Stephen Skinner

Stephen Skinner is known first for popular books. He wrote on feng shui from the 1970s, at a point when almost nothing on the subject was available in English, and his early collaboration with Francis King produced a practical handbook of ritual magic that shaped how a generation used Golden Dawn material outside any order. He also worked on geomancy, the divinatory system in which sixteen figures are generated from marks made at random and read through a chart, tracing it as a historical practice with an Arabic origin in the science of the sand and a documented route into medieval and Renaissance Europe, rather than presenting it as timeless.

That historical instinct is what separates the work from most of the shelf it sits on. A popular book on a divinatory system usually presents the system as received and complete, with no account of when its parts were assembled or by whom, and a reader has no way to tell a fifteenth century element from a twentieth century one. Treating the technique as something that has a history, with sources that can be named and dated, is a different undertaking, and it is the reason the atlas can cite this material at all.

The popular books carry the usual caution that applies to any introduction written for a general market. They simplify, they present a working version of a system rather than a survey of its variants, and in the case of feng shui they entered an English speaking market that had no way to judge them against the Chinese literature. The atlas cites the popular titles for what they demonstrably did, which is to introduce a subject, and cites the editions and the historical work for claims about what the sources say.

The larger contribution is editorial. Over many years, working with collaborators, he has produced editions of primary magical manuscripts, above all the working papers of John Dee and a range of grimoire material that had circulated for centuries in copies. The importance of that is easy to state. For most of the modern period, the Western magical tradition was known to its own practitioners through quotation, paraphrase and revised versions, produced by orders and authors who had an interest in what the material was taken to say, and the manuscripts they were working from were in private hands or in library collections that few people could reach.

Printing the manuscripts changes the standard of argument. A claim about what a text contains becomes checkable, a nineteenth century revision can be compared with the seventeenth century source it was made from, and the accumulated corrections and inventions become visible as such. The principle generalises well beyond this subject and the atlas follows it: an edition is worth more than a synthesis, because a synthesis asks to be believed and an edition can be tested. Where a reader of this atlas meets a magical text, the question to ask first is which edition, from which manuscript, and edited by whom.