User talk:Frater5/Archive1

Please Create an Abramelin stub, not a redirect[edit]

Please restore the existence of an Abramelin page and do not automatically redirect the word Abramelin to the "Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage." page you have just created with the text i co-wrote.

The Abramelin page was something that i undertook to rework and expand greatly as part of a project my husband and i spent three days on, namely creating and filling the category of Occut Authors. When you moved the Abramelin article that i had i rewritten away and made the word Abamelin a redirect to a book page, you also deleted the name Abramelin from the category of Occult authors, which i am sure was not your intent.

Please, as a favour for having taken my work on this article away, would you be so good as to start a short Abramelin stub page that does NOT redirect to this book page but is instead connected with a link, not a redirect?

I would do it myself, but i have to go to sleep now and will not be able to wikify for the next two days at least, as we are hosting a large party here at our occult shop. I will get to it when i can and will write more. But since i wrote a good deal of the text you moved, i think i can ask you in all fairness to restore the Abramelin entry so that it can be used as i intended it, as part of the Occult Authors project.

Thanks, Catherineyronwode 10:19, 5 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I was thinking about that this morning! Of course I'll create it. I also wanted to say that I really admire your writing here on the wiki. I look to you as an example. –Frater5 (talk/con) 15:47, 5 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"Crowleyfying"[edit]

Thanks for your calm attitude, and i have considered your opinion, but i think you are off-base.

First, i am almost 59 years old and i made my first Jewish Holy Oil and my first Abramelin Oil back in the early 1960s, following the recipes in the books as i received them (Tanakh and Mather's translation of Abramelin). This was a year or two before i had ever seen or read a book by Aleister Crowley. So your argument fails on the facts. later i learned that mathers had made a mistake, and i tried a corrected version of the oil, which i loved.

Again, you state that it was Crowley's interest in Abramelin that made Abramelin so popular now. But not to me or members of my generation, most of whom knew a lot more about A. E. Waite than Crowley because Waite's books were in print, whereas Crowley's were not.

As for adding Crowley's name to a disambiguation page about Abramelin Oil, that is silly. When i FIRST saw that disambiguation page, it read that the oil was "created" by Crowley, so i corrected that to the oil being found "within the book" by Abramelin, then someone added "made popular by Crowley". Don't you see a tinge of fanaticism in those revisions? If the description needs expansion (which i do not think it does), then he important point is that Abramelin's formula is a slightly modified copy of the Jewish recipe that YHVH gave to Moses!

Abramelin's version of the Jewish holy oil was wrongly translated by Mathers and the mistranslation was picked up by Crowley, who then misinterpreted the recipe to be a formula for blending essential oils -- but although this is ineresting to all occultists who work in perfumery, the Crowley version is only used by Thelemites.

Commercial occult perfumers use a variety of formulas and methods of preparation for Abramlin oil.

Abramelin Oil, as made by European perfumers not influenced by Mathers' mistaken English translation, contains Calamus.
I make and sell Abramelin oil in my Lucky Mojo shop in America; i do not use the Crowley recipe, but instead the ingredients as given in the original Abramelin manuscript (that is, Calamus instead of Galangal). On my sales page, the advertising copy reads, "From the ancient Jewish formula specified by Abramelin the Mage." I sell a good deal of Abramelin Oil, too.
Note also a link i placed on the page to the Alchemy Works site -- these folks follow the Mathers translation with respect to ingredients (Galangal instead of Calamus) -- but they do not follow the skin-burning Crowley recipe that consists of essential oils barely cut with Olive Oil; rather, theirs is a macerated and undistilled oil.
Thelemites want tCrowley's hot, stinging stuff made with Galangal and with barely cut essential oils.

There are many others working in the field, each of us according to our own lights. Catherineyronwode 07:02, 10 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Psychology userbox[edit]

Frater: do you mind rewording your userbox to say simply "Psychology Student".--- You are invited to participate in a discussion on how to arrange student and graduate userboxes so as to keep it neat and orderly. Drop me a message, or post to the field you added your userbox. Louie 22:04, 10 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Frater: you use the name User_psychology_student for your template. That's way too generic (not as generic as "favourite subject", but still pretty generic): a (US) college major, or a student at licenciatura (LA) may also qualify as "psychology student", even if they're not going to research or academia. You chose the general label, not something specific as, say User_psychology_student_graduate. I'm figuring out a general pattern to fill those userboxes. You're invited to contribute to that discussion in the corresponding talk page. Louie 03:46, 11 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Frater: would you mind trying the {user gradstudent subject} userbox? HalfDome has already made a {user:phd|field}, where PhD users may specify their field. Check the userbox in the student category in the education userboxes page. That userbox let you state you're a graduate student and your specialization subject. Otherwise, by subject, I see no way to avoid userbox overpopulation.--- Please discuss in the talk page. Louie 15:28, 20 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Frater: In a day or two I'll remove the {user psychology student} template from education userboxes. Now we have a more flexible generic structure that seems to be working. I won't be asking for deletion of your template, but you should consider using a generic userbox to save template namespace. Drop me a message if you have questions/complaints.--- Cheers! Louie 23:07, 25 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Abramelin Oil / Crowley Google test results[edit]

Frater5, you wrote on my talk pge that you had done a google test and found that "most" references to Abramelin Oil involve Crowley. I just did the test and found the exact OPPOSIITE results. Here are my test parameters, with the results:

< Abamelin Oil Crowley > [Flat search, no quotes, all 3 words required] 518 results
< Abamelin Oil -Crowley > [Flat search, no quotes, EXCLUDE Crowley] 11,400 results

"Abramelin Oil" Crowley [Exact on Abramelin Oil, Crowley required] 415 results
"Abramelin Oil" -Crowley [Exact on Abramelin Oil, EXCLUDE Crowley] 1,300 results

"Oil of Abramelin" Crowley [Exact on Oil of Abramelin, Crowley required] 115 results
"Oil of Abramelin" -Crowley [Exact on Oil of Abramelin, EXCLUDE Crowley] 165 results

As you can clearly see, EXCLUDING Crowley from the search results in MORE hits, no matter which way i phrase the search for Abramelin Oil / Oil of Abramelin.

So, far from proving that Crowley made Abramelin Oil popular, what google is telling me is that no matter how you work it -- on a flat search for Abramelin + Oil, on a restricted search for "Abramelin Oil", or on a restricted search for "Oil of Abramelin" -- adding "Crowley" to your search REDUCES the number of results dramatically and EXCLUDING "Crowley" INCREASES the number of results.

Sample pages of "Abramelin Oil" [rstricted search] EXCLUDING Crowley:

http://www.mysticwicks.com/archive/index.php/t-29229.html http://www.mysticconvergence.com/store/view_product.php?product=A-OABRA http://www.whitemagic.com.au/Mystoils.htm http://www.alchemy-works.com/magick_oils_abramelin.html http://www.fromgodsgarden.com/ritual-oils.phtml?cat3=210 http://www.luckymojo.com/mojocatoils.html http://www.thriceround.com/lofiversion/index.php/t8382.html http://www.geocities.com/bewitchindesign/oilsa.html http://www.occult-shop.co.uk/magickal-oils.htm

Note that many (but not all) of the above are catalogue pages for occult shops -- and the uses they give for Abramelin Oil are NOT about OTO or EGC rituals -- but relate back to the Abramelin book iself -- "to summion entities" and "for controlling others."

In other words, unseen by you, the tradition of the Abramelin book lives on in a non-Thelemic current, the recipe is passed along for use in non-Thelemic rites, and shops are manufacturing and retailing the oil for non-Thelemic magicians to use in spells of practical (not theurgic) magic.

Cordially, Catherineyronwode 02:17, 11 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This is getting funny. Now YOU have skewed the test results, by searching for the uniquely Crowleyan term set "Oil of Abramelin." Look above in my results --"Oil of Abramelin" is

(1) the version of the name with the fewest results (almost "not notable" by Wiki standards) and
(2) the version of the name in which the addition of or exclusion of the wod Crowley makes the least difference, because pretty much only Crowley and his followers use that particular locution, the rest of us calling it Abramelin Oil.

Finally, your statement that shop keepers would advertise it in the broadest terms possible is not going to float -- i, for instance, could sell it to Crowleyites (in addition to my regular occult customers) just by using his name -- but only if i made it by his ferkakte recipe, which i don't. And i don't use Mathers' recipe, either, beause it is deformed by the error of substituting galangal for calamus.

So we are just going around in circles here. Friendly circles, still, i trust, but circular circles nonethelss.

By the way, i just saw that there is a new translation of Abramelin coming out asoon, by Abraham Von Worms (ostensible author) and Georg Dehn, published by Nicholas Hays and due to hit the shops in September 2006, ISBN: 089254127X in hardcover only. This is an English translation of the Georg Dehn German translation of 2001, Editions Araki, ISBN: 3936149003 which, i have been told, corrects Mathers' Galangal error to Calamus. So what say you to that? (I shall add the relevant publication data to the relevant pages as soon as i post this to you.)

Catherineyronwode 04:35, 11 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hello again, so soon --

No, the new English translation by Dehn is not from French to German to English, it is directly from the two German copies of the manuscript to English, with critical comparison to the Herbew / Aramaic and French manuscript versions as well. I have just added a whole lot about this to the page on the book (not the page on the oil) and i invite you to look it over. It seems that not only was the Mathers version badly translated, Mathers was working from an incomplete copy. The German Wikipedia has a great entry on Abraham of Worms at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_von_Worms. Check it out! Crowley's name appears only once, if i recall. Obviously, we Americans are way, way, way behind the eightball when it coms to this book. We have a lot to learn from the German occultists, and i look forward eagerly to the Dehn transltion in English.

Catherineyronwode 05:42, 11 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Edit comments[edit]

Please keep civility in mind when making edit comments. "Removing crap" can easily be considered fighting words; likewise, calling other people's good-faith edits "vandalism" is not conducive to the collaborative process. --jpgordon ∇∆∇∆ 03:55, 20 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, I hope you don't think we're on any opposite sides regarding Crowley and "Crowleyanity". Your user page makes it clear that we have a very similar take on the real meaning of Thelema; and I imagine if you've spent any time with organized Thelema in the Bay Area, we've got some people in common. 93 and Spoon! (I'm not sure what the formal order should be for those two salutations.) --jpgordon ∇∆∇∆ 04:11, 20 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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