The Retreat, the Squares, and the Guardian Angel

The Book of Abramelin describes one operation and nothing else. The magician withdraws into seclusion and undertakes a programme of prayer, purity and increasing intensity, at the end of which he attains what the text calls the knowledge and conversation of his holy guardian angel. Only after that does he command the spirits, and the entire second half of the book, the part most often reproduced, is unusable before it.

That second half consists of word squares: grids of letters, each square assigned to a purpose, many of them containing genuine words and many apparently corrupt. Their transmission is poor and the versions disagree, which for a system that depends on exact letters is a serious problem.

The length of the retreat differs between the surviving manuscripts. The German versions give eighteen months; the French manuscript that Mathers translated gives six. That is not a small variation, and it means an English reader working from Mathers has been following a different regime from a German reader for over a century.

The operation is the direct ancestor of the Golden Dawn and Thelemic treatment of the Holy Guardian Angel, which is why an obscure fifteenth century text has modern currency.