The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage is a famous grimoire which tells the story of an Egyptian mage named Abramelin or Abra-Melin who teaches a system of magic to Abraham of Worms, a German Jew presumed to have lived from c.1362 - c.1458. The magic described in the book was to find new life in the 19th and 20th centuries thanks to the English translation of Samuel Mathers and its import within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and later within the mystical system of Thelema, established in 1904 by Aleister Crowley.
Contents |
[edit] The provenance of the manuscript
The grimoire is framed as a sort of epistolary novel or autobiography in which Abraham of Worms describes his journey from Germany to Egypt and reveals Abramelin's magical and Kabbalistic secrets to his son Lamech. Internally the text dates itself to the year 1458.
The book exists in the form of five manuscripts. The provenance of the text has not been definitively identified. A manuscript copy exists in French in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal in Paris, an institution founded in 1797. A partial copy in Aramaic or Hebrew is found in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Manuscript versions written in German are found in Dresden and Wolfenbüttel The first printed version, in German, dates to 1725 and was printed in Cologne.
All German manuscript copies of the text consist of four books: an autobiographical account of the travels of Abraham of Worms to Egypt, a book of assorted materials from the corpus of the practical Kabbalah (including some which is duplicated in the GermanJewish grimoire called "The Sixth and 7th Books of Moses"). and the two books of magic given by Abramelin to Abraham. The well-known English translation by S.L. MacGregor Mathers from the French Manuscript in Paris contains only three of the four books. The Aramaic version in Oxford is limited to Book One, without reference to the further books.
The German copies seem to date to the time period in which they internally claim to have been written, namely the 15th century, and of these, the Dresden manuscript is taken by scholars to be the authoritative text. An analysis of the spelling and language usage in the French manuscript indicates that this copy likely dates to the 18th century. Further, it gives few indications of having been copied from an Hebrew original, for although the author quotes from the Jewish Book of Psalms, the version given is not from the Hebrew; rather, it is from the Latin Vulgate, a translation of the Bible employed by Roman Catholics at that time.
[edit] The Abramelin operation
The text describes an elaborate ritual whose purpose is to obtain the "knowledge and conversation" of the magician's "Holy Guardian Angel." The preparations are elaborate, difficult, and long. In the Mathers translation, the initial phase of working the system lasts exactly six months before any divine contact is known. All of the German texts describe a duration for the operation of eighteen months.
During the period of the work, the magician must daily pray before sunrise and again at sunset. During this preparatory phase, there are many restrictions: chastity must be observed, alcoholic beverages refused, and the magician must conduct his business with scrupulous fairness.
After the preparatory phase has been successfully completed, the magician's guardian angel will appear to reveal to the magician magical secrets. The chief goals of these are to compel the magician's personal demon (presumably the inverse counterpart of the guardian angel) to serve the magician. The magical goals for which the demon can be employed are typical of those found in grimoires: the practitioner is promised the ability to find buried treasure, cast love charms, the ability of magical flight, and the secret of invisibility. Because the work involves evocation of a demon, the Abramelin operation has been compared to Goetic magic, especially by European scholars.
Magic squares feature prominently in the instructions for carrying out these operations, as does a recipe for an anointing oil, popularly used by ceremonial magicians under the name "Abramelin Oil".
[edit] Abramelin and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
In 1897, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage was translated into English by the British occultist Samuel L. MacGregor Mathers. The magic described in the grimoire was influential in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which Mathers was the head, a fact which has burnished the reputation of this particular text beyond its fellows such as the Key of Solomon.
The British occultist Aleister Crowley, at the time a young member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, started preparations for seeking the angel by following Abramelin's instructions, but he abandoned this plan to assist Mathers during the Golden Dawn schism of 1901.
[edit] Abramelin and Thelema
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage was to have a profound effect upon Crowley, the eventual founder of Thelema. As he developed the mystical system of Thelema, the Knowledge and Conversation of the HGA was to become the fundamental task of every adept. This was attached with the central concept of Thelema, True Will, which can be described as one's sacred destiny or path in life, which cannot be fully known in consciousness until the HGA is contacted. Although Crowley was to go on to create his own ritual for attaining this, while also saying that an adept could more or less achieve this mystical state in any number of ways, the fundamental concepts remained consistent with Abramelin.
In 1906, Crowley decided to alter the Abramelin operation so that he might perform it during a trip he and his wife Rose Kelly and their infant daughter were taking through China. He reported first a vision of a shining figure who admitted him to the Order of the Silver Star, and later a more drastic mystical experience that he considered to be the Knowledge and Conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel. However, he showed ambivalence about the role that his use of hashish had played in this experience, so in October 1908, he again performed the operation in Paris without the use of drugs. (See John St. John, in external links.)
In later years, Crowley claimed to have successfully completed the Abramelin operation, but the outcome of his experiment was not the advertised powers of treasure-finding, invisibility, flight, and love-drawing. Rather, he attributed to the Abramelin operation the revelation of The Book of the Law and the proclamation of the "Aeon of Horus", which he received while he was sojourning in Egypt in 1904.
[edit] Abramelin and contemporary eclectic occultism
Since the time of Mathers' translation, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage has remained popular among English-speaking ceremonial magicians and occultists interested in Christian pseudo-Kabbalah and grimoires. A paperback reprint during the renewed rise of interest in hermeticism during the 1970s placed the book before a new generation of readers, and one offshoot of this was that a number of people, both within and without the Thelemic and Golden Dawn communities, claimed to have either undertaken the Abramelin operation in toto or to have successfully experimented with the magic squares and Abramelin oil formula found in the text. Mathers' translation having fallen into the public domain, the text of this grimoire is now available both as a printed book and as an online electronic file.
There are several important differences between the original manuscripts and Mathers' edition. First, one of the four books was missing entirely from the French manuscript with which he worked. Second, Mathers gave the duration of the operation as six months, whereas all other sources specify eighteen months. Third, possibly due to a mistranslation, Mathers changed one of the ingredients within the recipe for Abramelin oil, specifying galangal instead of the original herb calamus. This substitution has led to several notable changes between the two recipes, including edibility, fragrance, dermal sensation, and spiritual symbolism.
A new German translation, credited to Abraham of Worms and edited by Georg Dehn, was published in 2001 by Editions Araki. In the Dehn version, the fourth book is included and Mathers' galangal substitution is reverted back to calamus. An English edition of the Dehn translation is forthcoming in 2006 from the American publisher Nicholas Hays.
[edit] The word square
According to Dmitri Borgmann's book Language on Vacation: an Olio of Orthographical Oddities, a 12x12 word square can be made from the names of angels, incubi, demons, and kindred souls found in the English version of the book:
| I S I C H A D A M I O N |
| S E R R A R E P I N T O |
| I R A A S I M E L E I S |
| C R A T I B A R I N S I |
| H A S I N A S U O T I R |
| A R I B A T I N T I R A |
| D E M A S I C O A N O C |
| A P E R U N O I B E M I |
| M I L I O T A B U L E L |
| I N E N T I N E L E L A |
| O T I S I R O M E L I R |
| N O S I R A C I L A R I |
Since the incidental occurrence of this is practically zero, Borgmann is convinced this is a hoax, and suggested someone named "Ira" created it, as the name appears 7 times in the square.
[edit] References
- The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage translated by S.L. MacGregor Mathers (1897; reprinted by Dover Publications, 1975) ISBN 0-85030-255-2
- Die heilige Magie des Abramelin von Abraham, edited by Johann Richard Beecken (Schikowski,1957) ISBN 3-87702-017-8
- Das Buch der wahren Praktik in der goettlichen Magie edited by Jeorg von Inns (Diederichs Gelbe Reihe, 1988)
- Abramelin & Co. by Peter-R. Koenig (Hiram-Edition, 1995) ISBN 3-927890-24-3
- Buch Abramelin das ist Die egyptischen großen Offenbarungen. Oder des Abraham von Worms Buch der wahren Praktik in der uralten göttlichen Magie (Editions Araki, 2001) ISBN 3-936149-00-3
- Book of Abramelin: A New Translation by Abraham von Worms, edited by Georg Dehn (Nicholas Hays, September 2006) ISBN 0-89254-127-X
