Abramelin Adventures: Alex vs COVID-19

An image based upon square 4, chapter 18 of Book IV of Abramelin – “To Heal Plague.”
© Alex Sumner 2020
For a full explanation, read on…

Following on from my previous post on Alchemy, my thoughts turned to whether it is possible to use the Sacred Magic to help with the current COVID-19 pandemic. Looking through my book of word-squares I noted that square 4 of chapter 18 is entitled “To Heal Plague.” I figured that this was the closest thing, the moreso because the name COVID-19 didn’t exist in the fifteenth century.

The square given by Dehn – which corresponds to the versions in both the Dresden and Leipzig manuscripts – goes thus:

NB: “Debher” is a phonetic rendering of the Hebrew דבר meaning a “plague, murrain or pestilence” – this at least makes the association of the square with healing plagues plausible, especially compared to “Bebher” (sic), the equivalent in Mathers’ Biblioteque Arsenal manuscript.

Now: riffing on a theme I mentioned in my previous Abramelin post, the word squares are meant to incorporate the names of various spirits in them. This particular Square is under the presidency of Amaymon – however: it does not contain the name of either Amaymon himself or any of his servant spirits. The third line, Barioh, however, is one letter away from the name Bariol – who is  one of Amaymon’s servants. At least according to Dehn, Dresden and Leipzig – Mathers’ version gives this spirit as “Buriol,” just to confuse matters. Hence, the Sumner Family Brain Cell cogitated, might this square be actually governed by “Bariol,” and if so, is this square lettered correctly?

As it happened, when I did some magical work on the subject, I received a message that although the word in the third line is indeed inspired by the name Bariol, instead of changing the lettering a more suitable way to link the energy of the spirit with the word-square would be to enclose it in a circular border, thus:

Alex Sumner’s version of square 4, ch18 of Book IV. © Alex Sumner 2020

I have therefore attempted to deploy this word-square to save this planet from the current Pandemic – hence the illustration at the top of this blog post. Ironically, however, in the short time between me planning this magical operation and me getting around to actually carrying out, I note that a vaccine has now been approved for use, although at the time of writing it has not been yet widely distributed, so this new word-square will probably only become relevant for the next pandemic…