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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 a police raid when one knows one is innocent could be interpreted as a message from the Angel.

This might seem a bit pussy-footed, but it reflects my views on magical vow-making. For several years I was an initiator for a formal magical order, and that required preparing the candidates for a secret ritual—i.e. one where they were not supposed to know what would happen to them during the ceremony. All these initiation rituals included a number of vows—for example a vow never to become addicted to drugs. According to tradition, the candidates do not know that they will be asked to make that vow, and it is sprung upon them. Unless they agree, they cannot be initiated further.

This seemed wrong to me, because I could not see how anyone could make a serious vow without carefully considering it in advance. If one were already a drug addict, the vow would require one to stop there and then—would that be possible without a rehabilitation programme? Does a fondness for wine or tobacco amount to addiction? Where does one draw the line?

I used to prepare my candidates by telling them that they would be required to take some vows, and then asking if they liked to know in advance what those vows would entail? Some were very grateful of my offer but, to my surprise, quite a few said they would rather not know in advance.

Initiation really is most potent when it puts you on the spot with something challenging and quite dangerous. The more apparently life-threatening, the more powerful the initiation. We all know instinctively the truth of this: witness all those movies where the hero does not change or become whole until a major crisis has been faced. But again: how can the initiator make this happen in today's safety conscious and litigious culture? I recall a media story about sadomasochistic pact in the UK where the police sought to convict the sadist for harm done, despite the consent of the masochist.

The idea that one should have vows sprung upon one without warning and be forced to make a commitment on the spot is quite sound magic. But is it realistic in view of the fringe nature of occult culture in our society? It is one thing to trust one's future to a long-established religious order but, when you are constantly being warned about “all those charlatans and perverts in occult circles”, is it wise to place yourself totally in the hands of any initiatory order? In any case, most of the “secret initiatory rituals” have already been published by ardent transparentists, so it is quite possible for any candidate to read them up first if they really wanted to.

For me this is an open question. I have Sun in Aries, so my heart tells me that a true initiate should throw caution to the winds and plunge ahead—“a faint heart never won a fair lady”, as my House Master used to insist when setting us a challenging geometry problem. But I also have Capricorn rising, so my head tells me that I should always look before I leap.

What, therefore, do I advise? Simply to bear in mind that one of the worst mistakes one can make with Abramelin is to break the vow and not complete the operation in the specified place and time. So consider carefully before you make the vow, and make sure it is a genuine promise about something that you really can keep to.

Location. Location. Location.

The book says: “Although the best counsel that I can give is that a man should go into retirement in some desert or solitude…as the Ancients used to do; nevertheless now this is hardly possible; and we must accommodate ourselves unto the era in which we live”. What he says is even more true now.

Abraham the Jew performed his operation in a remote desert location, against the backdrop of a culture where it was understood that some people chose to be hermits on religious grounds and just wanted to be left alone. These conditions are even harder to replicate since the twentieth century. Remote deserts are now far-better mapped, and most land is “owned” by someone or some institution; surveillance is widespread; and choosing to be a hermit would now be considered “weird”, and sufficient reason to be identified, filmed, and posted on social media.

There is also society's suspicion that anyone “lying low” might be doing so because they are up to no good, or on the run from authority. This suspicion has probably always existed, but in Abraham's time would be more likely to be sorted out directly by personal contact with the hermit, whereas now one would be more likely to be reported to the police, or the press, or security. The consequences could be highly invasive and demand a lot of explanation.

As a rural person born and bred, my instinct was to retire to deep country, find a lonely cottage and work in isolation—but I chose instead the relatively suburban setting of a cottage on a home counties village green. This was partly because I did not have time or money to find a perfect location, but also because I realised that in Britain nowadays it is easier to be anonymous in an urban setting. Redbourn in Hertfordshire was where I had been living for a few years, so people had seen me around and I would not stand out as a newcomer. Only a few close friends needed to know that I was doing something peculiar, otherwise I could get on with my vegetable garden and high street shopping apparently as normal.

The Book of Abramelin does give instructions for performing the operation in a country location, but it also advises on how to perform it in a city apartment. When I thought more about the social impact, I could see the sense of doing it in a city, but I still feel the magic would be more powerful when the aspirant is isolated. The downside of doing the operation in a familiar setting is that this has a definite normalising effect.

If I ever had the opportunity to perform the operation a second time, then I would choose somewhere isolated, because I believe that would lead to more dramatic—even scary—results. I discuss this matter more fully in my final chapter of commentary: the way that everyday normality tends to tame the paranormal.

This is actually a very profound question that the aspirant must ask when planning the operation. “Am I doing Abramelin in order to make weird things happen and so prove to myself that magic exists? Or do I already accept that magic can exist, and so am performing this operation to invoke such magic into my life?” Myself, I only saw the true significance of this dilemma many years later.

The fourth dimension of location

There is another aspect of location that has not changed over all these centuries. It is the time of sunrise and sunset at a chosen place. Bearing in mind the instruction that the practitioner should not sleep during the day, it becomes necessary to ensure enough sleep during the night.

The location I chose meant that for a month at the heart of the operation the official time of sunrise was about 4:40 am and sunset was about 9:20 pm. If, as instructed, I was to enter the oratory at a quarter of an hour before sunrise, then I would need to get up around 4:15 am or earlier to allow time for the necessary washing, dressing and going from the chamber to the oratory. Even if I limited my oration to one hour in length, I would be lucky to get to sleep before 11 pm—leaving me no more than five and a quarter hours sleep. In my case that was not enough—as a consequence, my diary reads like a long record of failure.

It was a failure because I was being too strict in intention—using the astronomical definition of sunrise as the time when the sun appears over a level horizon. In Abraham's time that figure would not generally be available, and sunrise would more likely be judged by the actual appearance of the sun. I never recorded when that actually happened, because I was usually deep in my oration at that time.

So, this is a further consideration: are you someone who really needs seven or eight hours sleep, or are you one of those who can survive on much less? Bear in mind that most people who do sleep shorter hours can only do this because they are able to compensate with brief catnaps during the day. That is not permitted by Abramelin.

If you cannot find a location close enough to the equator to give you a reasonable schedule, then make a conscious decision to mark the rising and setting of the sun by its appearance at the location, and see whether that allows enough sleep. If not, you will need to work around this problem.

Something borrowed, something made…

There is a powerful magical tradition that everything used in a magical operation should be manufactured for the purpose by the practitioner. I seem to recall Crowley saying something along these lines: that the ideal would be to dig up the iron ore and smelt the iron, to grow the tree used for the wood, and so on. It is true that there is special power in a magical object that is consciously constructed from raw materials with the specific magical purpose constantly in mind.

But there is another magical tradition about the four magical implements that says something along the lines that the Cup should be given to the magician, the Dagger (or the Disk) should be bought by the magician, the Wand should be found by and the Disk (or the Dagger) made by the magician. This is also interesting, because it opens up the creative process to embrace many more valid forms of interaction. You could, for example, argue that it is impossible to mine that iron without first finding it, in which case it would be a gift from Mother Earth.

My recommendation when preparing for this, or any other magical operation, is not so much to be bound by a set of rules but, rather to expand one's awareness of the preparation to a more holistic appreciation of the provenance of everything that will be used. Buying a robe, instead of making it, need not be a passive act: for some people, buying things is a lazy option, for others it is a hunting activity that involves investigating, assessing, budgeting and many other skills.

In whatever manner you obtain your magical paraphernalia, do so consciously and all the time explore the symbolism of its provenance. If someone breaks one of the cardinal rules of magic and gives you their old robe to wear, should you refuse it? Or might it be more appropriate to first cleanse and deconsecrate it, and then use it in the spirit of a gift imbued with goodwill and kindness?

What I am implying is that each item in the ritual should not just be an object that fits certain specifications, but also something that has come into your life in a significant and appropriate manner.