and adverts for weird stuff like dowsing pendulums and aura goggles. When I was about eleven I read its review of Watkins’ reprint of The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. The reviewer suggested that, amongst all the available rubbish and nonsense, this book was the “real thing”. So I got my brother to order a copy from the Gloucestershire Public Library and I took it to my prep school in Bristol to study. I was only twelve years old, and the book specified that one had to be older than twenty-five to perform the operation—so I decided I would do it “when I grew up”.
Unfortunately growing up does not always lead to the sort of omnipotence that a child imagines that adults possess, so many years passed. I had also come across many other magical and spiritual systems, including extensive study of the works of Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare. I had even in the mid 1970s self-published my own book about magic—SSOTBME an essay on Magic—and sold a few copies in “alternative” bookshops. Some people wrote to me as a result.
In 1976 I was renting and sharing a small cottage with a large garden on the edge of the village green in Redbourn, Hertfordshire, when I received a letter from a woman who wanted to meet me as she had an intriguing matter to discuss. This woman lived nearby in Luton, Bedfordshire, so I arranged to visit her. She had a plan to perform the Abramelin operation and she wanted me to be her guide and advisor—on the strength of my reputation as someone who knew about magic. I confessed that I could not help her. I did not feel qualified because I had not performed the operation myself.
At the time I was unhappily working as a stressman for an ailing British aircraft industry and was pretty unhappy in my career. I wanted to do something better and it occurred to me that, if I did find a better job, I would hardly want to put it aside and spend six months invoking my Holy Guardian Angel. So this might be my last chance to chuck it all in and perform the operation myself.
I re-read the book in detail, we also shared a copy of Chevalier's book, and I gave in my notice. She would perform the operation in her town house in Luton and I would build an oratory in the shrubbery in Redbourn and we would keep in touch and compare notes as we performed the six-month ceremony in parallel.
So that is how I first learned about the magic of Abramelin, and why I decided many years later to perform the operation myself.
CHAPTER THREE
What we should consider before undertaking this operation
Why does anyone consider performing this operation? The main attraction must be its reputation—both as a source of illumination but also, paradoxically, for the challenge presented by its real or imagined dangers.
Once the candidate has been drawn to it in some way, the second attraction is its relative realism. This grimoire does not make unreasonable demands for blood sacrifices, nor for grim paraphernalia (like the tongue of a hanged man or a stone from the skull of a toad), nor for extreme circumstances such as isolation in a mountain hideout. Instead it appears to accommodate itself to quite realistic urban as well as rural living conditions. These conditions accommodate a measure of religious freedom; one can live with a marriage partner; it even allows for the assistance of servants, and so on. In fact, it is tempting to skim through the book and decide that this operation will be an absolute doddle for anyone with six (or eighteen) months to spare.
Yes, it is relatively reasonable. It might even be undertaken by a complete sceptic who does not believe in religion or the spirit but can simply see the psychological value of acting “as if” and being subject to the discipline of a lengthy spiritual retreat.
However, my experience suggests to me that this operation is an example of “the devil being in the details”: that the reputation for the difficulty in completing the operation could be due to people underestimating the real challenge of adapting a fifteenth-century practice to everyday life in the twentieth or twenty-first century.
In this chapter I draw attention to certain problems and decisions that the aspirant should consider carefully before deciding to perform the operation. These are based purely on my own experience, so take them merely as indicators, and then re-read the second book of Abramelin carefully to see how all the conditions might work out in your own reality.
The vow
I had a surprise when, over thirty years later, I started to edit my Abramelin diary. On Wednesday 13 April 1977 at 9.30am I signed the following vow:
I vow that, subject to conditions mentioned below, I will endeavour to keep to the Abramelin operation for six months starting on Easter Monday. As stated in the book, severe illness will be recognised as a God-sent hindrance. However, in the case of great danger to my immediate family, who have been such a support, I would also consider suspending the operation. Also, if I am the victim of bureaucratic intervention, and can find no way of delaying or buying time, then I will be forced to step down. In all such cases, or in any unforeseen mishap, I will consider very carefully and calmly and make my decision in the light of advice from the I Ching.
I cannot see how I can obtain and use a child as instructed in the text, so I plan to do without—unless a suitable child conveniently makes himself known to me in time for training for the part.
Signed,
Lionel Snell
Something that I remembered clearly was not written in that vow: that was my assumption that, should overwhelming difficulties make it impossible to continue, I would understand this to be a message from my Holy Guardian Angel that I should not continue with the operation. Either I had remembered wrongly, or else there was a fuller version of the vow that I had left in my altar, or somewhere.
My point is that, in view of the overall reasonableness of the Abramelin operation, it might be tempting to simply vow to complete it, without thinking about possible changes in circumstance—yet the book insists that it is necessary to complete the operation where one began it.
First, consider someone performing this operation as Abraham the Jew did, in a remote desert location. What is the worst that might happen? One might fall ill—in which case this is treated as a “God-given” hindrance to completion (in fact the book gives instruction that one can continue to perform the daily orations while staying in bed and praying for recovery). Or the oratory and personal goods might be ransacked by robbers—in which case it might still be possible to struggle on with makeshift materials and still complete the operation in the same place where one had started, as insisted upon.
In today's western societies, however, it is far more difficult to operate incognito. However unlikely, it is too easy to find oneself in a Kafkaesque situation being dragged off by police and wrongly accused by suspicious neighbours of some heinous crime. Even if one were able to continue orating in a police cell, it would not be possible to “complete where you started”. With modern communications, I could also imagine a situation where a close family member suffers an accident or emergency, and it would be impossible simply to say: “Sorry, I'm busy.”
And how could anyone possibly recruit help from a young child for the final stages without risk of upsetting parents, being singled out as a paedophile, or falling victim to a tabloid campaign about evil Satanists corrupting innocent children?
That is why I added those clauses to my vow, as well as saying: “I will consider very carefully and calmly and make my decision in the light of advice from the I Ching.”
What was missing from my remembered version was an additional comment that I would take such insurmountable difficulties as a message from my Angel. If, as the book admits, severe illness could be interpreted as a message from God, then in our times
