The Book of Abramelin

The Book of Abramelin presents itself as a letter of instruction from a Jewish sage, Abraham, to his younger son Lamech, recounting his travels in search of true magic and the teaching he received from the hermit Abramelin in Egypt. Its core is a demanding devotional operation, lasting six months in the oldest versions and eighteen in the French text, of prayer, purification and withdrawal, culminating in the vision of one’s ‘Holy Guardian Angel’. Only after this contact may the magician summon and bind the princes of hell and their subordinate spirits, who are then compelled to perform services through hundreds of letter squares given in the third book. S. L. MacGregor Mathers published an English translation in 1898 from a French manuscript in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris, believing it derived from a Hebrew original. The work became enormously influential in the Golden Dawn and especially for Aleister Crowley, for whom ‘knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel’ became a central goal. Later research has shown that the earliest witnesses are German manuscripts and a German printing of 1725, and Georg Dehn’s edition of 2001 revealed that the French text Mathers used was abridged and garbled, with many squares missing or corrupted. Dehn proposed identifying the author with the rabbi Jacob Molin of Mainz, but this is disputed; recent German scholarship dates the text to around 1600 on linguistic grounds, which would make it a Christian or crypto-Jewish compilation rather than a fifteenth-century Jewish work.

What it contains

• Book I: Abraham’s autobiography and travels, with advice to his son
• Book II: the general method, the oratory and the six- or eighteen-month preparation
• Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel
• Convocation and binding of the princes of evil spirits
• Book III: magic squares of letters for specific operations
• Lists of spirit names under the eight sub-princes