THE ABRAMELIN DIARIES
Ramsey Dukes
AEON
First published in 2019 by
Aeon Books Ltd
12 New College Parade
Finchley Road
London NW3 5EP
Copyright © 2019 by Ramsey Dukes
The right of Ramsey Dukes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13: 978-1-91159-719-3
Typeset by Medlar Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd, India
Printed in Great Britain
CONTENTS
What is the Abramelin operation?
Background—why I attempted the Abramelin operation
What we should consider before undertaking this operation
Notes towards a better understanding of my diary
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