The Abramelin Diaries. Ramsey Dukes

for Thelemites, who are exhorted never to bend their knees in supplication!

      A more profound difficulty for me was that my religious inclinations at the time did not embrace any personal deity—I was closest to Taoism and a sense of a universal “way” that directed the course of nature. So, however freely I was permitted to adapt my prayers to my “God”, I was effectively praying towards nothingness. For some people that might present an insurmountable difficulty.

      About a year later, however, I was writing the first chapter of Thundersqueak in which Lemuel Johnstone says: “what some people call hypocrisy, I call freedom of spirit”. The decision I finally made was not an easy one; I wrestled with it for weeks, but eventually decided to perform the operation in the thoroughly magical spirit of acting “as if”—as described by Austin Spare—or what is popularly advocated as “fake it till you make it”.

      It will help you to understand what is happening on the following pages if you bear that in mind. During my oration, and at times through the day, I was adopting the attitude of one who believed in a personal God and prayed earnestly and with the greatest sincerity from that perspective. As you will see, that imagined deity did take on certain characteristics and behaviour during the course of six months, even if it did not take on visible manifestation.

       The meditations

      It was one thing to ritually throw myself into a state of theistic “energised enthusiasm” two or three times a day for the duration of an oration, but it was quite another thing to orient my whole life in that direction for six months. I also needed to adapt the operation to accommodate my True Will as best I could.

      My inclination at the time was towards a sort of quietist Taoism that saw everything in terms of flowing states along the lines of yin and yang, with the paradoxical feature that each of these opposing qualities contained the seed of the other, and that kept them locked in the eternal dance of existence. My intention was to extend my “religious” Abramelin practice along the lines of Taoist meditation, circulating the light within the framework of the body, and so on. I took The Secret of the Golden Flower as my guide, together with books on Taoist meditation by John Blofield and others.

      I think there are far more practical instructions available nowadays, but what was available at the time were mostly translations using teasingly far-eastern terminology that gave my western mind nothing very solid to chew on. Therefore, I was strongly influenced by the clear and sternly ascetic instructions provided by Crowley in his Eight Lectures on Yoga—summarised by Regardie (or someone) as: “Sit down. Shut up. Get out.”

      Typically, I would sit in meditation, and control my breathing while circulating from the base chakra up the spine and down the front of my body, in a pretty standard fashion. I could not physically sustain a cross-legged posture, so I adopted the thunderbolt kneeling position. This lead to screaming pain in my legs as I arose after what was often an hour and a half of stillness three times a day. (Amazingly, I did get used to the pain, but it left me with varicose veins.) On the days when I write that the meditation was “good” or “successful”, it typically means that I reached and sustained a sense of utter stillness, mental silence, and often a feeling of being detached from my body as if floating far above it.

      Strictly speaking, that state of still detachment was all that I should have aspired to, and any more complex or interesting phenomena should have been dismissed as mere distractions along the way. But I was not that accomplished. Instead I was often aware of things happening and “energy” shifts taking place inside me that seemed impossible to express in words. For these my guide was certain texts of western alchemy, especially those such as The Book of Lambspring that had illustrations that spoke to me.

      I cannot explain all of this in a short introduction, but I will give one simple example. At the beginning of The Book of Lambspring there is a figure with the heading: “BE WARNED AND UNDERSTAND TRULY THAT TWO FISHES ARE SWIMMING IN OUR SEA”. Under the picture it says: “The Sea is the Body, the two Fishes are Soul and Spirit”.

      It goes on to say paradoxical things about the two fishes being only one and yet two, and gives advice to cook all three together. What was the relevance of this?

      As I sat circulating my breath in my body, at times I became aware of a duality within me that might be called yin and yang, or soul and spirit, and that there was value in simply holding awareness of these two, gently “cooking” them in the body rather than trying hard to analyse or differentiate further. And so on, with other alchemical images and books: I was reaching a state where words failed, but I could still find meaning and some measure of guidance in images such as these. At one point late in the operation, I describe God splitting into two: a very vivid experience at the time, but hard to communicate in words.

      Resorting to alchemical terminology means that my original hand-written diary included a number of traditional alchemical symbols for the elements, planets and qualities, and in this edition I have replaced these symbols with their written names—not so mystical looking, but easier to typeset!

      I cannot say whether these explanations will convey much to the reader—they do not always mean much to me now forty years later—but at least this explanation might give the reader some idea of what was happening to me. If it does, then it will add value to what might otherwise be a boring description of one man's struggle with everyday routine.

       Watching the watcher

      One other expression that turns up from time to time is “watch the watcher”. I thought I got this idea from reading The Kybalion, but do not see it there. It is said somewhere that Hermetic teaching tells us to “Watch the watcher. Judge the judge. Examine the examiner.” I have often found this principle very helpful when meditating.

      When I first tried to meditate in my earlier years the usual thing happened: I tried to quieten my mind but soon found it was buzzing with ideas and that I simply had no success in controlling this fountain of thought. It was Gerald Yorke who taught me that the trick was not to try to block thoughts, but simply to observe them arising in a detached manner. When you do that the stream does start to dry up.

      “Watch the watcher” suggests something similar. When you sit in meditation you become aware of all that is going on inside you—it is apparently uncontrollable. But then you ask yourself how is it possible to be aware of all this? How can one single consciousness be simultaneously busy and aware that it is busy? Then you realise that there is another “higher” part of you that is watching this flow. Thus you discover “two fish in the sea”: a consciousness and a watcher or over-seer.

      How do you become aware of this “higher” part and the division between the two? It is because there is an even higher part of you that is watching and observing that there are these two parts within you…And so the meditation can lead one gently up a ladder of awareness to ever purer, simpler forms of consciousness.

      This is what I am referring to when I use terms like “watching the watcher”.

      To sum up: even when there is very little to report in my diary, I was throughout most days attempting to cultivate an ongoing state of detached awareness. This state came to a sharper focus during my twice or thrice daily orations and, not having an adequate language to describe the effects, I could sometimes only refer to them in this semi-alchemical language.

       “Obsessions incarnating”

      I was undecided whether it was better to edit out some passages where I use my diary as a sort of therapy exorcism—because these were too personal to be of interest to the reader—or whether I should leave them in, simply as examples of how psychological issues come up during the months of preparation. I asked the advice of my editor, and decided to leave them in, here are some explanations of the background to the most obvious obsessions.

       Snobbery

      Reading this diary again after forty years, I was at first puzzled by the early references to my “snobbery”. What was that about? Snobbery is not something that I identify with, but when