The Book of Abramelin - Abramelin and Contemporary Eclectic Occultism

Abramelin and Contemporary Eclectic Occultism

Since the time of Mathers' translation, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage has remained popular among English-speaking ceremonial magicians and occultists interested in Hermetic Qabalah, Christian Kabbalah and grimoires. A paperback reprint during the renewed rise of interest in hermeticism during the 1970s placed the book before a new generation of readers, and one offshoot of this was that a number of people, both within and without the Thelemic and Golden Dawn communities, claimed to have either undertaken the Abramelin operation in toto or to have successfully experimented with the magic squares and Abramelin oil formula found in the text.

There are several important differences between the original manuscripts and Mathers' edition. First, one of the four books was missing entirely from the French manuscript with which he worked. Second, Mathers gave the duration of the operation as six months, whereas all other sources specify eighteen months. Third, possibly due to a mistranslation, Mathers changed one of the ingredients within the recipe for Abramelin oil, specifying galangal instead of the original herb calamus. The oil in the German manuscript sources also contains cassia and is nearly identical to the biblical recipe for Holy anointing oil. The differences between the recipes cause several notable changes in the oil's characteristics, including edibility, fragrance, dermal sensation, and spiritual symbolism. Fourth, there are 242 word squares in Mathers' translation, while the original German has 251. Most of the squares in Mathers are not completely filled in, and those that are differ markedly from the German sources.

A German translation, credited to Abraham of Worms and edited by Georg Dehn, was published in 2001 by Edition Araki. In the Dehn version, the fourth book is included and Mathers' galangal substitution is reverted back to calamus (though not in the English translation — see Abramelin Oil). All 251 of the word squares are completely filled in. An English translation of Dehn's edition was published 2006 by the American publisher Nicholas Hays.