David Rankine has been practising magic for the last 25 years and writing about it for the last 17 years. During that time he has been involved with Golden Dawn, Qabalistic and Thelemic groups, and gives regular talks and workshops around Europe. He was a major contributor to the Enhancing Your Mind, Body, Spirit partwork. David lives in Glastonbury.

Books by David Rankine include Becoming Magick, Climbing the Tree of Life, Crystals: Healing & Folklore, Heka: Ancient Egyptian Magic, and with Sorita d’Este: Circle of Fire , Hekate Liminal Rites, Visions of the Cailleach, Practical Elemental Magick, Wicca Magickal Beginnings, Practical Planetary Magick , The Guises of the Morrigan , The Isles of the Many Gods , Avalonia’s Book of Chakras, and Magick Without Peers [with Ariadne Rainbird]

He has co-authored SWCM with Stephen Skinner:

Practical Angel Magic of Dr John Dee’s Enochian Tables – Volume I,

Keys to the Gateway of Magic – Volume II,

The Goetia of Dr Rudd – Volume III, The Veritable Key of Solomon – Volume IV,

The Grimoire of Saint Cyprian - Clavis Inferni - Volume V,

A Collection of Magical Secrets.

Don Karr (BFA RISD 1974, MFU Cornell 1976) is co-author of two books in the acclaimed series, Sourceworks of Ceremonial Magic: (with Stephen Skinner) Sepher Raziel: Liber Salomonis, a Sixteenth-century English Grimoire (Singapore: Golden Hoard Press, 2010), and (with Calanit Nachshon) Liber Lunæ – Book of the Moon – Sepher ha-Levanah (Singapore: Golden Hoard Press, 2011; paperback edition, 2017).

Karr also published the pioneering Approaching the Kabbalah of Maat (York Beach: Black Jackal Press, 2013), which contains a foreword by Colin Low. This is supplemented by Methods of Maat (forthcoming).

Karr is the author of numerous articles on Jewish mysticism and its influence on the Western esoteric tradition: a series of bibliographic essays covering merkabah mysticism and hekhalot literature, Sepher Yetzirah, early kabbalah, the Zohar, later kabbalah including the Lurianic kabbalah, and Christian kabbalah. Karr has transcribed and edited several key works, making them available to the general public for the first time: Morton Smith’s translation of Hekhalot Rabbati, British Library Sloane MS 3826, and selected writings of Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont. (The articles and transcriptions mentioned can be found online at Hermetic Kabbalah, edited by Colin Low, at www.digital-brilliance.com : “Bibliographies” & “Contributed Documents.”)

The 2017 version of Karr’s “Notes on the Study of Merkabah Mysticism and Hekhalot Literature in English with an appendix on Jewish Magic” appears in Jewish Studies 52 (Jerusalem: Journal of the World Union of Jewish Studies, 2017), English section, pages 35-112.

Karr contributed the article “Esotericism and Christian Kabbalah: 1480-1520,” the English version of “Ésotérisme et Kabbale chrétienne,” which appears in L'Époque de la Renaissance (1400-1600), Tome II: LA NOUVELLE CULTURE – 1480-1520, edited by Eva Kushner [HISTOIRE COMPARÉE DES LITTÉRATURES DE LANGUES EUROPÉENNES, volume 30] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó/Amsterdam: John Benjamins B. V., 2017).

All of the works mentioned can be found online at Hermetic Kabbalah, edited by Colin Low, at:

www.digital-brilliance.com/kab/

Don Karr’s paintings can be viewed at :

www.donkarr.com

Ioannis Marathakis was born in 1973, in Athens, Greece. He has studied Theology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where he attended classes on the history of religion, history of philosophy, ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew languages, as well as Byzantine literature and palaeography. As he was living in an environment where traditions such as the ‘evil eye’ and the ‘evil tongue’ still existed, he also developed an interest in the survival of such ancient notions and practices.

The so called Solomonike, or magical books allegedly attributed to Solomon, was a field where many of his interests converged. To name but some, it had a connection to the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, it was a major element of Greek folklore and, of course, the knowledge of Mediaeval Greek and Byzantine palaeography were absolute prerequisites for studying it. Since this was a book that nobody seemed to actually have seen, in his University years he turned his attention to the study of the relevant grimoires that had survived in the West. He finally tracked down the Magical Treatise, more than ten years later in 2004, and tried to formulate a critical edition together with an English translation, an attempt that proved to be futile, due to the diversity of the manuscripts.

It was not until 2010 that he decided to reorganize his material and translate the various manuscripts separately, something that led to the present publication. In the meantime, he published in Greek a history of the Solomonic literature, Searching for the Key of Solomon (2007), a web article concerning the history of the invisibility spells, From the Ring of Gyges to the Black Cat Bone (2007), and an introduction to the Treatise, under the title A Source of the Key of Solomon: The Magic Treatise or Hygromancy or Epistle to Rehoboam, for the web magazine Primordial Traditions (2009).