Customer Reviews

The Book of Gold ~ The Magic & Spells of the Biblical Psalms

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Book of Gold is truly a golden edition to the library of any magicians with an interest in Psalmic Magic or the Grimoire Traditions. This work is expertly translated and the commentary and appendices alone make it worth the price. Finally a work that catalogs the use of the Psalms throughout various manuscripts of the grimoire tradition in an easy to reference way!

This book will make a great supplement to the practices of a wide variety of magicians from ceremonialists to folk magicians. If you use the Psalms in your work, first you need to get a copy of Sepher Shimmush Tehillim (Magical Use of the Psalms), which is usually included in the The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, then you need to buy this book!

So why only three stars then? Because there are two problems with the book that I received. Firstly, and more likely to effect the average reader is the fact that many of the directions for working with the psalms will instruct you to read or write the Psalm out until a certain line of the Psalm.

For example for Psalm 12 it says "If you have fallen asleep in a desert, read this Psalm until 'ne quando dicat'".

Okay, so beyond the question of how someone who is sleeping is meant to read a psalm, basically they are giving you the line in the Psalm (in Latin)where you are meant to stop reading. This is excellent for those who have a working knowledge of Latin or an interlinear Bible at their fingertips and want to spend time cross referencing. However, for those who would like to use the psalms in English, this adds an annoying extra step of research to the process of doing the actual work. I'm all for doing research when it is called for, but I am assuming that David and Paul translated and edited this manuscript so that people could actually use it. Which begs the question, if you want to make it easily usable, which much the rest of it is, why not just translate the line into English as you have the rest of the manuscript? Or at least give the English translation in the commentary following the Psalm. Is that so much to ask?

The regularity with which translators and editors of various Grimoire manuscripts choose to include the Latin wording and conjurations without offering a translation has a tendency to quickly become annoying. Sorry, but we aren't all proficient in Latin and I really would appreciate avoiding the extra step of translating the parts that you have chosen not to illuminate us on. I'm not saying that the Latin should be omitted. I mean, hey, who doesn't love that oh so magical dead language? But at least include translations in the commentary. I'm not speaking just specifically of this author (who does this with some regularity) or this work, but in general. However, this work stands as an example of this type of an approach, which can be somewhat inconvenient at best or make the translator come across as linguistically elitist at worst.

My second issue with my copy of the work is that I have just received it and nearly every third page is either completely or partially unglued. I mean, pages are literally falling out of the book. I know that this isn't the fault of the author or publisher, but the printer. However, the physical quality of the book does play upon my review as well. I plan to exchange it an hope that the poor binding is a fluke. I have purchased other works from Avalonia in the past and not had this problem, so it is most likely a simple error.

That all said, I most certainly enjoy this work and give kudos to David Rankine and Paul Harry Barron for putting it together and translating (most of) it. I would recommend it to friends and students in the future. I'll just make sure to recommend that they procure an interlinear Douay-Rheims Bible while they're at it.