E. E. Rehmus | |
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Born | June 1929 Upper Michigan, United States |
Died | March 2004 (aged 74) San Francisco, California, United States |
Occupation | Writer, illustrator, occultist |
Language | English |
Nationality | American |
Subjects | Occult, Language, Mythology, Religion |
Notable work(s) | The Magician's Dictionary |
Partner(s) | Joseph Haskew |
E. E. Rehmus, also alternatively given as Ed Rehmus, Edward Rehmus or Edward E. Rehmus (June 1929 – March 2004),[1] was an American occultist, linguist, Egyptologist, classicist, writer, editor, translator, illustrator, cartoonist, and occasional graphic artist primarily known for being the author of The Magician's Dictionary.
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Joseph Haskew, his long-term partner, wrote of Rehmus's early life and youth:
Edward, an only child, was born midsummer's eve 1929 in Upper Michigan, of German ancestry. His father was a musician, a pianist, who played in the "Big Bands" and his mother was a housewife. They were "modern" for their time, spending time in restaurants and night clubs, and, aside from the usual love and nurturing, were unexceptional parents, so the child was left to his own devices, resulting in a lively imagination. Later, when they moved to Detroit, they lived in a mainly Jewish neighborhood, and Ed attributed to this experience a lifelong love of learning and solid study habits.
The family moved to southern California, in the late 1940's, where he found the ambience suffocating and so resolved to get away whenever the opportunity arose. When his mother died, he went to Tulane for a brief spell, then into the U.S. Army (for an even briefer spell), then to San Francisco. He went to the University of California at Berkeley off and on for many years, but always became bored and so never pursued a degree.[1]
Haskew further adds:
His life in San Francisco was in the company of the Bohemian intelligentsia of writers, artists, poets, philosophers, and metaphysicians, and in those days San Francisco was a hotbed of post-war intellectual ferment. Over the years he studied extensively in comparative religions, comparative languages, psychology, and Eastern philosophy, among other disciplines. Always he kept up his writing, his correspondence, his teaching, and his translations. Occasionally he would find a book that he felt had particular merit, that had no English language version in print and he would translate it, for free because he felt it needed a wider audience. This might take six months, or a couple of years, but no matter – "It’s important."[1]
As a polymath and philomath, Rehmus was actively involved with the quest to understand and expand human intelligence, himself being a member of several high-IQ support groups. Among these affiliations was his involvement with the San Francisco area Mensa society; he often contributed to that local society's publication, The Ecphorizer. Rehmus was also a member of the Prometheus Society, a high-IQ society with admission standards 600 times more stringent than Mensa's. His contributor notice from The Ecphorizer runs thus:
Ed Rehmus was well-known within San Francisco Regional Mensa in the 70s through the 80s as the "weird" cover artist of the newsletter Intelligencer. He later created an irregular comic strip called "The Clonies." Ed also wrote the occasional story for the Intelligencer.[2]
His public reputation rests mainly on his contribution to the study of the occult through his renowned book The Magician's Dictionary, a vast pseudo-encyclopaedic work first published in 1990 that proposes a re-evaluation of some of the core building blocks of modern belief structures through definition and commentary on key words and phrases, from "Aaron" to "Zuvuya".
Apart from founding and editing various magazines and journals (sometimes under pseudonyms), Rehmus was a regular contributor to numerous and diverse scholarly and amateur publications, providing articles, texts, artworks, and even erudite crossword puzzles.[3] While he remained an obscure figure to the public eye during his lifetime, the posthumous volume The Magic of Ed Rehmus, compiled and edited by Fred Vaughan and published in 2006, sheds light on his personal life and many other previously inaccessible aspects of his thought, wide interests, and activities.