The Book of Abramelin - Abramelin and Thelema

Abramelin and Thelema

The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage was to have a profound effect upon Crowley, the founder of Thelema. As he developed the mystical system of Thelema, the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel was to become the fundamental task of every adept. This was attached to the central concept of Thelema, True Will, which can be described as one's sacred destiny or path in life, which cannot be fully known in consciousness until the Holy Guardian Angel is contacted. Although Crowley was to go on to create his own ritual for attaining this, while also saying that an adept could more or less achieve this mystical state in any number of ways, the fundamental concepts remained consistent with Abramelin.

In 1906, Crowley decided to alter the Abramelin operation so that he might perform it during a trip he and his wife Rose Kelly and their infant daughter were taking through China. He reported first a vision of a shining figure who admitted him to the Order of the Silver Star, and later a more drastic mystical experience that he considered to be the Knowledge and Conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel. However, he showed ambivalence about the role that his use of hashish had played in this experience, so in October 1908, he again performed the operation in Paris without its use. (See John St. John, in external links.)

In later years, Crowley claimed to have successfully completed the Abramelin operation, but the outcome of his experiment was not the advertised powers of treasure-finding, invisibility, flight, and love-drawing. Rather, he attributed to the Abramelin operation the revelation of The Book of the Law and the proclamation of the "Aeon of Horus", which he received while he and Kelly were sojourning in Egypt in 1904.