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KCh
04-07-2007, 05:14 PM
Recently I had been studiously comparing the Mathers Translation of 'Abramelin' and the recently released(in english at least) 'Book of Abramelin' by Dehn and Guth.(Ibis Publications 2006)

In it, the editor Georg Dehn gives his account of searching out the location of Abramelin's hut. Its location, he pinpoints, is at a place called 'Araki' in Egypt. Araki also, it appears, to lie just due west of Nag Hammadi. Not only this, but monasteries, hermits, and Egyptian tombs are all within walking distance of this place. Even more intriguing to me was that a place called the 'Monastery of the Angel' "Deir al-Malak", and is 8 kil from Araki. This monastery is curious in that it is not devoted to a singular angel, but to the all encompassing ideal of 'Angel' or 'Malak'.

Now, of course you should be putting all this together by now. The Yezidi come to mind, and 'Malak Taus'. Crowley made a curious remark in an un-published letter about Thelema being rooted in ideas that are much older than the more modern religions of today, and that specifically the Yezidi and 'Malak Taus' are connected.

Abramelin living in such an area of condensed ideas, is it no wonder his system sought the 'Holy Guardian Angel'?

Now to take this over to the weird side.

Steven Guth, the other person responsible for this new translation, wrote a curious essay on some experiences and ideas he attained while in Egypt.

Two quotes from this really startled me:

"It quickly came to me that the pyramids were built to draw in and keep in a convenient location some of the ghosts that were attached to tombs throughout Egypt."

"Then came the realization that the Egyptians had a system going to turn the dead into their servants. They buried their dead in such a way that they remain within the frequency range of the living and so accessible to us-in our physical bodies-to perceive and use."

Apply this to the Supreme Invocation that Crowley did, and his Subsequent 'Angel' appearing.

Now, is this a reasonable suggestion? That the Gnostic techniques hinged on the fact of their invocating the spirits of the dead that were all around them. Namely the valley of the Kings and Queens. The various tombs of dead priests, etc...

Anibis
04-08-2007, 01:08 PM
To some extent are not all burial rituals a bit like that; keeping the dead within proximity of the living for the sake of use? This thought has occured to me whilst walking through the various cemetaries in st John's some are very very old (for the New World at any rate), and it's interesting to me that each is consecrated to a different religion (or denomination of Christianity; but 50 years ago here that was a HUGE deal)... It occured to me that a cemetary is a sort of 'lot-of-souls' or a spiritual capital of some sort... magick accrues to a religion to the degree that they accumulate many dead in their lots.... strange... Maybe the elaborate thanatology of the Egyptians and Chinese was a more hyper-charge/empirial style of the same...

I just heard recently the notion that 'if your grandmother is buried in Newfoundland, then you are a newfoundlander'... wierd eh? Says something about 'the momentum of the dead'. Sorry to derail, but what you said triggered this... I'll move it to another thread if it gets to be a tangent...

-Anibis

Stock-piling the dead... a whole new meaning to the term 'cold war'...

MythMath
04-08-2007, 03:46 PM
And 'body count'...

emeraldhanael
04-08-2007, 06:03 PM
Im curious Kch is there any change in the translation??? Anything important are there any revisions made to the procedure??? I ask because on Occasion whena new translation of a book comes out there maybe some revision. Also how does this version compare with the 21st century mage by Newcomb???

KCh
04-08-2007, 07:58 PM
The translation of the German edition is vastly more concise and condensed than Mathers. Mathers was working, unknowingly, with an incomplete manuscript in French that was transcribed from the original German manuscripts that Guth and Dehn eventually used for theirs. It includes an additional chapter of useless folk magic(Like taking off your left shoe and circling it above your head whilst incanting some hebrew psalms in order to escape pursuers type of useless), and completely filled in magic squares. It is a much more workable translation. I suggest anyone involved in doing the Abramelin operation to use this translation instead of the Mathers edition.

I haven't wasted my time reading anything by Newcomb. Its redundant I'm sure, though I haven't read any of it. So I can't compare them.

As for the Egyptians and their elaborate rites for the Dead, taken literally, it could mean that their Kings were actually what they claimed to be...reincarnations of Horus from time immemorial. The elaborate rites of initiations sought to implant the ageless wisdom of all their dead into a single King.

hitman777
04-18-2007, 04:01 PM
Is this book available in stores, or does it need to be ordered? Anymore information about it?