Hokay, so. I tracked down some nuts and bolts on this Solomon Ring situation, with a little help from the Google. Still really wishing I could just call Artie and put him on it, but the regular Internets will have to do. [If she'd found any hint of a database like the Warehouse's, she would have hacked the shit out of it, but alas.]

Name, as suspected, comes from the Biblical king, who supposedly had the first of these things. This isn't the second or even the third, but the last one set up was a good several centuries back. This one's got backing from the royal family and some dude called the Manticore, and with the spirit situation that's probably not a cute nickname; they've been working on getting it set up for a few decades now.

As far as why goes, and why now, that's trickier to place. There's a laundry list of dust-ups and incidents cited as reasons to get some intelligence-gathering going in the Spirit World, but I'm not sure if one in particular set off interest or sped the project up or what. I'm gonna keep digging as best I can.

And then there's what it does, which is establish a permanent gateway to the Spirit World - or as 'permanent' as it is allowed to stay upright, considering the older ones are all long gone. One entity gets through it at a time, but you don't need much power at all to open it, so it'd make it possible for just about anyone to go back and forth between planes.

Anyone else find out anything worth knowing, about this or other stuff?