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INTRODUCTION

Why would anyone want to read—or even publish—the diary of a not very successful magical retirement by a relatively unknown occultist?

When I told David Evans¹ in the 1990s that I still possessed the hand-written magical diary of my 1977 Abramelin operation, he said that I must publish it. I asked him why. He replied that it was “history”. (I pictured a gun to my head while a Schwarzenegger-like character snarls: “You're history!”). Both as someone who did magic, and as an academic engaged in the study of magic, he eventually convinced me that my diary might be worth publishing someday. He was also a good friend and I miss him.

Years later I was preparing The Little Book of Demons for Oliver Rathbone of Aeon Books, and we discussed the Abramelin project. So he arranged to have my hand-written diary transcribed in 2005, with a view to possible publication at some later date.

Ten years later I was persuaded to create a Ramsey Dukes YouTube channel to publish some videos of me discussing magical ideas. I have since been astonished to see the number of people who first discover these videos while searching the internet for “Abramelin”. There is clearly a growing interest in the operation—maybe stimulated by the movie A Dark Song² in which the main protagonist undertakes a retirement with reference to Abramelin. So I contacted Aeon Books and suggested they send me the transcript so I could edit it and add some material to make a publishable book.

That is why it is being published. But why would anyone want to read this particular diary?

For a start, there are still very few people who have completed and written up the Abramelin retirement—even in the shorter, six-month format published by S.L. MacGregor Mathers. Compared with many more exotic, ancient grimoires, the Abramelin looks relatively simple and straightforward and yet, as I was to discover, a simple regular practice is very hard to maintain in today's world. The fact that even Aleister Crowley failed to complete it on his first attempt has added a lot to the book's mystique, and the operation it describes has acquired a formidable reputation.

When I was preparing for it in 1977, I came across only one published Abramelin diary: The Sacred Magician by George Chevalier (pen name of William Bloom), published the year before. With little else to help me (apart from Israel Regardie's chapter in The Tree of Life), I read it avidly and, even though the content seemed pretty boring, it did in several ways help me to prepare. I could see that publishing my diary might provide additional help for anyone seriously considering performing the operation themselves. So, in March 2017, I started correcting and editing the transcript.

As the diary is “sacred”, I decided to edit as little as possible. I noticed that the 2005 transcriber of the original manuscript had already done a bit of editing to make some sentences flow better and I mostly accepted his changes, rather than go back through the text word by word. My main revision has been to replace people's names to preserve their anonymity, and to add some footnotes where extra explanation could be helpful.

I have also added four introductory chapters:

1. What is the Abramelin operation? explains the historic background of the operation. It is not the sort of academic study that Dave Evans could have provided, but just a very basic summary of what was known about the operation when I began, plus reference to material more recently discovered.

2. Background. Why I attempted the operation outlines my personal background to the operation: how I heard about and why I decided to try it.

3. Preparing for the operation. This is the most practical chapter, because it goes into some detail about the problems of performing an ancient ritual in a modern Western environment, and some of the challenges to be addressed.

4. Notes towards an understanding of my diary is added to outline some of the personal issues I had to face—like following instructions to pray to a God that I did not believe in, and what sort of meditative practices to choose. This chapter prepares the reader to make better sense of the diary, without my having to fill it with masses of extra explanatory footnotes.

Finally, I have added four Postscript chapters to address questions about the later impact of the operation on me and on my life. This does something to answer the inevitable question “was it all worth it?”.

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¹The late David Evans later co-founded JSM—The Journal for the Academic Study of Magic—and his books included The History of British Magic After Crowley, published in 2007.

²A 2016 Irish independent horror film, written and directed by Liam Gavin and starring Steve Oram and Catherine Walker.