Farewell for Now

I’m taking off for a couple days on a work-related assignment. What can I say? People have displayed pedagogical principles in many ways, but I doubt anyone has done so by walking across a frozen lake and ordering their henchman to fire Han Solo’s blaster.

Yes, my life is different.

I thought I’d get more Abramelin done (the last post of that is here), but I’m getting to the point where I have to do some serious reading. Crowley, Bloom/Chevalier, Gray, Newcomb – all books that await my attention. We’ll get to those covers as well.

Take care.

Cover Up

I meant to get to Abramelin tonight – really, I did – but instead I’ve been given fourteen hours to put together the Ultimate Bad Cover iPod mix.  I have to say that I’m finding iTunes’ selection disappointing.  There’s so much great bad cover music out there that has been unfairly ignored.

What of Eddie Vedder’s soulful “Roadhouse,” halfway through which he forgets the lyrics?  What of Henry Rollins belting out “Four Sticks,” I ask you?  What of Elton John and Axl Rose’s touching rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody”?  Have all traces of “Ice Ice Baby 2001″ been erased from the public consciousness?  (Yes, the rules state this counts as a cover.)   Have all the dance remixes of EVITA seem to have been consigned to some subterrene Gehenna?

Still, I believe I have uncovered enough to make a respectable showing, and business as usual shall return tomorrow.

Dead Names Review

The beautiful but deadly FTL has pointed me to the first major public review of Dead Names in Publisher’s Weekly.  Thanks to Amazon, you can see it online here.

I will render no judgment one way or the other on it, as that would be crass and beneath a gentleman’s notice.  All I can do is to provide you with FTL’s opinion on the topic:

…when PW hates you, you truly suck.

The Japanese Encyclopedia Cthulhiana Is Out!

And here it is:

I don’t have a copy yet, but I hope to soon.

As for that pesky English edition – I’m working on getting it published again.

The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin, Part 19: Well Oiled?

Welcome to the latest post in our Abramelin series. Last time, we were dealing with huge spiders. This time, we’ll look at a minor passage in Mathers’ translation that has had broad repercussions across most of modern magic:

You shall prepare the sacred oil in this manner: Take of myrrh in tears, one part; of fine cinnamon, two parts; of galangal half a part; and the half of the total weight of these drugs of the best oil olive. The which aromatics you shall mix together according unto the art of the apothecary, and shall make thereof a balsam, the which you shall keep in a glass vial which you shall put within the cupboard (formed by the interior) of the altar.

This substance, the Oil of Abramelin, has become quite popular in the magical community, largely due to the efforts of Aleister Crowley. His Liber Al, supposedly obtained from the angel/Higher Self/whatever Aiwass in Cairo, includes the following passages in Chapter III:

23. For perfume mix meal & honey & thick leavings of red wine: then oil of Abramelin and olive oil, and afterward soften & smooth down with rich fresh blood.

24. The best blood is of the moon, monthly: then the fresh blood of a child, or dropping from the host of heaven: then of enemies; then of the priest or of the worshippers: last of some beast, no matter what.

25. This burn: of this make cakes & eat unto me.

This unappetizing mixture became the sacrament in Crowley’s particular version of the Gnostic Mass, which is still practiced today. In addition, it has come integrated into a wide variety of ceremonial magic practices, including the evocation of spirits.

We might take Lon Milo DuQuette, long-time member of the OTO, as an atypical example thereof. In his book My Life with the Spirits, he describes his first summoning of a demon from the Goetia. The normal set of conjurations, magical circles, and other paraphernalia were enhanced with liberal doses of the Oil of Abramelin. After many preparations, the demon was called into the circle, as evidenced by a noticeable change in the atmosphere.

That’s when it happened.

A large drop of sweat scurried from my scalp over my forehead and dropped into my right eye socket just below the bridge of my nose. It stung and made my eye water. I quickly wiped both my eyes with the fingers of my left hand. The powerful smell of cinnamon triggered a terrifying alarm. My hand and fingers were still covered with Oil of Abramelin! Like the biggest idiot in the world I had just rubbed sweat and concentrated cinnamon oil into both my eyes! A second later I was blinded by the most excruciating pain I have ever experienced…

Thus, DuQuette was forced to choose between leaving the oil in (and thereby blinding himself) and performing the ultimate no-no in Solomonic magic: stepping outside the circle when a spirit was present. If you want to know how that one turned out, I highly recommend his book. It provides excellent and entertaining insight into modern magic in all of its gravity and levity.

Next time, what Dehn and Guth’s translation can tell us about all this!

The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin, Part 18: Huge Freakin’ Spiders and the Perils of Text Dating

In my ongoing quest to work in any thing of possible relevance to Abramelin’s book, I now present really big, scary spiders.

When speaking in the tenth chapter of the first book of Mathers’ translation about those whom the devil has misled, Abraham of Worms makes the following statement:

This is wherefore each one should take care to submit himself unto him neither by acts, nor by words, nor by thoughts, because he is so adroit and prompt that he can seize one unexpectedly; just as a spider may take a bird.

Mathers adds the following footnote:

There is a very large species of spider, which can even capture and kill small birds, but it is only met with in tropical regions, especially in Central America and Martinique; the zoological name of this species is Mygalé.

As you can imagine, this is quite a problem in terms of textual dating. Given his habit of referring at length to his travels, Abraham neglects to mention any transatlantic jaunt during which he hangs out in jungles performing amateur entomology. This sort of detail is something that could lead to a definite date before which the manuscript could not be written.

Nonetheless, I was cautious when I saw this. It’s not a good idea to base the dating of a text on a single element, because it’s quite possible that a single revelation could prove it wrong. (To link this back to a previous discussion, this is the same principle that makes me tepid on the topic of the Egyptian city of Araki – nobody can cover every possibility, and it only takes one map or book that mentions it to cast doubt on whether anyone, including Abramelin, actually went there.) Nonetheless, it was a clue.

I didn’t get too far in my investigation, save to contact the American Tarantula Society about the possible historicity of this claim. They didn’t have too much – the first appearance of a bird-eating spider was apparently in an engraving, possibly made by a woman, from two to three centuries ago. Nonetheless, based on this, it might be possible to track it down.

Or I could wait for the Dehn translation, which I chose to do instead. It was lucky that I did. Here’s the same passage in that book:

So, Lamech, take care – don’t support the devil in thoughts, words, or doings. Remember that he can catch you through your curiosity like a bird in a net.

Thus, the dating of the spider might help us to establish the French translation, but it falls apart for dating the Abramelin tradition as a whole. In short, you can see why such a project is such an intensive and frustrating task, likely accounting for why nobody really tries to date grimoires these days.

Next time, the Oil of Abramelin!

On the Shelf: Second Person

In honor of the uncommonly large number of rpg.net posters stopping by today – and because it showed up at work today – I’ll stop to indulge in a recent acquisition, Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Second Person:  Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media from MIT Press.  What’s most notable about this book, at least for our purposes, is its inclusion of two essays specifically on the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game.

First up is “Narrative Structure and Creative Tension in Call of Cthulhu“, written by none other than Ken Hite, author of Dubious Shards.  Hite’s innovation is to take the critical insights gained from studies of mystery and horror fiction and apply them to the game’s adventures, laying out in what ways they mirror the texts from which they sprang and how they differ or fall short as a group.  I especially like his thoughts on the “overreacher” plot, in which a character seeks out knowledge and is punished, or encounters horror, when they step over. Although he concentrates mainly on how this reflects those occasional “play a cultist!” sessions, Hite also notes how this is reflected in the broader campaign structure of the game.  It would be interesting for future writers to see if they can make this implicit structure more explicit.

Following it is, for me, a special bonus that I didn’t know was included – Keith “Doc” Herber’s “On ‘The Haunted House.’”  This, for you youngsters, is not the introductory scenario in the rulebook under that name, but the one from Compact Trail of Tsathogghua and Curse of Cthulhu that’s tragically out of print.  I have to admit, my first reaction was, “Out of a long career as a CoC writer, Doc chose this to tell us about?”  Nonetheless, in a few brief pages, Herber displays how this small scenario aims at breaking out of the traditional CoC paradigm to provide the players with a scary but memorable experience.  What seemed on my initial reading to be a major flaw was actually a design decision toward that end.  If anything, it’d be great to see an entire book of such discussions.

I won’t even go into the articles by Erik Mona, Jonathan Tweet, Will Hindmarch, Rebecca Borgstrom, Jim Wallis, and John Tynes on RPGs, or the three (yes, three!) short yet complete RPGs packaged with the book, or those boring old articles on computer gaming.  This book is expensive, but if you are writing for Call of Cthulhu (or want to do so), you need to read the two articles I mentioned.  Buy the book, look for it at a local library, or get it through interlibrary loan.  They’re that good.

The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin, Part 17: Who and When, Again?

I had to delay our last installment because I was trying to come up with a theory that would establish when Abramelin was actually written. That fell apart rather quickly, though. Thus, I’ll move on to my next task, which is to muddy the waters even further with a discussion of the difficulty of dating magical texts in general.

As I pointed out in a previous installment, we tend to think of books of magic in terms of their titles, which is a dangerous proposition when it comes to understanding them historically. Even in the Middle Ages, when many actually believed that grimoires were composed by Solomon or Toz Graecus, copies of the same work could vary considerably based on the skills of the copyist, their desire to expunge or incorporate material from them, and their experiences with their use, whether those could be empirically verified or not. The focus was on these books as practical manuals of immediate use to the user, rather than traditions to be passed down unchanged because the were the work of a Biblical patriarch (though some did try). Books were disassembled and reassembled to fit the copyist’s preconceptions and needs – and that’s before the eighteenth century, when Germany saw a cottage industry dedicated to the manufacture of new books of magic springing up. That’s another story, though.

We’ve already noted that the Mathers translation of Abramelin lacks a second book that appears in Dehn and Guth’s book, and throws in some curious instructions for using a child as a scryer. Now I’d like to illuminate how this process works in a couple other cases regarding the manuscript.

Second, Dehn notes that the second book of Abramelin contains many recipes in common with the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. As the first mention of that work doesn’t appear until 1797, this establishes Abramelin as an ancestor, possibly several times removed, of one of the most famous books of magic in the Western tradition.

(Some who own the Dehn translation might wonder what I’m talking about here, as the spells in the second section don’t match up with what’s in their copy of the Sixth and Seventh Books. This is because Germany has two traditions of the Sixth and Seventh Books, one geared more toward recipes and the other incorporating the amulets, tablets, and Faustian grimoires. When the Pennsylvania Germans emigrated, the latter made the jump and was translated into English, while the former never made the transition. Remember how I told you not to get too attached to those titles?)

Second, Carlos Gilly has spent some time examining books of magic, including a set of titles known as the De officiis spirituum, or “Of the offices of the spirits” written in the Middle Ages. These are typically lists of demons detailing their names, their ranking in the infernal hierarchy, their powers, and so forth. The most well-known offshoot of this tradition is the Lemegeton, or especially the Goetia. What Gilly uncovered during his research is a manuscript at the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica from the 15th century that shares much in common with the list of spirits in Abramelin. This means that this list inspired Abramelin or that Abramelin inspired this list, depending upon when you think the book dates.

This is why dating and authorship of these manuscripts is such a headache. We simply can’t assume that Abramelin, or anyone else, wrote this book from whole cloth in 1458, which can invalidate many of the assumptions made in the manuscript. Take the magic squares, which Patai says were likely translated into Latin characters by a Sephardic Jew. Even if this is the case, though, it doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about the authorship of any of the other books. Someone could have found a manuscript with these squares and written the surrounding text to match them. This creates a real difficulty with dealing with any such texts – the material in any given book might span millennia, but given the picking and choosing of occult authorship, an individual aspect of a book might not help us with dating the whole, save to establish a date earlier than which the work as a whole was written.

Next time, I’ll give you a good example of how this works that shows my own frustrations. Then, we’ll dive into the Oil of Abramelin (not literally – in fact, we’ll explain why that’s a bad idea), and follow that with some accounts from those who have practiced the ritual.

An Interlude with John Murray Spear

I’m taking a break from Abramelin – and believe me, I have more – to bring you the following announcement.  The Darlington Memorial Library at the University of Pittsburgh, one of my almae matres, is digitizing its entire collection.

What this means to you is that they’ll be putting up the papers of Thaddeus Shelton, lately of Randolph New York and a major booster of John Murray Spear.   I did look at this collection briefly while I was at Pitt, but I never got around to doing anything about it.  This statement should reestablish my impeccable credentials as a Johnny-Come-Lately to Spear studies.

Just as librarians welcome any new digitization project for the purposes of scholarship, though, we realize that there are tradeoffs.   For example, it looks like all those Shelton papers are being placed on the back burner in favor of unimportant stuff like this.  I urge Darlington to reconsider.  After all, what’s more important – some boring old letters from the so-called “Father of Our Country,” or documents on 19th century spiritualism and free love from a guy who built a perpetual motion machine powered via sexual energy?  That’s right.

At any rate, they’ll be appearing sooner or later, and I am full of anticipation.

The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin, Part 16: Who and When?

For this installment, I promised to discuss the authorship and possible dating for Abramelin. I’ve since realized that this could be considerable work on my part. Plus, it’s hard to provide any sort of real data absent any ability to look at the manuscripts themselves, so let me see if I can find an easy way out of it.

Let’s go to Patai’s quotation of the title page of the French version:

FIRST BOOK of the Sacred Magic which God gave to Moses Aaron David Solomon & to others Saints Patriarchs & Prophets, which teaches the true Divine wisdom, left by Abraham to Lamech His Son translated from the Hebrew 1458.

Hey! God wrote it! I’m done.

I can see some of you saying that this is simply not good enough. You’re probably the same malcontents who think evolution should be taught in schools. To keep you happy, we’ll keep going.

We can set aside some claims, such as the Hammer edition’s 1387 date, and Willy Schrodter’s insistence in his Rosicrucian Notebook that the author was an Ibrahim el-Mu’allim, who died in 1412. Seeing as one of the pope’s in Book 1 is Martin V, who was elected in 1417, we can eliminate them as possibilities for responsibility for the work as a whole.

Gerschom Scholem’s work on the book, mainly centering on the identity of its author, is described by both Patai and Dehn, though they don’t seem to have used the same sources. Correlating these sources, Scholem began his examination with the assumption that the book was written by a Jewish author. Noting the close connections it draws between Kabbala and magic, he was later to reverse his thinking and conclude that the author was a Christian who, based on the magic squares, knew Hebrew very well and who was familiar with the work of Pico della Mirandola and other Renaissance magi who combined natural magic with Kabbalistic speculation.

It’s difficult to know what to do with this, as Scholem didn’t go into his reasons at great depth. It is worth noting that later scholars have criticized Scholem for marginalizing magical material on the record in favor of the mystical side of Kabbala, so it’s possible that his later attempt to attribute it outside the Jewish realm was a reflection of that bias. Still, it’s hard to tell without a more definitive analysis from Scholem.

Next, we have Patai’s work in The Jewish Alchemists, which we’ve covered previously. Patai performs a close analysis of the 17th century Hebrew manuscript at Oxford, believing it establishes a textual tradition of an original Hebrew manuscript from which the German and French were taken. He notes that the phrasing of the translations and the succinct nature of the original seems to indicate that the Hebrew might be the earliest version. (In fact, his examination of the magic squares reveals that the transliterations from Hebrew into Latin were likely done by a Sephardic Jew.) Then again, Patai wasn’t aware of either of the 1608 manuscripts Dehn uses for his translation. Those predate the Oxford Hebrew by a century, so it’s hard to say what he’d think of them.

We dealt briefly with the question of Patai’s dating in a previous installment. Patai notes that there are some discrepancies between the historic record and the events Abraham describes in his book, implying that there was some distance from them in terms of time or space. He chooses space, largely because he can’t come up with a good reason why someone from a later period would choose to backdate it and research a different period. Thus, he states with some confidence that

…there are sufficient indications in Abraham’s Cabala mystica to attribute its authorship to a Jewish magus-alchemist who lived in Worms around 1400…

I’m not certain this is necessarily the case. One could easily put together a scenario in which a later writer knew about a historical figure from an earlier period – perhaps even the Abraham of Leipzig we’ve seen before. In keeping with the grimoire tradition, the book could be attributed to the earlier period, with the author showing a little more diligence than normal toward getting his facts straight regarding the history of the time. Thus, it’s by no means certain that the book was written around 1458.

Next, I weigh in with some thoughts of my own.