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CHAPTER TWO

Background—why I attempted the Abramelin operation

Like most children I was drawn to magic from an early age. Without any books to guide me I used to look up the word “magic” in big dictionaries or encyclopaedias and learn names for the many different types of magic—such as “black magic”, “natural magic”, “spirit magic” and so on. Then I discovered that the public library did have a few books on or around the subject, including books on Spiritism, from which I learned that it was mostly fraudulent.

The nearest available thing to an occult journal at that time was the astrology-based magazine Prediction, which had book reviews 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.