The Book of Abramelin

The Book of Abramelin recounts how the magician Abraham of Worms learned a system of magic from a master named Abramelin the Egyptian, and it centres on a long retreat, of purification, prayer and withdrawal, undertaken to attain "the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel," after which the operator commands a hierarchy of spirits by means of word-square talismans.

The frame is Jewish and the setting fifteenth-century, but the earliest actual manuscripts are German, from the seventeenth century, and the work is generally dated to the fifteenth or sixteenth; the ascription to a real Abraham of Worms is at best uncertain. The English text that made it famous is the 1900 translation of S. L. MacGregor Mathers, but Mathers worked from a single, defective French manuscript: it omits an entire book of practical spells, sets the retreat at six months where the older German manuscripts give eighteen, and garbles many of the magic squares.

The later critical edition of Georg Dehn (with Steven Guth), drawing on all the surviving German manuscripts, corrects these and is the more reliable text. The book's most influential idea, the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel as the central aim of the magical path, was taken up by Aleister Crowley, for whom it became the defining operation of his system, and it is largely through Crowley that the Abramelin working is known in modern occultism.

The Book of Abramelin describes one operation and nothing else. The magician withdraws into seclusion and undertakes a programme of prayer, purity and increasing intensity, at the end of which he attains what the text calls the knowledge and conversation of his holy guardian angel. Only after that does he command the spirits, and the entire second half of the book, the part most often reproduced, is unusable before it.

That second half consists of word squares: grids of letters, each square assigned to a purpose, many of them containing genuine words and many apparently corrupt. Their transmission is poor and the versions disagree, which for a system that depends on exact letters is a serious problem.

The length of the retreat differs between the surviving manuscripts. The German versions give eighteen months; the French manuscript that Mathers translated gives six. That is not a small variation, and it means an English reader working from Mathers has been following a different regime from a German reader for over a century.

The operation is the direct ancestor of the Golden Dawn and Thelemic treatment of the Holy Guardian Angel, which is why an obscure fifteenth century text has modern currency.