ages (a time absolutely rife with oppression & violence towards Jews), this ain’t it.
some people don’t seem to care about that, and appear to treat the “demons” and rituals in those books as spiritually useful in some way regardless of their origins, but i can’t say i really understand that line of thought & i certainly don’t have much respect for it as a Jew. those same people often seem to think that because ceremonial magic is not authentically Jewish, that means it’s not really appropriation, which is also fairly confusing to me because it literally wouldn’t exist without antisemitism.
but it’s obviously entirely up to you what you choose to do with this information now that you have it!
- Ezra