| 簡介: |
Introduction
A Note from the Author
Since childhood, I have had a series of related dreams. I am in a
labyrinthine library, musty, dusty, and full of joy. It is not any library I know
in waking life, but a combination of many libraries, real and fictional,
plausible and impossible. I hunt the stacks for a book, a magic book, which
I can sense but not find. It shimmers and glimmers and tinkles just outside
of my grasp. In some dreams, I do eventually find it. Most often it is a very
old, very large, leatherbound book, but it appears differently in each dream.
I always wake up as soon as I lay my hand on it. I have dreamed this dream,
on and off, for more than forty years, ever since I learned to read.
I suspect I am not the only magician who harbors a yearning to discover a
long-lost magical tome, not just about magic, but alight and alive with a
palpable spirit of magic. I imagined such books were not just tools but allies
and teachers and companions. When I was young, I thought the famed
grimoires were the magic books after which I sought. Sadly, when I finally
laid hands on them, it was not so. The word “grimoire” shares a root with
“grammar”; grimoires are the textbooks of magic. They were not the magic
books I craved, but they were excellent teachers.
The night I decided to write this book for you, I dreamt the dream once
again. That time, I found it! The book was huge—three feet tall, two feet
wide, and at least six inches thick. It was too big for me to move. I called a
strong friend/co-magician to help, and he moved it onto a large library table
for me. Then, wonder of wonders, I managed to open it before awakeningOn the page to which I opened, with which I was permitted to commune for
only a moment, was a secret you will learn by the end of this book.
Only a handful of times in my decades of searching have I met such books
“in the wild.” However, with long effort and much study, I have learned to
make my own awake, alive magic books, and one of my many goals in this
book is to teach you how to make them, too. Later in this book, you\\\'ll learn
to make a book of Solomonic pentacles, but the principles you\\\'ll learn easily
translate to other types of magic books.
Another objective of this book is to give you all the context—magical,
cultural, and linguistic—to fully understand the forty-four planetary
pentacles Samuel Liddell (MacGregor) Mathers presents in his edition of
the Key of Solomon. I adore the pentacles, and I am doing my best to
convey both my love and my decades of experience with them to you.
However, my hope is that you will use this book as a springboard to learn
how to delve into all sorts of cryptic texts and be able to understand them
using a combination of necromantic, linguistic, and sorcerous techniques.
I have done my best to provide clear, cogent translations and commentary,
but I am neither a linguist nor a historian, and I am certainly not a rabbi. I
am a student, lover, and descendant of Solomon, and it is my most sincere
goal to serve as his scribe and hermeneutes.³ This book is not a work of scholarship. It is a game of scholarship, and I encourage you to play |
狗仔卡
发表于 
收藏
分享
淘帖
支持
反對
提升卡
沉默卡
喧囂卡
变色卡
搶沙發
楼主