The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin: history of a manuscript

The story opens like a travel romance. A Jew of Worms named Abraham writes to his son Lamech, in 1458 according to the text's internal dating, to hand on the knowledge he gained on long journeys through Europe, Egypt and the Holy Land, above all from an Egyptian master called Abramelin. This is the framework of the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, one of the most famous grimoires of the modern age, whose real history is nonetheless full of questions.

Manuscripts and versions

The oldest witnesses are manuscripts in German, the earliest of which, kept at Wolfenbüttel, dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century. In 1725 a German version appeared in print bearing the imprint of Cologne and the printer Peter Hammer, a fictitious name used by many publishers for controversial works. No fifteenth-century manuscript is known, and the date of 1458 remains a claim made by the text itself.

There is also a French version held at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal in Paris, datable to the eighteenth century. This was the basis of the English translation by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, published in London in 1898 under the title The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. Compared with the German versions, the French one is shorter and shows significant differences in structure and detail.

Structure and content

In Mathers's edition the work is divided into three books. The first is autobiographical and recounts Abraham's travels, the masters he met, the deceptions of false sages and the wonders he claims to have witnessed. The second describes a long period of retreat and purification, whose length varies between versions, aimed at knowledge of and conversation with one's guardian angel. The third gathers numerous magic squares made up of letters.

The conception is unusual: only after achieving contact with the angel would the practitioner, according to the text, be able to command the lower spirits. The work thus places the spiritual and moral dimension at the centre and presents it as the condition of all power. This combination of religious asceticism and magic contributed to its success among occultists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The question of the author

Who Abraham of Worms was remains an open question. In the early 2000s Georg Dehn, editor of an edition based on the German manuscripts, proposed identifying him with Rabbi Jacob ben Moses Levi Moelin, known as the Maharil, a Talmudic authority of Mainz and Worms who died in 1427. The hypothesis has been received with many reservations: several scholars believe the text is the work of a Christian author who built a fictitious Jewish frame.

The motif of the learned Jew who passes on secrets is recurrent in European magical literature, where Kabbalah and the Hebrew language enjoyed enormous prestige. Some elements of the text, such as the letter squares, show a knowledge of Hebrew that has been assessed in conflicting ways, and the question of authorship remains bound up with the equally debated question of the original language.

The modern influence of Abramelin is linked above all to the Golden Dawn and to Aleister Crowley, who in 1899 bought Boleskine House, on the shores of Loch Ness, intending to devote himself to the operation described in the book. For the historian, however, the main interest remains the text itself: a work blending autobiography, devotion and magic, whose manuscript genealogy is still partly to be clarified.